The dog was coming. Kevin had known that would happen next, and Pop would have known it, too, if he’d had occasion to think on it, which he hadn’t -although from this moment on he would find it hard to think of anything else when he thought of the camera, and he would find those thoughts filling more and more of his time, both waking and dreaming.
It’s coming, Pop thought with the sort of frozen horror a man might feel standing in the dark as some Thing, some unspeakable and unbearable Thing, approaches with its razor-sharp claws and teeth. Oh my God, it’s coming, that dog is coming.
But it wasn’t just coming; it was changing.
It was impossible to say how. His eyes hurt, caught between what they should be seeing and what they were seeing, and in the end the only handle he could find was a very small one: it was as if someone had changed the lens on the camera, from the normal one to a fish-eye, so that the dog’s forehead with its clots of tangled fur seemed somehow to bulge and recede at the same time, and the dog’s murderous eyes seemed to have taken on filthy, barely visible glimmers of red, like the sparks a Polaroid flash sometimes puts in people’s eyes.
The dog’s body seemed to have elongated but not thinned; if anything, it seemed thicker – not fatter, but more heavily muscled.
And its teeth were bigger. Longer. Sharper.
Pop suddenly found himself remembering Joe Camber’s Saint Bernard, Cujo -the one who had killed Joe and that old tosspot Gary Pervier and Big George Bannerman. The dog had gone rabid. It had trapped a woman and a young boy in their car up there at Camber’s place and after two or three days the kid had died.
And now Pop found himself wondering if this was what they had been looking at during those long days
and nights trapped in the steaming oven of their car; this or something like this, the muddy red eyes, the long sharp teeth
A horn blared impatiently.
Pop screamed, his heart not only starting again but gunning, like the engine of a Formula One racing-car.
A van swerved around his sedan, still half in the driveway and half in the narrow residential street. The van’s driver stuck his fist out his open window and his middle finger popped up.
‘Eat my dick, you son of a whore!’ Pop screamed. He backed the rest of the way out, but so jerkily that he bumped up over the curb on the far side of the street. He twisted the wheel viciously (inadvertently honking his horn in the process) and then drove off. But three blocks south he had to pull over and just sit there behind the wheel for ten minutes, waiting for the shakes to subside enough so he could drive.
So much for the Pus Sisters.
During the next five days, Pop ran through the remaining names on his mental list. His asking price, which had begun at twenty thousand dollars with McCarty and dropped to ten with the Pus Sisters (not that he had gotten far enough into the business to mention price in either case), dropped steadily as he ran out the string. He was finally left with Emory Chaffee, and the possibility of realizing perhaps twenty-five hundred.
Chaffee presented a fascinating paradox: in all Pop’s experience with the Mad Hatters – an experience that was long and amazingly varied – Emory Chaffee was the only believer in the ‘other world’ who had absolutely no imagination whatsoever. That he had ever spared a single thought for the ‘other world’ with such a mind was surprising; that he believed in it was amazing; that he paid good money to collect objects connected with it was something Pop found absolutely astounding. Yet it was so, and Pop would have put Chaffee much higher on his fist save for the annoying fact that Chaffee was by far the least well off of what Pop thought of as his ‘rich’ Mad Hatters. He was doing a game but poor job of holding onto the last unravelling threads of what had once been a great family fortune. Hence, another large drop in Pop’s asking price for Kevin’s Polaroid.
But, he had thought, pulling his car into the overgrown driveway of what had in the twenties been one of Sebago Lake’s finest summer homes and which was now only a step or two away from becoming one of Sebago Lake’s shabbiest year-round homes (the Chaffee house in Portland’s Bramhall district had been sold for taxes fifteen years before), if anyone’ll buy this beshitted thing, I reckon Emory will.
The only thing that really distressed him – and it had done so more and more as he worked his way fruitlessly down the list – was the demonstration part. He could describe what the camera did until he was black in the face, but not even an odd duck like Emory Chaffee would lay out good money on the basis of a description alone.
Sometimes Pop thought it had been stupid to have Kevin take all those pictures so he could make that videotape. But when you got right down to where the bear shit in the buckwheat, he wasn’t sure it would have made any difference. Time passed over there in that world (for, like Kevin, he had come to think of it as that: an actual world), and it passed much more slowly than it did in this one … but wasn’t it speeding up as the dog approached the camera? Pop thought it was. The movement of the dog along the fence had been barely visible at first; now only a blind man could fail to see that the dog was closer each time the shutter was pressed. You could see the difference in distance even if you snapped two photographs one right after the other. It was almost as if time over there were trying to … well, trying to catch up somehow, and get in sync with time over here.
If that had been all, it would have been bad enough. But it wasn’t all.
That was no dog, goddammit.
POP didn’t know what it was, but he knew as well as he knew his mother was buried in Homeland Cemetery that it was no dog.
He thought it had been a dog, when it had been snuffling its way along that picket fence which it had now left a good ten feet behind; it had looked like one, albeit an exceptionally mean one once it got its head turned enough so you could get a good look at its phiz.
But to Pop it now looked like no creature that had ever existed on God’s earth, and probably not in Lucifer’s hell, either. What troubled him even more was this: the few people for whom he had taken demonstration photographs did not seem to see this. They inevitably recoiled, inevitably said it was the ugliest, meanest-looking junkyard mongrel they had ever seen, but that was all. Not a single one of them suggested that the dog in Kevin’s Sun 660 was turning into some kind of monster as it approached the photographer. As it approached the lens which might be some sort of portal between that world and this one.
Pop thought again (as Kevin had), But it could never get through. Never. If something is going to happen, I’ll tell you what that something will be, because that thing is an ANIMAL, Maybe a goddam ugly one, a scary one, even, like the kind of thing a little kid imagines in his closet after his momma turns off the lights, but it’s still an ANIMAL, and if anything happens it’ll be this: there’ll be one last pitcher where you can’t see nothing but blur because that devil-dog will have jumped, you can see that’s what it means to do, and after that the camera either won’t work, or if it does, it won’t take pitchers that develop into anything but Black squares, because you can’t take pitchers with a camera that has a busted lens or with one that’s broke right in two for that matter, and if whoever owns that shadow drops the camera when the devil-dog hits it and him, and I imagine he will, it’s apt to fall on the sidewalk and it probably WILL break. Goddam thing’s nothing but plastic, after all, and plastic and cement don’t get along hardly at all.
But Emory Chaffee had come out on his splintery porch now, where the paint on the boards was flaking off and the boards themselves were warping out of true and the screens were turning the rusty color of dried blood and gaping holes in some of them; Emory Chaffee wearing a blazer which had once been a natty blue but had now been cleaned so many times it was the nondescript gray of an elevator operator’s uniform; Emory Chaffee with his high forehead sloping back and back until it finally disappeared beneath what little hair he had left and grinning his Pip-pip, jolly good, old boy, jolly good, wot, wot? grin that showed his gigantic buck teeth and made him look the way Pop imagined Bugs Bunny would look if Bugs had suffered some cataclysmic mental retardation.