Four Past Midnight Read online

  Pop Merrill sounded like Paulette the stuffed panda this morning. His blank gaze was uncannily like Paulette's. Molly had thought any change from the old man's usual leer would be a welcome one. She had been wrong.

  Molly bent over the display, for once totally unconscious of the way her rump was poking out, and tried to find what the old man wanted as quickly as she could. She was sure that when she turned around, Pop would be looking at anything but her. This time she was right. When she had the film and started back (brushing a couple of errant fall leaves from one of the boxes), Pop was still staring at the cigarette racks, at first glance appearing to look so closely he might have been inventorying the stock. It took a second or two to see that that expression was no expression at all, really, but a gaze of almost divine blankness.

  Please get out of here, Molly prayed. Please, just take your film and go. And whatever else you do, don't touch me. Please.

  If he touched her while he was looking like that, Molly thought she would scream. Why did the place have to be empty? Why couldn't at least one other customer be in here, preferably Sheriff Pangborn, but since he seemed to be otherwise engaged, anyone at all? She supposed Mr. Constantine, the pharmacist, was in the store someplace, but the drug counter looked easily a quarter of a mile away, and while she knew it couldn't be that far, not really, it was still too far for him to reach her in a hurry if old man Merrill decided to touch her. And suppose Mr. Constantine had gone out to Nan's for coffee with Mr. Keeton from the selectmen's office? The more she thought about that possibility, the more likely it seemed. When something genuinely weird like this happened, wasn't it an almost foregone conclusion that it should happen while one was alone?

  He's having a mental breakdown of some kind.

  She heard herself saying with glassy cheerfulness: "Here you are, Mr. Merrill." She put the film on the counter and scooted to her left and behind the register at once, wanting it between her and him.

  The ancient leather purse came out of Pop Merrill's pants, and her stuttering fingers miskeyed the purchase so she had to clear the register and start again.

  He was holding two ten-dollar bills out to her.

  She told herself they were only rumpled from being squashed up with the other bills in that little pocketbook, probably not even old, although they looked old. That didn't stop her galloping mind, however. Her mind insisted that they weren't just rumpled, they were rumpled and slimy. It further insisted that old wasn't the right word, that old wasn't even in the ballpark. For those particular items of currency, not even the word ancient would do. Those were prehistoric tens, somehow printed before Christ was born and Stonehenge was built, before the first low-browed, no-neck Neanderthal had crawled out of his cave. They belonged to a time when even God had been a baby.

  She didn't want to touch them.

  She had to touch them.

  The man would want his change.

  Steeling herself, she took the bills and shoved them into the cash register as fast as she could, banging a finger so hard she ripped most of the nail clear off, an ordinarily exquisite pain she would not notice, in her extreme state of distress, until sometime later ... when, that was, she had chivvied her willing mind around enough to scold herself for acting like a whoopsy little girl on the edge of her first menstrual period.

  At the moment, however, she only concentrated on getting the bills into the register as fast as she could and getting her hand off them, but even later she would remember what the surfaces of those tens had felt like. It felt as if they were actually crawling and moving under the pads of her fingers; as if billions of germs, huge germs almost big enough to be seen with the naked eye, were sliding along them toward her, eager to infect her with whatever he had.

  But the man would want his change.

  She concentrated on that, lips pressed together so tightly they were dead white; four singles that did not, absolutely did not want to come out from beneath the roller that held them down in the cash drawer. Then a dime, but oh Jesus-please-us, there were no dimes, and what the hell was wrong with her, what had she done to be saddled for so long with this weird old man on the one morning in recorded history when he actually seemed to want to get out of here in a hurry?

  She fished out a nickel, feeling the silent, stinky loom of him so close to her (and she felt that when she was finally forced to look up she would see he was even closer, that he was leaning over the counter toward her), then three pennies, four, five ... but the last one dropped back into the drawer among the quarters and she had to fish for it with one of her cold, numb fingers. It almost squirted away from her again; she could feel sweat popping out on the nape of her neck and on the little strip of skin between her nose and her upper lip. Then, clutching the coins tightly in her fist and praying he wouldn't have his hand outstretched to receive them so she would have to touch his dry, reptilian skin, but knowing, somehow knowing that he would, she looked up, feeling her bright and cheery LaVerdiere's smile stretching the muscles of her face in a kind of frozen scream, trying to steel herself for even that, telling herself it would be the last, and never mind the image her stupid, insisting mind kept trying to make her see, an image of that dry hand suddenly snapping shut over hers like the talon of some old and horrid bird, a bird not of prey, no, not even that, but one of carrion; she told herself she did not see those images, absolutely did NOT, and, seeing them all the same, she looked up with that smile screaming off her face as brightly as a cry of murder on a hot still night, and the store was empty.

  Pop was gone.

  He had left while she was making change.

  Molly began to shudder all over. If she had needed concrete proof that the old geezer was not right, this was it. This was proof positive, proof indubitable, proof of the purest ray serene: for the first time in her memory (and in the living memory of the town, she would have bet, and she would have won her bet), Pop Merrill, who refused to tip even on those rare occasions when he was forced to eat in a restaurant that had no take-out service, had left a place of business without waiting for his change.

  Molly tried to open her hand and let go of the four ones, the nickel, and the five pennies. She was stunned to find she couldn't do it. She had to reach over with her other hand and pry the fingers loose. Pop's change dropped to the glass top of the counter and she swept it off to one side, not wanting to touch it.

  And she never wanted to see Pop Merrill again.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Pop's vacant gaze held as he left LaVerdiere's. It held as he crossed the sidewalk with the boxes of film in his hand. It broke and became an expression of somehow unsettling alertness as he stepped off into the gutter ... and stopped there, with one foot on the sidewalk and one planted amid the litter of squashed cigarette butts and empty potato-chip bags. Here was another Pop Molly would not have recognized, although there were those who had been sharp-traded by the old man who would have known it quite well. This was neither Merrill the lecher nor Merrill the robot, but Merrill the animal with its wind up. All at once he was there, in a way he seldom allowed himself to be there in public. Showing so much of one's true self in public was not, in Pop's estimation, a good idea. This morning, however, he was far from being in command of himself, and there was no one out to observe him, anyway. If there had been, that person would not have seen Pop the folksy crackerbarrel philosopher or even Pop the sharp trader, but something like the spirit of the man. In that moment of being totally there, Pop looked like a rogue dog himself, a stray who has gone feral and now pauses amid a midnight henhouse slaughter, raggedy ears up, head cocked, bloodstreaked teeth showing a little as he hears some sound from the farmer's house and thinks of the shotgun with its wide black holes like a figure eight rolled onto its side. The dog knows nothing of figure eights, but even a dog may recognize the dim shape of eternity if its instincts are honed sharp enough.

  Across the town square he could see the urine-yellow front of the Emporium Galorium, standing slightly apart from its nearest
neighbors: the vacant building which had housed The Village Washtub until earlier that year, Nan's Luncheonette, and You Sew and Sew, the dress-and-notions shop run by Evvie Chalmers's great-granddaughter, Polly-a woman of whom we must speak at another time.

  There were slant-parking spaces in front of all the shops on Lower Main Street, and all of them were empty ... except for one, which was just now being filled with a Ford station-wagon Pop recognized. The light throb of its engine was clearly audible in the morning-still air. Then it cut off, the brakelights went out, and Pop pulled back the foot which had been in the gutter and prudently withdrew himself to the corner of LaVerdiere's. Here he stood as still as that dog who has been alerted in the henhouse by some small sound, the sort of sound which might be disregarded in the killing frenzy of dogs neither so old nor so wise as this one.

  John Delevan got out from behind the wheel of the station-wagon. The boy got out on the passenger side. They went to the door of the Emporium Galorium. The man began to knock impatiently, loud enough so the sound of it came as clearly to Pop as the sound of the engine had done. Delevan paused, they both listened, and then Delevan started in again, not knocking now but hammering at the door, and you didn't have to be a goddam mind-reader to know the man was steamed up.

  They know, Pop thought. Somehow they know. Damned good thing I smashed the fucking camera.

  He stood a moment longer, nothing moving except his hooded eyes, and then he slipped around the corner of the drugstore and into the alley between it and the neighboring bank. He did it so smoothly that a man fifty years younger might have envied the almost effortless agility of the movement.

  This morning, Pop figured, it might be a little wiser to go back home by backyard express.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  When there was still no answer, John Delevan went at the door a third time, hammering so hard he made the glass rattle loosely in its rotting putty gums and hurt his hand. It was hurting his hand that made him realize how angry he was. Not that he felt the anger was in any way unjustified if Merrill had done what Kevin thought he had done--and yes, the more he thought about it, the more John Delevan was sure that Kevin was right. But he was surprised that he hadn't recognized the anger for what it was until just now.

  This seems to be a morning for learning about myself, he thought, and there was something schoolmarmish in that. It allowed him to smile and relax a little.

  Kevin was not smiling, nor did he look relaxed.

  "It seems like one of three things has happened," Mr. Delevan said to his son. "Merrill's either not up, not answering the door, or he figured we were getting warm and he's absconded with your camera." He paused, then actually laughed. "I guess there's a fourth, too. Maybe he died in his sleep."

  "He didn't die." Kevin now stood with his head against the dirty glass of the door he mightily wished he had never gone through in the first place. He had his hands cupped around his eyes to make blinders, because the sun rising over the east side of the town square ran a harsh glare across the glass. "Look."

  Mr. Delevan cupped his own hands to the sides of his face and pressed his nose to the glass. They stood there side by side, backs to the square, looking into the dimness of the Emporium Galorium like the world's most dedicated window-shoppers. "Well," he said after a few seconds, "it looks like if he absconded he left his shit behind."

  "Yeah--but that's not what I mean. Do you see it?"

  "See what?"

  "Hanging on that post. The one by the bureau with all the clocks on it."

  And after a moment, Mr. Delevan did see it: a Polaroid camera, hanging by its strap from a hook on the post. He thought he could even see the chipped place, although that might have been his imagination.

  It's not your imagination.

  The smile faded off his lips as he realized he was starting to feel what Kevin was feeling: the weird and distressing certainty that some simple yet terribly dangerous piece of machinery was running ... and unlike most of Pop's clocks, it was running right on time.

  "Do you think he's just sitting upstairs and waiting for us to go away?" Mr. Delevan spoke aloud, but he was really talking to himself. The lock on the door looked both new and expensive ... but he was willing to bet that if one of them--probably Kevin was in better shape--hit the door hard enough, it would rip right through the old wood. He mused randomly: A lock is only as good as the door you put it in. People never think.

  Kevin turned his strained face to look at his father. In that moment, John Delevan was as struck by Kevin's face as Kevin had been by his not long ago. He thought: I wonder how many fathers get a chance to see what their sons will look like as men? He won't always look this strained, this tightly drawn-- God, I hope not--but this is what he will look like. And, Jesus, he's going to be handsome!

  He, like Kevin, had that one moment in the midst of whatever it was that was going on here, and the moment was a short one, but he also never forgot; it was always within his mind's reach.

  "What?" Kevin asked hoarsely. "What, Dad?"

  "You want to bust it? Because I'd go along."

  "Not yet. I don't think we'll have to. I don't think he's here ... but he's close."

  You can't know any such thing. Can't even think it.

  But his son did think it, and he believed Kevin was right. Some sort of link had been formed between Pop and his son. "Some sort" of link? Get serious. He knew perfectly well what the link was. It was that fucking camera hanging on the wall in there, and the longer this went on, the longer he felt that machinery running, its gears grinding and its vicious unthinking cogs turning, the less he liked it.

  Break the camera, break the link, he thought, and said: "Are you sure, Kev?"

  "Let's go around to the back. Try the door there."

  "There's a gate. He'll keep it locked."

  "Maybe we can climb over."

  "Okay," Mr. Delevan said, and followed his son down the steps of the Emporium Galorium and around to the alley, wondering as he went if he had lost his mind.

  But the gate wasn't locked. Somewhere along the line Pop had forgotten to lock it, and although Mr. Delevan hadn't liked the idea of climbing over the fence, or maybe falling over the fence, quite likely tearing the hell out of his balls in the process, he somehow liked the open gate even less. All the same, he and Kevin went through it and into Pop's littered backyard, which not even the drifts of fallen October leaves could improve.

  Kevin wove his way through the piles of junk Pop had thrown. out but not bothered to take to the dump, and Mr. Delevan followed him. They arrived at the chopping block at about the same time Pop was coming out of Mrs. Althea Linden's backyard and onto Mulberry Street, a block west. He would follow Mulberry Street until he reached the offices of the Wolf Jaw Lumber Company. Although the company's pulp trucks would already be coursing the roads of western Maine and the yowl and yark of the cutters' chainsaws would have been rising from the area's diminishing stands of hardwood since six-thirty or so, no one would come in to man the office until nine, which was still a good fifteen minutes away. At the rear of the lumber company's tiny backyard was a high board fence. It was gated, and this gate was locked, but Pop had the key. He would unlock the gate and step through into his own backyard.

  Kevin reached the chopping block. Mr. Delevan caught up, followed his son's gaze, and blinked. He opened his mouth to ask what in the hell this was all about, then shut it again. He was starting to have an idea of what in the hell it was all about without any aid from Kevin. It wasn't right to have such ideas, wasn't natural, and he knew from bitter experience (in which Reginald Marion "Pop" Merrill himself had played a part at one point, as he had told his son not so long ago) that doing things on impulse was a good way to reach the wrong decision and go flying off half-cocked, but it didn't matter. Although he did not think it in such terms, it would be fair to say Mr. Delevan just hoped he could apply for readmittance to the Reasonable tribe when this was over.

  At first he thought he was looking at th
e smashed remains of a Polaroid camera. Of course that was just his mind, trying to find a little rationality in repetition; what lay on and around the chopping block didn't look anything at all like a camera, Polaroid or otherwise. All those gears and flywheels could only belong to a clock. Then he saw the dead cartoon-bird and even knew what kind of clock. He opened his mouth to ask Kevin why in God's name Pop would bring a cuckoo clock out back and then sledgehammer it to death. He thought it over again and decided he didn't have to ask, after all. The answer to that was also beginning to come. He didn't want it to come, because it pointed to madness on what seemed to Mr. Delevan a grand scale, but that didn't matter; it came anyway.

  You had to hang a cuckoo clock on something. You had to hang it because of the pendulum weights. And what did you hang it on? Why, a hook, of course.

  Maybe a hook sticking out of a beam.

  Like the beam Kevin's Polaroid had been hanging on.

  Now he spoke, and his words seemed to come from some long distance away: "What in the hell is wrong with him, Kevin? Has he gone nuts?"

  "Not gone," Kevin answered, and his voice also seemed to come from some long distance away as they stood above the chopping block, looking down on the busted timepiece. "Driven there. By the camera."

  "We've got to smash it," Mr. Delevan said. His voice seemed to float to his ears long after he had felt the words coming out of his mouth.