Four Past Midnight

by Stephen King

  "God-damn," Kevin said. He had rarely said that in his father's presence, but his father did not seem to notice.

  "Anyway, I got two dollars and eighty cents an hour, and after two months they bumped me to three ten," he said. "It was hell. I'd work on the road project all day long--at least it was early spring and not hot--and then race off to the mill, pushing that Chevy for all it was worth to keep from being late. I'd take off my khakis and just about jump into a pair of blue-jeans and a tee-shirt and work the rollers from three until eleven. I'd get home around midnight and the worst part was the nights when your mother waited up--which she did two or three nights a week--and I'd have to act cheery and full of pep when I could hardly walk a straight line, I was so tired. But if she'd seen that--"

  "She would have made you stop."

  "Yes. She would. So I'd act bright and chipper and tell her funny stories about the sorting room where I wasn't working and sometimes I'd wonder what would happen if she ever decided to drive up some night--to give me a hot dinner, or something like that. I did a pretty good job, but some of it must have showed, because she kept telling me I was silly to be knocking myself out for so little--and it really did seem like chicken-feed once the government dipped their beak and Pop dipped his. It seemed like just about what a fellow working in the sorting room for minimum wage would clear. They paid Wednesday afternoons, and I always made sure to cash my check in the office before the girls went home.

  "Your mother never saw one of those checks.

  "The first week I paid Pop fifty dollars--forty was interest, and ten was on the four hundred, which left three hundred and ninety owing. I was like a walking zombie. On the road I'd sit in my car at lunch, eat my sandwich, and then sleep until the foreman rang his goddamned bell. I hated that bell.

  "I paid him fifty dollars the second week-thirty-nine was interest, eleven was on the principal--and I had it down to three hundred and seventy-nine dollars. I felt like a bird trying to eat a mountain one peck at a time.

  "The third week I almost went into the roller myself, and it scared me so bad I woke up for a few minutes--enough to have an idea, anyway, so I guess it was a blessing in disguise. I had to give up smoking. I couldn't understand why I hadn't seen it before. In those days a pack of smokes cost forty cents. I smoked two packs a day. That was five dollars and sixty cents a week!

  "We had a cigarette break every two hours and I looked at my pack of Tareytons and saw I had ten, maybe twelve. I made those cigarettes last a week and a half, and I never bought another pack.

  "I spent a month not knowing if I could make it or not. There were days when the alarm went off at six o'clock and I knew I couldn't, that I'd just have to tell Mary and take whatever she wanted to dish out. But by the time the second month started, I knew I was probably going to be all right. I think to this day it was the extra five sixty a week--that, and all the returnable beer and soda bottles I could pick up along the sides of the road--that made the difference. I had the principal down to three hundred, and that meant I could knock off twenty-five, twenty-six dollars a week from it, more as time went on.

  "Then, in late April, we finished the road project and got a week off, with pay. I told Mary I was getting ready to quit my job at the mill and she said thank God, and I spent that week off from my regular job working all the hours I could get at the mill, because it was time and a half. I never had an accident. I saw them, saw men fresher and more awake than I was have them, but I never did. I don't know why. At the end of that week I gave Pop Merrill a hundred dollars and gave my week's notice at the paper mill. After that last week I had whittled the nut down enough so I could chip the rest off my regular pay-check without your mother noticing."

  He fetched a deep sigh.

  "Now you know how I know Pop Merrill, and why I don't trust him. I spent ten weeks in hell and he reaped the sweat off my forehead and my ass, too, in ten-dollar bills that he undoubtedly took out of that Crisco can or another one and passed on to some other sad sack who had got himself in the same kind of mess I did."

  "Boy, you must hate him."

  "No," Mr. Delevan said, getting up. "I don't hate him and I don't hate myself. I got a fever, that's all. It could have been worse. My marriage could have died of it, and you and Meg never would have been born, Kevin. Or I might have died of it myself. Pop Merrill was the cure. He was a hard cure, but he worked. What's hard to forgive is how he worked. He took every damned cent and wrote it down in a book in a drawer under his cash register and looked at the circles under my eyes and the way my pants had gotten a way of hanging off my hip-bones and he said nothing."

  They walked toward the Emporium Galorium, which was painted the dusty faded yellow of signs left too long in country store windows, its false front both obvious and unapologetic. Next to it, Polly Chalmers was sweeping her walk and talking to Alan Pangborn, the county sheriff. She looked young and fresh with her hair pulled back in a horsetail; he looked young and heroic in his neatly pressed uniform. But things were not always the way they looked; even Kevin, at fifteen, knew that. Sheriff Pangborn had lost his wife and youngest son in a car accident that spring, and Kevin had heard that Ms. Chalmers, young or not, had a bad case of arthritis and might be crippled up with it before too many more years passed. Things were not always the way they looked. This thought caused him to glance toward the Emporium Galorium again ... and then to look down at his birthday camera, which he was carrying in his hand.

  "He even did me a favor," Mr. Delevan mused. "He got me to quit smoking. But I don't trust him. Walk careful around him, Kevin. And no matter what, let me do the talking. I might know him a little better now."

  So they went into the dusty ticking silence, where Pop Merrill waited for them by the door, with his glasses propped on the bald dome of his head and a trick or two still up his sleeve.

  CHAPTER SIX

  "Well, and here you are, father and son," Pop said, giving them an admiring, grandfatherly smile. His eyes twinkled behind a haze of pipe-smoke and for a moment, although he was clean-shaven, Kevin thought Pop looked like Father Christmas. "You've got a fine boy, Mr. Delevan. Fine."

  "I know," Mr. Delevan said. "I was upset when I heard he'd been dealing with you because I want him to stay that way."

  "That's hard," Pop said, with the faintest touch of reproach. "That's hard comin from a man who when he had nowhere else to turn--"

  "That's over," Mr. Delevan said.

  "Ayuh, ayuh, that's just what I mean to say."

  "But this isn't."

  "It will be," Pop said. He held a hand out to Kevin and Kevin gave him the Sun camera. "It will be today." He held the camera up, turning it over in his hands. "This is a piece of work. What kind of piece I don't know, but your boy wants to smash it because he thinks it's dangerous. I think he's right. But I told him, 'You don't want your daddy to think you're a sissy, do you?' That's the only reason I had him ho you down here, John--"

  "I liked 'Mr. Delevan' better."

  "All right," Pop said, and sighed. "I can see you ain't gonna warm up none and let bygones be bygones."

  "No."

  Kevin looked from one man to the other, his face distressed.

  "Well, it don't matter," Pop said; both his voice and face went cold with remarkable suddenness, and he didn't look like Father Christmas at all. "When I said the past is the past and what's done is done, I meant it ... except when it affects what people do in the here and now. But I'm gonna say this, Mr. Delevan: I don't bottom deal, and you know it."

  Pop delivered this magnificent lie with such flat coldness that both of them believed it; Mr. Delevan even felt a little ashamed of himself, as incredible as that was.

  "Our business was our business. You told me what you wanted, I told you what I'd have to have in return, and you give it to me, and there was an end to it. This is another thing." And then Pop told a lie even more magnificent, a lie which was simply too towering to be disbelieved. "I got no stake in this, Mr. Delevan. There is nothing I
want but to help your boy. I like him."

  He smiled and Father Christmas was back so fast and strong that Kevin forgot he had ever been gone. Yet more than this: John Delevan, who had for months worked himself to the edge of exhaustion and perhaps even death between the rollers in order to pay the exorbitant price this man demanded to atone for a momentary lapse into insanity--John Delevan forgot that other expression, too.

  Pop led them along the twisting aisles, through the smell of dead newsprint and past the tick-tock clocks, and he put the Sun 660 casually down on the worktable a little too near the edge (just as Kevin had done in his own house after taking that first picture) and then just went on toward the stairs at the back which led up to his little apartment. There was a dusty old mirror propped against the wall back there, and Pop looked into it, watching to see if the boy or his father would pick the camera up or move it further away from the edge. He didn't think either would, but it was possible.

  They spared it not so much as a passing glance and as Pop led them up the narrow stairway with the ancient eroded rubber treads he grinned in a way it would have been bad business for anyone to see and thought, Damn, I'm good!

  He opened the door and they went into the apartment.

  Neither John nor Kevin Delevan had ever been in Pop's private quarters, and John knew of no one who had. In a way this was not surprising; no one was ever going to nominate Pop as the town's number-one citizen. John thought it was not impossible that the old fuck had a friend or two--the world never exhausted its oddities, it seemed--but if so, he didn't know who they were.

  And Kevin spared a fleeting thought for Mr. Baker, his favorite teacher. He wondered if, perchance, Mr. Baker had ever gotten into the sort of crack he'd need a fellow like Pop to get him out of. This seemed as unlikely to him as the idea of Pop having friends seemed to his father ... but then, an hour ago the idea that his own father--

  Well. It was best let go, perhaps.

  Pop did have a friend (or at least an acquaintance) or two, but he didn't bring them here. He didn't want to. It was his place, and it came closer to revealing his true nature than he wanted anyone to see. It struggled to be neat and couldn't get there. The wallpaper was marked with water-stains; they weren't glaring, but stealthy and brown, like the phantom thoughts that trouble anxious minds. There were crusty dishes in the old-fashioned deep sink, and although the table was clean and the lid on the plastic waste-can was shut, there was an odor of sardines and something else--unwashed feet, maybe--which was almost not there. An odor as stealthy as the water-stains on the wallpaper.

  The living room was tiny. Here the smell was not of sardines and (maybe) feet but of old pipe-smoke. Two windows looked out on nothing more scenic than the alley that ran behind Mulberry Street, and while their panes showed some signs of having been washed--at least swiped at occasionally--the corners were bleared and greasy with years of condensed smoke. The whole place had an air of nasty things swept under the faded hooked rugs and hidden beneath the old-fashioned, overstuffed easy-chair and sofa. Both of these articles were light green, and your eye wanted to tell you they matched but couldn't, because they didn't. Not quite.

  The only new things in the room were a large Mitsubishi television with a twenty-five-inch screen and a VCR on the endtable beside it. To the left of the endtable was a rack which caught Kevin's eye because it was totally empty. Pop had thought it best to put the better than seventy fuck-movies he owned in the closet for the time being.

  One video cassette rested on top of the television in an unmarked case.

  "Sit down," Pop said, gesturing at the lumpy couch. He went over to the TV and slipped the cassette out of its case.

  Mr. Delevan looked at the couch with a momentary expression of doubt, as if he thought it might have bugs, and then sat down gingerly. Kevin sat beside him. The fear was back, stronger than ever.

  Pop turned on the VCR, slid the cassette in, and then pushed the carriage down. "I know a fellow up the city," he began (to residents of Castle Rock and its neighboring towns, "up the city" always meant Lewiston), "who's run a camera store for twenty years or so. He got into this VCR business as soon as it started up, said it was going to be the wave of the future. He wanted me to go halves with him, but I thought he was nuts. Well, I was wrong on that one, is what I mean to say, but--"

  "Get to the point," Kevin's father said.

  "I'm tryin," Pop said, wide-eyed and injured. "If you'll let me."

  Kevin pushed his elbow gently against his father's side, and Mr. Delevan said no more.

  "Anyway, a couple of years ago he found out rentin tapes for folks to watch wasn't the only way to make money with these gadgets. If you was willin to lay out as little as eight hundred bucks, you could take people's movies and snapshots and put em on a tape for em. Lots easier to watch."

  Kevin made a little involuntary noise and Pop smiled and nodded.

  "Ayuh. You took fifty-eight pitchers with that camera of yours, and we all saw each one was a little different than the last one, and I guess we knew what it meant, but I wanted to see for myself. You don't have to be from Missouri to say show me, is what I mean to say."

  "You tried to make a movie out of those snapshots?" Mr. Delevan asked.

  "Didn't try," Pop said. "Did. Or rather, the fella I know up the city did. But it was my idea."

  "Is it a movie?" Kevin asked. He understood what Pop had done, and part of him was even chagrined that he hadn't thought of it himself, but mostly he was awash in wonder (and delight) at the idea.

  "Look for yourself," Pop said, and turned on the TV. "Fifty-eight pitchers. When this fella does snapshots for folks, he generally videotapes each one for five seconds--long enough to get a good look, he says, but not long enough to get bored before you go on to the next one. I told him I wanted each of these on for just a single second, and to run them right together with no fades."

  Kevin remembered a game he used to play in grade school when he had finished some lesson and had free time before the next one began. He had a little dime pad of paper which was called a Rain-Bo Skool Pad because there would be thirty pages of little yellow sheets, then thirty pages of little pink sheets, then thirty pages of green, and so on. To play the game, you went to the very last page and at the bottom you drew a stick-man wearing baggy shorts and holding his arms out. On the next page you drew the same stick-man in the same place and wearing the same baggy shorts, only this time you drew his arms further up ... but just a little bit. You did that on every page until the arms came together over the stick-man's head. Then, if you still had time, you went on drawing the stick-man, but now with the arms going down. And if you flipped the pages very fast when you were done, you had a crude sort of cartoon which showed a boxer celebrating a KO: he raised his hands over his head, clasped them, shook them, lowered them.

  He shivered. His father looked at him. Kevin shook his head and murmured, "Nothing."

  "So what I mean to say is the tape only runs about a minute," Pop said. "You got to look close. Ready?"

  No, Kevin thought.

  "I guess so," Mr. Delevan said. He was still trying to sound grumpy and put-out, but Kevin could tell he had gotten interested in spite of himself.

  "Okay," Pop Merrill said, and pushed the PLAY button.

  Kevin told himself over and over again that it was stupid to feel scared. He told himself this and it didn't do a single bit of good.

  He knew what he was going to see, because he and Meg had both noticed the Sun was doing something besides simply reproducing the same image over and over, like a photocopier; it did not take long for them to realize that the photographs were expressing movement from one to the next.

  "Look," Meg had said. "The dog's moving!"

  Instead of responding with one of the friendly-but-irritating wisecracks he usually reserved for his little sister, Kevin had said, "It does look like it ... but you can't tell for sure, Meg."

  "Yes, you can," she said. They were in his room, where he had
been morosely looking at the camera. It sat on the middle of his desk with his new schoolbooks, which he had been meaning to cover, pushed to one side. Meg had bent the goose-neck of his study-lamp so it shone a bright circle of light on the middle of his desk blotter. She moved the camera aside and put the first picture--the one with the dab of cake-frosting on it--in the center of the light. "Count the fence-posts between the dog's behind and the righthand edge of the picture," she said.

  "Those are pickets, not fence-posts," he told her. "Like what you do when your nose goes on strike."

  "Ha-ha. Count them."

  He did. He could see four, and part of a fifth, although the dog's scraggly hindquarters obscured most of that one.

  "Now look at this one."

  She put the fourth Polaroid in front of him. Now he could see all of the fifth picket, and part of the sixth.

  So he knew--or believed--he was going to see a cross between a very old cartoon and one of those "flip-books" he used to make in grammar school when the time weighed heavy on his hands.

  The last twenty-five seconds of the tape were indeed like that, although, Kevin thought, the flip-books he had drawn in the second grade were really better ... the perceived action of the boxer raising and lowering his hands smoother. In the last twenty-five seconds of the videotape the action moved in rams and jerks which made the old Keystone Kops silent films look like marvels of modern filmmaking in comparison.

  Still, the key word was action, and it held all of them--even Pop--spellbound. They watched the minute of footage three times without saying a word. There was no sound but breathing: Kevin's fast and smooth through his nose, his father's deeper, Pop's a phlegmy rattle in his narrow chest.

  And the first thirty seconds or so ...

  He had expected action, he supposed; there was action in the flip-books, and there was action in the Saturday-morning cartoons, which were just a slightly more sophisticated version of the flip-books, but what he had not expected was that for the first thirty seconds of the tape it wasn't like watching notebook pages rapidly thumbed or even a primitive cartoon like Possible Possum on TV: for thirty seconds (twenty-eight, anyway), his single Polaroid photographs looked eerily like a real movie. Not a Hollywood movie, of course, not even a low-budget horror movie of the sort Megan sometimes pestered him to rent for their own VCR when their mother and father went out for the evening; it was more like a snippet of home movie made by someone who has just gotten an eight-millimeter camera and doesn't know how to use it very well yet.