‘Do you?’ Kevin asked. He was suddenly tense all over.
‘I might,’ Pop Merrill said calmly. He bent over the pile of photographs twenty-eight of them now, counting the one Kevin had snapped to demonstrate, and the one Pop had snapped to demonstrate to himself. ‘These in order?’
‘Not really. Pretty close, though. Does it matter?’
‘I think so,’ Pop said. ‘They’re a little bit different, ain’t they? Not much, but a little.’
‘Yeah,’ Kevin said. ‘I can see the difference in some of them, but .
‘Do you know which one is the first? I could prob’ly figure it out for myself, but time is money, son.’
‘That’s easy,’ Kevin said, and picked one out of the untidy little pile. ‘See the frosting?’ He pointed at a small brown spot on the picture’s white edging.
‘Ayup.’ Pop didn’t spare the dab of frosting more than a glance. He looked closely at the photograph, and after a moment he opened the drawer of his worktable. Tools were littered untidily about inside. To one side, in its own space, was an object wrapped in jeweler’s velvet. Pop took this out, folded the cloth back, and removed a large magnifying glass with a switch in its base. He bent over the Polaroid and pushed the switch. A bright circle of light fell on the picture’s surface.
‘That’s neat!’ Kevin said.
‘Ayup,’ Pop said again. Kevin could tell that for Pop he was no longer there. Pop was studying the picture closely.
If one had not known the odd circumstances of its taking, the picture would hardly have seemed to warrant such close scrutiny. Like most photographs which are taken with a decent camera, good film, and by a photographer at least intelligent enough to keep his finger from blocking the lens, it was clear, understandable … and, like so many Polaroids, oddly undramatic. It was a picture in which you could identify and name each object, but its content was as flat as its surface. It was not well composed, but composition wasn’t what was wrong with it – that undramatic flatness could hardly be called wrong at all, any more than a real day in a real life could be called wrong because nothing worthy of even a made-for-television movie happened during its course. As in so many Polaroids, the things in the picture were only there, like an empty chair on a porch or an unoccupied child’s swing in a back yard or a passengerless car sitting at an unremarkable curb without even a flat tire to make it interesting or unique.
What was wrong with the picture was the feeling that it was wrong. Kevin had remembered the sense of unease he had felt while composing his subjects for the picture he meant to take, and the ripple of gooseflesh up his back when, with the glare of the flashbulb still lighting the room, he had thought, It’s mine. That was what was wrong, and as with the man in the moon you can’t unsee once you’ve seen it, so, he was discovering, you couldn’t unfeel certain feelings … and when it came to these pictures, those feelings were bad.
Kevin thought: It’s like there was a wind – very soft, very cold – blowing out of that picture.
For the first time, the idea that it might be something supernatural – that this was part of a Manifestation –
did something more than just intrigue him. For the first time he found himself wishing he had simply let this thing go. It’s mine – that was what he had thought when his finger had pushed the shutter-button for the first time. Now he found himself wondering if maybe he hadn’t gotten that backward.
I’m scared of it. Of what it’s doing.
That made him mad, and he bent over Pop Merrill’s shoulder, hunting as grimly as a man who has lost a diamond in a sandpile, determined that, no matter what he saw (always supposing he should see something new, and he didn’t think he would; he had studied all these photographs often enough now to believe he had seen all there was to see in them), he would look at it, study it, and under no circumstances allow himself to unsee it. Even if he could … and a dolorous voice inside suggested very strongly that the time for unseeing was now past, possibly forever.
What the picture showed was a large black dog in front of a white picket fence. The picket fence wasn’t going to be white much longer, unless someone in that flat Polaroid world painted or at least whitewashed it. That didn’t seem likely; the fence looked untended, forgotten. The tops of some pickets were broken off.
Others sagged loosely outward.
The dog was on a sidewalk in front of the fence. His hindquarters were to the viewer. His tail, long and bushy, drooped. He appeared to be smelling one of the fence-pickets – probably, Kevin thought, because the fence was what his dad called a ‘letter-drop,’ a place where many dogs would lift their legs and leave mystic yellow squirts of message before moving on.
The dog looked like a stray to Kevin. Its coat was long and tangled and sown with burdocks. One of its ears had the crumpled look of an old battle-scar. Its shadow trailed long enough to finish outside the frame on the weedy, patchy lawn inside the picket fence. The shadow made Kevin think the picture had been taken not long after dawn or not long before sunset; with no idea of the direction the photographer (what photographer, ha-ha) had been facing, it was impossible to tell which, just that he (or she) must have been standing only a few degrees shy of due east or west.
There was something in the grass at the far left of the picture which looked like a child’s red rubber ball. It was inside the fence, and enough behind one of the lackluster clumps of grass so it was hard to tell.
And that was all.
‘Do you recognize anything?’ Pop asked, cruising his magnifying glass slowly back and forth over the photo’s surface. Now the dog’s hindquarters swelled to the size of hillocks tangled with wild and ominously exotic black undergrowth; now three or four of the scaly pickets became the size of old telephone poles; now, suddenly, the object behind the clump of grass clearly became a child’s ball (although under Pop’s glass it was as big as a soccer ball): Kevin could even see the stars which girdled its middle in upraised rubber lines. So something new was revealed under Pop’s glass, and in a few moments Kevin would see something else himself, without it. But that was later.
‘Jeez, no,’ Kevin said. ‘How could I, Mr Merrill?’
‘Because there are things here,’ Pop said patiently. His glass went on cruising. Kevin thought of a movie he had seen once where the cops sent out a searchlight-equipped helicopter to look for escaped prisoners. ‘A dog, a sidewalk, a picket fence that needs paintin or takin down, a lawn that needs tendin. The sidewalk ain’t much – you can’t even see all of it – and the house, even the foundation, ain’t in the frame, but what I mean to say is there’s that dog. You recognize it?’
‘No.’
‘The fence?’
‘No.’
‘What about that red rubber ball? What about that, son?’
‘No … but you look like you think I should.’
‘I look like I thought you might,’ Pop said. ‘You never had a ball like that when you were a tyke?’
‘Not that I remember, no.’
‘You got a sister, you said.’
‘Megan.’
‘She never had a ball like that?’
‘I don’t think so. I never took that much interest in Meg’s toys. She had a BoLo bouncer once, and the ball on the end of it was red, but a different shade. Darker.’
‘Ayuh. I know what a ball like that looks like. This ain’t one. And that mightn’t be your lawn?’
‘Jes – I mean jeepers, no.’ Kevin felt a little offended. He and his dad took good care of the lawn around their house. It was a deep green and would stay that way, even under the fallen leaves, until at least mid-October. ‘We don’t have a picket fence, anyway.’ And if we did, he thought, it wouldn’t look like that mess.
Pop let go of the switch in the base of the magnifying glass, placed it on the square of jeweler’s velvet, and with a care which approached reverence folded the sides over it. He returned it to its former place in the drawer and closed the drawer. He looked at Kevin closely. He had put his pipe aside, and there was now no smoke to obscure his eyes, which were still sharp but not twinkling anymore.
‘What I mean to say is, could it have been your house before you owned it, do you think? Ten years ago -‘