• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1023 0

of him, or just of anybody? At first he had thought the Answer was anybody, anybody would do because anybody could take pictures of it and the movement always advanced. But the thing around its neck, that thing that wasn't a collar ... that had to do with him, Kevin Delevan, and nobody else. Did it want to do something to him? If the answer to that question was yes, you could forget all the other ones, because it was pretty goddamned obvious what the dog wanted to do. It was in its murky eye, in the snarl you could just see beginning. He thought it wanted two things.

First to escape.

Then to kill.

There's a man or woman over there with a camera who maybe doesn't even see that dog, Kevin thought, and if the photographer can't see the dog, maybe the dog can't see the photographer, and so the

photographer is safe. But if the dog really is three-dimensional, maybe he sees out - maybe he sees whoever is using my camera. Maybe it's still not me, or not specifically me; maybe whoever is using the camera is its target.

Still - the thing it was wearing around its neck. What about that?

He thought of the cur's dark eyes, saved from stupidity by a single malevolent spark. God knew how the dog had gotten into that Polaroid world in the first place, but when its picture was taken, it could see out, and it wanted to get out, and Kevin believed in his heart that it wanted to kill him first, the thing it was wearing around its neck said it wanted to kill him first, proclaimed that it wanted to kill him first, but after that?

Why, after Kevin, anyone would do.

Anyone at all.

In a way it was like another game you played when you were a little kid, wasn't it? It was like Giant Step. The dog had been walking along the fence. The dog had heard the Polaroid, that squidgy little whine. It turned, and saw ... what? Its own world or universe? A world or universe enough like its own so it saw or sensed it could or at least might be able to live and hunt here? It didn't matter. Now, every time someone took a picture of it, the dog would get closer. It would get closer and closer until ... well, until what? Until it burst through, somehow?

'That's stupid,' he muttered. 'It'd never fit.'

'What?' his father asked, roused from his own musings.

'Nothing,' Kevin said. 'I was just talking to myse -'

Then, from downstairs, muffled but audible, they heard Pop Merrill cry out in mingled dismay, irritation, and surprise: 'Well shit fire and save matches! Goddammit!'

Kevin and his father looked at each other, startled.

'Let's go see what happened,' his father said, and got up. 'I hope he didn't fall down and break his arm, or something. I mean, part of me does hope it, but ... you know.'

Kevin thought: What if he's been taking pictures? What if that dog's down there?

It hadn't sounded like fear in the old man's voice, and of course there really was no way a dog that looked as big as a medium-sized German shepherd could come through either a camera the size of the Sun 660 or one of the prints it made. You might as well try to drag a washing machine through a knothole.

Still, he felt fear enough for both of them - for all three of them - as he followed his father back down the stairs to the gloomy bazaar below.

Going down the stairs, Pop Merrill was as happy as a clam at high tide.

He had been prepared to make the switch right in front of them if he had to. Might have been a problem if it had just been the boy, who was still a year or so away from thinking he knew everything, but the boy's dad - ah, fooling that fine fellow would have been like stealing a bottle from a baby. Had he told the boy about the jam he'd gotten into that time? From the way the boy looked at him - a new, cautious way - Pop thought Delevan probably had. And what else had the father told the son? Well, let's see. Does he let you call him Pop? That means he's planning to pull a fast one on you. That was for starters. He's a lowdown snake in the grass, son. That was for seconds. And, of course, there was the prize of them all: Let