Four Past Midnight - Stephen King [358]
So, saying a quick mental prayer that his tongue wouldn't fail him now that the moment had come, he gave it his best and was pleased to hear the names slip as smoothly from his tongue as a pitch from a snake-oil salesman: 'Is it Eleusippus or Meleusippus?' he asked, his face suggesting he was no more concerned about getting the names right than if they had been Joan and Kate.
'Meleusippus, Mr Merrill,' she said, ah, good, now he was Mister Merrill, and he was sure everything was going to go just as slick as ever a man could want, and he was just as wrong as ever a man could be. 'Won't you step in?'
'Thank you kindly,' Pop said, and entered the gloomy depths of the Deere Mansion.
'Oh dear,' Eleusippus Deere said as the Polaroid began to develop.
'What a brute he looks!' Meleusippus Verrill said, speaking in tones of genuine dismay and fear.
The dog was getting uglier, Pop had to admit that, and there was something else that worried him even more: the time-sequence of the pictures seemed to be speeding up.
He had posed the Pus Sisters on their Queen Anne sofa for the demonstration picture. The camera flashed its bright white light, turning the room for one single instant from the purgatorial zone between the land of the living and that of the dead where these two old relics somehow existed into something flat and tawdry, like a police photo of a museum in which a crime had been committed.
Except the picture which emerged did not show the Pus Sisters sitting together on their parlor sofa like identical bookends. The picture showed the black dog, now turned so that it was full-face to the camera and whatever photographer it was who was nuts enough to stand there and keep snapping pictures of it. Now all of its teeth were exposed in a crazy, homicidal snarl, and its head had taken on a slight, predatory tilt to the left. That head, Pop thought, would continue to tilt as it sprang at its victim, accomplishing two purposes: concealing the vulnerable area of its neck from possible attack and putting the head in a position where, once the teeth were clamped solidly in flesh, it could revolve upright again, ripping a large chunk of living tissue from its target.
'It's so awful!' Eleusippus said, putting one mummified hand to the scaly flesh of her neck.
'So terrible!' Meleusippus nearly moaned, lighting a fresh Camel from the butt of an old one with a hand shaking so badly she came close to branding the cracked and fissured left comer of her mouth.
'It's totally in-ex-PLICK-able!' Pop said triumphantly, thinking: I wish you was here, McCarty, you happy asshole. I just wish you was. Here's two ladies been round the Horn and back a few times that don't think this goddam camera's just some kind of a carny magic-show trick!
'Does it show something which has happened?' Meleusippus whispered.
'Or something which will happen?' Eleusippus added in an equally awed whisper.
'I dunno,' Pop said. 'All I know for sure is that I have seen some goddam strange things in my time, but I've never seen the beat of these pitchers.'
'I'm not surprised!' Eleusippus.
'Nor E' Meleusippus.
Pop was all set to start the conversation going in the direction of price - a delicate business when you were dealing with anyone, but never more so than when you were dealing with the Pus Sisters: when it got down to hard trading, they were as delicate as a pair of virgins - which, for all Pop knew, at least one of them was. He was just deciding on the To start with, it never crossed my mind to sell something like this, but ... approach (it was older than the Pus Sisters themselves - although probably not by much, you would have said after a good close look at them - but when you were dealing