In the white afterglare he saw the Sun dog frozen, a perfect black-and-white Polaroid photograph, its head thrown back, every twisting fold and crevasse in its wildly bushed-out fur caught like the complicated topography of a dry river-valley. Its teeth shone, no longer subtly shaded yellow but as white and nasty as old bones in that sterile emptiness where water had quit running millennia ago. Its single swollen eye, robbed of the dark and bloody porthole of iris by the merciless flash, was as white as an eye in the head of a Greek bust. Smoking snot drizzled from its flared nostrils and ran like hot lava in the narrow gutters between its rolled-back muzzle and its gums.

It was like a negative of all the Polaroids Kevin had ever seen: black-and-white instead of color, and in three dimensions instead of two. And it was like watching a living creature turned instantly to stone by a careless look at the head of Medusa.

“You’re done, you son of a bitch!” Kevin screamed in a cracked, hysterical voice, and as if in agreement, the thing’s frozen forelegs lost their hold on the desk and it began to disappear, first slowly and then rapidly, into the hole from which it had come. It went with a rocky coughing sound, like a landslide.

What would I see if I ran over now and looked into that hole? he wondered incoherently. Would I see that house, that fence, the old man with his shopping-cart, staring with wide-eyed wonder at the face of a giant, not a boy but a Boy, staring back at him from a torn and charred hole in the hazy sky? Would it suck me in? What?

Instead, he dropped the Polaroid and raised his hands to his face.

Only John Delevan, lying on the floor, saw the final act: the twisted, dead membrane shrivelling in on itself, pulling into a complicated but unimportant node around the hole, crumpling there, and then falling (or being inhaled) into itself.

There was a whooping sound of air, which rose from a broad gasp to a thin tea-kettle whistle.

Then it turned inside-out and was gone. Simply gone, as if it had never been.

Getting slowly and shakily to his feet, Mr. Delevan saw that the final inrush (or outrush, he supposed, depending on which side of that hole you were on) of air had pulled the desk-blotter and the other Polaroids the old man had taken in with it.

His son was standing in the middle of the floor with his hands over his face, weeping.

“Kevin,” he said quietly, and put his arms around his boy.

“I had to take its picture,” Kevin said through his tears and through his hands. “It was the only way to get rid of it. I had to take the rotten whoredog’s picture. That’s what I mean to say.”

“Yes.” He hugged him tighter. “Yes, and you did it.”

Kevin looked at his father with naked, streaming eyes. “That’s how I had to shoot it, Dad. Do you see?”

“Yes,” his father said. “Yes, I see that.” He kissed Kevin’s hot cheek again. “Let’s go home, son.”

He tightened his grip around Kevin’s shoulders, wanting to lead him toward the door and away from the smoking, bloody body of the old man (Kevin hadn’t really noticed yet, Mr. Delevan thought, but if they spent much longer here, he would), and for a moment Kevin resisted him.

“What are people going to say?” Kevin asked, and his tone was so prim and spinsterish that Mr. Delevan laughed in spite of his own sizzling nerves.

“Let them say whatever they want,” he told Kevin. “They’ll never get within shouting distance of the truth, and I don’t think anyone will try very hard, anyway.” He paused. “No one really liked him much, you know.”

“I never want to be in shouting distance of the truth,” Kevin whispered. “Let’s go home.”

“Yes. I love you, Kevin.”

“I love you, too,” Kevin said hoarsely, and they went out of the smoke and the stink of old things best left forgotten and into the bright light of day. Behind them, a pile of old magazines burst into flame ... and the fire was quick to stretch out its hungry orange fingers.