CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
This time it was like standing in the center of a
sun which goes supernova in one sudden, heatless gust of light.
Kevin felt as if his shadow had actually been hammered off his
heels and driven into the wall. Perhaps this was at least partly
true, for all of the wall behind him was instantly flash-baked and
threaded with a thousand crazy cracks except for one sunken area
where his shadow fell. His outline, as clear and unmistakable as a
silhouette cut-out, was tattooed there with one elbow stuck out in
a flying wedge, caught and frozen even as the arm which cast the
shadow left its frozen image behind, rising to bring the new camera
up to his face.
The top of the camera in Pop’s hands tore free of
the rest with a thick sound like a very fat man clearing his
throat. The Sun dog growled, and this time that bass thunder was
loud enough, clear enough, near enough, to shatter the glass in the
fronts of the clocks and to send the glass in the mirrors and in
the frames of pictures belching across the floor in momentary
crystal arcs of amazing and improbable beauty.
The camera did not moan or whine this time; the
sound of its mechanism was a scream, high and drilling, like a
woman who is dying in the throes of a breech delivery. The square
of paper which shoved and bulled its way out of that slitted
opening smoked and fumed. Then the dark delivery-slot itself began
to melt, one side drooping downward, the other wrinkling upward,
all of it beginning to yawn like a toothless mouth. A bubble was
forming upon the shiny surface of the last picture, which still
hung in the widening mouth of the channel from which the Polaroid
Sun gave birth to its photographs.
As Kevin watched, frozen, looking through a curtain
of flashing, zinging dots that last white explosion had put in
front of his eyes, the Sun dog roared again. The sound was smaller
now, with less of that sense that it was coming from beneath and
from everywhere, but it was also more deadly because it was more
real, more here.
Part of the dissolving camera blew backward in a
great gray gobbet, striking Pop Merrill’s neck and expanding into a
necklace. Suddenly both Pop’s jugular vein and carotid artery gave
way in spraying gouts of blood that jetted upward and outward in
bright-red spirals. Pop’s head whipped bonelessly backward.
The bubble on the surface of the picture grew. The
picture itself began to jitter in the yawning slot at the bottom of
the now-decapitated camera. Its sides began to spread, as if the
picture was no longer on cardboard at all but some flexible
substance like knitted nylon. It wiggled back and forth in the
slot, and Kevin thought of the cowboy boots he had gotten for his
birthday two years ago, and how he had had to wiggle his feet into
them, because they were a little too tight.
The edges of the picture struck the edges of the
camera delivery-slot, where they should have stuck firmly. But the
camera was no longer a solid; was, in fact, losing all resemblance
to what it had been. The edges of the picture sliced through its
sides as cleanly as the razor-sharp sides of a good double-edged
knife slide through tender meat. They poked through what had been
the Polaroid’s housing, sending gray drops of smoking plastic
flying into the dim air. One landed on a dry, crumbling stack of
old Popular Mechanics magazines and burrowed a fuming,
charred hole into them.
The dog roared again, an angry, ugly sound—the cry
of something with nothing but rending and killing on its mind.
Those things, and nothing else.
The picture teetered on the edge of the sagging,
dissolving slit, which now looked more like the bell of some
misshapen wind instrument than anything else, and then fell forward
to the desk with the speed of a stone tumbling into a well.
Kevin felt a hand claw at his shoulder.
“What’s it doing?” his father asked hoarsely.
“Jesus Christ almighty, Kevin, what’s it doing?”
Kevin heard himself answer in a remote, almost
disinterested voice: “Being born.”