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 séances 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 séance ...

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, séances, crystal balls, spirit trumpets, rampaging cats, or the fabled 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 séance 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 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 individual 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—voilà!”

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—”

“What’s the matter with you, Mr. McCarty?” Pop bleated. “These pitchers didn’t come out all developed! You watched em develop with your own eyes!”

“An emulsion any kid with a twelve-dollar chemistry set could whip up,” McCarty said coldly. “It’s not the catalyst-fixative the Polaroid people use, but it’s close. You expose your Polaroids—or create them from movie-film, if that’s what you did—and then you take them in a standard darkroom and paint them with goop. When they’re dry, you load them. When they pop out, they look like any Polaroid that hasn’t started to develop yet. Solid gray in a white border. Then the light hits your home-made emulsion, creating a chemical change, and it evaporates, showing a picture you yourself took hours or days or weeks before. Joe?”

Before Pop could say anything else, his arms were seized and he was not so much walked as propelled from the spacious, glass-walled living room. He wouldn’t have said anything, anyway. Another of the many things a good businessman had to know was when he was licked. And yet he wanted to shout over his shoulder: Some dumb cunt with dyed hair and a crystal ball she ordered from Fate magazine floats a book or a lamp or a page of goddam sheet-music through a dark room and you bout shit yourself, but when I show you a camera that takes pitchers of some other world, you have me thrown out by the seat of m’pants! You’re mad as a hatter, all right! Well, fuck ya! There’s other fish in the sea!

So there were.

On October 5th, Pop got into his perfectly maintained car and drove to Portland to pay a visit on the Pus Sisters.

The Colonial mansion was in Portland’s Bramhall district, which is to Portland what the Beacon Hill area is to Boston. In that latter city, in the land of the bean and the cod, it’s said the Cabots speak only to Lowells and the Lowells speak only to God, but the Pus Sisters and their few remaining contemporaries in Portland would and did calmly assert that the Lowells had turned a private connection into a party line some years after the Deeres and their Portland contemporaries had set up the original wire.

And of course no one in his right mind would have called them the Pus Sisters to their identical faces any more than anyone in his right mind would have stuck his nose in a bandsaw to take care of a troublesome itch. They were the Pus Sisters when they weren’t around (and when one was fairly sure one was in company which didn’t contain a tale-bearer or two), but their real names were Miss Eleusippus Deere and Mrs. Meleusippus Verrill. Their father, in his determination to combine devout Christianity with an exhibition of his own erudition, had named them for two of three triplets who had all became saints ... but who, unfortunately, had been male saints.

Meleusippus’s husband had died a great many years before, during the Battle of Leyte Gulf in 1944, as a matter of fact, but she had resolutely kept his name ever since, which made it impossible to take the easy way out and simply call them the Misses Deere. No; you had to practice those goddamned tongue-twister names until they came out as smooth as shit from a waxed asshole. If you fucked up once, they held it against you, and you might lose their custom for as long as six months or a year. Fuck up twice, and don’t even bother to call. Ever again.

Pop drove with the steel box containing the Polaroid camera on the seat beside him, saying their names over and over again in a low voice: “Eleusippus. Meleusippus. Eleusippus and Meleusippus. Ayuh. That’s all right.”

But, as it turned out, that was the only thing that was all right. They wanted the Polaroid no more than McCarty had wanted it ... although Pop had been so shaken by that encounter he went in fully prepared to take ten thousand dollars less, or fifty per cent of his original confident estimate of what the camera might fetch.

The elderly black woman was raking leaves, revealing a lawn which, October or not, was still as green as the felt on a billiard table. Pop nodded to her. She looked at him, looked through him, and continued raking leaves. Pop rang the bell and, somewhere in the depths of the house, a bell bonged. Mansion seemed the perfectly proper word for the Pus Sisters’ domicile. Although it was nowhere near as big as some of the old homes in the Bramhall district, the perpetual dimness which reigned inside made it seem much bigger. The sound of the bell really did seem to come floating through a depth of rooms and corridors, and the sound of that bell always stirred a specific image in Pop’s mind: the dead-cart passing through the streets of London during the plague year, the driver ceaselessly tolling his bell and crying, “Bring outcher dead! Bring outcher dead! For the luwa Jaysus, bring outcher dead!”

The Pus Sister who opened the door some thirty seconds later looked not only dead but embalmed; a mummy between whose lips someone had poked the smouldering butt of a cigarette for a joke.

“Merrill,” the lady said. Her dress was a deep blue, her hair colored to match. She tried to speak to him as a great lady would speak to a tradesman who had come to the wrong door by mistake, but Pop could see she was, in her way, every bit as excited as that son of a bitch McCarty had been; it was just that the Pus Sisters had been born in Maine, raised in Maine, and would die in Maine, while McCarty hailed from someplace in the Midwest, where the art and craft of taciturnity were apparently not considered an important part of a child’s upbringing.

A shadow flitted somewhere near the parlor end of the hallway, just visible over the bony shoulder of the sister who had opened the door. The other one. Oh, they were eager, all right. Pop began to wonder if he couldn’t squeeze twelve grand out of them after all. Maybe even fourteen.

Pop knew he could say, “Do I have the honor of addressing Miss Deere or Mrs. Verrill?” and be completely correct and completely polite, but he had dealt with this pair of eccentric old bags before and he knew that, while the Pus Sister who had opened the door wouldn’t raise an eyebrow or flare a nostril, would simply tell him which one he was speaking to, he would lose at least a thousand by doing so. They took great pride in their odd masculine names, and were apt to look more kindly on a person who tried and failed than one who took the coward’s way out.

So, saying a quick mental prayer that his tongue wouldn’t fail him now that the moment had come, he gave it his best and was pleased to hear the names slip as smoothly from his tongue as a pitch from a snake-oil salesman: “Is it Eleusippus or Meleusippus?” he asked, his face suggesting he was no more concerned about getting the names right than if they had been Joan and Kate.

“Meleusippus, Mr. Merrill,” she said, ah, good, now he was Mister Merrill, and he was sure everything was going to go just as slick as ever a man could want, and he was just as wrong as ever a man could be. “Won’t you step in?”

“Thank you kindly,” Pop said, and entered the gloomy depths of the Deere Mansion.

“Oh dear,” Eleusippus Deere said as the Polaroid began to develop.

“What a brute he looks!” Meleusippus Verrill said, speaking in tones of genuine dismay and fear.

The dog was getting uglier, Pop had to admit that, and there was something else that worried him even more: the time-sequence of the pictures seemed to be speeding up.

He had posed the Pus Sisters on their Queen Anne sofa for the demonstration picture. The camera flashed its bright white light, turning the room for one single instant from the purgatorial zone between the land of the living and that of the dead where these two old relics somehow existed into something flat and tawdry, like a police photo of a museum in which a crime had been committed.

Except the picture which emerged did not show the Pus Sisters sitting together on their parlor sofa like identical book-ends. The picture showed the black dog, now turned so that it was full-face to the camera and whatever photographer it was who was nuts enough to stand there and keep snapping pictures of it. Now all of its teeth were exposed in a crazy, homicidal snarl, and its head had taken on a slight, predatory tilt to the left. That head, Pop thought, would continue to tilt as it sprang at its victim, accomplishing two purposes: concealing the vulnerable area of its neck from possible attack and putting the head in a position where, once the teeth were clamped solidly in flesh, it could revolve upright again, ripping a large chunk of living tissue from its target.

“It’s so awful!” Eleusippus said, putting one mummified hand to the scaly flesh of her neck.

“So terrible!” Meleusippus nearly moaned, lighting a fresh Camel from the butt of an old one with a hand shaking so badly she came close to branding the cracked and fissured left comer of her mouth.

“It’s totally in-ex-PLICK-able!” Pop said triumphantly, thinking: I wish you was here, McCarty, you happy asshole. I just wish you was. Here’s two ladies been round the Horn and back a few times that don’t think this goddam camera’s just some kind of a carny magic-show trick!

“Does it show something which has happened?” Meleusippus whispered.

“Or something which will happen?” Eleusippus added in an equally awed whisper.

“I dunno,” Pop said. “All I know for sure is that I have seen some goldarn strange things in my time, but I’ve never seen the beat of these pitchers.”

“I’m not surprised!” Eleusippus.

“Nor I!” Meleusippus.

Pop was all set to start the conversation going in the direction of price—a delicate business when you were dealing with anyone, but never more so than when you were dealing with the Pus Sisters: when it got down to hard trading, they were as delicate as a pair of virgins—which, for all Pop knew, at least one of them was. He was just deciding on the To start with, it never crossed my mind to sell something like this,

but... approach (it was older than the Pus Sisters themselves—although probably not by much, you would have said after a good close look at them—but when you were dealing with Mad Hatters, that didn’t matter a bit; in fact, they liked to hear it, the way small children like to hear the same fairy tales over and over) when Eleusippus absolutely floored him by saying, “I don’t know about my sister, Mr. Merrill, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable looking at anything you might have to”—here a slight, pained pause—“offer us in a business way until you put that ... that camera, or whatever God-awful thing it is ... back in your car.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” Meleusippus said, stubbing out her half-smoked Camel in a fish-shaped ashtray which was doing everything but shitting Camel cigarette butts.

“Ghost photographs,” Eleusippus said, “are one thing. They have a certain—”

“Dignity,” Meleusippus suggested. “Yes! Dignity! But that dog—The old woman actually shivered. ”It looks as if it’s ready to jump right out of that photograph and bite one of us.”

“All of us!” Meleusippus elaborated.

Up until this last exchange, Pop had been convinced— perhaps because he had to be—that the sisters had merely begun their own part of the dickering, and in admirable style. But the tone of their voices, as identical as their faces and figures (if they could have been said to have such things as figures), was beyond his power to disbelieve. They had no doubt that the Sun 660 was exhibiting some sort of paranormal behavior ... too paranormal to suit them. They weren’t dickering ; they weren’t pretending; they weren’t playing games with him in an effort to knock the price down. When they said they wanted no part of the camera and the weird thing it was doing, that was exactly what they meant—nor had they done him the discourtesy (and that’s just what it would have been, in their minds) of supposing or even dreaming that selling it had been his purpose in coming.

Pop looked around the parlor. It was like the old lady’s room in a horror movie he’d watched once on his VCR—a piece of claptrap called Burnt Offerings, where this big old beefy fella tried to drown his son in the swimming pool but nobody even took their clothes off. That lady’s room had been filled, overfilled, actually stuffed with old and new photographs. They sat on the tables and the mantel in every sort of frame; they covered so much of the walls you couldn’t even tell what the pattern on the frigging paper was supposed to be.

The Pus Sisters’ parlor wasn’t quite that bad, but there were still plenty of photographs; maybe as many as a hundred and fifty, which seemed like three times that many in a room as small and dim as this one. Pop had been here often enough to notice most of them at least in passing, and he knew others even better than that, for he had been the one to sell them to Eleusippus and Meleusippus.

They had a great many more “ghost photographs,” as Eleusippus Deere called them, perhaps as many as a thousand in all, but apparently even they had realized a room the size of their parlor was limited in terms of display-space, if not in those of taste. The rest of the ghost photographs were distributed among the mansion’s other fourteen rooms. Pop had seen them all. He was one of the fortunate few who had been granted what the Pus Sisters called, with simple grandiosity, The Tour. But it was here in the parlor that they kept their prize “ghost photographs,” with the prize of prizes attracting the eye by the simple fact that it stood in solitary splendor atop the closed Steinway baby grand by the bow windows. In it, a corpse was levitating from its coffin before fifty or sixty horrified mourners. It was a fake, of course. A child of ten— hell, a child of eight—would have known it was a fake. It made the photographs of the dancing elves which had so bewitched poor Arthur Conan Doyle near the end of his life look accomplished by comparison. In fact, as Pop ranged his eye about the room, he saw only two photographs that weren’t obvious fakes. It would take closer study to see how the trickery had been worked in those. Yet these two ancient pussies, who had collected “ghost photographs” all their lives and claimed to be great experts in the field, acted like a couple of teenage girls at a horror movie when he showed them not just a paranormal photograph but a goddam Jesus-jumping paranormal camera that didn’t just do its trick once and then quit, like the one that had taken the picture of the ghost-lady watching the fox-hunters come home, but one that did it again and again and again, and how much had they spent on this stuff that was nothing but claptrap? Thousands? Tens of thousands ? Hundreds of—

“—show us?” Meleusippus was asking him.

Pop Merrill forced his lips to turn up in what must have been at least a reasonable imitation of his Folksy Crackerbarrel Smile, because they registered no surprise or distrust.

“Pardon me, dear lady,” Pop said. “M’mind went woolgatherin all on its own for a minute or two there. I guess it happens to all of us as we get on.”

“We’re eighty-three, and our minds are as clear as window-glass,” Eleusippus said with clear disapproval.

“Freshly washed window-glass,” Meleusippus added. “I asked if you have some new photographs you would care to show us ... once you’ve put that wretched thing away, of course.”

“It’s been ages since we saw any really good new ones,” Eleusippus said, lighting a fresh Camel.

“We went to The New England Psychic and Tarot Convention in Providence last month,” Meleusippus said, “and while the lectures were enlightening—”

“—and uplifting—”

“—so many of the photographs were arrant fakes! Even a child of ten—”

“—of seven!—”

“—could have seen through them. So ...” Meleusippus paused. Her face assumed an expression of perplexity which looked as if it might hurt (the muscles of her face having long since atrophied into expressions of mild pleasure and serene knowledge). “I am puzzled. Mr. Merrill, I must admit to being a bit puzzled.”

“I was about to say the same thing,” Eleusippus said.

“Why did you bring that awful thing?” Meleusippus and Eleusippus asked in perfect two-part harmony, spoiled only by the nicotine rasp of their voices.

The urge Pop felt to say Because I didn’t know what a pair of chickenshit old cunts you two were was so strong that for one horrified second he believed he had said it, and he quailed, waiting for the twin screams of outrage to rise in the dim and hallowed confines of the parlor, screams which would rise like the squeal of rusty bandsaws biting into tough pine-knots, and go on rising until the glass in the frame of every bogus picture in the room shattered in an agony of vibration.

The idea that he had spoken such a terrible thought aloud lasted only a split-second, but when he relived it on later wakeful nights while the clocks rustled sleepily below (and while Kevin Delevan’s Polaroid crouched sleeplessly in the locked drawer of the worktable), it seemed much longer. In those sleepless hours, he sometimes found himself wishing he had said it, and wondered if he was maybe losing his mind.

What he did do was react with a speed and a canny instinct for self-preservation that were nearly noble. To blow up at the Pus Sisters would give him immense gratification, but it would, unfortunately, be short-lived gratification. If he buttered them up—which was exactly what they expected, since they had been basted in butter all their lives (although it hadn’t done a goddam thing for their skins)—he could perhaps sell them another three or four thousand dollars’ worth of claptrap “ghost photographs,” if they continued to elude the lung cancer which should surely have claimed one or both at least a dozen years ago.

And there were, after all, other Mad Hatters in Pop’s mental file, although not quite so many as he’d thought on the day he’d set off to see Cedric McCarty. A little checking had revealed that two had died and one was currently learning how to weave baskets in a posh northern California retreat which catered to the incredibly rich who also happened to have gone hopelessly insane.

“Actually,” he said, “I brought the camera out so you ladies could look at it. What I mean to say,” he hastened on, observing their expressions of consternation, “is I know how much experience you ladies have in this field.”

Consternation turned to gratification; the sisters exchanged smug, comfy looks, and Pop found himself wishing he could douse a couple of their goddam packs of Camels with barbecue lighter fluid and jam them up their tight little old-maid asses and then strike a match. They’d smoke then, all right. They’d smoke just like plugged chimneys, was what he meant to say.

“I thought you might have some advice on what I should do with the camera, is what I mean to say,” he finished.

“Destroy it,” Eleusippus said immediately.

“I’d use dynamite,” Meleusippus said.

“Acid first, then dynamite,” Eleusippus said.

“Right,” Meleusippus finished. “It’s dangerous. You don’t have to look at that devil-dog to know that.” She did look though; they both did, and identical expressions of revulsion and fear crossed their faces.

“You can feel eeevil coming out of it,” Eleusippus said in a voice of such portentousness that it should have been laughable, like a high-school girl playing a witch in Macbeth, but which somehow wasn’t. “Destroy it, Mr. Merrill. Before something awful happens. Before—perhaps, you’ll notice I only say perhaps—it destroys you.”

“Now, now,” Pop said, annoyed to find he felt just a little uneasy in spite of himself, “that’s drawing it a little strong. It’s just a camera is what I mean to say.”

Eleusippus Deere said quietly: “And the planchette that put out poor Colette Simineaux’s eye a few years ago—that was nothing but a piece of fiberboard.”

“At least until those foolish, foolish, foolish people put their fingers on it and woke it up,” Meleusippus said, more quietly still.

There seemed nothing left to say. Pop picked up the camera—careful to do so by the strap, not touching the actual camera itself, although he told himself this was just for the benefit of these two old pussies—and stood.

“Well, you’re the experts,” he said. The two old women looked at each other and preened.

Yes; retreat. Retreat was the answer ... for now, at least. But he wasn’t done yet. Every dog had its day, and you could take that to the bank. “I don’t want to take up any more of y’time, and I surely don’t want to discommode you.”

“Oh, you haven’t !” Eleusippus said, also rising.

“We have so very few guests these days!” Meleusippus said, also rising.

“Put it in your car, Mr. Merrill,” Eleusippus said, “and then—”

“—come in and have tea.”

“High tea!”

And although Pop wanted nothing more in his life than to be out of there (and to tell them exactly that: Thanks but no thanks, I want to get the fuck out of here), he made a courtly little half-bow and an excuse of the same sort. “It would be my pleasure,” he said, “but I’m afraid I have another appointment. I don’t get to the city as often as I’d like.” If you’re going to tell one lie, you might as well tell a pack, Pop’s own Pop had often told him, and it was advice he had taken to heart. He made a business of looking at his watch. “I’ve stayed too long already. You girls have made me late, I’m afraid, but I suppose I’m not the first man you’ve done that to.”

They giggled and actually raised identical blushes, like the glow of very old roses. “Why, Mr. Merrill!” Eleusippus trilled.

“Ask me next time,” he said, smiling until his face felt as if it would break. “Ask me next time, by the Lord Harry! You just ask and see if I don’t say yes faster’n a hoss can trot!”

He went out, and as one of them quickly closed the door behind him (maybe they think the sun’ll fade their goddam fake ghost photographs, Pop thought sourly), he turned and snapped the Polaroid at the old black woman, who was still raking leaves. He did it on impulse, as a man with a mean streak may on impulse swerve across a country road to kill a skunk or raccoon.

The black woman’s upper lip rose in a snarl, and Pop was stunned to see she was actually forking the sign of the evil eye at him.

He got into his car and backed hurriedly down the driveway.

The rear end of his car was halfway into the street and he was turning to check for traffic when his eye happened upon the Polaroid he had just taken. It wasn’t fully developed; it had the listless, milky look of all Polaroid photographs which are still developing.

Yet it had come up enough so that Pop only stared at it, the breath he had begun to unthinkingly draw into his lungs suddenly ceasing like a breeze that unaccountably drops away to nothing for a moment. His very heart seemed to cease in mid-beat.

What Kevin had imagined was now happening. The dog had finished its pivot, and had now begun its relentless ordained irrefutable approach toward the camera and whoever held it ... ah, but he had held it this time, hadn’t he? He, Reginald Marion “Pop” Merrill, had raised it and snapped it at the old black woman in a moment’s pique like a spanked child that shoots a pop bottle off the top of a fence-post with his BB gun because he can’t very well shoot his father, although in that humiliating, bottom-throbbing time directly after the paddling he would be more than happy to.

The dog was coming. Kevin had known that would happen next, and Pop would have known it, too, if he’d had occasion to think on it, which he hadn’t—although from this moment on he would find it hard to think of anything else when he thought of the camera, and he would find those thoughts filling more and more of his time, both waking and dreaming.

It’s coming, Pop thought with the sort of frozen horror a man might feel standing in the dark as some Thing, some unspeakable and unbearable Thing, approaches with its razor-sharp claws and teeth. Oh my God, it’s coming, that dog is coming.

But it wasn’t just coming; it was changing.

It was impossible to say how. His eyes hurt, caught between what they should be seeing and what they were seeing, and in the end the only handle he could find was a very small one: it was as if someone had changed the lens on the camera, from the normal one to a fish-eye, so that the dog’s forehead with its clots of tangled fur seemed somehow to bulge and recede at the same time, and the dog’s murderous eyes seemed to have taken on filthy, barely visible glimmers of red, like the sparks a Polaroid flash sometimes puts in people’s eyes.

The dog’s body seemed to have elongated but not thinned; if anything, it seemed thicker—not fatter, but more heavily muscled.

And its teeth were bigger. Longer. Sharper.

Pop suddenly found himself remembering Joe Camber’s Saint Bernard, Cujo—the one who had killed Joe and that old tosspot Gary Pervier and Big George Bannerman. The dog had gone rabid. It had trapped a woman and a young boy in their car up there at Camber’s place and after two or three days the kid had died. And now Pop found himself wondering if this was what they had been looking at during those long days and nights trapped in the steaming oven of their car; this or something like this, the muddy red eyes, the long sharp teeth—

A horn blared impatiently.

Pop screamed, his heart not only starting again but gunning, like the engine of a Formula One racing-car.

A van swerved around his sedan, still half in the driveway and half in the narrow residential street. The van’s driver stuck his fist out his open window and his middle finger popped up.

“Eat my dick, you son of a whore!” Pop screamed. He backed the rest of the way out, but so jerkily that he bumped up over the curb on the far side of the street. He twisted the wheel viciously (inadvertently honking his horn in the process) and then drove off. But three blocks south he had to pull over and just sit there behind the wheel for ten minutes, waiting for the shakes to subside enough so he could drive.

So much for the Pus Sisters.

Chaffee presented a fascinating paradox: in all Pop’s experience with the Mad Hatters—an experience that was long and amazingly varied—Emory Chaffee was the only believer in the “other world” who had absolutely no imagination whatsoever. That he had ever spared a single thought for the “other world” with such a mind was surprising; that he believed in it was amazing; that he paid good money to collect objects connected with it was something Pop found absolutely astounding. Yet it was so, and Pop would have put Chaffee much higher on his list save for the annoying fact that Chaffee was by far the least well off of what Pop thought of as his “rich” Mad Hatters. He was doing a game but poor job of holding onto the last unravelling threads of what had once been a great family fortune. Hence, another large drop in Pop’s asking price for Kevin’s Polaroid.

But, he had thought, pulling his car into the overgrown driveway of what had in the ’20s been one of Sebago Lake’s finest summer homes and which was now only a step or two away from becoming one of Sebago Lake’s shabbiest year-round homes (the Chaffee house in Portland’s Bramhall district had been sold for taxes fifteen years before), if anyone’ll buy this beshitted thing, I reckon Emory will.

The only thing that really distressed him—and it had done so more and more as he worked his way fruitlessly down the list—was the demonstration part. He could describe what the camera did until he was black in the face, but not even an odd duck like Emory Chaffee would lay out good money on the basis of a description alone.

Sometimes Pop thought it had been stupid to have Kevin take all those pictures so he. could make that videotape. But when you got right down to where the bear shit in the buckwheat, he wasn’t sure it would have made any difference. Time passed over there in that world (for, like Kevin, he had come to think of it as that: an actual world), and it passed much more slowly than it did in this one ... but wasn’t it speeding up as the dog approached the camera? Pop thought it was. The movement of the dog along the fence had been barely visible at first; now only a blind man could fail to see that the dog was closer each time the shutter was pressed. You could see the difference in distance even if you snapped two photographs one right after the other. It was almost as if time over there were trying to ... well, trying to catch up somehow, and get in sync with time over here.

If that had been all, it would have been bad enough. But it wasn’t all.

That was no dog, goddammit.

Pop didn’t know what it was, but he knew as well as he knew his mother was buried in Homeland Cemetery that it was no dog.

He thought it had been a dog, when it had been snuffling its way along that picket fence which it had now left a good ten feet behind; it had looked like one, albeit an exceptionally mean one once it got its head turned enough so you could get a good look at its phiz.

But to Pop it now looked like no creature that had ever existed on God’s earth, and probably not in Lucifer’s hell, either. What troubled him even more was this: the few people for whom he had taken demonstration photographs did not seem to see this. They inevitably recoiled, inevitably said it was the ugliest, meanest-looking junkyard mongrel they had ever seen, but that was all. Not a single one of them suggested that the dog in Kevin’s Sun 660 was turning into some kind of monster as it approached the photographer. As it approached the lens which might be some sort of portal between that world and this one.

Pop thought again (as Kevin had), But it could never get through. Never. If something is going to happen, I’ll tell you what that something will be, because that thing is an ANIMAL, maybe a goddam ugly one, a scary one, even, like the kind of thing a little kid imagines in his closet after his momma turns off the lights, but it’s still an ANIMAL, and if anything happens it’ll be this: there’ll be one last pitcher where you can’t see nothing but blur because that devil-dog will have jumped, you can see that’s what it means to do, and after that the camera either won’t work, or if it does, it won’t take pitchers that develop into anything but black squares, because you can’t take pitchers with a camera that has a busted lens or with one that’s broke right in two for that matter, and if whoever owns that shadow drops the camera when the devil-dog hits it and him, and I imagine he will, it’s apt to fall on the sidewalk and it probably WILL break. Goddam thing’s nothing but plastic, after all, and plastic and cement don’t get along hardly at all.

But Emory Chaffee had come out on his splintery porch now, where the paint on the boards was flaking off and the boards themselves were warping out of true and the screens were turning the rusty color of dried blood and gaping holes in some of them; Emory Chaffee wearing a blazer which had once been a natty blue but had now been cleaned so many times it was the nondescript gray of an elevator operator’s uniform; Emory Chaffee with his high forehead sloping back and back until it finally disappeared beneath what little hair he had left and grinning his Pip-pip, jolly good, old boy, jolly good, wot, wot? grin that showed his gigantic buck teeth and made him look the way Pop imagined Bugs Bunny would look if Bugs had suffered some cataclysmic mental retardation.

Pop took hold of the camera’s strap—God, how he had come to hate the thing!—got out of his car, and forced himself to return the man’s wave and grin.

Business, after all, was business.

Chaffee was studying the Polaroid which was now almost completely developed. Pop had explained what the camera did, and had been encouraged by Chaffee’s frank interest and curiosity. Then he had given the Sun to the man, inviting him to take a picture of anything he liked.

Emory Chaffee, grinning that repulsive buck-toothed grin, swung the Polaroid Pop’s way.

“Except me,” Pop said hastily. “I’d ruther you pointed a shotgun at my head instead of that camera.”

“When you sell a thing, you really sell it,” Chaffee said admiringly, but he had obliged just the same, turning the Sun 660 toward the wide picture window with its view of the lake, a magnificent view that remained as rich now as the Chaffee family itself had been in those years which began after World War I, golden years which had somehow begun to turn to brass around 1970.

He pressed the shutter.

The camera whined.

Pop winced. He found that now he winced every time he heard that sound—that squidgy little whine. He had tried to control the wince and had found to his dismay that he could not.

Yet it was equally clear to him that the man wasn’t seeing what he, Pop, was seeing. Pop had had some preparation for this eventuality; he was, all the same, badly shaken behind his impassive Yankee mask. He believed that if Chaffee had been granted the power (for that was what it seemed to be) to see what Pop was seeing, the stupid fuck would have been headed for the nearest door, and at top speed.

The dog—well, it wasn’t a dog, not anymore, but you had to call it something—hadn’t begun its leap at the photographer yet, but it was getting ready; its hindquarters were simultaneously bunching and lowering toward the cracked anonymous sidewalk in a way that somehow reminded Pop of a kid’s souped-up car, trembling, barely leashed by the clutch during the last few seconds of a red light; the needle on the rpm dial already standing straight up at 60 x 10, the engine screaming through chrome pipes, fat deep-tread tires ready to smoke the macadam in a hot soul-kiss.

The dog’s face was no longer a recognizable thing at all. It had twisted and distorted into a carny freak-show thing that seemed to have but a single dark and malevolent eye, neither round nor oval but somehow runny, like the yolk of an egg that has been stabbed with the tines of a fork. Its nose was a black beak with deep flared holes drilled into either side. And was there smoke coming from those holes—like steam from the vents of a volcano? Maybe—or maybe that part was just imagination.

But he didn’t want to find out. He looked at the black, murdering thing whose matted coat had caught perhaps two dozen wayward burdocks, the thing which no longer had fur, exactly, but stuff like living spikes, and a tail like a medieval weapon. He observed the shadow it had taken a damned snot-nosed kid to extract meaning from, and saw it had changed. One of the shadow-legs appeared to have moved a stride backward—a very long stride, even taking the effect of the lowering or rising sun (but it was going down; Pop had somehow become very sure it was going down, that it was night coming in that world over there, not day) into account.

The photographer over there in that world had finally discovered that his subject did not mean to sit for its portrait; that had never been a part of its plan. It intended to eat, not sit. That was the plan.

Eat, and, maybe, in some way he didn’t understand, escape.

Find out! he thought ironically. Go ahead! Just keep taking pitchers! You’ll find out! You’ll find out PLENTY!

“And you, sir,” Emory Chaffee was saying, for he had only been stopped for a moment; creatures of little imagination are rarely stopped for long by such trivial things as consideration, “are one hell of a salesman!”

The memory of McCarty was still very close to the surface of Pop’s mind, and it still rankled.

“If you think it’s a fake—” he began.

“A fake? Not at all! Not ... at all!” Chaffee’s buck-toothed smile spread wide in all its repulsive splendor. He spread his hands in a surely-you-jest motion. “But I’m afraid, you see, that we can’t do business on this particular item, Mr. Merrill. I’m sorry to say so, but—”

“Why?” Pop bit off. “If you don’t think the goddam thing’s a fake, why in the hell don’t you want it?” And he was astonished to hear his voice rising in a kind of plaintive, balked fury. There had never been anything like this, never in the history of the world, Pop was sure of it, nor ever would be again. Yet it seemed he couldn’t give the goddam thing away.

“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.

“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 the 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—

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.