Four Past Midnight - Stephen King [320]
'An F-stop philosopher?' Mr Baker asked. His saying things like that was one of the reasons why Kevin respected him. It was just a cool thing to say. 'A sage of the shutter? An alchemist of the aperture? A-'
'A guy who's seen a lot,' Kevin said cagily.
'Pop Merrill,' Mr Baker said.
'Who?'
'He runs the Emporium Galorium.'
'Oh. That place.'
'Yeah,' Mr Baker said, grinning. 'That place. If, that is, what you're looking for is a sort of homespun Mr Fixit.'
'I guess that's what I am looking for.'
'He's got damn near everything in there,' Mr Baker said, and Kevin could agree with that. Even though he had never actually been inside, he passed the Emporium Galorium five, ten, maybe fifteen times a week (in a town the size of Castle Rock, you had to pass everything a lot, and it got amazingly boring in Kevin Delevan's humble opinion), and he had looked in the windows. It seemed crammed literally to the rafters with objects, most of them mechanical. But his mother called it 'a junk-store' in a sniffing voice, and his father said Mr Merrill made his money 'rooking the summer people,' and so Kevin had never gone in. If it had only been a 'junk-store,' he might have; almost certainly would have, in fact. But doing what the summer people did, or buying something where summer people 'got rooked' was unthinkable. He would be as apt to wear a blouse and skirt to high school. Summer people could do what they wanted (and did). They were all mad, and conducted their affairs in a mad fashion. Exist with them, fine. But be confused with them? No. No. And no sir.
'Damn near everything,' Mr Baker repeated, 'and most of what he's got, he fixed himself. He thinks that crackerbarrel-philosopher act he does, glasses up on top of the head, wise pronouncements, all of that - fools people. No one who knows him disabuses him. I'm not sure anyone would dare disabuse him.'
'Why? What do you mean?'
Mr Baker shrugged. An odd, tight little smile touched his mouth. 'Pop - Mr Merrill, I mean - has got his fingers in a lot of pies around here. You'd be surprised, Kevin.'
Kevin didn't care about how many pies Pop Merrill was currently fingering, or what their fillings might be. He was left with only one more important question, since the summer people were gone and he could probably slink into the Emporium Galorium unseen tomorrow afternoon if he took advantage of the rule which allowed all students but freshmen to cut their last-period study hall twice a month.
'Do I call him Pop or Mr Merrill?'
Solemnly, Mr Baker replied, 'I think the man kills anyone under the age of sixty who calls him Pop.'
And the thing was, Kevin had an idea Mr Baker wasn't exactly joking.
'You really don't know, huh?' Kevin said when the clocks began to wind down.
It had not been like in a movie, where they all start and finish striking at once; these were real clocks, and he guessed that most of them - along with the rest of the appliances in the Emporium Galorium - were not really running at all but sort of lurching along. They had begun at what his own Seiko quartz watch said was 3:58. They began to pick up speed and volume gradually (like an old truck fetching second gear with a tired groan and jerk). There were maybe four seconds when all of them really did seem to be striking, bonging, chiming, clanging, and cuckoo-ing at the same time, but four seconds was all the synchronicity they could manage. And 'winding down' was not exactly what they did. What they did was sort of give up, like water finally consenting to gurgle its way down a drain which is almost but not quite completely plugged.
He didn't have any idea why he was so disappointed. Had he really expected anything else? For Pop Merrill, whom Mr Baker had described as a crackerbarrel philosopher and homespun Mr Fixit, to pull out a spring and say, 'Here it is - this is the bastard causing that dog to show up every time you push the shutter release. It's a dog-spring, belongs in one of those toy dogs a kid winds