Four Past Midnight

by Stephen King

  "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 idiot's head toppling off into his lap. "But ... surely you see, Mr. Merrill ... what a problem this presents for the collector. The serious collector."

  "No, I guess I don't," Pop said, but after running through the entire list of Mad Hatters, a list which had seemed so promising at first, he was beginning to. In fact, he was beginning to see a whole host of problems the Polaroid Sun presented for the serious collector. As for Emory Chaffee ... God knew what Emory thought, exactly.

  "There are most certainly such things as ghost photographs," Chaffee said in a rich, pedantic voice that made Pop want to strangle him. "But these are not ghost photographs. They--"

  "They're sure as hell not normal photographs!"

  "My point exactly," Chaffee said, frowning slightly. "But what sort of photographs are they? One can hardly say, can one? One can only display a perfectly normal camera that photographs a dog which is apparently preparing to leap. And once it leaps, it will be gone from the frame of the picture. At that point, one of three things may happen. The camera may start taking normal pictures, which is to say, pictures of the things it is aimed at; it may take no more pictures at all, its one purpose, to photograph--to document, one might even say--that dog, completed; or it may simply go on taking pictures of that white fence and the ill-tended lawn behind it." He paused and added, "I suppose someone might walk by at some point, forty photographs down the line--or four hundred--but unless the photographer raised his angle, which he doesn't seem to have done in any of these, one would only see the passerby from the waist down. More or less." And, echoing Kevin's father without even knowing who Kevin's father was, he added: "Pardon me for saying so, Mr. Merrill, but you've shown me something I thought I'd never see: an inexplicable and almost irrefutable paranormal occurrence that is really quite boring."

  This amazing but apparently sincere remark forced Pop to disregard whatever Chaffee might think about his sanity and ask again: "It really is only a dog, as far as you can see?"

  "Of course," Chaffee said, looking mildly surprised. "A stray mongrel that looks exceedingly bad-tempered."

  He sighed.

  "And it wouldn't be taken seriously, of course. What I mean is it wouldn't be taken seriously by people who don't know you personally, Mr. Merrill. People who aren't familiar with your honesty and reliability in these matters. It looks like a trick, you see? And not even a very good one. Something on the order of a child's Magic Eight-Ball."

  Two weeks ago, Pop would have argued strenuously against such an idea. But that was before he had been not walked but actually propelled from that bastard McCarty's house.

  "Well, if that's your final word," Pop said, getting up and taking the camera by the strap.

  "I'm very sorry you made a trip to such little purpose," Chaffee said ... and then his horrid grin burst forth again, all rubbery lips and huge teeth shining with spit. "I was about to make myself a Spam sandwich when you drove in. Would you care to join me, Mr. Merrill? I make quite a nice one, if I do say so myself. I add a little horseradish and Bermuda onion--that's my secret--and then I--"

  "I'll pass," Pop said heavily. As in the Pus Sisters' parlor, all he really wanted right now was to get out of here and put miles between himself and this grinning idiot. Pop had a definite allergy to places where he had gambled and lost. Just lately there seemed to be a lot of those. Too goddam many. "I already had m'dinner, is what I mean to say. Got to be gettin back."

  Chaffee laughed fruitily. "The lot of the toiler in the vineyards is busy but yields great bounty," he said.

  Not just lately, Pop thought. Just lately it ain't yielded no fuckin bounty at all.

  "It's a livin, anyway," Pop replied, and was eventually allowed out of the house, which was damp and chill (what it must be like to live in such a place come February, Pop couldn't imagine) and had that mousy, mildewed smell that might be rotting curtains and sofa-covers and such ... or just the smell money leaves behind when it has spent a longish period of time in a place and then departed. He thought the fresh October air, tinged with just a small taste of the lake and a stronger tang of pine-needles, had never smelled so good.

  He got into his car and started it up. Emory Chaffee, unlike the Pus Sister who had shown him as far as the door and then closed it quickly behind him, as if afraid the sun might strike her and turn her to dust like a vampire, was standing on the front porch, grinning his idiot grin and actually waving, as if he were seeing Pop off on a goddam ocean cruise.

  And, without thinking, just as he had taken the picture of (or at, anyway) the old black woman without thinking, he had snapped Chaffee and the just-starting-to-moulder house which was all that remained of the Chaffee family holdings. He didn't remember picking the camera up off the seat where he had tossed it in disgust before closing his door, was not even aware that the camera was in his hands or the shutter fired until he heard the whine of the mechanism shoving the photograph out like a tongue coated with some bland gray fluid--Milk of Magnesia, perhaps. That sound seemed to vibrate along his nerve-endings now, making them scream; it was like the feeling you got when something too cold or hot hit a new filling.

  He was peripherally aware that Chaffee was laughing as if it was the best goddam joke in the world before snatching the picture from the slot in a kind of furious horror, telling himself he had imagined the momentary, blurred sound of a snarl, a sound like you might hear if a power-boat was approaching while you had your head ducked under water; telling himself he had imagined the momentary feeling that the camera had bulged in his hands, as if some huge pressure inside had pushed the sides out momentarily. He punched the glove-compartment button and threw the picture inside and then closed it so hard and fast that he tore his thumbnail all the way down to the tender quick.

  He pulled out jerkily, almost stalling, then almost hitting one of the hoary old spruces which flanked the house end of the long Chaffee driveway, and all the way up that driveway he thought he could hear Emory Chaffee laughing in loud mindless cheery bellows of sound: Haw! Haw! Haw! Haw!

  His heart slammed in his chest, and his head felt as if someone was using a sledgehammer inside there. The small cluster of veins which nestled in the hollows of each temple pulsed steadily.

  He got himself under control little by little. Five miles, and the little man inside his head quit using the sledgehammer. Ten miles (by now he was almost halfway back to Castle Rock), and his heartbeat was back to normal. And he told himself: You ain't gonna look at it. You AIN'T. Let the goddam thing rot in there. You don't need to look at it, and you don't need to take no more of em, either. Time to mark th
e thing off as a dead loss. Time to do what you should have let the boy do in the first place.

  So of course when he got to the Castle View rest area, a turn-out from which you could, it seemed, see all of western Maine and half of New Hampshire, he swung in and turned off his motor and opened the glove compartment and brought out the picture which he had taken with no more intent or knowledge than a man might have if he did a thing while walking in his sleep. The photograph had developed in there, of course; the chemicals inside that deceptively flat square had come to life and done their usual efficient job. Dark or light, it didn't make any difference to a Polaroid picture.

  The dog-thing was crouched all the way down now. It was as fully coiled as it was going to get, a trigger pulled back to full cock. Its teeth had outgrown its mouth so that the thing's snarl seemed now to be not only an expression of rage but a simple necessity; how could its lips ever fully close over those teeth? How could those jaws ever chew? It looked more like a weird species of wild boar than a dog now, but what it really looked like was nothing Pop had ever seen before. It did more than hurt his eyes to look at it; it hurt his mind. It made him feel as if he was going crazy.

  Why not get rid of that camera right here? he thought suddenly. You can. Just get out, walk to the guardrail there, and toss her over. All gone. Goodbye.

  But that would have been an impulsive act, and Pop Merrill belonged to the Reasonable tribe--belonged to it body and soul, is what I mean to say. He didn't want to do anything on the spur of the moment that he might regret later, and--

  If you don't do this, you'll regret it later.

  But no. And no. And no. A man couldn't run against his nature. It was unnatural. He needed time to think. To be sure.

  He compromised by throwing the print out instead and then drove on quickly. For a minute or two he felt as if he might throw up, but the urge passed. When it did, he felt a little more himself. Safely back in his shop, he unlocked the steel box, took out the Sun, rummaged through his keys once more, and located the one for the drawer where he kept his "special" items. He started to put the camera inside ... and paused, brow furrowed. The image of the chopping block out back entered his mind with such clarity, every detail crisply limned, that it was like a photograph itself.

  He thought: Never mind all that about how a man can't run against his nature. That's crap, and you know it. It ain't in a man's nature to eat dirt, but you could eat a whole bowl of it, by the bald-headed Christ, if someone with a gun pointed at your head told you to do it. You know what time it is, chummy--time to do what you should have let the boy do in the first place. After all, it ain't like you got any investment in this.

  But at this, another part of his mind rose in angry, fist-waving protest. Yes I do! I do have an investment, goddammit! That kid smashed a perfectly good Polaroid camera! He may not know it, but that don't change the fact that I'm out a hundred and thirty-nine bucks!

  "Oh, shit on toast!" he muttered agitatedly. "It ain't that! It ain't the fuckin money!"

  No--it wasn't the fucking money. He could at least admit that it wasn't the money. He could afford it; Pop could indeed have afforded a great deal, including his own mansion in Portland's Bramhall district and a brand-new Mercedes-Benz to go in the carport. He never would have bought those things--he pinched his pennies and chose to regard almost pathological miserliness as nothing more than good old Yankee thrift--but that didn't mean he couldn't have had them if he so chose.

  It wasn't about money; it was about something more important than money ever could be. It was about not getting skinned. Pop had made a life's work out of not getting skinned, and on the few occasions when he had been, he had felt like a man with red ants crawling around inside his skull.

  Take the business of the goddam Kraut record-player, for instance. When Pop found out that antique dealer from Boston--Donahue, his name had been--had gotten fifty bucks more than he'd ought to have gotten for a 1915 Victor-Graff gramophone (which had actually turned out to be a much more common 1919 model), Pop had lost three hundred dollars' worth of sleep over it, sometimes plotting various forms of revenge (each more wild-eyed and ridiculous than the last), sometimes just damning himself for a fool, telling himself he must really be slipping if a city man like that Donahue could skin Pop Merrill. And sometimes he imagined the fucker telling his poker-buddies about how easy it had been, hell, they were all just a bunch of rubes up there, he believed that if you tried to sell the Brooklyn Bridge to a fellow like that country mouse Merrill in Castle Rock, the damned fool would ask "How much?" Then him and his cronies rocking back in their chairs around that poker-table (why he always saw them around such a table in this morbid daydream Pop didn't know, but he did), smoking dollar cigars and roaring with laughter like a bunch of trolls.

  The business of the Polaroid was eating into him like acid, but he still wasn't ready to let go of the thing yet.

  Not quite yet.

  You're crazy! a voice shouted at him. You're crazy to go on with it!

  "Damned if I'll eat it," he muttered sulkily to that voice and to his empty shadowed store, which ticked softly to itself like a bomb in a suitcase. "Damned if I will."

  But that didn't mean he had to go haring off on any more stupid goddam trips trying to sell the sonofawhore, and he certainly didn't mean to take any more pictures with it. He judged there were at least three more "safe" ones left in it, and there were probably as many as seven, but he wasn't going to be the one to find out. Not at all.

  Still, something might come up. You never knew. And it could hardly do him or anyone else any harm locked up in a drawer, could it?

  "Nope," Pop agreed briskly to himself. He dropped the camera inside, locked the drawer, repocketed his keys, and then went to the door and turned CLOSED over to OPEN with the air of a man who has finally put some nagging problem behind him for good.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Pop woke up at three the next morning, bathed with sweat and peering fearfully into the dark. The clocks had just begun another weary run at the hour.

  It was not this sound which awakened him, although it could have done, since he was not upstairs in his bed but down below, in the shop itself. The Emporium Galorium was a cave of darkness crowded with hulking shadows created by the streetlamp outside, which managed to send just enough light through the dirty plate-glass windows to create the unpleasant feeling of things hiding beyond the borders of vision.

  It wasn't the clocks that woke him; it was the flash.

  He was horrified to find himself standing in his pajamas beside his worktable with the Polaroid Sun 660 in his hands. The "special" drawer was open. He was aware that, although he had taken only a single picture, his finger had been pushing the button which triggered the shutter again and again and again. He would have taken a great many more than the one that protruded from the slot at the bottom of the camera but for simple good luck. There had only been a single picture left in the film pack currently in the camera.

  Pop started to lower his arms--he had been holding the camera pointed toward the front of the shop, the viewfinder with its minute hairline crack held up to one open, sleeping eye--and when he got them down as far as his ribcage, they began to tremble and the muscles holding the hinges of his elbows just seemed to give way. His arms fell, his fingers opened, and the camera tumbled back into the "special" drawer with a clatter. The picture he had taken slipped from the slot and fluttered. It struck one edge of the open drawer, teetered first one way as if it would follow the camera in, and then the other. It fell on the floor.

  Heart attack, Pop thought incoherently. I'm gonna have a goddam Christing heart attack.

  He tried to raise his right arm, wanting to massage the left side of his chest with the hand on the end of it, but the arm wouldn't come. The hand on the end of it dangled as limp as a dead man at the end of a hangrope. The world wavered in and out of focus. The sound of the clocks (the tardy ones were just finishing up) faded away to distant echoes. Then the pain in his che
st diminished, the light seemed to come back a little, and he realized all he was doing was trying to faint.

  He made to sit down in the wheeled chair behind the worktable, and the business of lowering himself into the seat, like the business of lowering the camera, began all right, but before he had gotten even halfway down, those hinges, the ones that strapped his thighs and calves together by way of his knees, also gave way and he didn't so much sit in the chair as cave into it. It rolled a foot backward, struck a crate filled with old Life and Look magazines, and stopped.

  Pop put his head down, the way you were supposed to do when you felt lightheaded, and time passed. He had no idea at all, then or later, how much. He might even have gone back to sleep for a little while. But when he raised his head, he was more or less all right again. There was a steady dull throbbing at his temples and behind his forehead, probably because he had stuffed his goddam noodle with blood, hanging it over so long that way, but he found he could stand up and he knew what he had to do. When the thing had gotten hold of him so badly it could make him walk in his sleep, then make him (his mind tried to revolt at that verb, that make, but he wouldn't let it) take pictures with it, that was enough. He had no idea what the goddam thing was, but one thing was clear: you couldn't compromise with it.

  Time to do what you should have let the boy do in the first place.

  Yes. But not tonight. He was exhausted, drenched with sweat, and shivering. He thought he would have his work cut out for him just climbing the stairs to his apartment again, let alone swinging that sledge. He supposed he could do the job in here, simply pick it out of the drawer and dash it against the floor again and again, but there was a deeper truth, and he'd better own up to it: he couldn't have any more truck with that camera tonight. The morning would be time enough ... and the camera couldn't do any damage between now and then, could it? There was no film in it.

  Pop shut the drawer and locked it. Then he got up slowly, looking more like a man pushing eighty than seventy, and tottered slowly to the stairs. He climbed them one at a time, resting on each, clinging to the bannister (which was none too solid itself) with one hand while he held his heavy bunch of keys on their steel ring in the other. At last he made the top. With the door shut behind him, he seemed to feel a little stronger. He went back into his bedroom and got into bed, unaware as always of the strong yellow smell of sweat and old man that puffed up when he lay down--he changed the sheets on the first of every month and called it good.