Four Past Midnight - Stephen King [343]
The dog's head was coming around to face the photographer, owner of the shadow, like the head of a dog in the grip of a fit: at one moment the face and even the shape of the head was obscured by that floppy ear; then you saw one black-brown eye enclosed by a round and somehow mucky corona that made Kevin think of a spoiled egg-white; then you saw half the muzzle with the lips appearing slightly wrinkled, as if the dog were getting ready to bark or growl; and last of all you saw three-quarters of a face somehow more awful than the face of any mere dog had a right to be, even a mean one. The white spackles along its muzzle suggested it was no longer young. At the very end of the tape you saw the dog's lips were indeed pulling back. There was one blink of white Kevin thought was a tooth. He didn't see that until the third runthrough. It was the eye that held him. It was homicidal. This breedless dog almost screamed rogue. And it was nameless; he knew that, as well. He knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that no Polaroid man or Polaroid woman or Polaroid child had ever named that Polaroid dog; it was a stray, born stray, raised stray, grown old and mean stray, the avatar of all the dogs who had ever wandered the world, unnamed and unhomed, killing chickens, eating garbage out of the cans they had long since learned to knock over, sleeping in culverts and beneath the porches of deserted houses. Its wits would be dim, but its instincts would be sharp and red. It ..
When Pop Merrill spoke, Kevin was so deeply and fundamentally startled out of his thoughts that he nearly screamed.
'The man who took those pitchers,' he said. 'If there was a person, is what I mean to say. What do you suppose happened to him?'
Pop had frozen the last frame with his remote control. A line of static ran through the picture. Kevin wished it ran through the dog's eye, but the line was below it. That eye stared out at them, baleful, stupidly murderous - no, not stupidly, not entirely, that was what made it not merely frightening but terrifying -and no one needed to answer Pop's question. You needed no more pictures to understand what was going to happen next. The dog had perhaps heard something: of course it had, and Kevin knew what. It had heard that squidgy little whine.
Further pictures would show it continuing to turn, and then beginning to fill more and more of each frame until there was nothing to see but dog - no listless patchy lawn, no fence, no sidewalk, no shadow. Just the dog.
Who meant to attack.
Who meant to kill, if it could.
Kevin's dry voice seemed to be coming from someone else. 'I don't think it likes getting its picture taken,' he said.
Pop's short laugh was like a bunch of dry twigs broken over a knee for kindling.
'Rewind it,' Mr Delevan said.
'You want to see the whole thing again?' Pop asked.
'No - just the last ten seconds or so.'
Pop used the remote control to go back, then ran it again. The dog turned its head, as jerky as a robot which is old and running down but still dangerous, and Kevin wanted to tell them, Stop now. Just stop. That's enough. Just stop and let's break the camera. Because there was something else, wasn't there? Something he didn't want to think about but soon would, like it or not; he could feel it breaching in his mind like the broad back of a whale.
'Once more,' Mr Delevan said. 'Frame by frame this time. Can you do that?'
'Ayuh,' Pop said. 'Goddam machine does everything but the laundry.'
This time one frame, one picture, at a time. It was not like a robot now, or not exactly, but like some weird clock, something that belonged with Pop's other specimens downstairs. jerk. Jerk. Jerk. The head coming around. Soon they would be faced by that merciless, not-quite-idiotic eye again.
'What's that?' Mr Delevan asked.
'What's what?' Pop asked, as if he didn't know it was the thing the boy hadn't wanted to talk about the other day, the thing, he was convinced, that had made up the boy's mind about destroying the