Four Past Midnight

CHAPTER 13

'Kevin, I'm going to be late for work if I don't -'

'Will you call in? Can you? Call in and say you'll be late, or that you might not get there at all? If it was something really, really, really important?'

Warily, Mr Delevan asked, 'What's the something?'

'Could you?'

Mrs Delevan was standing in the doorway of Kevin's bedroom now. Meg was behind her. Both of them were eyeing the man in his business suit and the tall boy, still wearing only his jockey shorts, curiously.

'I suppose I - yes, say I could. But I won't until I know what it is.'

Kevin lowered his voice, and, cutting his eyes toward the door, he said: 'It's about Pop Merrill. And the camera.'

Mr Delevan, who had at first only looked puzzled at what Kevin's eyes were doing, now went to the door. He murmured something to his wife, who nodded. Then he closed the door, paying no more attention to Meg's protesting whine than he would have to a bird singing a bundle of notes on a telephone wire outside the bedroom window.

'What did you tell Mom?' Kevin asked.

'That it was man-to-man stuff.' Mr Delevan smiled a little. 'I think she thinks you want to talk about masturbating.'

Kevin flushed.

Mr Delevan looked concerned. 'You don't, do you? I mean, you know about -'

'I know, I know,' Kevin said hastily; he was not about to tell his father (and wasn't sure he would have been able to put the right string of words together, even if he had wanted to) that what had thrown him momentarily off-track was finding out that not only did his father know about whacking off - which of course shouldn't have surprised him at all but somehow did, leaving him with feelings of surprise at his own surprise - but that his mother somehow did, too.

Never mind. All this had nothing to do with the nightmares, or with the new certainty which had locked into place in his head.

'It's about Pop, I told you. And some bad dreams I've been having. But mostly it's about the camera. Because Pop stole it somehow, Dad.'

'Kevin -'

'I beat it to pieces on his chopping block, I know. But it wasn't my camera. It was another camera. And that isn't even the worst thing. The worst thing is that he's still using mine to take pictures! And that dog is going to get out! When it does, I think it's going to kill me. In that other world it's already started to j-j-j '

He couldn't finish. Kevin surprised himself again - this time by bursting into tears.

By the time John Delevan got his son calmed down it was ten minutes of eight, and he had resigned himself to at least being late for work. He held the boy in his arms - whatever it was, it really had the kid shook, and if it really was nothing but a bunch of dreams, Mr Delevan supposed he would find sex at the root of the matter someplace.

When Kevin was shivering and only sucking breath deep into his lungs in an occasional dry-sob, Mr Delevan went to the door and opened it cautiously, hoping Kate had taken Meg downstairs. She had; the hallway was empty. That's one for our side, anyway, he thought, and went back to Kevin.

'Can you talk now?' he asked.

'Pop's got my camera,' Kevin said hoarsely. His red eyes, still watery, peered at his father almost myopically. 'He got it somehow, and he's using it.'

'And this is something you dreamed?'

'Yes ... and I remembered something.'

'Kevin ... that was your camera. I'm sorry, son, but it was. I even saw the little chip in the side.'

'He must have rigged that somehow -'

'Kevin, that seems pretty farf -'

'Listen,' Kevin said urgently, 'will you just listen?'

'All right. Yes. I'm listening.'

'What I remembered was that when he handed me the camera - when we went out back to crunch it, remember?'

'Yes ... and I remembered something.'

'I looked in the little window where the camera keeps count of how many shots there are left. And it said three, Dad! It said three!'

'Well? What about it?'

'It had film in it, too! Film! I know, because I remember one of those shiny black things jumping up when I squashed the camera. It jumped up and then it fluttered back down.'

'I repeat: so what?'

'There wasn't any film in my camera when I gave it to Pop! That's so-what.'

I had twenty-eight pictures. He wanted me to take thirty more, for a total of fifty-eight. I might have bought more film if I'd known what he was up to, but probably not. By then I was scared of the thing

'Yeah. I was, a little, too.'

Kevin looked at him respectfully. 'Were you?'

'Yeah. Go on. I think I see where you're heading.'

'I was just going to say, he chipped in for the film, but not enough - not even half. He's a wicked skinflint, Dad.'

John Delevan smiled thinly. 'He is that, my boy. One of the world's greatest, is what I mean to say. Go on and finish up. Tempus is fugiting away like mad.'

Kevin glanced at the clock. It was almost eight. Although neither of them knew it, Pop would wake up in just under two minutes and start about his morning's business, very little of which he would remember correctly.

'All right,' Kevin said. 'All I'm trying to say is I couldn't have bought any more film even if I'd wanted to. I used up all the money I had buying the three film packs. I even borrowed a buck from Megan, so I let her shoot a couple, too.'

'Between the two of you, you used up all the exposures? Every single one?'

'Yes! Yes! He even said it was fifty-eight! And between the time when I finished shooting all the pictures he wanted and when we went to look at the tape he made, I never bought any more film. It was dead empty when I brought it in, Dad! The number in the little window was a zero! I saw it, I remember! So if it was my camera, how come it said three in the window when we went back downstairs?'

'He couldn't have -' Then his father stopped, and a queer look of uncharacteristic gloom came over his face as he realized that Pop could have, and that the truth of it was this: he, John Delevan, didn't want to believe that Pop had; that even bitter experience had not been sufficient vaccination against foolishness, and Pop might have pulled the wool over his own eyes as well as those of his son.

'Couldn't have what? What are you thinking about, Dad? Something just hit you!'

Something had hit him, all right. How eager Pop had been to go downstairs and get the original Polaroids so they could all get a closer look at the thing around the dog's neck, the thing that turned out to be Kevin's latest string tie from Aunt Hilda, the one with the bird on it that was probably a woodpecker.

We might as well go down with you, Kevin had said when Pop had offered to get the photos, but hadn't Pop jumped up himself, chipper as a chickadee? Won't take a minute, the old man had said, or some such thing, and the truth was, Mr Delevan told himself, I hardly noticed what he was saying or doing, because I wanted to watch that goddamned tape again. And the truth also was this: Pop hadn't even had to pull the old switcheroo right in front of them - although, with his eyes unwooled, Mr Delevan was reluctantly willing to believe the old son of a bitch had probably been prepared to do just that, if he had to, and probably could have done it, too, pushing seventy or not. With them upstairs and him downstairs, presumably doing no more than getting Kevin's photographs, he could have swapped twenty cameras, at his leisure.

'Dad?'

'I suppose he could have,' Mr Delevan said. 'But why?'

Kevin could only shake his head. He didn't know why. But that was all right; Mr Delevan thought he did, and it was something of a relief. Maybe honest men didn't have to learn the world's simplest truths over and over again; maybe some of those truths eventually stuck fast. He'd only had to articulate the question aloud in order to find the answer. Why did the Pop Merrills of this world do anything? To make a profit. That was the reason, the whole reason, and nothing but the reason. Kevin had wanted to destroy it. After looking at Pop's videotape, Mr Delevan had found himself in accord with that. Of the three of them, who had been the only one capable of taking a longer view?

Why, Pop, of course. Reginald Marion 'Pop' Merrill.

John Delevan had been sitting on the edge of Kevin's bed with an arm about his son's shoulders. Now he stood up. 'Get dressed. I'll go downstairs and call in. I'll tell Brandon I'll probably just be late, but to assume I won't be in at all.'

He was preoccupied with this, already talking to Brandon Reed in his mind, but not so preoccupied he didn't see the gratitude which lighted his son's worried face. Mr Delevan smiled a little and felt that uncharacteristic gloom first ease and then let go entirely. There was this much, at least: his son was as yet not too old to take comfort from him, or accept him as a higher power to whom appeals could sometimes be directed in the knowledge that they would be acted upon; nor was he himself too old to take comfort from his son's comfort.

'I think,' he said, moving toward the door, 'that we ought to pay a call on Pop Merrill.' He glanced at the clock on Kevin's night-table. It was ten minutes after eight, and in back of the Emporium Galorium, a sledgehammer was coming down on an imitation German cuckoo clock. 'He usually opens around eightthirty. just about the time we'll get there, I think. If you get a wiggle on, that is.'

He paused on his way out and a brief, cold smile flickered on his mouth. He was not smiling at his son. 'I think he's got some explaining to do, is what I mean to say.'

Mr Delevan went out, closing the door behind him. Kevin quickly began to dress.