Four Past Midnight

by Stephen King

  "What did you tell Mom?" Kevin asked.

  "That it was man-to-man stuff." Mr. Delevan smiled a little. "I think she thinks you want to talk about masturbating."

  Kevin flushed.

  Mr. Delevan looked concerned. "You don't, do you? I mean, you know about--"

  "I know, I know," Kevin said hastily; he was not about to tell his father (and wasn't sure he would have been able to put the right string of words together, even if he had wanted to) that what had thrown him momentarily off-track was finding out that not only did his father know about whacking off--which of course shouldn't have surprised him at all but somehow did, leaving him with feelings of surprise at his own surprise--but that his mother somehow did, too.

  Never mind. All this had nothing to do with the nightmares, or with the new certainty which had locked into place in his head.

  "It's about Pop, I told you. And some bad dreams I've been having. But mostly it's about the camera. Because Pop stole it somehow, Dad."

  "Kevin--"

  "I beat it to pieces on his chopping block, I know. But it wasn't my camera. It was another camera. And that isn't even the worst thing. The worst thing is that he's still using mine to take pictures! And that dog is going to get out! When it does, I think it's going to kill me. In that other world it's already started to j-j-j--"

  He couldn't finish. Kevin surprised himself again--this time by bursting into tears.

  By the time John Delevan got his son calmed down it was ten minutes of eight, and he had resigned himself to at least being late for work. He held the boy in his arms--whatever it was, it really had the kid shook, and if it really was nothing but a bunch of dreams, Mr. Delevan supposed he would find sex at the root of the matter someplace.

  When Kevin was shivering and only sucking breath deep into his lungs in an occasional dry-sob, Mr. Delevan went to the door and opened it cautiously, hoping Kate had taken Meg downstairs. She had; the hallway was empty. That's one for our side, anyway, he thought, and went back to Kevin.

  "Can you talk now?" he asked.

  "Pop's got my camera," Kevin said hoarsely. His red eyes, still watery, peered at his father almost myopically. "He got it somehow, and he's using it."

  "And this is something you dreamed?"

  "Yes ... and I remembered something."

  "Kevin ... that was your camera. I'm sorry, son, but it was. I even saw the little chip in the side."

  "He must have rigged that somehow--"

  "Kevin, that seems pretty farf--"

  "Listen," Kevin said urgently, "will you just listen?"

  "All right. Yes. I'm listening."

  "What I remembered was that when he handed me the camera--when we went out back to crunch it, remember?"

  "Yes--"

  "I looked in the little window where the camera keeps count of how many shots there are left. And it said three, Dad! It said three!"

  "Well? What about it?"

  "It had film in it, too! Film! I know, because I remember one of those shiny black things jumping up when I squashed the camera. It jumped up and then it fluttered back down."

  "I repeat: so what?"

  "There wasn't any film in my camera when I gave it to Pop! That's so-what. I had twenty-eight pictures. He wanted me to take thirty more, for a total of fifty-eight. I might have bought more film if I'd known what he was up to, but probably not. By then I was scared of the thing--"

  "Yeah. I was, a little, too."

  Kevin looked at him respectfully. "Were you?"

  "Yeah. Go on. I think I see where you're heading."

  "I was just going to say, he chipped in for the film, but not enough--not even half. He's a wicked skinflint, Dad."

  John Delevan smiled thinly. "He is that, my boy. One of the world's greatest, is what I mean to say. Go on and finish up. Tempus is fugiting. away like mad."

  Kevin glanced at the clock. It was almost eight. Although neither of them knew it, Pop would wake up in just under two minutes and start about his morning's business, very little of which he would remember correctly.

  "All right," Kevin said. "All I'm trying to say is I couldn't have bought any more film even if I'd wanted to. I used up all the money I had buying the three film packs. I even borrowed a buck from Megan, so I let her shoot a couple, too."

  "Between the two of you, you used up all the exposures? Every single one?"

  "Yes! Yes! He even said it was fifty-eight! And between the time when I finished shooting all the pictures he wanted and when we went to look at the tape he made, I never bought any more film. It was dead empty when I brought it in, Dad! The number in the little window was a zero! I saw it, I remember! So if it was my camera, how come it said three in the window when we went back downstairs?"

  "He couldn't have--" Then his father stopped, and a queer look of uncharacteristic gloom came over his face as he realized that Pop could have, and that the truth of it was this: he, John Delevan, didn't want to believe that Pop had; that even bitter experience had not been sufficient vaccination against foolishness, and Pop might have pulled the wool over his own eyes as well as those of his son.

  "Couldn't have what? What are you thinking about, Dad? Something just hit you!"

  Something had hit him, all right. How eager Pop had been to go downstairs and get the original Polaroids so they could all get a closer look at the thing around the dog's neck, the thing that turned out to.be Kevin's latest string tie from Aunt Hilda, the one with the bird on it that was probably a woodpecker.

  We might as well go down with you, Kevin had said when Pop had offered to get the photos, but hadn't Pop jumped up himself, chipper as a chickadee? Won't take a minute, the old man had said, or some such thing, and the truth was, Mr. Delevan told himself, I hardly noticed what he was saying or doing, because I wanted to watch that goddamned tape again. And the truth also was this: Pop hadn't even had to pull the old switcheroo right in front of them--although, with his eyes unwooled, Mr. Delevan was reluctantly willing to believe the old son of a bitch had probably been prepared to do just that, if he had to, and probably could have done it, too, pushing seventy or not. With them upstairs and him downstairs, presumably doing no more than getting Kevin's photographs, he could have swapped twenty cameras, at his leisure.

  "Dad?"

  "I suppose he could have," Mr. Delevan said. "But why?"

  Kevin could only shake his head. He didn't know why. But that was all right; Mr. Delevan thought he did, and it was something of a relief. Maybe honest men didn't have to learn the world's simplest truths over and over again; maybe some of those truths eventually stuck fast. He'd only had to articulate the question aloud in order to find the answer. Why did the Pop Merrills of this world do anything? To make a profit. That was the reason, the whole reason, and nothing but the reason. Kevin had wanted to destroy it. After looking at Pop's videotape, Mr. Delevan had found himself in accord with that. Of the three of them, who had been the only one capable of taking a longer view?

  Why, Pop, or course. Reginald Marion "Pop" Merrill.

  John Delevan had been sitting on the edge of Kevin's bed with an arm about his son's shoulders. Now he stood up. "Get dressed. I'll go downstairs and call in. I'll tell Brandon I'll probably just be late, but to assume I won't be in at all."

  He was preoccupied with this, already talking to Brandon Reed in his mind, but not so preoccupied he didn't see the gratitude which lighted his son's worried face. Mr. Delevan smiled a little and felt that uncharacteristic gloom first ease and then let go entirely. There was this much, at least: his son was as yet not too old to take comfort from him, or accept him as a higher power to whom appeals could sometimes be directed in the knowledge that they would be acted upon; nor was he himself too old to take comfort from his son's comfort.

  "I think," he said, moving toward the door, "that we ought to pay a call on Pop Merrill." He glanced at the clock on Kevin's night-table. It was ten minutes after eight, and in back of the Emporium Galorium, a sledgehammer was coming down
on an imitation German cuckoo clock. "He usually opens around eight-thirty. Just about the time we'll get there, I think. If you get a wiggle on, that is."

  He paused on his way out and a brief, cold smile flickered on his mouth. He was not smiling at his son. "I think he's got some explaining to do, is what I mean to say."

  Mr. Delevan went out, closing the door behind him. Kevin quickly began to dress.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The Castle Rock LaVerdiere's Super Drug Store was a lot more than just a drugstore. Put another way, it was really only a drugstore as an afterthought. It was as if someone had noticed at the last moment--just before the grand opening, say--that one of the words in the sign was still "Drug." That someone might have made a mental note to tell someone else, someone in the company's management, that here they were, opening yet another LaVerdiere's, and they had by simple oversight neglected yet again to correct the sign so it read, more simply and accurately, LaVerdiere's Super Store ... and, after making the mental note, the someone in charge of noticing such things had delayed the grand opening a day or two so they could shoe-horn in a prescription counter about the size of a telephone booth in the long building's furthest, darkest, and most neglected comer.

  The LaVerdiere's Super Drug Store was really more of a jumped-up five-and-dime than anything else. The town's last real five-and-dime, a long dim room with feeble, fly-specked overhead globes hung on chains and reflected murkily in the creaking but often-waxed wooden floor, had been The Ben Franklin Store. It had given up the ghost in 1978 to make way for a video-games arcade called Galaxia and E-Z Video Rentals, where Tuesday was Toofers Day and no one under the age of twenty could go in the back room.

  LaVerdiere's carried everything the old Ben Franklin had carried, but the goods were bathed in the pitiless light of Maxi-Glo fluorescent bars which gave every bit of stock its own hectic, feverish shimmer. Buy me! each item seemed to shriek. Buy me or you may die! Or your wife may die! Or your kids! Or your best friend! Possibly all of them at once! Why? How should I know? I'm just a brainless item sitting on a pre-fab LaVerdiere's shelf! But doesn't it feel true? You know it does! So buy me and buy me RIGHT. . . Now!

  There was an aisle of notions, two aisles of first-aid supplies and nostrums, an aisle of video and audio tapes (both blank and pre-recorded). There was a long rack of magazines giving way to paperback books, a display of lighters under one digital cash-register and a display of watches under another (a third register was hidden in the dark corner where the pharmacist lurked in his lonely shadows). Halloween candy had taken over most of the toy aisle (the toys would not only come back after Halloween but eventually take over two whole aisles as the days slid remorselessly down toward Christmas). And, like something too neat to exist in reality except as a kind of dumb admission that there was such a thing as Fate with a capital F, and that Fate might, in its own way, indicate the existence of that whole "other world" about which Pop had never before cared (except in terms of how it might fatten his pocketbook, that was) and about which Kevin Delevan had never before even thought, at the front of the store, in the main display area, was a carefully arranged work of salesmanship which was billed as the FALL FOTO FESTIVAL.

  This display consisted of a basket of colorful autumn leaves spilling out on the floor in a bright flood (a flood too large to actually have come from that one basket alone, a careful observer might have concluded). Amid the leaves were a number of Kodak and Polaroid cameras--several Sun 660s among the latter--and all sorts of other equipment: cases, albums, film, flashbars. In the midst of this odd cornucopia, an old-fashioned tripod rose like one of H. G. Wells's Martian death-machines towering over the crispy wreck of London. It bore a sign which told all patrons interested enough to look that this week one could obtain SUPER REDUCITONS ON ALL POLAROID CAMERAS & ACCESSORIES!

  At eight-thirty that morning, half an hour after LaVerdiere's opened for the day, "all patrons" consisted of Pop Merrill and Pop alone. He took no notice of the display but marched straight to the only open counter, where Molly Durham had just finished laying out the watches on their imitation-velvet display-cloth.

  Oh no, here comes old Eyeballs, she thought, and grimaced. Pop's idea of a really keen way to kill a stretch of time about as long as Molly's coffee-break was to kind of ooze up to the counter where she was working (he always picked hers, even if he had to stand in line; in fact, she thought he liked it better when there was a line) and buy a pouch of Prince Albert tobacco. This was a purchase an ordinary fellow could transact in maybe thirty seconds, but if she got Eyeballs out of her face in under three minutes, she thought she was doing very well indeed. He kept all of his money in a cracked leather purse on a chain, and he'd haul it out of his pocket--giving his doorbells a good feel on the way, it always looked to Motty--and then open it. It always gave out a little screeeeek! noise, and honest to God if you didn't expect to see a moth flutter out of it, just like in those cartoons people draw of tightwads. On top of the purse's contents there would be a whole mess of paper money, bills that looked somehow as if you shouldn't handle them, as if they might be coated with disease germs of some kind, and jingling silver underneath. Pop would fish out a dollar bill and then kind of hook the other bills to one side with one of those thick fingers of his to get to the change underneath--he'd never give you a couple of bucks, hunh-uh, that would make everything too quick to suit him--and then he'd work that out, too. And all the time his eyes would be busy, flicking down to the purse for a second or two but mostly letting the fingers sort out the proper coins by touch while his eyes crawled over her boobs, her belly, her hips, and then back up to her boobs again. Never once her face; not even so far as her mouth, which was a part of a girl in which most men seemed to be interested; no, Pop Merrill was strictly interested in the lower portions of the female anatomy. When he finally finished--and no matter how quick that was, it always seemed like three times as long to Molly--and got the hell out of the store again, she always felt like going somewhere and taking a long shower.

  So she braced herself, put on her best it's-only-eight-thirty-and-I' ve-got-seven-and-a-half-hours-to-go smile, and stood at the counter as Pop approached. She told herself, He's only looking at you, guys have been doing that since you sprouted,

  and that was true, but this wasn't the same. Because Pop Merrill wasn't like most of the guys who had run their eyes over her trim and eminently watchable superstructure since that time ten years ago. Part of it was that Pop was old, but that wasn't all of it. The truth was that some guys looked at you and some--a very few--seemed to actually be feeling you up with their eyes, and Merrill was one of those. His gaze actually seemed to have weight; when he fumbled in his creaky old-maid's purse on its length of incongruously masculine chain, she seemed to actually feel his eyes squirming up and down her front, lashing their way up her hills on their optic nerves like tadpoles and then sliding bonelessly down into her valleys, making her wish she had worn a nun's habit to work that day. Or maybe a suit of armor.

  But her mother had been fond of saying What can't be cured must be endured, sweet Molly, and until someone discovered a method of weighing gazes so those of dirty men both young and old could be outlawed, or, more likely, until Pop Merrill did everyone in Castle Rock a favor by dying so that eyesore of a tourist trap he kept could be torn down, she would just have to deal with it as best she could.

  But today she was in for a pleasant surprise--or so it seemed at first. Pop's usual hungry appraisal was not even an ordinary patron's look; it seemed utterly blank. It wasn't that he looked through her, or that his gaze struck her and bounced off. It seemed to Molly that he was so deep in his thoughts that his usually penetrating look did not even reach her, but made it about halfway and then petered out--like a man trying to locate and observe a star on the far side of the galaxy with just the naked eye.

  "May I help you, Mr. Merrill?" she asked, and her feet were already cocking so she could turn quickly and reach up for where the pouches of tobacco were
kept. With Pop, this was a task she always did as quickly as possible, because when she turned and reached, she could.feel his eyes crawling busily over her ass, dropping for a quick check of her legs, then rising again to her butt for a final ocular squeeze and perhaps a pinch before she turned back.

  "Yes," he said calmly and serenely, and he might as well have been talking to one of those automated bank machines for all the interest in her he showed. That was fine by Molly. "I'd like some" and then either a word she didn't hear right or one that was utter gibberish. If it was gobbledegook, she thought with some hope, maybe the first few parts of the complicated network of dikes, levees, and spillways the old crock had constructed against the rising sea of senility were finally giving way.

  It sounded as if he had said toefilmacco, which wasn't a product they stocked ... unless it was a prescription drug of some sort.

  "I beg pardon, Mr. Merrill?"

  "Film," he said, so clearly and firmly that Molly was more than disappointed; she was convinced he must have said it just that way the first time and her ears had picked it up wrong. Maybe she was the one who was beginning to lose her dikes and levees.

  "What kind would you like?"

  "Polaroid," he said. "Two packs." She didn't know exactly what was going on here, but it was beyond doubt that Castle Rock's premier dirty old man was not himself today. His eyes would still not focus, and the words ... they reminded her of something, something she associated with her five-year-old niece, Ellen, but she couldn't catch hold of it.

  "For what model, Mr. Merrill?"

  She sounded brittle and actressy to herself, but Pop Merrill didn't even come close to noticing. Pop was lost in the ozone.

  After a moment's consideration in which he did not look at her at all but seemed instead to study the racks of cigarettes behind her left shoulder, he jerked out: "For a Polaroid Sun camera. Model 660." And then it came to her, even as she told him she'd have to get it from the display. Her niece owned a big soft panda toy, which she had, for reasons which would probably make sense only to another little girl, named Paulette. Somewhere inside of Paulette was an electronic circuitboard and a memory chip on which were stored about four hundred short, simple sentences such as "I like to hug, don't you?" and "I wish you'd never go away." Whenever you poked Paulette above her fuzzy little navel, there was a brief pause and then one of those lovesome little remarks would come out, almost jerk out, in a somehow remote and emotionless voice that seemed by its tone to deny the content of the words. Ellen thought Paulette was the nuts. Molly thought there was something creepy about it; she kept expecting Ellen to poke the panda-doll in the guts someday and it would surprise them all (except for Aunt Molly from Castle Rock) by saying what was really on its mind. "I think tonight after you're asleep I'll strangle you dead," perhaps, or maybe just "I have a knife."