Four Past Midnight

by Stephen King

  Kevin hesitated a moment longer and the bright eyes behind the rimless spectacles measured him. I ain't gonna ask you if you're a man or a mouse, Pop Merrill's eyes said. You're fifteen years old, and what I mean to say is at fifteen you may not be a man yet, not quite, but you are too goddam old to be a mouse and both of us know it. And besides you're not from Away; you're from town, just like me.

  "Sure," Kevin said with a hollow lightness in his voice. It fooled neither of them. "I can get the film tonight, I guess, and bring the pictures in tomorrow, after school."

  "Nope," Pop said.

  "You're closed tomorrow?"

  "Nope," Pop said, and because he was from town, Kevin waited patiently. "You're thinkin about takin thirty pitchers all at once, aren't you?"

  "I guess so."

  "That ain't the way I want you to do it," Pop said. "It don't matter where you take them, but it does matter when. Here. Lemme figure."

  Pop figured, and then even wrote down a list of times, which Kevin pocketed.

  "So!" Pop said, rubbing his hands briskly together so that they made a dry sound that was like two pieces of used-up sandpaper rubbing together. "You'll see me in ... oh, three days or so?"

  "Yes ... I guess so."

  "I'll bet you'd just as lief wait until Monday after school, anyway," Pop said. He dropped Kevin a fourth wink, slow and sly and humiliating in the extreme. "So your friends don't see you coming in here and tax you with it, is what I mean to say."

  Kevin flushed and dropped his eyes to the worktable and began to gather up the Polaroids so his hands would have something to do. When he was embarrassed and they didn't, he cracked his knuckles.

  "I--" He began some sort of absurd protest that would convince neither of them and then stopped, staring down at one of the photos.

  "What?" Pop asked. For the first time since Kevin had approached him, Pop sounded entirely human, but Kevin hardly heard his words, much less his tone of faint alarm. "Now you look like you seen a ghost, boy."

  "No," Kevin said. "No ghost. I see who took the picture. Who really took the picture."

  "What in glory are you talking about?"

  Kevin pointed to a shadow. He, his father, his mother, Meg, and apparently Mr. Merrill himself had taken it for the shadow of a tree that wasn't itself in the frame. But it wasn't a tree. Kevin saw that now, and what you had seen could never be unseen.

  More hieroglyphics on the plinth.

  "I don't see what you're gettin at," Pop said. But Kevin knew the old man knew he was getting at something, which was why he sounded put out.

  "Look at the shadow of the dog first," Kevin said. "Then look at this one here again." He tapped the left side of the photograph. "In the picture, the sun is either going down or coming up. That makes all the shadows long, and it's hard to tell what's throwing them. But looking at it, just now, it clicked home for me."

  "What clicked home, son?" Pop reached for the drawer, probably meaning to get the magnifying glass with the light in it again ... and then stopped. All at once he didn't need it. All at once it had clicked into place for him, too.

  "It's the shadow of a man, ain't it?" Pop said. "I be go to hell if that one ain't the shadow of a man."

  "Or a woman. You can't tell. Those are legs, I'm sure they are, but they could belong to a woman wearing pants. Or even a kid. With the shadow running so long--"

  "Ayuh, you can't tell."

  Kevin said, "It's the shadow of whoever took it, isn't it?"

  "Ayuh."

  "But it wasn't me," Kevin said. "It came out of my camera--all of them did--but I didn't take it. So who did, Mr. Merrill? Who did?"

  "Call me Pop," the old man said absently, looking at the shadow in the picture, and Kevin felt his chest swell with pleasure as those few clocks still capable of running a little fast began to signal the others that, weary as they might be, it was time to charge the half-hour.

  CHAPTER THREE

  When Kevin arrived back at the Emporium Galorium with the photographs on Monday after school, the leaves had begun to turn color. He had been fifteen for almost two weeks and the novelty had worn off.

  The novelty of that plinth, the supernatural, had not, but this wasn't anything he counted among his blessings. He had finished taking the schedule of photographs Pop had given him, and by the time he had, he had seen clearly--clearly enough, anyway--why Pop had wanted him to take them at intervals: the first ten on the hour, then let the camera rest, the second ten every two hours, and the third at three-hour intervals. He'd taken the last few that day at school. He had seen something else as well, something none of them could have seen at first; it was not clearly visible until the final three pictures. They had scared him so badly he had decided, even before taking the pictures to the Emporium Galorium, that he wanted to get rid of the Sun 660. Not exchange it; that was the last thing he wanted to do, because it would mean the camera would be out of his hands and hence out of his control. He couldn't have that.

  It's mine, he had thought, and the thought kept recurring, but it wasn't a true thought. If it was--if the Sun only took pictures of the black breedless dog by the white picket fence when he, Kevin, was the one pushing the trigger--that would have been one thing. But that wasn't the case. Whatever the nasty magic inside the Sun might be, he was not its sole initiator. His father had taken the same (well, almost the same) picture, and so had Pop Merrill, and so had Meg when Kevin had let her take a couple of the pictures on Pop's carefully timed schedule.

  "Did you number em, like I asked?" Pop asked when Kevin delivered them.

  "Yes, one to fifty-eight," Kevin said. He thumbed through the stack of photographs, showing Pop the small circled numbers in the lower lefthand corner of each. "But I don't know if it matters. I've decided to get rid of the camera."

  "Get rid of it? That ain't what you mean."

  "No. I guess not. I'm going to break it up with a sledgehammer."

  Pop looked at him with those shrewd little eyes. "That so?"

  "Yes," Kevin said, meeting the shrewd gaze steadfastly. "Last week I would have laughed at the idea, but I'm not laughing now. I think the thing is dangerous."

  "Well, I guess you could be right, and I guess you could tape a charge of dynamite to it and blow it to smithereens if you wanted. It's yours, is what I mean to say. But why don't you hold off a little while? There's somethin I want to do with these pitchers. You might be interested."

  "What?"

  "I druther not say," Pop answered, "case it don't turn out. But I might have somethin by the end of the week that'd help you decide better, one way or the other."

  "I have decided," Kevin said, and tapped something that had shown up in the last two photographs.

  "What is it?" Pop asked. "I've looked at it with m'glass, and I feel like I should know what it is--it's like a name you can't quite remember but have right on the tip of your tongue, is what I mean to say--but I don't quite."

  "I suppose I could hold off until Friday or so," Kevin said, choosing not to answer the old man's question. "I really don't want to hold off much longer."

  "Scared?"

  "Yes," Kevin said simply. "I'm scared."

  "You told your folks?"

  "Not all of it, no."

  "Well, you might want to. Might want to tell your dad, anyway, is what I mean to say. You got time to think on it while I take care of what it is I want to take care of."

  "No matter what you want to do, I'm going to put my dad's sledgehammer on it come Friday," Kevin said. "I don't even want a camera anymore. Not a Polaroid or any other kind."

  "Where is it now?"

  "In my bureau drawer. And that's where it's going to stay."

  "Stop by the store here on Friday," Pop said. "Bring the camera with you. We'll take a look at this little idear of mine, and then, if you want to bust the goddam thing up, I'll provide the sledgehammer myself. No charge. Even got a chopping block out back you can set it on."

  "That's a deal," Kevin said, and smiled.


  "Just what have you told your folks about all this?"

  "That I'm still deciding. I didn't want to worry them. My mom, especially." Kevin looked at him curiously. "Why did you say I might want to tell my dad?"

  "You bust up that camera, your father is going to be mad at you," Pop said. "That ain't so bad, but he's maybe gonna think you're a little bit of a fool, too. Or an old maid, squallin burglar to the police on account of a creaky board is what I mean to say."

  Kevin flushed a little, thinking of how angry his father had gotten when the idea of the supernatural had come up, then sighed. He hadn't thought of it in that light at all, but now that he did, he thought Pop was probably right. He didn't like the idea of his father being mad at him, but he could live with it. The idea that his father might think him a coward, a fool, or both, though ... that was a different kettle of fish altogether.

  Pop was watching him shrewdly, reading these thoughts as they crossed Kevin's face as easily as a man might read the headlines on the front page of a tabloid newspaper.

  "You think he could meet you here around four in the afternoon on Friday?"

  "No way," Kevin said. "He works in Portland. He hardly ever gets home before six."

  "I'll give him a call, if you want," Pop said. "He'll come if I call."

  Kevin gave him a wide-eyed stare.

  Pop smiled thinly. "Oh, I know him," he said. "Know him of old. He don't like to let on about me any more than you do, and I understand that, but what I mean to say is I know him. I know a lot of people in this town. You'd be surprised, son."

  "How?"

  "Did him a favor one time," Pop said. He popped a match alight with his thumbnail, and veiled those eyes behind enough smoke so you couldn't tell if it was amusement, sentiment, or contempt in them.

  "What kind of favor?"

  "That," Pop said, "is between him and me. Just like this business here"--he gestured at the pile of photographs--"is between me and you. That's what I mean to say."

  "Well ... okay ... I guess. Should I say anything to him?"

  "Nope!" Pop said in his chipper way. "You let me take care of everything." And for a moment, in spite of the obfuseating pipe-smoke, there was something in Pop Merrill's eyes Kevin Delevan didn't care for. He went out, a sorely confused boy who knew only one thing for sure: he wanted this to be over.

  When he was gone, Pop sat silent and moveless for nearly five minutes. He allowed his pipe to go out in his mouth and drummed his fingers, which were nearly as knowing and talented as those of a concert violinist but masqueraded as equipment which should more properly have belonged to a digger of ditches or a pourer of cement, next to the stack of photographs. As the smoke dissipated, his eyes stood out clearly, and they were as cold as ice in a December puddle.

  Abruptly he put the pipe in its holder and called a camera-and-video shop in Lewiston. He asked two questions. The answer to both of them was yes. Pop hung up the phone and went back to drumming his fingers on the table beside the Polaroids. What he was planning wasn't really fair to the boy, but the boy had uncovered the corner of something he not only didn't understand but didn't want to understand.

  Fair or not, Pop didn't believe he intended to let the boy do what the boy wanted to do. He hadn't decided what he himself meant to do, not yet, not entirely, but it was wise to be prepared.

  That was always wise.

  He sat and drummed his fingers and wondered what that thing was the boy had seen. He had obviously felt Pop would know--or might know--but Pop hadn't a clue. The boy might tell him on Friday. Or not. But if the boy didn't, the father, to whom Pop had once loaned four hundred dollars to cover a bet on a basketball game, a bet he had lost and which his wife knew nothing about, certainly would. If, that was, he could. Even the best of fathers didn't know all about their sons anymore once those sons were fifteen or so, but Pop thought Kevin was a very young fifteen, and that his dad knew most things ... or could find them out.

  He smiled and drummed his fingers and all the clocks began to charge wearily at the hour of five.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Pop Merrill turned the sign which hung in his door from OPEN to CLOSED at two o'clock on Friday afternoon, slipped himself behind the wheel of his 1959 Chevrolet, which had been for years perfectly maintained at Sonny's Texaco at absolutely no cost at all (the fallout of another little loan, and Sonny Jackett another town fellow who would prefer hot coals pressed against the soles of his feet to admitting that he not only knew but was deeply indebted to Pop Merrill, who had gotten him out of a desperate scrape over in New Hampshire in '69), and took himself up to Lewiston, a city he hated because it seemed to him that there were only two streets in the whole town (maybe three) that weren't one-ways. He arrived as he always did when Lewiston and only Lewiston would do: not by driving to it but arriving somewhere near it and then spiraling slowly inward along those beshitted one-way streets until he reckoned he was as close as he could get and then walking the rest of the way, a tall thin man with a bald head, rimless specs, clean khaki pants with creases and cuffs, and a blue workman's shirt buttoned right up to the collar.

  There was a sign in the window of Twin City Camera and Video that showed a cartoon man who appeared to be battling a huge tangle of movie-film and losing. The fellow looked just about ready to blow his stack. The words over and under the picture read: TIRED OF FIGHTING? WE TRANSFER YOUR 8 MM MOVIES (SNAPSHOTS TOO!) ONTO VIDEO TAPE!

  Just another goddam gadget, Pop thought, opening the door and going in. World's dying of em.

  But he was one of those people--world's dying of em--not at all above using what he disparaged if it proved expedient. He spoke briefly with the clerk. The clerk got the proprietor. They had known each other for many years (probably since Homer sailed the wine-dark sea, some wits might have said). The proprietor invited Pop into the back room, where they shared a nip.

  "That's a goddam strange bunch of photos," the proprietor said.

  "Ayuh."

  "The videotape I made of them is even stranger."

  "I bet so."

  "That all you got to say?"

  "Ayuh."

  "Fuck ya, then," the proprietor said, and they both cackled their shrill old-man's cackles. Behind the counter, the clerk winced.

  Pop left twenty minutes later with two items: a video cassette, and a brand-new Polaroid Sun 660, still in its box.

  When he got back to the shop, he called Kevin's house. He was not surprised when it was John Delevan who answered.

  "If you've been fucking my boy over, I'll kill you, you old snake," John Delevan said without preamble, and distantly Pop could hear the boy's wounded cry: "Da-ad!"

  Pop's lips skinned back from his teeth--crooked, eroded, pipe-yellow, but his own, by the bald-headed Christ--and if Kevin had seen him in that moment he would have done more than wonder if maybe Pop Merrill was something other than the Castle Rock version of the Kindly Old Sage of the Crackerbarrel: he would have known.

  "Now, John," he said. "I've been trying to help your boy with that camera. That's all in the world I've been trying to do." He paused. "Just like that one time I gave you a help when you got a little too proud of the Seventy-Sixers, is what I mean to say."

  A thundering silence from John Delevan's end of the line which meant he had plenty to say on that subject, but the kiddo was in the room and that was as good as a gag.

  "Now, your kid don't know nothing about that," Pop said, that nasty grin broadening in the tick-tock shadows of the Emporium Galorium, where the dominant smells were old magazines and mouse-turds. "I told him it wasn't none of his business, just like I told him that this business here was. I wouldn't have even brought up that bet if I knew another way to get you here, is what I mean to say. And you ought to see what I've got, John, because if you don't you won't understand why the boy wants to smash that camera you bought him--"

  "Smash it!"

  "--and why I think it's a hell of a good idea. Now are you going to come down here with him,
or not?"

  "I'm not in Portland, am I, dammit?"

  "Never mind the CLOSED sign on the door," Pop said in the serene tone of a man who has been getting his own way for many years and expects to go right on getting it for many more. "Just knock."

  "Who in hell gave my boy your name, Merrill?"

  "I didn't ask him," Pop said in that same infuriatingly serene tone of voice, and hung up the telephone. And, to the empty shop: "All I know is that he came. Just like they always do."

  While he waited, he took the Sun 660 he had bought in Lewiston out of its box and buried the box deep in the trash-can beside his worktable. He looked at the camera thoughtfully, then loaded the four-picture starter-pack that came with the camera. With that done, he unfolded the body of the camera, exposing the lens. The red light to the left of the lightning-bolt shape came on briefly, and then the green one began to stutter. Pop was not very surprised to find he was filled with trepidation. Well, he thought, God hates a coward, and pushed the shutter-release. The clutter of the Emporium Galorium's barnlike interior was bathed in an instant of merciless and improbable white light. The camera made its squidgy little whine and spat out what would be a Polaroid picture--perfectly adequate but somehow lacking; a picture that was all surfaces depicting a world where ships undoubtedly would sail off the fuming and monster-raddled edge of the earth if they went far enough west.

  Pop watched it with the same mesmerized expression Clan Delevan had worn as it waited for Kevin's first picture to develop. He told himself this camera would not do the same thing, of course not, but he was stiff and wiry with tension just the same and, tough old bird or not, if a random board had creaked in the place just then, he almost certainly would have cried out.

  But no board did creak, and when the picture developed it showed only what it was supposed to show: clocks assembled, clocks in pieces, toasters, stacks of magazines tied with twine, lamps with shades so horrible only women of the British upper classes could truly love them, shelves of quarter paperbacks (six for a buck) with titles like After Dark My Sweet and Fire in the Flesh and The Brass Cupcake, and, in the distant background, the dusty front window. You could read the letters EMPOR backward before the bulky silhouette of a bureau blocked off the rest.