CHAPTER TWENTY
The second Polaroid Pop took forced the first one
out of the slot. It fluttered down to the top of the desk, where it
landed with a thud heavier than such a square of chemically treated
cardboard could possibly make. The Sun dog filled almost the entire
frame now; the foreground was its impossible head, the black pits
of the eyes, the smoking, teeth-filled jaws. The skull seemed to be
elongating into a shape like a bullet or a teardrop as the
dog-thing’s speed and the shortening distance between it and the
lens combined to drive it further out of focus. Only the tops of
the pickets in the fence behind it were visible now; the bulk of
the thing’s flexed shoulders ate up the rest of the frame.
Kevin’s birthday string tie, which had rested next
to the Sun camera in his drawer, showed at the bottom of the frame,
winking back a shaft of hazy sunlight.
“Almost got you, you son of a whore,” Pop said in a
high, cracked voice. His eyes were blinded by the light. He saw
neither dog nor camera. He saw only the voiceless cuckoo which had
become his life’s mission. “You’ll sing, damn you! I’ll make you
sing!”
FLASH!
The third picture pushed the second from the slot.
It fell too fast, more like a chunk of stone than a square of
cardboard, and when it hit the desk, it dug through the ancient
frayed blotter there and sent startled splinters flying up from the
wood beneath.
In this picture, the dog’s head was torn even
further out of focus; it had become a long column of flesh that
gave it a strange, almost three-dimensional aspect.
In the third one, still poking out of the slot in
the bottom of the camera, the Sun dog’s snout seemed, impossibly,
to be coming back into focus again. It was impossible because it
was as close to the lens as it could get; so close it seemed to be
the snout of some sea-monster just below that fragile meniscus we
call the surface.
“Damn thing still ain’t quite right,” Pop
said.
His finger pushed the Polaroid’s trigger
again.