Four Past Midnight - Stephen King [332]
'Now, John,' he said. 'I've been trying to help your boy with that camera. That's all in the world I've been trying to do.' He paused. 'Just like that one time I gave you a help when you got a little too proud of the Seventy-Sixers, is what I mean to say.'
A thundering silence from John Delevan's end of the line which meant he had plenty to say on that subject, but the kiddo was in the room and that was as good as a gag.
'Now, your kid don't know nothing about that,' Pop said, that nasty grin broadening in the tick-tock shadows of the Emporium Galorium, where the dominant smells were old magazines and mouse-turds. 'I told him it wasn't none of his business, just like I told him that this business here was. I wouldn't have even brought up that bet if I knew another way to get you here, is what I mean to say. And you ought to see what I've got, John, because if you don't you won't understand why the boy wants to smash that camera you bought him -'
'Smash it!'
'and why I think it's a hell of a good idea. Now are you going to come down here with him, or not?'
'I'm not in Portland, am I, dammit?'
'Never mind the CLOSED sign on the door,' Pop said in the serene tone of a man who has been getting his own way for many years and expects to go right on getting it for many more. 'Just knock.'
'Who in hell gave my boy your name, Merrill?'
'I didn't ask him,' Pop said in that same infuriatingly serene tone of voice, and hung up the telephone. And, to the empty shop: 'All I know is that he came. Just like they always do.'
While he waited, he took the Sun 660 he had bought in Lewiston out of its box and buried the box deep in the trash-can beside his worktable. He looked at the camera thoughtfully, then loaded the four-picture starter-pack that came with the camera. With that done, he unfolded the body of the camera, exposing the lens. The red light to the left of the lightning-bolt shape came on briefly, and then the green one began to stutter. Pop was not very surprised to find he was filled with trepidation. Well, he thought, God hates a coward, and pushed the shutter-release. The clutter of the Emporium Galorium's barnlike interior was bathed in an instant of merciless and improbable white light. The camera made its squidgy little whine and spat out what would be a Polaroid picture - perfectly adequate but somehow lacking; a picture that was all surfaces depicting a world where ships undoubtedly would sail off the fuming and monster-raddled edge of the earth if they went far enough west.
Pop watched it with the same mesmerized expression Clan Delevan had worn as it waited for Kevin's first picture to develop. He told himself this camera would not do the same thing, of course not, but he was stiff and wiry with tension just the same and, tough old bird or not, if a random board had creaked in the place just then, he almost certainly would have cried out.
But no board did creak, and when the picture developed it showed only what it was supposed to show: clocks assembled, clocks in pieces, toasters. stacks of magazines tied with twine, lamps with shades so horrible only women of the British upper classes could truly love them, shelves of quarter paperbacks (six for a buck) with titles like After Dark My Sweet and Fire in the Flesh and The Brass Cupcake, and, in the distant background, the dusty front window. You could read the letters EMPOR backward before the bulky silhouette of a bureau blocked off the rest.
No hulking creature from beyond the grave; no knife-wielding doll in blue overalls. just a camera. He supposed the whim which had caused him to take a picture in the first place, just to see, showed how deeply this thing had worked its way under his skin.
Pop sighed and buried the photograph in the trash-can.