A shadow flitted somewhere near the parlor end of the hallway, just visible over the bony shoulder of the sister who had opened the door. The other one. Oh. they were eager, all right. Pop began to wonder if he couldn’t squeeze twelve grand out of them after all. Maybe even fourteen.
Pop knew he could say, ‘Do I have the honor of addressing Miss Deere or Mrs Verrill?’ and be completely correct and completely polite, but he had dealt with this pair of eccentric old bags before and he knew that, while the Pus Sister who had opened the door wouldn’t raise an eyebrow or flare a nostril, would simply tell him which one he was speaking to, he would lose at least a thousand by doing so. They took great pride in their odd masculine names, and were apt to look more kindly on a person who tried and failed than one who took the coward’s way out.
So, saying a quick mental prayer that his tongue wouldn’t fail him now that the moment had come, he gave it his best and was pleased to hear the names slip as smoothly from his tongue as a pitch from a snake-oil salesman: ‘Is it Eleusippus or Meleusippus?’ he asked, his face suggesting he was no more concerned about getting the names right than if they had been Joan and Kate.
‘Meleusippus, Mr Merrill,’ she said, ah, good, now he was Mister Merrill, and he was sure everything was going to go just as slick as ever a man could want, and he was just as wrong as ever a man could be. ‘Won’t you step in?’
‘Thank you kindly,’ Pop said, and entered the gloomy depths of the Deere Mansion.
‘Oh dear,’ Eleusippus Deere said as the Polaroid began to develop.
‘What a brute he looks!’ Meleusippus Verrill said, speaking in tones of genuine dismay and fear.
The dog was getting uglier, Pop had to admit that, and there was something else that worried him even more: the time-sequence of the pictures seemed to be speeding up.
He had posed the Pus Sisters on their Queen Anne sofa for the demonstration picture. The camera flashed its bright white light, turning the room for one single instant from the purgatorial zone between the land of the living and that of the dead where these two old relics somehow existed into something flat and tawdry, like a police photo of a museum in which a crime had been committed.
Except the picture which emerged did not show the Pus Sisters sitting together on their parlor sofa like identical bookends. The picture showed the black dog, now turned so that it was full-face to the camera and whatever photographer it was who was nuts enough to stand there and keep snapping pictures of it. Now all of its teeth were exposed in a crazy, homicidal snarl, and its head had taken on a slight, predatory tilt to the left. That head, Pop thought, would continue to tilt as it sprang at its victim, accomplishing two purposes: concealing the vulnerable area of its neck from possible attack and putting the head in a position where,
once the teeth were clamped solidly in flesh, it could revolve upright again, ripping a large chunk of living tissue from its target.
‘It’s so awful!’ Eleusippus said, putting one mummified hand to the scaly flesh of her neck.
‘So terrible!’ Meleusippus nearly moaned, lighting a fresh Camel from the butt of an old one with a hand shaking so badly she came close to branding the cracked and fissured left comer of her mouth.
‘It’s totally in-ex-PLICK-able!’ Pop said triumphantly, thinking: I wish you was here, McCarty, you happy asshole. I just wish you was. Here’s two ladies been round the Horn and back a few times that don’t think this goddam camera’s just some kind of a carny magic-show trick!
‘Does it show something which has happened?’ Meleusippus whispered.
‘Or something which will happen?’ Eleusippus added in an equally awed whisper.
‘I dunno,’ Pop said. ‘All I know for sure is that I have seen some goddam strange things in my time, but I’ve never seen the beat of these pitchers.’
‘I’m not surprised!’ Eleusippus.
‘Nor E’ Meleusippus.
Pop was all set to start the conversation going in the direction of price – a delicate business when you were dealing with anyone, but never more so than when you were dealing with the Pus Sisters: when it got down to hard trading, they were as delicate as a pair of virgins – which, for all Pop knew, at least one of them was. He was just deciding on the To start with, it never crossed my mind to sell something like this, but …
approach (it was older than the Pus Sisters themselves – although probably not by much, you would have said after a good close look at them – but when you were dealing with Mad Hatters, that didn’t matter a bit; in fact, they liked to hear it, the way small children like to hear the same fairy tales over and over) when Eleusippus absolutely floored him by saying, ‘I don’t know about my sister, Mr Merrill, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable looking at anything you might have to’ – here a slight, pained pause – ‘offer us in a business way until you put that … that camera, or whatever God-awful thing it is … back in your car.’
‘I couldn’t agree more,’ Meleusippus said, stubbing out her half-smoked Camel in a fish-shaped ashtray which was doing everything but shitting Camel cigarette butts.
‘Ghost photographs,’ Eleusippus said, ‘are one thing. They have a certain -‘
‘Dignity,’ Meleusippus suggested.
‘Yes! Dignity! But that dog -‘ The old woman actually shivered. ‘It looks as if it’s ready to jump right out of that photograph and bite one of us.’
‘All of us!’ Meleusippus elaborated.
Up until this last exchange, Pop had been convinced – perhaps because he had to be – that the sisters had merely begun their own part of the dickering, and in admirable style. But the tone of their voices, as identical as their faces and figures (if they could have been said to have such things as figures), was beyond his power to disbelieve. They had no doubt that the Sun 660 was exhibiting some sort of paranormal behavior … too paranormal to suit them. They weren’t dickering; they weren’t pretending; they weren’t playing games with him in an effort to knock the price down. When they said they wanted no part of the camera and the weird thing it was doing, that was exactly what they meant – nor had they done him the
discourtesy (and that’s just what it would have been, in their minds) of supposing or even dreaming that selling it had been his purpose in coming.
Pop looked around the parlor. It was like the old lady’s room in a horror movie he’d watched once on his VCR – a piece of claptrap called Burnt Offerings, where this big old beefy fella tried to drown his son in the swimming pool but nobody even took their clothes off. That lady’s room had been filled, overfilled, actually stuffed with old and new photographs. They sat on the tables and the mantel in every sort of frame; they covered so much of the walls you couldn’t even tell what the pattern on the frigging paper was supposed to be.
The Pus Sisters’ parlor wasn’t quite that bad, but there were still plenty of photographs; maybe as many as a hundred and fifty, which seemed like three times that many in a room as small and dim as this one. Pop had been here often enough to notice most of them at least in passing, and he knew others even better than that, for he had been the one to sell them to Eleusippus and Meleusippus.
They had a great many more ‘ghost photographs,’ as Eleusippus Deere called them, perhaps as many as a thousand in all, but apparently even they had realized a room the size of their parlor was limited in terms of display-space, if not in those of taste. The rest of the ghost photographs were distributed among the mansion’s other fourteen rooms. Pop had seen them all. He was one of the fortunate few who had been granted what the Pus Sisters called, with simple grandiosity, The Tour. But it was here in the parlor that they kept their prize ‘ghost photographs,’ with the prize of prizes attracting the eye by the simple fact that it stood in solitary splendor atop the closed Steinway baby grand by the bow windows. In it, a corpse was levitating from its coffin before fifty or sixty horrified mourners. It was a fake, of course. A child of ten –
hell, a child of eight – would have known it was a fake. It made the photographs of the dancing elves which had so bewitched poor Arthur Conan Doyle near the end of his life look accomplished by comparison. In fact, as Pop ranged his eye about the room, he saw only two photographs that weren’t obvious fakes. It would take closer study to see how the trickery had been worked in those. Yet these two ancient pussies, who had collected ‘ghost photographs’ all their lives and claimed to be great experts in the field, acted like a couple of teenage girls at a horror movie when he showed them not just a paranormal photograph but a goddam Jesus-jumping paranormal camera that didn’t just do its trick once and then quit, like the one that had taken the picture of the ghost-lady watching the fox-hunters come home, but one that did it again and again and again, and how much had they spent on this stuff that was nothing but claptrap? Thousands?