Four Past Midnight - Stephen King [365]
Don't matter, Pop thought. You just keep working that shutter, or letting people like this fool work it, and you are gonna find out, aren't you?
But he didn't want to find out. He looked at the black, murdering thing whose matted coat had caught perhaps two dozen wayward burdocks, the thing which no longer had fur, exactly, but stuff like living spikes, and a tail like a medieval weapon. He observed the shadow it had taken a damned snot-nosed kid to extract meaning from, and saw it had changed. One of the shadow-legs appeared to have moved a stride backward - a very long stride, even taking the effect of the lowering or rising sun (but it was going down; Pop had somehow become very sure it was going down, that it was night coming in that world over there, not day) into account.
The photographer over there in that world had finally discovered that his subject did not mean to sit for its portrait; that had never been a part of its plan. It intended to eat, not sit. That was the plan.
Eat, and, maybe, in some way he didn't understand, escape.
Find out! he thought ironically. Go ahead! Just keep taking pitchers! You'll find out! You'll find out PLENTY!
'And you, sir,' Emory Chaffee was saying, for he had only been stopped for a moment; creatures of little imagination are rarely stopped for long by such trivial things as consideration, 'are one hell of a salesman!'
The memory of McCarty was still very close to the surface of Pop's mind, and it still rankled.
'If you think it's a fake -' he began.
'A fake? Not at all! Not ... at all!' Chaffee's buck-toothed smile spread wide in all its repulsive splendor. He spread his hands in a surely-you-jest motion. 'But I'm afraid, you see, that we can't do business on this particular item, Mr Merrill. I'm sorry to say so, but -'
'Why?' Pop bit off. 'If you don't think the goddam thing's a fake, why in the hell don't you want it?' And he was astonished to hear his voice rising in a kind of plaintive, balked fury. There had never been anything like this, never in the history of the world, Pop was sure of it, nor ever would be again. Yet it seemed he couldn't give the goddam thing away.
'But . . .' Chaffee looked puzzled, as if not sure how to state it, because whatever it was he had to say seemed so obvious to him. In that moment he looked like a pleasant but not very capable pre-school teacher trying to teach a backward child how to tie his shoes. 'But it doesn't do anything, does it?'
'Doesn't do anything?' Pop nearly screamed. He couldn't believe he had lost control of himself to such a degree as this, and was losing more all the time. What was happening to him? Or, cutting closer to the bone, what was the son-of-a-bitching camera doing to him? 'Doesn't do anything? What are you, blind? It takes pitchers of another world! It takes pitchers that move in time from one to the next, no matter where you take em or when you take em in this world! And that ... that thing ... that monster -'
Oh. Oh dear. He had finally done it. He had finally gone too far. He could see it in the way Chaffee was looking at him.
'But it's just a dog, isn't it?' Chaffee said in a low, comforting voice. It was the sort of voice you'd use to try and soothe a madman while the nurses ran for the cabinet where they kept the hypos and the knock-out stuff.
'Ayuh,' Pop said slowly and tiredly. 'Just a dog is all it is. But you said yourself it was a hell of an ugly brute.'
'That's right, that's right, I did,' Chaffee said, agreeing much too quickly. Pop thought if the man's grin got any wider and broader he might just be treated to the sight of the top three-quarters of the