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By Root 968 0

now,' Pop said, like a narrator moving briskly to a new chapter in a novel and reading the words Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, 'I've seen pitchers with people in em that the other people in the pitcher swear weren't there with em when the pitcher was taken. And there's one - this is a famous one - that a lady took over in England. What she did was snap a pitcher of some fox-hunters comin back home at the end of the day. You see em, about twenty in all, comin over a little wooden bridge. It's a tree-lined country road on both sides of that bridge. The ones in front are off the bridge already. And over on the right of the pitcher, standin by the road, there's a lady in a long dress and a hat with a veil on it so you can't see her face and she's got her pocketbook over her arm. Why, you can even see she's wearin a locket on her bosom, or maybe it's a watch.

'Well, when the lady that took the pitcher saw it, she got wicked upset, and wasn't nobody could blame her, son, because what I mean to say is she meant to take a pitcher of those fox-hunters comin home and no one else, because there wasn't nobody else there. Except in the pitcher there is. And when you look real close, it seems like you can see the trees right through that lady.'

He's making all this up, putting me on, and when I leave he'll have a great big horselaugh, Kevin thought, knowing Pop Merrill was doing nothing of the sort.

'The lady that took that pitcher was stayin at one of those big English homes like they have on the education-TV shows, and when she showed that pitcher, I heard the man of the house fainted dead away. That part could be made up. Prob'ly is. Sounds made up, don't it? But I seen that pitcher in an article next to a painted portrait of that fella's great-grandmother, and it could be her, all right. Can't tell for certain because of the veil. But it could be.'

'Could be a hoax, too,' Kevin said faintly.

'Could be,' Pop said indifferently. 'People get up to all sorts of didos. Lookit my nephew, there, for instance, Ace.' Pop's nose wrinkled. 'Doin four years in Shawshank, and for what? Bustin into The Mellow Tiger. He got up to didos and Sheriff Pangborn. slammed him in the jug for it. Little ringmeat got just what he deserved.'

Kevin, displaying a wisdom far beyond his years, said nothing.

'But when ghosts show up in photographs, son - or, like you say, what people claim to be ghosts - it's almost always in Polaroid photographs. And it almost always seems to be by accident. Now your pitchers of flyin saucers and that Lock Nest Monster, they almost always show up in the other kind. The kind some smart fella can get up to didos with in a darkroom.'

He dropped Kevin a third wink, expressing all the didos (whatever they were) an unscrupulous photographer might get up to in a well-equipped darkroom.

Kevin thought of asking Pop if it was possible someone could get up to didos with a weegee and decided to continue keeping his mouth shut. It still seemed by far the wisest course.

'All by way of sayin I thought I'd ask if you saw somethin you knew in these Polaroid pitchers.'

'I don't, though,' Kevin said so earnestly that he believed Pop would believe he was lying, as his mom always did when he made the tactical mistake of even controlled vehemence.

'Ayuh, ayuh,' Pop said, believing him so dismissively Kevin was almost irritated.

'Well,' Kevin said after a moment which was silent except for the fifty thousand ticking clocks, 'I guess that's it, huh?'

'Maybe not,' Pop said. 'What I mean to say is I got me a little idear. You mind takin some more pitchers with that camera?'

'What good is it? They're all the same.'

'That's the point. They ain't.'

Kevin opened his mouth, then closed it.

'I'll even chip in for the film,' Pop said, and when he saw the amazed look on Kevin's face he quickly qualified: 'A little, anyway.'

'How many pictures would you want?'

'Well, you got ... what? Twenty-eight already, is that right?'

'Yes, I think so.'

'Thirty more,' Pop said after a moment's thought.