Four Past Midnight

by Stephen King

  The shiny surface of the bubble tore open. Red smoke, like the blast from a tea-kettle set in front of red neon, billowed out.

  The thing roared again, an angry, homicidal sound. A gigantic jaw, filled with croggled teeth, burst up through the shrivelling membrane of the now-collapsing bubble like the jaw of a breaching pilot whale. It ripped and chewed and gnawed at the membrane, which gave way with gummy splattering sounds.

  The clocks struck wildly, crazily.

  His father grabbed him again, so hard that Kevin's teeth rapped against the plastic body of the camera and it came within a hair of spilling out of his hands and shattering on the floor.

  "Shoot it!" his father screamed over the thing's bellowing din. "Shoot it, Kevin, if you can shoot it, SHOOT IT NOW, Christ Jesus, it's going to--"

  Kevin yanked away from his father's hand. "Not yet," he said. "Not just y--"

  The thing screamed at the sound of Kevin's voice. The Sun dog lunged up from wherever it was, driving the picture still wider. It gave and stretched with a groaning sound. This was replaced by the thick cough of ripping fabric again.

  And suddenly the Sun dog was up, its head rising black and rough and tangled through the hole in reality like some weird periscope which was all tangled metal and glittering, glaring lenses ... except it wasn't metal but that twisted, spiky fur Kevin was looking at, and those were not lenses but the thing's insane, raging eyes.

  It caught at the neck, the spines of its pelt shredding the edges of the hole it had made into a strange sunburst pattern. It roared again, and sickly yellow-red fire licked out of its mouth.

  John Delevan took a step backward and struck a table overloaded with thick copies of Weird Tales and Fantastic Universe. The table tilted and Mr. Delevan flailed helplessly against it, his heels first rocking back and then shooting out from under him. Man and table went over with a crash. The Sun dog roared again, then dipped its head with an unsuspected delicacy and tore at the membrane which held it. The membrane ripped. The thing barked out a thin stream of fire which ignited the membrane and turned it to ash. The beast lunged upward again and Kevin saw that the thing on the tie around its neck was no longer a tie-clasp but the spoon-shaped tool which Pop Merrill had used to clean his pipe.

  In that moment a clean calmness fell over the boy. His father bellowed in surprise and fear as he tried to untangle himself from the table he had fallen over, but Kevin took no notice. The cry seemed to come from a great distance away.

  It's all right, Dad, he thought, fixing the struggling, emerging beast more firmly in the viewfinder. It's all right, don't you see? It can be all right, anyway ... because the charm it wears has changed.

  He thought that perhaps the Sun dog had its master, too ... and its master had realized that Kevin was no longer sure prey.

  And perhaps there was a dog-catcher in that strange nowhere town of Polaroidsville; there must be, else why had the fat woman been in his dream? It was the fat woman who had told him what he must do, either on her own or because that dog-catcher had put her there for him to see and notice: the two-dimensional fat woman with her two-dimensional shopping-cart full of two-dimensional cameras. Be careful, boy. Pop's dog broke his leash and he's a mean un.... It's hard to take his pitcher, but you can't do it at all, 'less you have a cam'ra.

  And now he had his camera, didn't he? It was not sure, not by any means, but at least he had it.

  The dog paused, head turning almost aimlessly ... until its muddy, burning gaze settled on Kevin Delevan. Its black lips peeled back from its corkscrewed boar's fangs, its muzzle opened to reveal the smoking channel of its throat, and it gave a high, drilling howl of fury. The ancient hanging globes that lit Pop's place at night shattered one after another in rows, sending down spinning shards of frosted fly-beshitted glass. It lunged, its broad, panting chest bursting through the membrane between the worlds.

  Kevin's finger settled on the Polaroid's trigger.

  It lunged again, and now its front legs popped free, and those cruel spurs of bone, so like gigantic thorns, scraped and scrabbled for purchase on the desk. They dug long vertical scars in the heavy rock-maple. Kevin could hear the dusky thud-and-scratch of its pistoning rear legs digging for a grip down there (wherever down there was), and he knew that this was the final short stretch of seconds in which it would be trapped and at his mercy; the next convulsive lunge would send it flying over the desk, and once free of the hole through which it was squirming, it would move as fast as liquid death, charging across the space between them, setting his pants ablaze with its fiery breath split-seconds before it tore into his warm innards.

  Very clearly, Kevin instructed: "Say cheese, you motherfucker."

  And triggered the Polaroid.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  The flash was so bright that Kevin could not conceive of it later; could, in fact, barely remember it at all. The camera he was holding did not grow hot and melt; instead there were three or four quick, decisive breaking sounds from inside it as its ground-glass lenses burst and its springs either snapped or simply disintegrated.

  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.

  EPILOGUE

  It was Kevin Delevan's sixteenth birthday, and he got exactly what he wanted: a WordStar 70 PC and word processor. It was a seventeen-hundred-dollar toy, and his parents could never have afforded it in the old days, but in January, about three months after that final confrontation in the Emporium Galorium, Aunt Hilda had died quietly in her sleep. She had indeed Done Something for Kevin and Meg; had, in fact, Done Quite a Lot for the Whole Family. When the will cleared probate in early June, the Delevans found themselves richer by nearly seventy thousand dollars ... and that was after taxes, not before.

  "Jeez, it's neat! Thank you!" Kevin cried, and kissed his mother, his father, and even his sister, Meg (who giggled but, being a year older, made no attempt to rub it off; Kevin couldn't decide if this change was a step in the right direction or not). He spent much of the afternoon in his room, fussing over it and trying out the test program.

  Around four o'clock, he came downstairs and into his father's den. "Where's Mom and Meg?" he asked.

  "They've gone out to the crafts fair at ... Kevin? Kevin, what's wrong?"

  "You better come upstairs," Kevin said hollowly.

  At the door to his room, he turned his pale face toward his father's equally pale face. There was something more to pay, Mr. Delevan had been thinking as he followed his son up the stairs. Of course there was. And hadn't he also learned that from Reginald Marion "Pop" Merrill? The debt you incurred was what hurt you.

  It was the interest that broke your back.

  "Can we get another one of these?" Kevin asked, pointing to the laptop computer which stood open on his desk, glowing a mystic yellow oblong of light onto the blotter.

  "I don't know," Mr. Delevan said, approaching the desk. Kevin stood behind him, a pallid watcher. "I guess, if we had to--"

  He stopped, looking down at the screen.

  "I booted up the word-processing program and typed 'The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy sleeping dog,' " Kevin said. "Only that was what came out of the printer."

  Mr. Delevan stood, silently reading the hard copy. His hands and forehead felt very cold. The words there read: The dog is loose again. It is not sleeping. It is not lazy. It's coming for you, Kevin.

  The original debt was what hurt you, he thought again; it was the interest that broke your back. The last two lines read: It's very hungry. And it's VERY angry.

  You are invited to preview Stephen King's latest triumph

  NEEDFUL THINGS

  A new spectacle of terror from the undisputed master of the macabre

  CHAPTER ONE

  1

  In a small town, the opening of a new store is big news.

  It wasn't as big a deal to Brian Rusk as it was to some; his mother, for instance. He had heard her discussing it (he wasn't supposed to call it gossiping, she had told him, because gossiping was a dirty habit and she didn't do it) at some length on the telephone with her best friend, Myra Evans, over the last month or so. The first workmen had arrived at the old building which had last housed Western Maine Realty and Insurance right around the time school let in again, and they had been busily at work ever since. Not that anyone had much idea what they were up to in there; their first act had been to put in a large display window, and their second had been to soap it opaque.

  Two weeks ago a sign had appeared in the doorway, hung on a string over a plastic see-through suction-cup.

  OPENING SOON!

  The sign read.

  NEEDFUL THINGS A NEW KIND OF STORE

  "You won't believe your eyes!"

  "It'll be just another antique shop," Brian's mother said to Myra. Cora Rusk had been reclining on the sofa at the time, holding the telephone with one hand and eating chocolate-covered cherries with the other while she watched Santa Barbara on the TV. "Just another antique shop with a lot of phony early American furniture and moldy old crank telephones. You wait and see."

  That had been shortly after the new display window had been first installed and then soaped over, and his mother spoke with such assurance that Brian should have felt sure the subject was closed. Only with his mother, no subject ever seemed to be completely closed. Her speculations and suppositions seemed as endless as the problems of the characters on Santa Barbara and General Hospital.

  Last week the first line of the sign hanging in the door was changed to read: GRAND OPENING OCTOBER 9TH--BRING YOUR FRIENDS!

  Brian was not as interested in the new store as his mother (and some of the teachers; he had heard them talking about it in the teachers' room at Castle Rock Middle School when it was his turn to be Office Mailman), but he was eleven, and a healthy eleven-year-old boy is interested in anything new. Besides, the name of the place fascinated him. Needful Things: what, exactly, did that mean?

  He had read the changed first line last Tuesday, on his way home from school. Tuesday afternoons were his late days. Brian had been born with a harelip, and although it had been surgically corrected when he was seven, he still had to go to speech therapy. He maintained stoutly to everyone who asked that he hated this, but he did not. He was deeply and hopelessly in love with Miss Ratcliffe, and he waited all week for his special ed class to come around. The Tuesday schoolday seemed to last a thousand years, and he always spent the last two hours of it with pleasant butterflies in his stomach.

  There were only four other kids in the class, and none of them came from Brian's end of town. He was glad. After an hour in the same room with Miss Ratcliffe; he felt too exalted for company. He liked to make his way home slowly in the late afternoon, usually pushing his bike instead of riding it, dreaming of her as yellow and gold leaves fell around him in the slanting bars of October sunlight.

  His way took him along the two-block section of Main Street across from the Town Common, and on the day he saw the sign announcing the grand opening, he had pushed his nose up to the glass of the door, hoping to see what had replaced the stodgy desks and industrial yellow walls of the departed Western Maine Realtors and Insurance Agents. His curiosity was defeated. A shade had been installed and was pulled all the way down. Brian saw nothing but his own reflected face and cupped hands.

  On Friday the 4th, there had been an ad for the new store in Castle Rock's weekly newspaper, the Call. The ad was surrounded by a ruffled border, and below the printed matter was a drawing of angels standing back to back and blowing long trumpets. Aside from the opening time, 10:00 a.m., the ad said nothing that could not be read on the sign dangling from the suction cup: the name of the store was Needful Things, it would open for business at ten o'clock in the morning on October 9th, and, of course, "You won't believe your eyes." There was not the slightest hint of what goods the proprietor or proprietors of Needful Things intended to dispense.

  This seemed to irritate Cora Rusk a great deal--enough, anyway, for her to put in a rare Saturday-morning call to Myra.

  "I'll believe my eyes, all right," she said. "When I see those spool beds that are supposed to be two hundred years old but have Rochester, New York, stamped on the frames for anybody who cares to bend down their heads a
nd look under the bedspread flounces to see, I'll believe my eyes just fine. "

  Myra said something. Cora listened, fishing Planter's Peanuts out of the can by ones and twos and munching them rapidly. Brian and his little brother, Sean, sat on the living-room floor watching cartoons on TV. Sean was completely immersed in the world of the Smurfs, and Brian was not totally uninvolved with that community of small blue people, but he kept one ear cocked toward the conversation.

  "Ri-iiight!" Cora Rusk had exclaimed with even more assurance and emphasis than usual as Myra made some particularly trenchant point. "High prices and moldy antique telephones!"

  Yesterday, Monday, Brian had ridden through downtown right after school with two or three friends. They were across the street from the new shop, and he saw that during the day someone had put up a dark-green awning. Written across the front in white letters were the words NEEDFUL THINGS. Polly Chalmers, the lady who ran the sewing shop, was standing out on the sidewalk, hands on her admirably slim hips, looking at the awning with an expression that seemed to be equally puzzled and admiring.

  Brian, who knew a bit about awnings, admired it himself. It was the only real awning on Main Street, and it gave the new store its own special look. The word "sophisticated" was not a part of his working vocabulary, but he knew at once there was no other shop in Castle Rock which looked like this. The awning made it look like a store you might see in a television show. The Western Auto across the street looked dowdy and countrified by comparison.

  When he got home, his mother was on the sofa, watching Santa Barbara, eating a Little Debbie Creme Pie, and drinking Diet Coke. His mother always drank diet soda while she watched the afternoon shows. Brian was not sure why, considering what she was using it to wash down, but thought it would probably be dangerous to ask. It might even get her shouting at him, and when his mother started shouting, it was wise to seek shelter.