Four Past Midnight - Stephen King [328]
'Why?'
'Ain't gonna tell you. Not right now.' He produced a heavy purse that was hooked to a belt-loop on a steel chain. He opened it and took out a ten-dollar bill, hesitated, and added two ones with obvious reluctance. 'Guess that'd cover half of it.'
Yeah, right, Kevin thought.
'If you really are int'rested in the trick that camera's doing, I guess you'd pony up the rest, wouldn't you?' Pop's eyes gleamed at him like the eyes of an old, curious cat.
Kevin understood the man did more than expect him to say yes; to Pop it was inconceivable that he could say no. Kevin thought, If I said no he wouldn't hear it; he'd say 'Good, that's agreed, then,' and I'd end up back on the sidewalk with his money in my pocket whether I wanted it or not.
And he did have his birthday money.
All the same, there was that chill wind to think about. That wind that seemed to blow not from the surface but right out of those photographs in spite of their deceptively flat, deceptively shiny surfaces. He felt that wind coming from them despite their mute declaration which averred We are Polaroids, and for no reason we can tell or even understand, we show only the undramatic surfaces of things. That wind was there. What about that wind?
Kevin hesitated a moment longer and the bright eyes behind the rimless spectacles measured him. I ain't gonna ask you if you're a man or a mouse, Pop Merrill's eyes said. You're fifteen years old, and what I mean to say is at fifteen you may not be a man yet, not quite, but you are too goddam old to be a mouse and both of us know it. And besides you're not from Away; you're from town, just like me.
'Sure,' Kevin said with a hollow lightness in his voice. It fooled neither of them. 'I can get the film tonight, I guess, and bring the pictures in tomorrow, after school.'
'Nope,' Pop said.
'You're closed tomorrow?'
'Nope,' Pop said, and because he was from town, Kevin waited patiently. 'You're thinkin about takin thirty pictures all at once, aren't you?'
'I guess so.' But Kevin hadn't thought about it; he had simply taken it for granted.
'That ain't the way I want you to do it,' Pop said. 'It don't matter where you take them, but it does matter when. Here. Lemme figure.'
Pop figured, and then even wrote down a list of times, which Kevin pocketed.
'So!' Pop said, rubbing his hands briskly together so that they made a dry sound that was like two pieces of used-up sandpaper rubbing together. 'You'll see me in ... oh, three days or so?'
'Yes . . . I guess so.'
'I'll bet you'd just as lief wait until Monday after school, anyway,' Pop said. He dropped Kevin a fourth wink, slow and sly and humiliating in the extreme. 'So your friends don't see you comin in here and tax you with it, is what I mean to say.'
Kevin flushed and dropped his eyes to the worktable and began to gather up the Polaroids so his hands would have something to do. When he was embarrassed and they didn't, he cracked his knuckles.
'I -' He began some sort of absurd protest that would convince neither of them and then stopped, staring down at one of the photos.
'What?' Pop asked. For the first time since Kevin had approached him, Pop sounded entirely human, but Kevin hardly heard his words, much less his tone of faint alarm. 'Now you look like you seen a ghost, boy.'
'No,' Kevin said. 'No ghost. I see who took the picture. Who really took the picture.'
'What in glory are you talking about?'
Kevin pointed to a shadow. He, his father, his mother, Meg, and apparently Mr Merrill himself had taken it for the shadow of a tree that wasn't itself in the frame. But it wasn't a tree. Kevin saw that now, and what you had seen could never be unseen.
More hieroglyphics on the plinth.
'I don't see what you're gettin at,' Pop said. But Kevin knew the old man knew he was getting at something, which was why he sounded put out.
'Look at the shadow of the dog first,' Kevin said. 'Then look at this one here again.' He tapped the left side of the photograph. 'In the picture, the sun is either going down