Four Past Midnight

by Stephen King

  Further, as a human being who had gone through his life to that point making most decisions on instinct rather than reason (and he was one of those lucky ones whose instincts were almost always good--the sort of person, in other words, who drives reasonable people mad), Kevin was surprised and intrigued to find that he was actually On the Horns of a Dilemma.

  Horn #1: he had wanted a Polaroid camera and he had gotten one for his birthday, but, dammit, he had wanted a Polaroid camera that worked.

  Horn #2: he was deeply intrigued by Meg's use of the word supernatural.

  His younger sister had a daffy streak a mile wide, but she wasn't stupid, and Kevin didn't think she had used the word lightly or thoughtlessly. His father, who was of the Reasonable rather than Instinctive tribe, had scoffed, but Kevin found he wasn't ready to go and do likewise ... at least, not yet. That word. That fascinating, exotic word. It became a plinth which his mind couldn't help circling.

  I think it's a Manifestation.

  Kevin was amused (and a little chagrined) that only Meg had been smart enough--or brave enough--to actually say what should have occurred to all of them, given the oddity of the pictures the Sun produced, but in truth, it wasn't really that amazing. They were not a religious family; they went to church on the Christmas Day every third year when Aunt Hilda came to spend the holiday with them instead of her other remaining relatives, but except for the occasional wedding or funeral, that was about all. If any of them truly believed in the invisible world it was Megan, who couldn't get enough of walking corpses, living dolls, and cars that came to life and ran down people they didn't like.

  Neither of Kevin's parents had much taste for the bizarre. They didn't read their horoscopes in the daily paper; they would never mistake comets or falling stars for signs from the Almighty; where one couple might see the face of Jesus on the bottom of an enchilada, John and Mary Delevan would see only an overcooked enchilada. It was not surprising that Kevin, who had never seen the man in the moon because neither mother nor father had bothered to point it out to him, had been likewise unable to see the possibility of a supernatural Manifestation in a camera which took the same picture over and over again, inside or outside, even in the dark of his bedroom closet, until it was suggested to him by his sister, who had once written a fan-letter to Jason and gotten an autographed glossy photo of a guy in a bloodstained hockey mask by return mail.

  Once the possibility had been pointed out, it became difficult to unthink; as Dostoyevsky, that smart old Russian, once said to his little brother when the two of them were both smart young Russians, try to spend the next thirty seconds not thinking of a blue-eyed polar bear.

  It was hard to do.

  So he had spent two days circling that plinth in his mind, trying to read hieroglyphics that weren't even there, for pity's sake, and trying to decide which he wanted more: the camera or the possibility of a Manifestation. Or, put another way, whether he wanted the Sun ... or the man in the moon.

  By the end of the second day (even in fifteen-year-olds who are clearly destined for the Reasonable tribe, dilemmas rarely last longer than a week), he had decided to take the man in the moon ... on a trial basis, at least.

  He came to this decision in study hall period seven, and when the bell rang, signalling the end of both the study hall and the school-day, he had gone to the teacher he respected most, Mr. Baker, and had asked him if he knew of anyone who repaired cameras.

  "Not like a regular camera-shop guy," he explained. "More like a ... you know ... a thoughtful guy."

  "An F-stop philosopher?" Mr. Baker asked. His saying things like that was one of the reasons why Kevin respected him. It was just a cool thing to say. "A sage of the shutter? An alchemist of the aperture? A--"

  "A guy who's seen a lot," Kevin said cagily.

  "Pop Merrill," Mr. Baker said.

  "Who?"

  "He runs the Emporium Galorium."

  "Oh. That place."

  "Yeah," Mr. Baker said, grinning. "That place. If, that is, what you're looking for is a sort of homespun Mr. Fixit."

  "I guess that's what I am looking for."

  "He's got damn near everything in there," Mr. Baker said, and Kevin could agree with that. Even though he had never actually been inside, he passed the Emporium Galorium five, ten, maybe fifteen times a week (in a town the size of Castle Rock, you had to pass everything a lot, and it got amazingly boring in Kevin Delevan's humble opinion), and he had looked in the windows. It seemed crammed literally to the rafters with objects, most of them mechanical. But his mother called it "a junk-store" in a sniffing voice, and his father said Mr. Merrill made his money "rooking the summer people," and so Kevin had never gone in. If it had only been a "junk-store," he might have; almost certainly would have, in fact. But doing what the summer people did, or buying something where summer people "got rooked" was unthinkable. He would be as apt to wear a blouse and skirt to high school. Summer people could do what they wanted (and did). They were all mad, and conducted their affairs in a mad fashion. Exist with them, fine. But be confused with them? No. No. And no sir.

  "Damn near everything," Mr. Baker repeated, "and most of what he's got, he fixed himself. He thinks that crackerbarrel-philosopher act he does--glasses up on top of the head, wise pronouncements, all of that--fools people. No one who knows him disabuses him. I'm not sure anyone would dare disabuse him."

  "Why? What do you mean?"

  Mr. Baker shrugged. An odd, tight little smile touched his mouth. "Pop--Mr. Merrill, I mean--has got his fingers in a lot of pies around here. You'd be surprised, Kevin."

  Kevin didn't care about how many pies Pop Merrill was currently fingering, or what their fillings might be. He was left with only one more important question, since the summer people were gone and he could probably slink into the Emporium Galorium unseen tomorrow afternoon if he took advantage of the rule which allowed all students but freshmen to cut their last-period study hall twice a month.

  "Do I call him Pop or Mr. Merrill?"

  Solemnly, Mr. Baker replied, "I think the man kills anyone under the age of sixty who calls him Pop."

  And the thing was, Kevin had an idea Mr. Baker wasn't exactly joking.

  "You really don't know, huh?" Kevin said when the clocks began to wind down.

  It had not been like in a movie, where they all start and finish striking at once; these were real clocks, and he guessed that most of them--along with the rest of the appliances in the Emporium Galorium--were not really running at all but sort of lurching along. They had begun at what his own Seiko quartz watch said was 3:58. They began to pick up speed and volume gradually (like an old truck fetching second gear with a tired groan and jerk). There were maybe four seconds when all of them really did seem to be striking, bonging, chiming, clanging, and cuckoo-ing at the same time, but four seconds was all the synchronicity they could manage. And "winding down" was not exactly what they did. What they did was sort of give up, like water finally consenting to gurgle its way down a drain which is almost but not quite completely plugged.

  He didn't have any idea why he was so disappointed. Had he really expected anything else? For Pop Merrill, whom Mr. Baker had described as a crackerbarrel philosopher and homespun Mr. Fixit, to pull out a spring and say, "Here it is--this is the bastard causing that dog to show up every time you push the shutter release. It's a dog-spring, belongs in one of those toy dogs a kid winds up so it'll walk and bark a little, some joker on the Polaroid Sun 660 assembly line's always putting them in the damn cameras."

  Had he expected that?

  No. But he had expected ... something.

  "Don't have a friggin clue," Pop repeated cheerfully. He reached behind him and took a Douglas MacArthur corncob pipe from a holder shaped like a bucket seat. He began to tamp tobacco into it from an imitation-leather pouch with the words EVIL WEED stamped into it. "Can't even take these babies apart, you know."

  "You can't?"

  "Nope," Pop said. He was just as chipper as a bird. He
paused long enough to hook a thumb over the wire ridge between the lenses of his rimless specs and give them a yank. They dropped off his bald dome and fell neatly into place, hiding the red spots on the sides of his nose, with a fleshy little thump. "You could take apart the old ones," he went on, now producing a Diamond Blue Tip match from a pocket of his vest (of course he was wearing a vest) and pressing the thick yellow thumbnail of his right hand on its head. Yes, this was a man who could rook the summer people with one hand tied behind his back (always assuming it wasn't the one he used to first fish out his matches and then light them)--even at fifteen years of age, Kevin could see that. Pop Merrill had style. "The Polaroid Land cameras, I mean. Ever seen one of those beauties?"

  "No," Kevin said.

  Pop snapped the match alight on the first try, which of course he would always do, and applied it to the corncob, his words sending out little smoke-signals which looked pretty and smelled absolutely foul.

  "Oh yeah," he said. "They looked like those old-time cameras people like Mathew Brady used before the turn of the century--or before the Kodak people introduced the Brownie box camera, anyway. What I mean to say is" (Kevin was rapidly learning that this was Pop Merrill's favorite phrase; he used it the way some of the kids in school used "you know," as intensifier, modifier, qualifier, and most of all as a convenient thought-gathering pause) "they tricked it up some, put on chrome and real leather side-panels, but it still looked old-fashioned, like the sort of camera folks used to make daguerreotypes with. When you opened one of those old Polaroid Land cameras, it snapped out an accordion neck, because the lens needed half a foot, maybe even nine inches, to focus the image. It looked old-fashioned as hell when you put it next to one of the Kodaks in the late forties and early fifties, and it was like those old daguerreotype cameras in another way--it only took black-and-white photos."

  "Is that so?" Kevin asked, interested in spite of himself.

  "Oh, ayuh!" Pop said, chipper as a chickadee, blue eyes twinkling at Kevin through the smoke from his fuming stewpot of a pipe and from behind his round rimless glasses. It was the sort of twinkle which may indicate either good humor or avarice. "What I mean to say is that people laughed at those cameras the way they laughed at the Volkswagen Beetles when they first come out ... but they bought the Polaroids just like they bought the VWs. Because the Beetles got good gas mileage and didn't go bust so often as American cars, and the Polaroids did one thing the Kodaks and even the Nikons and Minoltas and Leicas didn't."

  "Took instant pictures."

  Pop smiled. "Well ... not exactly. What I mean to say is you took your pitcher, and then you yanked on this flap to pull it out. It didn't have no motor, didn't make that squidgy little whining noise like modem Polaroids."

  So there was a perfect way to describe that sound after all, it was just that you had to find a Pop Merrill to tell it to you: the sound that Polaroid cameras made when they spat out their product was a squidgy little whine.

  "Then you had to time her," Pop said.

  "Time--?"

  "Oh; ayuh!" Pop said with great relish, bright as the early bird who has found that fabled worm. "What I mean to say is they didn't have none of this happy automatic crappy back in those days. You yanked and out come this long strip which you put on the table or whatever and timed off sixty seconds on your watch. Had to be sixty, or right around there, anyway. Less and you'd have an underexposed pitcher. More and it'd be overexposed."

  "Wow," Kevin said respectfully. And this was not bogus respect, jollying the old man along in hopes he would get back to the point, which was not a bunch of long-dead cameras that had been wonders in their day but his own camera, the damned balky Sun 660 sitting on Pop's worktable with the guts of an old seven-day clock on its right and something which looked suspiciously like a dildo on its left. It wasn't bogus respect and Pop knew it, and it occurred to Pop (it wouldn't have to Kevin) how fleeting that great white god "state-of-the-art" really was; ten years, he thought, and the phrase itself would be gone. From the boy's fascinated expression, you would have thought he was hearing about something as antique as George Washington's wooden dentures instead of a camera everyone had thought was the ultimate only thirty-five years ago. But of course this boy had still been circling around in the unhatched void thirty-five years ago, part of a female who hadn't yet even met the male who would provide his other half.

  "What I mean to say is it was a regular little darkroom goin on in there between the pitcher and the backing," Pop resumed, slow at first but speeding up as his own mostly genuine interest in the subject resurfaced (but the thoughts of who this kid's father was and what the kid might be worth to him and the strange thing the kid's camera was up to never completely left his mind). "And at the end of the minute, you peeled the pitcher off the back--had to be careful when you did it, too, because there was all this goo like jelly on the back, and if your skin was in the least bit sensitive, you could get a pretty good burn."

  "Awesome," Kevin said. His eyes were wide, and now he looked like a kid hearing about the old two-holer outhouses which Pop and all his childhood colleagues (they were almost all colleagues; he had had few childhood friends in Castle Rock, perhaps preparing even then for his life's work of rooking the summer people and the other children somehow sensing it, like a faint smell of skunk) had taken for granted, doing your business as fast as you could in high summer because one of the wasps always circling around down there between the manna and the two holes which were the heaven from which the manna fell might at any time take a notion to plant its stinger in one of your tender little boycheeks, and also doing it as fast as you could in deep winter because your tender little boycheeks were apt to freeze solid if you didn't. Well, Pop thought, so much for the Camera of the Future. Thirty-five years and to this kid it's interestin in the same way a backyard shithouse is interestin.

  "The negative was on the back," Pop said. "And your positive--well, it was black and white, but it was fine black and white. It was just as crisp and clear as you'd ever want even today. And you had this little pink thing, about as long as a school eraser, as I remember; it squeegeed out some kind of chemical, smelled like ether, and you had to rub it over the pitcher as fast as you could, or that pitcher'd roll right up, like the tube in the middle of a roll of bung-fodder."

  Kevin burst out laughing, tickled by these pleasant antiquities.

  Pops quit long enough to get his pipe going again. When he had, he resumed: "A camera like that, nobody but the Polaroid people really knew what it was doing--I mean to say those people were close--but it was mechanical. You could take it apart."

  He looked at Kevin's Sun with some distaste.

  "And, lots of times when one went bust, that was as much as you needed. Fella'd come in with one of those and say it wouldn't work, moanin about how he'd have to send it back to the Polaroid people to get it fixed and that'd prob'ly take months and would I take a look. 'Well,' I'd say, 'prob'ly nothin I can do, what I mean to say is nobody really knows about these cameras but the Polaroid people and they're goddam close, but I'll take a look.' All the time knowin it was prob'ly just a loose screw inside that shutter-housin or maybe a fouled spring, or hell, maybe Junior slathered some peanut butter in the film compartment."

  One of his bright bird-eyes dropped in a wink so quick and so marvellously sly that, Kevin thought, if you hadn't known he was talking about summer people, you would have thought it was your paranoid imagination, or, more likely, missed it entirely.

  "What I mean to say is you had your perfect situation," Pop said. "If you could fix it, you were a goddam wonder-worker. Why, I have put eight dollars and fifty cents in my pocket for takin a couple of little pieces of potato-chip out from between the trigger and the shutter-spring, my son, and the woman who brought that camera in kissed me on the lips. Right ... on ... the lips."

  Kevin observed Pop's eye drop momentarily closed again behind the semi-transparent mat of blue smoke.

  "And of course, if it was somethin y
ou couldn't fix, they didn't hold it against you because, what I mean to say, they never really expected you to be able to do nothin in the first place. You was only a last resort before they put her in a box and stuffed newspaper around her to keep her from bein broke even worse in the mail, and shipped her off to Schenectady.

  "But--this camera." He spoke in the ritualistic tone of distaste all philosophers of the crackerbarrel, whether in Athens of the golden age or in a small-town junk-shop during this current one of brass, adopt to express their view of entropy without having to come right out and state it. "Wasn't put together, son. What I mean to say is it was poured. I could maybe pop the lens, and will if you want me to, and I did look in the film compartment, although I knew I wouldn't see a goddam thing wrong--that I recognized, at least--and I didn't. But beyond that I can't go. I could take a hammer and wind it right to her, could break it, what I mean to say, but fix it?" He spread his hands in pipe-smoke. "Nossir."

  "Then I guess I'll just have to--" return it after all, he meant to finish, but Pop broke in.

  "Anyway, son, I think you knew that. What I mean to say is you're a bright boy, you can see when a thing's all of a piece. I don't think you brought that camera in to be fixed. I think you know that even if it wasn't all of a piece, a man couldn't fix what that thing's doing, at least not with a screwdriver. I think you brought it in to ask me if I knew what it's up to."

  "Do you?" Kevin asked. He was suddenly tense all over.

  "I might," Pop Merrill said calmly. He bent over the pile of photographs-twenty-eight of them now, counting the one Kevin had snapped to demonstrate, and the one Pop had snapped to demonstrate to himself. "These in order?"