Four Past Midnight

by Stephen King

  Still ...

  "Leave it," he said roughly in the darkness, and the sound of his own voice startled him and got him moving and he went upstairs without another look back.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Very early the next morning, Kevin Delevan had a nightmare so horrible he could only remember parts of it, like isolated phrases of music heard on a radio with a defective speaker.

  He was walking into a grungy little mill-town. Apparently he was on the bum, because he had a pack on his back. The name of the town was Oatley, and Kevin had the idea it was either in Vermont or upstate New York. You know anyone hiring here in Oatley? he asked an old man pushing a shopping-cart along a cracked sidewalk. There were no groceries in the cart; it was full of indeterminate junk, and Kevin realized the man was a wino. Get away! the wino screamed. Get away! Feef! Fushing feef! Fushing FEEF!

  Kevin ran, darted across the street, more frightened of the man's madness than he was of the idea anyone might believe that he, Kevin, was a thief. The wino called after him: This ain't Oatley! This is Hildasville! Get out of town, you fushing feef!

  It was then that he realized that this town wasn't Oatley or Hildasville or any other town with a normal name. How could an utterly abnormal town have a normal name?

  Everything--streets, buildings, cars, signs, the few pedestrians--was two-dimensional. Things had height, they had width ... but they had no thickness. He passed a woman who looked the way Meg's ballet teacher might look if the ballet teacher put on a hundred and fifty pounds. She was wearing slacks the color of Bazooka bubble gum. Like the wino, she was pushing a shopping-cart. It had a squeaky wheel. It was full of Polaroid Sun 660 cameras. She looked at Kevin with narrow suspicion as they drew closer together. At the moment when they passed each other on the sidewalk, she disappeared. Her shadow was still there and he could still hear that rhythmic squeaking, but she was no longer there. Then she reappeared, looking back at him from her fat flat suspicious face, and Kevin understood the reason why she had disappeared for a moment. It was because the concept of "a side view" didn't exist, couldn't exist, in a world where everything was perfectly flat.

  This is Polaroidsville, he thought with a relief which was strangely mingled with horror. And that means this is only a dream.

  Then he saw the white picket fence, and the dog, and the photographer standing in the gutter. There were rimless spectacles propped up on his head. It was Pop Merrill.

  Well, son, you found him, the two-dimensional Polaroid Pop said to Kevin without removing his eye from the shutter. That's the dog, right there. The one tore up that kid out in Schenectady. YOUR dog, is what I mean to say.

  Then Kevin woke up in his own bed, afraid he had screamed but more concerned at first not about the dream but to make sure he was all there, all three dimensions of him.

  He was. But something was wrong.

  Stupid dream, he thought. Let it go, why can't you? It's over. Photos are burned, all fifty-eight of them. And the camera's bus--

  His thought broke off like ice as that something, that something wrong, teased at his mind again.

  It's not over, he thought. It's n--

  But before the thought could finish itself, Kevin Delevan fell deeply, dreamlessly asleep. The next morning, he barely remembered the nightmare at all.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The two weeks following his acquisition of Kevin Delevan's Polaroid Sun were the most aggravating, infuriating, humiliating two weeks of Pop Merrill's life. There were quite a few people in Castle Rock who would have said it couldn't have happened to a more deserving guy. Not that anyone in Castle Rock did know ... and that was just about all the consolation Pop could take. He found it cold comfort. Very cold indeed, thank you very much.

  But who would have ever believed the Mad Hatters would have, could have, let him down so badly?

  It was almost enough to make a man wonder if he was starting to slip a little.

  God forbid.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Back in September, he hadn't even bothered to wonder if he would sell the Polaroid; the only questions were how soon and how much. The Delevans had bandied the word supernatural about, and Pop hadn't corrected them, although he knew that what the Sun was doing would be more properly classed by psychic investigators as a paranormal rather than supernatural phenomenon. He could have told them that, but if he had, they might both have wondered how come the owner of a small-town used-goods store (and part-time usurer) knew so much about the subject. The fact was this: he knew a lot because it was profitable to know a lot, and it was profitable to know a lot because of the people he thought of as "my Mad Hatters."

  Mad Hatters were people who recorded empty rooms on expensive audio equipment not for a lark or a drunken party stunt, but either because they believed passionately in an unseen world and wanted to prove its existence, or because they wanted passionately to get in touch with friends and/or relatives who had "passed on" ("passed on": that's what they always called it; Mad Hatters never had relatives who did something so simple as die).

  Mad Hatters not only owned and used Ouija Boards, they had regular conversations with "spirit guides" in the "other world" (never "heaven," "hell," or even "the rest area of the dead" but the "other world") who put them in touch with friends, relatives, queens, dead rock-and-roll singers, even arch-villains. Pop knew of a Mad Hatter in Vermont who had twice-weekly conversations with Hitler. Hitler had told him it was all a bum rap, he had sued for peace in January of 1943 and that son of a bitch Churchill had turned him down. Hitler had also told him Paul Newman was a space alien who had been born in a cave on the moon.

  Mad Hatters went to seances as regularly (and as compulsively) as drug addicts visited their pushers. They bought crystal balls and amulets guaranteed to bring good luck; they organized their own little societies and investigated reputedly haunted houses for all the usual phenomena: teleplasm, tablerappings, floating tables and beds, cold spots, and, of course, ghosts. They noted all of these, real or imagined, with the enthusiasm of dedicated bird-watchers.

  Most of them had a ripping good time. Some did not. There was that fellow from Wolfeboro, for instance. He hanged himself in the notorious Tecumseh House, where a gentleman farmer had, in the 1880s and '90s, helped his fellow men by day and helped himself to them by night, dining on them at a formal table in his cellar. The table stood upon a floor of sour packed dirt which had yielded the bones and decomposed bodies of at least twelve and perhaps as many as thirty-five young men, all vagabonds. The fellow from Wolfeboro had left this brief note on a pad of paper beside his Ouija Board: Can't leave the house. Doors all locked. I hear him eating. Tried cotton. Does no good.

  And the poor deluded asshole probably thought he really did, Pop had mused after hearing this story from a source he trusted.

  Then there was a fellow in Dunwich, Massachusetts, to whom Pop had once sold a so-called spirit trumpet for ninety dollars; the fellow had taken the trumpet to the Dunwich Cemetery and must have heard something exceedingly unpleasant, because he had been raving in a padded cell in Arkham for almost six years now, totally insane. When he had gone into the boneyard, his hair had been black; when his screams awoke the few neighbors who lived close enough to the cemetery to hear them and the police were summoned, it was as white as his howling face.

  And there was the woman in Portland who lost an eye when a session with the Ouija Board went cataclysmically wrong ... the man in Kingston, Rhode Island, who lost three fingers on his right hand when the rear door of a car in which two teenagers had committed suicide closed on it ... the old lady who landed in Massachusetts Memorial Hospital short most of one ear when her equally elderly cat, Claudette, supposedly went on a rampage during a seance ...

  Pop believed some of these things, disbelieved others, and mostly held no opinion--not because he didn't have enough hard evidence one way or the other, but because he didn't give a fart in a high wind about ghosts, seances, crystal balls, spirit trumpets, rampaging cats, or the f
abled John the Conquerer Root. As far as Reginald Marion "Pop" Merrill was concerned, the Mad Hatters could all take a flying fuck at the moon.

  As long, of course, as one of them handed over some mighty tall tickets for Kevin Delevan's camera before taking passage on the next shuttle.

  Pop didn't call these enthusiasts Mad Hatters because of their spectral interests; he called them that because the great majority--he was sometimes tempted to say all of them--seemed to be rich, retired, and just begging to be plucked. If you were willing to spend fifteen minutes with them nodding and agreeing while they assured you they could pick a fake medium from a real one just by walking into the room, let alone sitting down at the seance table, or if you spent an equal amount of time listening to garbled noises which might or might not be words on a tape player with the proper expression of awe on your face, you could sell them a four-dollar paperweight for a hundred by telling them a man had once glimpsed his dead mother in it. You gave them a smile and they wrote you a check for two hundred dollars. You gave them an encouraging word and they wrote you a check for two thousand dollars. If you gave them both things at the same time, they just kind of passed the checkbook over to you and asked you to fill in an amount.

  It had always been as easy as taking candy from a baby.

  Until now.

  Pop didn't keep a file in his cabinet marked MAD HATTERS any more than he kept one marked COIN COLLECTORS or STAMP COLLECTORS. He didn't even have a file-cabinet. The closest thing to it was a battered old book of phone numbers he carried around in his back pocket (which, like his purse, had over the years taken on the shallow ungenerous curve of the spindly buttock it lay against every day). Pop kept his files where a man in his line of work should always keep them: in his head. There were eight full-blown Mad Hatters that he had done business with over the years, people who didn't just dabble in the occult but who got right down and rolled around in it. The richest was a retired industrialist named McCarty who lived on his own island about twelve miles off the coast. This fellow disdained boats and employed a full-time pilot who flew him back and forth to the mainland when he needed to go.

  Pop went to see him on September 28th, the day after he obtained the camera from Kevin (he didn't, couldn't, exactly think of it as robbery; the boy, after all, had been planning to smash it to shit anyway, and what he didn't know surely couldn't hurt him). He drove to a private airstrip just north of Boothbay Harbor in his old but perfectly maintained car, then gritted his teeth and slitted his eyes and held onto the steel lockbox with the Polaroid Sun 660 in it for dear life as the Mad Hatter's Beechcraft plunged down the dirt runway like a rogue horse, rose into the air just as Pop was sure they were going to fall off the edge and be smashed to jelly on the rocks below, and flew away into the autumn empyrean. He had made this trip twice before, and had sworn each time that he would never get into that goddam flying coffin again.

  They bumped and jounced along with the hungry Atlantic less than five hundred feet below, the pilot talking cheerfully the whole way. Pop nodded and said ayuh in what seemed like the right places, although he was more concerned with his imminent demise than with anything the pilot was saying.

  Then the island was ahead with its horribly, dismally, suicidally short landing strip and its sprawling house of redwood and fieldstone, and the pilot swooped down, leaving Pop's poor old acid-shrivelled stomach somewhere in the air above them, and they hit with a thud and then, somehow, miraculously, they were taxiing to a stop, still alive and whole, and Pop could safely go back to believing God was just another invention of the Mad Hatters ... at least until he had to get back in that damned plane for the return journey.

  "Great day for flying, huh, Mr. Merrill?" the pilot asked, unfolding the steps for him.

  "Finest kind," Pop grunted, then strode up the walk to the house where the Thanksgiving turkey stood in the doorway, smiling in eager anticipation. Pop had promised to show him "the goddamnedest thing I ever come across," and Cedric McCarty looked like he couldn't wait. He'd take one quick look for form's sake, Pop thought, and then fork over the lettuce. He went back to the mainland forty-five minutes later, barely noticing the thumps and jounces and gut-goozling drops as the Beech hit the occasional air-pocket. He was a chastened, thoughtful man.

  He had aimed the Polaroid at the Mad Hatter and took his picture. While they waited for it to develop, the Mad Hatter took a picture of Pop ... and when the flashbulb went off, had he heard something? Had he heard the low, ugly snarl of that black dog, or had it been his imagination? Imagination, most likely. Pop had made some magnificent deals in his time, and you couldn't do that without imagination.

  Still--

  Cedric McCarty, retired industrialist par excellence and Mad Hatter extraordinaire, watched the photographs develop with that same childlike eagerness, but when they finally came clear, he looked amused and even perhaps a little contemptuous and Pop knew with the infallible intuition which had developed over almost fifty years that arguing, cajolery, even vague hints that he had another customer just slavering for a chance to buy this camera--none of those usually reliable techniques would work. A big orange No SALE card had gone up in Cedric McCarty's mind.

  By why?

  Goddammit, why?

  In the picture Pop took, that glint Kevin had spotted amid the wrinkles of the black dog's muzzle had clearly become a tooth--except tooth wasn't the right word, not by any stretch of the imagination. That was a fang. In the one McCarty took, you could see the beginnings of the neighboring teeth.

  Fucking dog's got a mouth like a bear-trap, Pop thought. Unbidden, an image of his arm in that dog's mouth rose in his mind. He saw the dog not biting it, not eating it, but shredding it, the way the many teeth of a wood-chipper shred bark, leaves, and small branches. How long would it take? he wondered, and looked at those dirty eyes staring out at him from the overgrown face and knew it wouldn't take long. Or suppose the dog seized him by the crotch, instead? Suppose--

  But McCarty had said something and was waiting for a response. Pop turned his attention to the man, and any lingering hope he might have held of making a sale evaporated. The Mad Hatter extraordinaire, who would cheerfully spend an afternoon with you trying to call up the ghost of your dear departed Uncle Ned, was gone. In his place was McCarty's other side: the hardheaded realist who had made Fortune magazine's listing of the richest men in America for twelve straight years--not because he was an airhead who had had the good fortune to inherit both a lot of money and an honest, capable staff to husband and expand it, but because he had been a genius in the field of aerodynamic design and development. He was not as rich as Howard Hughes but not quite as crazy as Hughes had been at the end, either. When it came to psychic phenomena, the man was a Mad Hatter. Outside that one area, however, he was a shark that made the likes of Pop Merrill look like a tadpole swimming in a mud-puddle.

  "Sorry," Pop said. "I was woolgatherin a little, Mr. McCarty."

  "I said it's fascinating," McCarty said. "Especially the subtle indications of passing time from one photo to the next. How does it work? Camera in camera?"

  "I don't understand what you're gettin at."

  "No, not a camera," McCarty said, speaking to himself. He picked the camera up and shook it next to his ear. "More likely some sort of roller device."

  Pop stared at the man with no idea what he was talking about ... except it spelled NO SALE, whatever it was. That goddam Christless ride in the little plane (and soon to do over again), all for nothing. But why? Why? He had been so sure of this fellow, who would probably believe the Brooklyn Bridge was a spectral illusion from the "other side" if you told him it was. So why?

  "Slots, of course!" McCarty said, as delighted as a child. "Slots! There's a circular belt on pulleys inside this housing with a number of slots built into it. Each slot contains an exposed Polaroid picture of this dog. Continuity suggests"--he looked carefully at the pictures again--"yes, that the dog might have been filmed, with the Polaroids made from individua
l frames. When the shutter is released, a picture drops from its slot and emerges. The battery turns the belt enough to position the next photo, and--voila!"

  His pleasant expression was suddenly gone, and Pop saw a man who looked like he might have made his way to fame and fortune over the broken, bleeding bodies of his competitors ... and enjoyed it.

  "Joe will fly you back," he said. His voice had gone chill and impersonal. "You're good, Mr. Merrill"--this man, Pop realized glumly, would never call him Pop again--"I'll admit that. You've finally overstepped yourself, but for a long time you had me fooled. How much did you take me for? Was it all claptrap?"

  "I didn't take you for one red cent," Pop said, lying stoutly. "I never sold you one single thing I didn't b'lieve was the genuine article, and what I mean to say is that goes for that camera as well."

  "You make me sick," McCarty said. "Not because I trusted you; I've trusted others who were fakes and shams. Not because you took my money; it wasn't enough to matter. You make me sick because it's men like you that have kept the scientific investigation of psychic phenomena in the dark ages, something to be laughed at, something to be dismissed as the sole province of crackpots and dimwits. The one consolation is that sooner or later you fellows always overstep yourselves. You get greedy and try to palm off something ridiculous like this. I want you out of here, Mr. Merrill."

  Pop had his pipe in his mouth and a Diamond Blue Tip in one shaking hand. McCarty pointed at him, and the chilly eyes above that finger made it look like the barrel of a gun.

  "And if you light that stinking thing in here," he said, "I'll have Joe yank it out of your mouth and dump the coals down the back of your pants. So unless you want to leave my house with your skinny ass in flames, I suggest--"