His pleasant expression was suddenly gone, and Pop saw a man who looked like he might have made his way to fame and fortune over the broken, bleeding bodies of his competitors … and enjoyed it.
‘Joe will fly you back,’ he said. His voice had gone chill and impersonal. ‘You’re good, Mr Merrill’ – this man, Pop realized glumly, would never call him Pop again -‘I’ll admit that. You’ve finally overstepped yourself, but for a long time you had me fooled. How much did you take me for? Was it all claptrap?’
‘I didn’t take you for one red cent,’ Pop said, lying stoutly. ‘I never sold you one single thing I didn’t b’lieve was the genuine article, and what I mean to say is that goes for that camera as well.’
‘You make me sick,’ McCarty said. ‘Not because I trusted you; I’ve trusted others who were fakes and shams. Not because you took my money; it wasn’t enough to matter. You make me sick because it’s men like you that have kept the scientific investigation of psychic phenomena in the dark ages, something to be laughed at, something to be dismissed as the sole province of crackpots and dimwits. The one consolation is that sooner or later you fellows always overstep yourselves. You get greedy and try to palm off something ridiculous like this. I want you out of here, Mr Merrill.’
Pop had his pipe in his mouth and a Diamond Blue Tip in one shaking hand. McCarty pointed at him, and the chilly eyes above that finger made it look like the barrel of a gun.
‘And if you light that stinking thing in here,’ he said, ‘I’ll have Joe yank it out of your mouth and dump the coals down the back of your pants. So unless you want to leave my house with your skinny ass in flames, I suggest -‘
‘What’s the matter with you, Mr McCarty?’ Pop bleated. ‘These pitchers didn’t come out all developed! You watched em develop with your own eyes!’
‘An emulsion any kid with a twelve-dollar chemistry set could whip up,’ McCarty said coldly. ‘It’s not the catalyst-fixative the Polaroid people use, but it’s close. You expose your Polaroids – or create them from movie-film, if that’s what you did – and then you take them in a standard darkroom and paint them with the goop. When they’re dry, you load them. When they pop out, they look like any Polaroid that hasn’t started to develop yet. Solid gray in a white border. Then the light hits your home-made emulsion, creating a chemical change, and it evaporates, showing a picture you yourself took hours or days or weeks before.
Joe?’
Before Pop could say anything else, his arms were seized and he was not so much walked as propelled from the spacious, glass-walled living room. He wouldn’t have said anything, anyway. Another of the many things a good businessman had to know was when he was licked. And yet he wanted to shout over his shoulder: Some dumb cunt with dyed hair and a crystal ball she ordered from Fate magazine floats a book or a lamp or a page of goddam sheet-music through a dark room and you bout shit yourself, but when I show you a camera that takes pitchers of some other world, you have me thrown out by the seat of m’pants!
You’re mad as a hatter, all right! Well, fuck ya! There’s other fish in the sea!
So there were.
On October 5th, Pop got into his perfectly maintained car and drove to Portland to pay a visit on the Pus Sisters.
The Pus Sisters were identical twins who lived in Portland. They were eighty or so but looked older than Stonehenge. They chain-smoked Camel cigarettes, and had done so since they were seventeen, they were happy to tell you. They never coughed in spite of the six packs they smoked between them each and every day. They were driven about – on those rare occasions when they left their red brick Colonial mansion – in a 1958 Lincoln Continental which had the somber glow of a hearse. This vehicle was piloted by a black woman only a little younger than the Pus Sisters themselves. This female chauffeur was probably a mute, but might just be something a bit more special: one of the few truly taciturn human beings God ever made.
Pop did not know and had never asked. He had dealt with the two old ladies for nearly thirty years, the black woman had been with them all that time, mostly driving the car, sometimes washing it, sometimes mowing the lawn or clipping the hedges around the house, sometimes stalking down to the mailbox on the corner with letters from the Pus Sisters to God alone knew who (he didn’t know if the black woman ever went or was allowed inside the house, either, only that he had never seen her there), and during all that time he had never heard this marvellous creature speak.
The Colonial mansion was in Portland’s Bramhall district, which is to Portland what the Beacon Hill area is to Boston. In that latter city, in the land of the bean and the cod, it’s said the Cabots speak only to Lowells and the Lowells speak only to God, but the Pus Sisters and their few remaining contemporaries in Portland would and did calmly assert that the Lowells had turned a private connection into a party line some years after the Deeres and their Portland contemporaries had set up the original wire.
And of course no one in his right mind would have called them the Pus Sisters to their identical faces any more than anyone in his right mind would have stuck his nose in a bandsaw to take care of a troublesome itch. They were the Pus Sisters when they weren’t around (and when one was fairly sure one was in company which didn’t contain a tale-bearer or two), but their real names were Miss Eleusippus Deere and Mrs. Meleusippus Verrill. Their father, in his determination to combine devout Christianity with an exhibition of his own erudition, had named them for two of three triplets who had all become saints … but who, unfortunately, had been male saints.
Meleusippus’s husband had died a great many years before, during the Battle of Leyte Gulf in 1944, as a matter of fact. but she had resolutely kept his name ever since, which made it impossible to take the easy way out and simply call them the Misses Deere. No; you had to practice those goddamned tongue-twister names until they came out as smooth as shit from a waxed asshole. If you fucked up once, they held it against you, and you might lose their custom for as long as six months or a year. Fuck up twice, and don’t even bother to call. Ever again.
Pop drove with the steel box containing the Polaroid camera on the seat beside him, saying their names over and over again in a low voice: ‘Eleusippus. Meleusippus. E leusippus and Meleusippus. Ayuh. That’s all right.’
But, as it turned out, that was the only thing that was all right. They wanted the Polaroid no more than McCarty had wanted it … although Pop had been so shaken by that encounter he went in fully prepared to take ten thousand dollars less, or fifty per cent of his original confident estimate of what the camera might fetch.
The elderly black woman was raking leaves, revealing a lawn which, October or not, was still as green as the felt on a billiard table. Pop nodded to her. She looked at him, looked through him, and continued raking leaves. Pop rang the bell and, somewhere in the depths of the house, a bell bonged. Mansion seemed the perfectly proper word for the Pus Sisters’ domicile. Although it was nowhere as big as some of the old homes in the Bramhall district, the perpetual dimness which reigned inside made it seem much bigger. The sound of the bell really did seem to come floating through a depth of rooms and corridors and the sound of that bell always stirred a specific image in Pop’s mind: the dead-cart passing through the streets of London
during the plague year, the driver ceaselessly tolling his bell and crying, ‘Bring outcher dead! Bring outcher dead! For the luvva Jaysus, bring outcher dead!’
The Pus Sister who opened the door some thirty seconds later looked not only dead but embalmed; a mummy between whose lips someone had poked the smouldering butt of a cigarette for a joke.
‘Merrill,’ the lady said. Her dress was a deep blue, her hair colored to match. She tried to speak to him as a great lady would speak to a tradesman who had come to the wrong door by mistake, but Pop could see she was, in her way, every bit as excited as that son of a bitch McCarty had been; it was just that the Pus Sisters had been born in Maine, raised in Maine, and would die in Maine, while McCarty hailed from someplace in the Midwest, where the art and craft of taciturnity were apparently not considered an important part of a child’s upbringing.