“Uh-huh,” he said, and clicked the light off.

“Does that mean you know what’s wrong with it?” Kevin asked.

“Nope,” Pop Merrill said, and snapped the Sun’s film compartment, now empty, closed. “Don’t have a clue.” And before Kevin could say anything else, the clocks began to strike four o’clock, and for a few moments conversation, although possible, seemed absurd.

I want to think it over, he had told his father on the evening he had turned fifteen—three days ago now—and it was a statement which had surprised both of them. As a child he had made a career of not thinking about things, and Mr. Delevan had in his heart of hearts come to believe Kevin never would think about things, whether he ought to or not. They had been seduced, as fathers and sons often are, by the idea that their behavior and very different modes of thinking would never change, thus fixing their relationship eternally ... and childhood would thus go on forever. I want to think it over: there was a world of potential change implicit in that statement.

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.

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.

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 you 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?”

“Not really. Pretty close, though. Does it matter?”

“I think so,” Pop said. “They’re a little bit different, ain’t they? Not much, but a little.”

“Yeah,” Kevin said. “I can see the difference in some of them, but ...”

“Do you know which one is the first? I could prob’ly figure it out for myself, but time is money, son.”

“That’s easy,” Kevin said, and picked one out of the untidy little pile. “See the frosting?” He pointed at a small brown spot on the picture’s white edging.

“Ayup.” Pop didn’t spare the dab of frosting more than a glance. He looked closely at the photograph, and after a moment he opened the drawer of his worktable. Tools were littered untidily about inside. To one side, in its own space, was an object wrapped in jeweler’s velvet. Pop took this out, folded the cloth back, and removed a large magnifying glass with a switch in its base. He bent over the Polaroid and pushed the switch. A bright circle of light fell on the picture’s surface.

“That’s neat!” Kevin said.

“Ayup,” Pop said again. Kevin could tell that for Pop he was no longer there. Pop was studying the picture closely.

If one had not known the odd circumstances of its taking, the picture would hardly have seemed to warrant such close scrutiny. Like most photographs which are taken with a decent camera, good film, and by a photographer at least intelligent enough to keep his finger from blocking the lens, it was clear, understandable ... and, like so many Polaroids, oddly undramatic. It was a picture in which you could identify and name each object, but its content was as flat as its surface. It was not well composed, but composition wasn’t what was wrong with it—that undramatic flatness could hardly be called wrong at all, any more than a real day in a real life could be called wrong because nothing worthy of even a made-for-television movie happened during its course. As in so many Polaroids, the things in the picture were only there, like an empty chair on a porch or an unoccupied child’s swing in a back yard or a passengerless car sitting at an unremarkable curb without even a flat tire to make it interesting or unique.

What was wrong with the picture was the feeling that it was wrong. Kevin had remembered the sense of unease he had felt while composing his subjects for the picture he meant to take, and the ripple of gooseflesh up his back when, with the glare of the flashbulb still lighting the room, he had thought, It’s mine. That was what was wrong, and as with the man in the moon you can’t unsee once you’ve seen it, so, he was discovering, you couldn’t unfeel certain feelings ... and when it came to these pictures, those feelings were bad.

Kevin thought: It’s like there was a wind-very soft, very cold-blowing out of that picture.

For the first time, the idea that it might be something supernatural—that this was part of a Manifestation—did something more than just intrigue him. For the first time he found himself wishing he had simply let this thing go. It’s mine—that was what he had thought when his finger had pushed the shutter-button for the first time. Now he found himself wondering if maybe he hadn’t gotten that backward.

That made him mad, and he bent over Pop Merrill’s shoulder, hunting as grimly as a man who has lost a diamond in a sandpile, determined that, no matter what he saw (always supposing he should see something new, and he didn’t think he would; he had studied all these photographs often enough now to believe he had seen all there was to see in them), he would look at it, study it, and under no circumstances allow himself to unsee it. Even if he could ... and a dolorous voice inside suggested very strongly that the time for unseeing was now past, possibly forever.

The dog was on a sidewalk in front of the fence. His hindquarters were to the viewer. His tail, long and bushy, drooped. He appeared to be smelling one of the fence-pickets—probably, Kevin thought, because the fence was what his dad called a “letter-drop,” a place where many dogs would lift their legs and leave mystic yellow squirts of message before moving on.

The dog looked like a stray to Kevin. Its coat was long and tangled and sown with burdocks. One of its ears had the crumpled look of an old battle-scar. Its shadow trailed long enough to finish outside the frame on the weedy, patchy lawn inside the picket fence. The shadow made Kevin think the picture had been taken not long after dawn or not long before sunset; with no idea of the direction the photographer (what photographer, ha-ha) had been facing, it was impossible to tell which, just that he (or she) must have been standing only a few degrees shy of due east or west.

There was something in the grass at the far left of the picture which looked like a child’s red rubber ball. It was inside the fence, and enough behind one of the lackluster clumps of grass so it was hard to tell.

And that was all.

“Do you recognize anything?” Pop asked, cruising his magnifying glass slowly back and forth over the photo’s surface. Now the dog’s hindquarters swelled to the size of hillocks tangled with wild and ominously exotic black undergrowth; now three or four of the scaly pickets became the size of old telephone poles; now, suddenly, the object behind the clump of grass clearly became a child’s ball (although under Pop’s glass it was as big as a soccer ball): Kevin could even see the stars which girdled its middle in upraised rubber lines. So something new was revealed under Pop’s glass, and in a few moments Kevin would see something else himself, without it. But that was later.

“Jeez, no,” Kevin said. “How could I, Mr. Merrill?”

“Because there are things here,” Pop said patiently. His glass went on cruising. Kevin thought of a movie he had seen once where the cops sent out a searchlight-equipped helicopter to look for escaped prisoners. “A dog, a sidewalk, a picket fence that needs paintin or takin down, a lawn that needs tendin. The sidewalk ain’t much—you can’t even see all of it—and the house, even the foundation, ain’t in the frame, but what I mean to say is there’s that dog. You recognize it?”

“No.”

“The fence?”

“No.”

“What about that red rubber ball? What about that, son?”

“No ... but you look like you think I should.”

“I look like I thought you might,” Pop said. “You never had a ball like that when you were a tyke?”

“Not that I remember, no.”

“You got a sister, you said.”

“Megan.”

“She never had a ball like that?”

“I don’t think so. I never took that much interest in Meg’s toys. She had a BoLo bouncer once, and the ball on the end of it was red, but a different shade. Darker.”

“Ayuh. I know what a ball like that looks like. This ain’t one. And that mightn’t be your lawn?”

“Jes—I mean jeepers, no.” Kevin felt a little offended. He and his dad took good care of the lawn around their house. It was a deep green and would stay that way, even under the fallen leaves, until at least mid-October. “We don’t have a picket fence, anyway.” And if we did, he thought, it wouldn’t look like that mess.

Pop let go of the switch in the base of the magnifying glass, placed it on the square of jeweler’s velvet, and with a care which approached reverence folded the sides over it. He returned it to its former place in the drawer and closed the drawer. He looked at Kevin closely. He had put his pipe aside, and there was now no smoke to obscure his eyes, which were still sharp but not twinkling anymore.

“What I mean to say is, could it have been your house before you owned it, do you think? Ten years ago—”

“We owned it ten years ago,” Kevin replied, bewildered.

“Well, twenty? Thirty? What I mean to say, do you recognize how the land lies? Looks like it climbs a little.”

“Our front lawn—” He thought deeply, then shook his head. “No, ours is flat. If it does anything, it goes down a little. Maybe that’s why the cellar ships a little water in a wet spring.”

“Ayuh, ayuh, could be. What about the back lawn?”

“There’s no sidewalk back there,” Kevin said. “And on the sides—” He broke off. “You’re trying to find out if my camera’s taking pictures of the past!” he said, and for the first time he was really, actively frightened. He rubbed his tongue on the roof of his mouth and seemed to taste metal.

“I was just askin.” Pop rapped his fingers beside the photographs, and when he spoke, it seemed to be more to himself than to Kevin. “You know,” he said, “some goddam funny things seem to happen from time to time with two gadgets we’ve come to take pretty much for granted. I ain’t sayin they do happen; only if they don’t, there are a lot of liars and out-n-out hoaxers in the world.”

“What gadgets?”

“Tape recorders and Polaroid cameras,” Pop said, still seeming to talk to the pictures, or himself, and there was no Kevin in this dusty clock-drumming space at the back of the Emporium Galorium at all. “Take tape recorders. Do you know how many people claim to have recorded the voices of dead folks on tape recorders?”

“No,” Kevin said. He didn’t particularly mean for his own voice to come out hushed, but it did; he didn’t seem to have a whole lot of air in his lungs to speak with, for some reason or other.

“Me neither,” Pop said, stirring the photographs with one finger. It was blunt and gnarled, a finger which looked made for rude and clumsy motions and operations, for poking people and knocking vases off endtables and causing nosebleeds if it tried to do so much as hook a humble chunk of dried snot from one of its owner’s nostrils. Yet Kevin had watched the man’s hands and thought there was probably more grace in that one finger than in his sister Meg’s entire body (and maybe in his own; Clan Delevan was not known for its lightfootedness or -handedness, which was probably one reason why he thought that image of his father so nimbly catching his mother on the way down had stuck with him, and might forever). Pop Merrill’s finger looked as if it would at any moment sweep all the photographs onto the floor—by mistake; this sort of clumsy finger would always poke and knock and tweak by mistake—but it did not. The Polaroids seemed to barely stir in response to its restless movements.

Supernatural, Kevin thought again, and shivered a little. An actual shiver, surprising and dismaying and a little embarrassing even if Pop had not seen it.

“But there’s even a way they do it,” Pop said, and then, as if Kevin had asked: “Who? Damn if I know. I guess some of them are ‘psychic investigators,’ or at least call themselves that or some such, but I guess it’s more’n likely most of em are just playin around, like folks that use Ouija Boards at parties.”

He looked up at Kevin grimly, as if rediscovering him.

“You got a Ouija, son?”

“No.”

“Ever played with one?”

“No.”

“Don’t,” Pop said more grimly than ever. “Fucking things are dangerous.”

Kevin didn’t dare tell the old man he hadn’t the slightest idea what a weegee board was.

“Anyway, they set up a tape machine to record in an empty room. It’s supposed to be an old house, is what I mean to say, one with a History, if they can find it. Do you know what I mean when I say a house with a History, son?”

“I guess ... like a haunted house?” Kevin hazarded. He found he was sweating lightly, as he had done last year every time Mrs. Whittaker announced a pop quiz in Algebra I.

“Well, that’ll do. These ... people ... like it best if it’s a house with a Violent History, but they’ll take what they can get. Anyhow, they set up the machine and record that empty room. Then, the next day—they always do it at night is what I mean to say, they ain’t happy unless they can do it at night, and midnight if they can get it—the next day they play her back.”

“An empty room?”

“Sometimes,” Pop said in a musing voice that might or might not have disguised some deeper feeling, “there are voices.”

Kevin shivered again. There were hieroglyphics on the plinth after all. Nothing you’d want to read, but ... yeah. They were there.

“Real voices?”

“Usually imagination,” Pop said dismissively. “But once or twice I’ve heard people I trust say they’ve heard real voices.”

“But you never have?”

“Once,” Pop said shortly, and said nothing else for so long Kevin was beginning to think he was done when he added, “It was one word. Clear as a bell. ’Twas recorded in the parlor of an empty house in Bath. Man killed his wife there in 1946.”

“What was the word?” Kevin asked, knowing he would not be told just as surely as he knew no power on earth, certainly not his own willpower, could have kept him from asking.

But Pop did tell.

“Basin.”

Kevin blinked. “Basin?”

“Ayuh.”

“That doesn’t mean anything.”

“It might,” Pop said calmly, “if you know he cut her throat and then held her head over a basin to catch the blood.”

“Oh my God!”

“Ayuh.”

“Oh my God, really?”

Pop didn’t bother answering that.

“It couldn’t have been a fake?”

Pop gestured with the stem of his pipe at the Polaroids. “Are those?”

“Oh my God.”

“Polaroids, now,” Pop said, like a narrator moving briskly to a new chapter in a novel and reading the words Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, “I’ve seen pitchers with people in em that the other people in the pitcher swear weren’t there with em when the pitcher was taken. And there’s one—this is a famous one—that a lady took over in England. What she did was snap a pitcher of some fox-hunters comin back home at the end of the day. You see em, about twenty in all, comin over a little wooden bridge. It’s a tree-lined country road on both sides of that bridge. The ones in front are off the bridge already. And over on the right of the pitcher, standin by the road, there’s a lady in a long dress and a hat with a veil on it so you can’t see her face and she’s got her pocketbook over her arm. Why, you can even see she’s wearin a locket on her boosom, or maybe it’s a watch.

“Well, when the lady that took the pitcher saw it, she got wicked upset, and wasn’t nobody could blame her, son, because what I mean to say is she meant to take a pitcher of those fox-hunters comin home and no one else, because there wasn’t nobody else there. Except in the pitcher there is. And when you look real close, it seems like you can see the trees right through that lady.”

He’s making all this up, putting me on, and when I leave he’ll have a great big horselaugh, Kevin thought, knowing Pop Merrill was doing nothing of the sort.

“The lady that took that pitcher was stayin at one of those big English homes like they have on the education-TV shows, and when she showed that pitcher, I heard the man of the house fainted dead away. That part could be made up. Prob’ly is. Sounds made up, don’t it? But I seen that pitcher in an article next to a painted portrait of that fella’s great-grandmother, and it could be her, all right. Can’t tell for certain because of the veil. But it could be.”

“Could be a hoax, too,” Kevin said faintly.

“Could be,” Pop said indifferently. “People get up to all sorts of didos. Lookit my nephew, there, for instance, Ace.” Pop’s nose wrinkled. “Doin four years in Shawshank, and for what? Bustin into The Mellow Tiger. He got up to didos and Sheriff Pangborn slammed him in the jug for it. Little ring-meat got just what he deserved.”

Kevin, displaying a wisdom far beyond his years, said nothing.

“But when ghosts show up in photographs, son—or, like you say, what people claim to be ghosts—it’s almost always in Polaroid photographs. And it almost always seems to be by accident. Now your pitchers of flyin saucers and that Lock Nest Monster, they almost always show up in the other kind. The kind some smart fella can get up to didos with in a darkroom.”

He dropped Kevin a third wink, expressing all the didos (whatever they were) an unscrupulous photographer might get up to in a well-equipped darkroom.

Kevin thought of asking Pop if it was possible someone could get up to didos with a weegee and decided to continue keeping his mouth shut. It still seemed by far the wisest course.

“All by way of sayin I thought I’d ask if you saw somethin you knew in these Polaroid pitchers.”

“I don’t, though,” Kevin said so earnestly that he believed Pop would believe he was lying, as his mom always did when he made the tactical mistake of even controlled vehemence.

“Ayuh, ayuh,” Pop said, believing him so dismissively Kevin was almost irritated.

“Well,” Kevin said after a moment which was silent except for the fifty thousand ticking clocks, “I guess that’s it, huh?”

“Maybe not,” Pop said. “What I mean to say is I got me a little idear. You mind takin some more pitchers with that camera?”

“What good is it? They’re all the same.”

“That’s the point. They ain’t.”

Kevin opened his mouth, then closed it.

“I’ll even chip in for the film,” Pop said, and when he saw the amazed look on Kevin’s face he quickly qualified: “A little, anyway.”

“How many pictures would you want?”

“Well, you got ... what? Twenty-eight already, is that right?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Thirty more,” Pop said after a moment’s thought.

“Why?”

“Ain’t gonna tell you. Not right now.” He produced a heavy purse that was hooked to a belt-loop on a steel chain. He opened it and took out a ten-dollar bill, hesitated, and added two ones with obvious reluctance. “Guess that’d cover half of it.”

Yeah, right, Kevin thought.

“If you really are int’rested in the trick that camera’s doing, I guess you’d pony up the rest, wouldn’t you?” Pop’s eyes gleamed at him like the eyes of an old, curious cat.

Kevin understood the man did more than expect him to say yes; to Pop it was inconceivable that he could say no. Kevin thought, If I said no he wouldn’t hear it; he’d say “Good, that’s agreed, then, ” and I’d end up back on the sidewalk with his money in my pocket whether I wanted it or not.

And he did have his birthday money.

All the same, there was that chill wind to think about. That wind that seemed to blow not from the surface but right out of those photographs in spite of their deceptively flat, deceptively shiny surfaces. He felt that wind coming from them despite their mute declaration which averred We are Polaroids, and for no reason we can tell or even understand, we show only the undramatic surfaces of things. That wind was there. What about that wind?

Kevin hesitated a moment longer and the bright eyes behind the rimless spectacles measured him. I ain’t gonna ask you if you’re a man or a mouse, Pop Merrill’s eyes said. You’re fifteen years old, and what I mean to say is at fifteen you may not be a man yet, not quite, but you are too goddam old to be a mouse and both of us know it. And besides you’re not from Away; you’re from town, just like me.

“Sure,” Kevin said with a hollow lightness in his voice. It fooled neither of them. “I can get the film tonight, I guess, and bring the pictures in tomorrow, after school.”

“Nope,” Pop said.

“You’re closed tomorrow?”

“Nope,” Pop said, and because he was from town, Kevin waited patiently. “You’re thinkin about takin thirty pitchers all at once, aren’t you?”

“I guess so.”

“That ain’t the way I want you to do it,” Pop said. “It don’t matter where you take them, but it does matter when. Here. Lemme figure.”

Pop figured, and then even wrote down a list of times, which Kevin pocketed.

“So!” Pop said, rubbing his hands briskly together so that they made a dry sound that was like two pieces of used-up sandpaper rubbing together. “You’ll see me in ... oh, three days or so?”

“Yes ... I guess so.”

“I’ll bet you’d just as lief wait until Monday after school, anyway,” Pop said. He dropped Kevin a fourth wink, slow and sly and humiliating in the extreme. “So your friends don’t see you coming in here and tax you with it, is what I mean to say.”

Kevin flushed and dropped his eyes to the worktable and began to gather up the Polaroids so his hands would have something to do. When he was embarrassed and they didn’t, he cracked his knuckles.

“I—” He began some sort of absurd protest that would convince neither of them and then stopped, staring down at one of the photos.

“What?” Pop asked. For the first time since Kevin had approached him, Pop sounded entirely human, but Kevin hardly heard his words, much less his tone of faint alarm. “Now you look like you seen a ghost, boy.”

“No,” Kevin said. “No ghost. I see who took the picture. Who really took the picture.”

“What in glory are you talking about?”

Kevin pointed to a shadow. He, his father, his mother, Meg, and apparently Mr. Merrill himself had taken it for the shadow of a tree that wasn’t itself in the frame. But it wasn’t a tree. Kevin saw that now, and what you had seen could never be unseen.

More hieroglyphics on the plinth.

“I don’t see what you’re gettin at,” Pop said. But Kevin knew the old man knew he was getting at something, which was why he sounded put out.

“Look at the shadow of the dog first,” Kevin said. “Then look at this one here again.” He tapped the left side of the photograph. “In the picture, the sun is either going down or coming up. That makes all the shadows long, and it’s hard to tell what’s throwing them. But looking at it, just now, it clicked home for me.”

“What clicked home, son?” Pop reached for the drawer, probably meaning to get the magnifying glass with the light in it again ... and then stopped. All at once he didn’t need it. All at once it had clicked into place for him, too.

“It’s the shadow of a man, ain’t it?” Pop said. “I be go to hell if that one ain’t the shadow of a man.”

“Or a woman. You can’t tell. Those are legs, I’m sure they are, but they could belong to a woman wearing pants. Or even a kid. With the shadow running so long—”

“Ayuh, you can’t tell.”

Kevin said, “It’s the shadow of whoever took it, isn’t it?”

“Ayuh.”

“But it wasn’t me,” Kevin said. “It came out of my camera—all of them did—but I didn’t take it. So who did, Mr. Merrill? Who did?”

“Call me Pop,” the old man said absently, looking at the shadow in the picture, and Kevin felt his chest swell with pleasure as those few clocks still capable of running a little fast began to signal the others that, weary as they might be, it was time to charge the half-hour.