CHAPTER NINETEEN
Across the square, Pop Merrill, who believed he
was peacefully repairing a cheap cuckoo clock, innocent as a babe
in arms, finished loading Kevin’s camera with one of the film
packs. He snapped it shut. It made its squidgy little whine.
Damn cuckoo sounds like he’s got a bad case of
laryngitis. Slipped a gear, I guess. Well, I got the cure for
that.
“I’ll fix you,” Pop said, and raised the camera. He
applied one blank eye to the viewfinder with the hairline crack
which was so tiny you didn’t even see it when you got your eye up
to it. The camera was aimed at the front of the store, but
that didn’t matter; wherever you pointed it, it was aimed at
a certain black dog that wasn’t any dog God had ever made in a
little town called for the want of a better word Polaroidsville,
which He also hadn’t ever made.
FLASH!
That squidgy little whine as Kevin’s camera pushed
out a new picture.
“There,” Pop said with quiet satisfaction. “Maybe
I’ll do more than get you talking, bird. What I mean to say is I
might just get you singing. I don’t promise, but I’ll give
her a try.”
Pop grinned a dry, leathery grin and pushed the
button again.
FLASH!
They were halfway across the square when John
Delevan saw a silent white light fill the dirty windows of the
Emporium Galorium. The light was silent, but following it, like an
aftershock, he heard a low, dark rumble that seemed to come to his
ears from the old man’s junk-store ... but only because the old
man’s junk-store was the only place it could find a way to get out.
Where it seemed to be emanating from was under the earth ...
or was it just that the earth itself seemed the only place large
enough to cradle the owner of that voice?
“Run, Dad!” Kevin cried. “He’s started doing
it!”
That flash recurred, lighting the windows like a
heatless stroke of electricity. It was followed by that subaural
growl again, the sound of a sonic boom in a wind-tunnel, the sound
of some animal which was horrible beyond comprehension being kicked
out of its sleep.
Mr. Delevan, helpless to stop himself and almost
unaware of what he was doing, opened his mouth to tell his son that
a light that big and bright could not possibly be coming from the
built-in flash of a Polaroid camera, but Kevin had already started
to run.
Mr. Delevan began to run himself, knowing perfectly
well what he meant to do: catch up to his son and collar him and
drag him away before something dreadful beyond his grasp of all
dreadful things could happen.