Pop didn’t call these enthusiasts Mad Hatters because of their spectral interests; he called them that because the great majority – he was sometimes tempted to say all of them – seemed to be rich, retired, and just begging to be plucked. If you were willing to spend fifteen minutes with them nodding and agreeing while they assured you they could pick a fake medium from a real one just by walking into the room, let alone sitting down at the seance table, or if you spent an equal amount of time listening to garbled noises which might or might not be words on a tape player with the proper expression of awe on your face, you could sell them a four-dollar paperweight for a hundred by telling them a man had once glimpsed his dead mother in it. You gave them a smile and they wrote you a check for two hundred dollars. You gave them an encouraging word and they wrote you a check for two thousand dollars. If you gave them both things at the same time, they just kind of passed the checkbook over to you and asked you to fill in an amount.
It had always been as easy as taking candy from a baby.
Until now.
Pop didn’t keep a file in his cabinet marked MAD HATTERS any more than he kept one marked COIN
COLLECTORS or STAMP COLLECTORS. He didn’t even have a file-cabinet. The closest thing to it was a battered old book of phone numbers he carried around in his back pocket (which, like his purse, had over the years taken on the shallow ungenerous curve of the spindly buttock it lay against every day). Pop kept his files where a man in his line of work should always keep them: in his head. There were eight full-blown Mad Hatters that he had done business with over the years, people who didn’t just dabble in the occult but who got right down and rolled around in it. The richest was a retired industrialist named McCarty who lived on his own island about twelve miles off the coast. This fellow disdained boats and employed a full-time pilot who flew him back and forth to the mainland when he needed to go.
Pop went to him on September 28th, the day after he obtained the camera from Kevin (he didn’t, couldn’t, exactly think of it as robbery; the boy, after all, had been planning to smash it to shit anyway, and what he didn’t know surely couldn’t hurt him). He drove to a private airstrip just north of Boothbay Harbor in his old but perfectly maintained car, then gritted his teeth and slitted his eyes and held onto the steel lockbox with the Polaroid Sun 660 in it for dear fife as the Mad Hatter’s Beechcraft plunged down the dirt runway like a rogue horse, rose into the air just as Pop was sure they were going to fall off the edge and be smashed to jelly on the rocks below, and flew away into the autumn empyrean. He had made this trip twice before, and had sworn each time that he would never get into that goddam flying coffin again.
They bumped and jounced along with the hungry Atlantic less than five hundred feet below, the pilot talking cheerfully the whole way. Pop nodded and said ayuh in what seemed like the right places, although he was more concerned with his imminent demise than with anything the pilot was saying.
Then the island was ahead with its horribly, dismally, suicidally short landing strip and its sprawling house of redwood and fieldstone, and the pilot swooped down, leaving Pop’s poor old acid-shrivelled stomach somewhere in the air above them, and they hit with a thud and then, somehow, miraculously, they were taxiing to a stop, still alive and whole, and Pop could safely go back to believing God was just another invention of the Mad Hatters … at least until he had to get back in that damned plane for the return journey.
‘Great day for flying, huh, Mr Merrill?’ the pilot asked, unfolding the steps for him.
‘Finest kind,’ Pop grunted, then strode up the walk to the house where the Thanksgiving turkey stood in the doorway, smiling in eager anticipation. Pop had promised to show him ‘the goddanmedest thing I ever come across,’ and Cedric McCarty looked like he couldn’t wait. He’d take one quick look for form’s sake, Pop thought, and then fork over the lettuce. He went back to the mainland forty-five minutes later, barely
noticing the thumps and jounces and gut-goozling drops as the Beech hit the occasional air-pocket. He was a chastened, thoughtful man.
He had aimed the Polaroid at the Mad Hatter and took his picture. While they waited for it to develop, the Mad Hatter took a picture of Pop … and when the flashbulb went off, had he heard something? Had he heard the low, ugly snarl of that black dog, or had it been his imagination? Imagination, most likely. Pop had made some magnificent deals in his time, and you couldn’t do that without imagination.
Still
Cedric McCarty, retired industrialist par excellence and Mad Hatter extraordinaire, watched the photographs develop with that same childlike eagerness, but when they finally came clear, he looked amused and even perhaps a little contemptuous and Pop knew with the infallible intuition which had developed over almost fifty years that arguing, cajolery, even vague hints that he had another customer just slavering for a chance to buy this camera – none of those usually reliable techniques would work. A big orange NO SALE card had gone up in Cedric McCarty’s mind.
But why?
Goddammit, why?
In the picture Pop took, that glint Kevin had spotted amid the wrinkles of the black dog’s muzzle had clearly become a tooth – except tooth wasn’t the right word, not by any stretch of the imagination. That was a fang. In the one McCarty took, you could see the beginnings of the neighboring teeth.
Fucking dog’s got a mouth like a bear-trap, Pop thought. Unbidden, an image of his arm in that dog’s mouth rose in his mind. He saw the dog not biting it, not eating it, but shredding it, the way the many teeth of a wood-chipper shreds bark, leaves, and small branches. How long would it take? he wondered, and looked at those dirty eyes staring out at him from the overgrown face and knew it wouldn’t take long. Or suppose the dog seized him by the crotch, instead? Suppose But McCarty had said something and was waiting for a response. Pop turned his attention to the man, and any lingering hope he might have held of making a sale evaporated. The Mad Hatter extraordinaire, who would cheerfully spend an afternoon with you trying to call UP the ghost of your dear departed Uncle Ned, was gone. In his place was McCarty’s other side: the hardheaded realist who had made Fortune magazine’s listing of the richest men in America for twelve straight years – not because he was an airhead who had had the good fortune to inherit both a lot of money and an honest, capable staff to husband and expand it, but because he had been a genius in the field of aerodynamic design and development. He was not as rich as Howard Hughes but not quite as crazy as Hughes had been at the end, either. When it came to psychic phenomena, the man was a Mad Hatter.
Outside that one area, however, he was a shark that make the likes of Pop Merrill look like a tadpole swimming in a mud-puddle.
‘Sorry,’ Pop said. ‘I was woolgatherin a little, Mr McCarty.’
‘I said it’s fascinating,’ McCarty said. ‘Especially the subtle indications of passing time from one photo to the next. How does it work? Camera in camera?’
‘I don’t understand what you’re gettin at.’
‘No, not a camera,’ McCarty said, speaking to himself. He picked the camera up and shook it next to his ear.
‘More likely some sort of roller device.’
Pop stared at the man with no idea what he was talking about … except it spelled NO SALE, whatever it was. That goddam Christless ride in the little plane (and soon to do over again), all for nothing. But why?
Why? He had been so sure of this fellow, who would probably believe the Brooklyn Bridge was a spectral illusion from the ‘other side’ if you told him it was. So why?
‘Slots, of course!’ McCarty said, as delighted as a child. ‘Slots! There’s a circular belt on pulleys inside this housing with a number of slots built into it. Each slot contains an exposed Polaroid picture of this dog.
Continuity suggests’ -he looked carefully at the pictures again – ‘yes, that the dog might have been filmed, with the Polaroids made from individual frames. When the shutter is released, a picture drops from its slot and emerges. The battery turns the belt enough to position the next photo, and – voila!’