Four Past Midnight - Stephen King [363]
Chaffee presented a fascinating paradox: in all Pop's experience with the Mad Hatters - an experience that was long and amazingly varied - Emory Chaffee was the only believer in the 'other world' who had absolutely no imagination whatsoever. That he had ever spared a single thought for the 'other world' with such a mind was surprising; that he believed in it was amazing; that he paid good money to collect objects connected with it was something Pop found absolutely astounding. Yet it was so, and Pop would have put Chaffee much higher on his fist save for the annoying fact that Chaffee was by far the least well off of what Pop thought of as his 'rich' Mad Hatters. He was doing a game but poor job of holding onto the last unravelling threads of what had once been a great family fortune. Hence, another large drop in Pop's asking price for Kevin's Polaroid.
But, he had thought, pulling his car into the overgrown driveway of what had in the twenties been one of Sebago Lake's finest summer homes and which was now only a step or two away from becoming one of Sebago Lake's shabbiest year-round homes (the Chaffee house in Portland's Bramhall district had been sold for taxes fifteen years before), if anyone'll buy this beshitted thing, I reckon Emory will.
The only thing that really distressed him - and it had done so more and more as he worked his way fruitlessly down the list - was the demonstration part. He could describe what the camera did until he was black in the face, but not even an odd duck like Emory Chaffee would lay out good money on the basis of a description alone.
Sometimes Pop thought it had been stupid to have Kevin take all those pictures so he could make that videotape. But when you got right down to where the bear shit in the buckwheat, he wasn't sure it would have made any difference. Time passed over there in that world (for, like Kevin, he had come to think of it as that: an actual world), and it passed much more slowly than it did in this one ... but wasn't it speeding up as the dog approached the camera? Pop thought it was. The movement of the dog along the fence had been barely visible at first; now only a blind man could fail to see that the dog was closer each time the shutter was pressed. You could see the difference in distance even if you snapped two photographs one right after the other. It was almost as if time over there were trying to ... well, trying to catch up somehow, and get in sync with time over here.
If that had been all, it would have been bad enough. But it wasn't all.
That was no dog, goddammit.
POP didn't know what it was, but he knew as well as he knew his mother was buried in Homeland Cemetery that it was no dog.
He thought it had been a dog, when it had been snuffling its way along that picket fence which it had now left a good ten feet behind; it had looked like one, albeit an exceptionally mean one once it got its head turned enough so you could get a good look at its phiz.
But to Pop it now looked like no creature that had ever existed on God's earth, and probably not in Lucifer's hell, either. What troubled him even more was this: the few people for whom he had taken demonstration photographs did not seem to see this. They inevitably recoiled, inevitably said it was the ugliest, meanestlooking junkyard mongrel they had ever seen, but that was all. Not a single one of them suggested that the dog in Kevin's Sun 660 was turning into some kind of monster as it approached the photographer. As it approached the lens which might be some sort of portal between that world and this one.
Pop thought again (as Kevin had), But it could never get through. Never. If something is going to happen, I'll tell you what that something will be, because that thing is an ANIMAL, Maybe a goddam ugly one, a scary one, even, like the kind of thing a little kid imagines in his closet after his momma turns off the lights, but it's still an ANIMAL, and if anything happens it'll be this: there'll be one