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'No,' Kevin said. He didn't particularly mean for his own voice to come out hushed, but it did; he didn't seem to have a whole lot of air in his lungs to speak with, for some reason or other.

'Me neither,' Pop said, stirring the photographs with one finger. It was blunt and gnarled, a finger which looked made for rude and clumsy motions and operations, for poking people and knocking vases off endtables and causing nosebleeds if it tried to do so much as hook a humble chunk of dried snot from one of its owner's nostrils. Yet Kevin had watched the man's hands and thought there was probably more grace in that one finger than in his sister Meg's entire body (and maybe in his own; Clan Delevan was not known for its lightfootedness or handedness, which was probably one reason why he thought that image of his father so nimbly catching his mother on the way down had stuck with him, and might forever). Pop Merrill's finger looked as if it would at any moment sweep all the photographs onto the floor - by mistake; this sort of clumsy finger would always poke and knock and tweak by mistake - but it did not. The Polaroids seemed to barely stir in response to its restless movements.

Supernatural, Kevin thought again, and shivered a little. An actual shiver, surprising and dismaying and a little embarrassing even if Pop had not seen it.

'But there's even a way they do it,' Pop said, and then, as if Kevin had asked: 'Who? Damn if I know. I guess some of them are "psychic investigators," or at least call themselves that or some such, but I guess it's more'n likely most of em are just playin around, like folks that use Ouija Boards at parties.'

He looked up at Kevin grimly, as if rediscovering him.

'You got a Ouija, son?'

'No.'

'Ever played with one?'

'No.'

'Don't,' Pop said more grimly than ever. 'Fuckin things are dangerous.'

Kevin didn't dare tell the old man he hadn't the slightest idea what a weegee board was.

'Anyway, they set up a tape machine to record in an empty room. It's supposed to be an old house, is what I mean to say, one with a History, if they can find it. Do you know what I mean when I say a house with a History, son?'

'I guess ... like a haunted house?' Kevin hazarded. He found he was sweating lightly, as he had done last year every time Mrs Whittaker announced a pop quiz in Algebra 1.

'Well, that'll do. These ... people ... like it best if it's a house with a Violent History, but they'll take what they can get. Anyhow, they set up the machine and record that empty room. Then, the next day - they always do it at night is what I mean to say, they ain't happy unless they can do it at night, and midnight if they can get it - the next day they play her back.'

'An empty room?'

'Sometimes,' Pop said in a musing voice that might or might not have disguised some deeper feeling, 'there are voices.'

Kevin shivered again. There were hieroglyphics on the plinth after all. Nothing you'd want to read, but ... yeah. They were there.

'Real voices?'

'Usually imagination,' Pop said dismissively. 'But once or twice I've heard people I trust say they've heard real voices.'

'But you never have?'

'Once,' Pop said shortly, and said nothing else for so long Kevin was beginning to think he was done when he added, 'It was one word. Clear as a bell. 'Twas recorded in the parlor of an empty house in Bath. Man killed his wife there in 1946.'

'What was the word?' Kevin asked, knowing he would not be told just as surely as he knew no power on earth, certainly not his own willpower, could have kept him from asking.

But Pop did tell.

'Basin.'

Kevin blinked. 'Basin?'

'Ayuh.'

'That doesn't mean anything.'

'It might,' Pop said calmly, 'if you know he cut her throat and then held her head over a basin to catch the blood.'

'Oh my God!'

'Ayuh.'

'Oh my God, really?'

Pop didn't bother answering that.

'It couldn't have been a fake?'

Pop gestured with the stem of his pipe at the Polaroids. 'Are those?'

'Oh my God.'

'Polaroids,