Four Past Midnight - Stephen King [350]
Luv you,
Mom
They looked at each other, both saying Well, there's one thing we don't have to worry about without having to say it out loud. Apparently neither she nor Meg had noticed that Mr Delevan's car was still in the garage.
'Do you want me to -' Kevin began, but there was no need to finish because his father cut across him: 'Yes. Check. Right now.'
Kevin went up the stairs by twos and into his room. He had a bureau and a desk. The bottom desk drawer was full of what Kevin simply thought of as 'stuff': things it would have seemed somehow criminal to throw away, although he had no real use for any of them. There was his grandfather's pocket-watch, heavy, scrolled, magnificent ... and so badly rusted that the jeweler in Lewiston he and his mother had brought it to only took one look, shook his head, and pushed it back across the counter. There were two sets of matching cufflinks and two orphans, a Penthouse gatefold, a paperback book called Gross Jokes, and a Sony Walkman which had for some reason developed a habit of eating the tapes it was supposed to play. It was just stuff, that was all. There was no other word that fit.
Part of the stuff, of course, was the thirteen string ties Aunt Hilda had sent him for his last thirteen birthdays.
He took them out one by one, counted, came up with twelve instead of thirteen, rooted through the stuffdrawer again, then counted again. Still twelve.
'Not there?'
Kevin, who had been squatting, cried out and leaped to his feet.
'I'm sorry,' Mr Delevan said from the doorway. 'That was dumb.'
'That's okay,' Kevin said. He wondered briefly how fast a person's heart could beat before the person in question simply blew his engine. 'I'm just ... on edge. Stupid.'
'It's not.' His father looked at him soberly. 'When I saw that tape, I got so scared I felt like maybe I'd have to reach into my mouth and push my stomach back down with my fingers.'
Kevin looked at his father gratefully.
'It's not there, is it?' Mr Delevan said. 'The one with the woodpecker or whatever in hell it was supposed to be?'
'No. It's not.'
'Did you keep the camera in that drawer?'
Kevin nodded his head slowly. 'Pop - Mr Merrill - said to let it rest every so often. That was part of the schedule he made out.'
Something tugged briefly at his mind, was gone.
'So I stuck it in there.'
'Boy,' Mr Delevan said softly.
'Yeah.'
They looked at each other in the gloom, and then suddenly Kevin smiled. It was like watching the sun burst through a raft of clouds.
'What?'
'I was remembering how it felt,' Kevin said. 'I swung that sledgehammer so hard -'
Mr Delevan began to smile, too. 'I thought you were going to take off your own damned and when it hit it made this CRUNCH! sound flew every damn whichway -'
'BOOM!' Kevin finished. 'Gone!'
They began to laugh together in Kevin's room, and Kevin found he was almost - almost - glad all this had happened. The sense of relief was as inexpressible and yet as perfect as the sensation one feels when, either by happy accident or by some psychic guidance, another person manages to scratch that one itchy place on one's back that one cannot scratch oneself, hitting it exactly, bang on the money, making it wonderfully worse for a single second by the simple touch, pressure, arrival, of those fingers ... and then, oh blessed relief.
It was like that with the camera and with his father's knowing.
'It's gone,' Kevin said. 'Isn't it?'
'As gone as Hiroshima after the Enola Gay dropped the A-bomb on it,' Mr Delevan replied, and then added: 'Smashed to shit, is what I mean to say.'
Kevin gawped at his father and then burst into helpless peals - screams, almost - of laughter. His father joined him. They ordered a loaded pizza shortly after. When Mary and Meg