Four Past Midnight - Stephen King [341]
'You tried to make a movie out of those snapshots?' Mr Delevan asked.
'Didn't try,' Pop said. 'Did. Or rather, the fella I know up the city did. But it was my idea.'
'Is it a movie?' Kevin asked. He understood what Pop had done, and part of him was even chagrined that he hadn't thought of it himself, but mostly he was awash in wonder (and delight) at the idea.
'Look for yourself,' Pop said, and turned on the TV. 'Fifty-eight pitchers. When this fella does snapshots for folks, he generally videotapes each one for five seconds - long enough to get a good look, he says, but not long enough to get bored before you go on to the next one. I told him I wanted each of these on for just a single second, and to run them right together with no fades.'
Kevin remembered a game he used to play in grade school when he had finished some lesson and had free time before the next one began. He had a little dime pad of paper which was called a Rain-Bo Skool Pad because there would be thirty pages of little yellow sheets, then thirty pages of little pink sheets, then thirty pages of green, and so on. To play the game, you went to the very last page and at the bottom you drew a stick-man wearing baggy shorts and holding his arms out. On the next page you drew the same stick-man in the same place and wearing the same baggy shorts, only this time you drew his arms further up ... but just a little bit. You did that on every page until the arms came together over the stick-man's head. Then, if you still had time, you went on drawing the stick-man, but now with the arms going down. And if you flipped the pages very fast when you were done, you had a crude sort of cartoon which showed a boxer celebrating a KO: he raised his hands over his head, clasped them, shook them, lowered them.
He shivered. His father looked at him. Kevin shook his head and murmured, 'Nothing.'
'So what I mean to say is the tape only runs about a minute,' Pop said. 'You got to look close. Ready?'
No, Kevin thought.
'I guess so,' Mr Delevan said. He was still trying to sound grumpy and put-out, but Kevin could tell he had gotten interested in spite of himself.
'Okay,' Pop Merrill said, and pushed the PLAY button.
Kevin told himself over and over again that it was stupid to feel scared. He told himself this and it didn't do a single bit of good.
He knew what he was going to see, because he and Meg had both noticed the Sun was doing something besides simply reproducing the same image over and over, like a photocopier; it did not take long for them to realize that the photographs were expressing movement from one to the next.
'Look,' Meg had said. 'The dog's moving!'
Instead of responding with one of the friendly-but-irritating wisecracks he usually reserved for his little sister, Kevin had said, 'It does look like it ... but you can't tell for sure, Meg.'
'Yes, you can,' she said. They were in his room, where he had been morosely looking at the camera. It sat on the middle of his desk with his new schoolbooks, which he had been meaning to cover, pushed to one side. Meg had bent the goose-neck of his study-lamp so it shone a bright circle of light on the middle of his desk blotter. She moved the camera aside and put the first picture - the one with the dab of cake-frosting on it - in the center of the light. 'Count the fence-posts between the dog's behind and the righthand edge of the picture,' she said.
'Those are pickets, not fence-posts,' he told her. 'Like what you do when your nose goes on strike.'
'Ha-ha. Count them.'
He did. He could see four, and part of a fifth, although the dog's scraggly hindquarters obscured most of that one.
'Now look at this one.'
She put the fourth Polaroid in front of him. Now he could see all of the fifth picket, and part of a sixth.
So he knew - or believed - he was going to see a cross between a very old cartoon and one of those 'flipbooks' he used to make in grammar school when the time weighed heavy on his hands.