Stephen King - The Sun Dog

VIP免费

2024-12-14 0 0 300.8KB 108 页 5.9玖币

The Sun Dog

A Note on 'The Sun Dog'

Every now and then someone will ask me, 'When are you going to get tired of this horror stuff, Steve, and write something

serious?'

I used to believe the implied insult in this question was accidental, but as the years go by I have become more and more

convinced that it is not. I watch the faces of the people who drop that particular dime, you see, and most of them look like

bombardiers waiting to see if their last stick of bombs is going to fall wide or hit the targeted factory or munitions dump

dead on.

The fact is, almost all of the stuff I have written - and that includes a lot of the funny stuff - was written in a serious frame

of mind. I can remember very few occasions when I sat at the typewriter laughing uncontrollably over some wild and crazy

bit of fluff I had just finished churning out. I'm never going to be Reynolds Price or Larry Woiwode - it isn't in me - but that

doesn't mean I don't care as deeply about what I do. I have to do what I can do, however - as Nils Lofgren once put it, 'I

gotta be my dirty self ... I won't play no jive.'

If real - meaning !!SOMETHING THAT COULD ACTUALLY HAPPEN!! - is your definition of serious, you are in the

wrong place and you should by all means leave the building. But please remember as you go that I'm not the only one doing

business at this particular site; Franz Kafka had an office here, and George Orwell, and Shirley Jackson, and Jorge Luis

Borges, and Jonathan Swift, and Lewis Carroll. A glance at the directory in the lobby shows the present tenants include

Thomas Berger, Ray Bradbury, Jonathan Carroll, Thomas Pynchon, Thomas Disch, Kurt Vonnegut, jr, Peter Straub, Joyce

Carol Oates, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Katherine Dunn, and Mark Halpern.

I am doing what I do for the most serious reasons: love, money, and obsession. The tale of the irrational is the sanest way I

know of expressing the world in which I live. These tales have served me as instruments of both metaphor and morality;

they continue to offer the best window I know on the question of how we perceive things and the corollary question of how

we do or do not behave on the basis of our perceptions. I have explored these questions as well as I can within the limits of

my talent and intelligence. I am no one's National Book Award or Pulitzer Prize winner, but I'm serious, all right. If you

don't believe anything else, believe this: when I take you by your hand and begin to talk, my friend, I believe every word I

say.

A lot of the things I have to say - those Really Serious Things - have to do with the small-town world in which I was raised

and where I still live. Stories and novels are scale models of what we laughingly call 'real life,' and I believe that lives as

they are lived in small towns are scale models of what we laughingly call 'society.' This idea is certainly open to argument,

and argument is perfectly fine (without it, a lot of literature teachers and critics would be looking for work); I'm just saying

that a writer needs some sort of launching pad, and aside from the firm belief that a story may exist with honor for its own

self, the idea of the small town as social and psychological microcosm is mine. I began experimenting with this sort of

thing in Came, and continued on a more ambitious level with 'Salem's Lot. I never really hit my stride, however, until The

Dead Zone.

That was, I think, the first of my Castle Rock stories (and Castle Rock is really just the town of Jerusalem's Lot without the

vampires). In the years since it was written, Castle Rock has increasingly become 'my town,' in the sense that the mythical

city of Isola is Ed McBain's town and the West Virginia village of Glory was Davis Grubb's town. I have been called back

there time and time again to examine the lives of its residents and the geographies which seem to rule their lives - Castle

Hill and Castle View, Castle Lake and the Town Roads which lie around it in a tangle at the western end of the town.

As the years passed, I became more and more interested in - almost entranced by - the secret life of this town, by the hidden

relationships which seemed to come clearer and clearer to me. Much of this history remains either unwritten or

file:///F|/rah/Stephen%20King/King,%20Stephen%20-%20FPM4%20The%20Sun%20Dog.html (1 of 108) [1/20/03 12:13:16 AM]

The Sun Dog

unpublished:- how the late Sheriff George Bannerman lost his virginity in the back seat of his dead father's car, how

Ophelia Todd's husband was killed by a walking windmill, how Deputy Andy Clutterbuck lost the index finger on his left

hand (it was cut off in a fan and the family dog ate it).

Following The Dead Zone, which is partly the story of the psychotic Frank Dodd, I wrote a novella called 'The Body'; Cujo,

the novel in which good old Sheriff Bannerman bit the dust; and a number of short stories and novelettes about the town

(the best of them, at least in my mind, are 'Mrs Todd's Shortcut' and 'Uncle Otto's Truck'). All of which is very well, but a

state of entrancement with a fictional setting may not be the best thing in the world for a writer. It was for Faulkner and J.

R. R. Tolkien, but sometimes a couple of exceptions just prove the rule, and besides, I don't play in that league.

So at some point I decided - first in my subconscious mind, I think, where all that Really Serious Work takes place - that

the time had come to close the book on Castle Rock, Maine, where so many of my own favorite characters have lived and

died. Enough, after all, is enough. Time to move on (maybe all the way next door to Harlow, ha-ha). But I didn't just want

to walk away; I wanted to finish things, and do it with a bang.

Little by little I began to grasp how that could be done, and over the last four years or so I have been engaged in writing a

Castle Rock Trilogy, if you please -the last Castle Rock stories. They were not written in order (I sometimes think 'out of

order' is the story of my life), but now they are written, and they are serious enough ... but I hope that doesn't mean that

they are sober-sided or boring.

The first of these stories, The Dark Half, was published in 1989. While it is primarily the story of Thad Beaumont and is in

large part set in a town called Ludlow (the town where the Creeds lived in Pet Sematary), the town of Castle Rock figures

in the tale, and the book serves to introduce Sheriff Bannerman's replacement, a fellow named Alan Pangborn. Sheriff

Pangborn is at the center of the last story in this sequence, a long novel called Needful Things, which is scheduled to be

published next year and will conclude my doings with what local people call The Rock.

The connective tissue between these longer works is the story which follows. You will meet few if any of Castle Rock's

larger figures in 'The Sun Dog,' but it will serve to introduce you to Pop Merrill, whose nephew is town bad boy (and

Gordie LaChance's bete noire in 'The Body') Ace Merrill. 'The Sun Dog' also sets the stage for the final fireworks display ...

and, I hope, exists as a satisfying story on its own, one that can be read with pleasure even if you don't give a hang about

The Dark Half or Needful Things.

One other thing needs to be said: every story has its own secret life, quite separate from its setting, and 'The Sun Dog' is a

story about cameras and photographs. About five years ago, my wife, Tabitha, became interested in photography,

discovered she was good at it, and began to pursue it in a serious way, through study, experiment, and practice-practice-

practice. I myself take bad photos (I'm one of those guys who always manage to cut off my subjects' heads, get pictures of

them with their mouths hanging open, or both), but I have a great deal of respect for those who take good ones ... and the

whole process fascinates me.

In the course of her experiments, my wife got a Polaroid camera, a simple one accessible even to a doofus like me. I

became fascinated with this camera. I had seen and used Polaroids before, of course, but I had never really thought about

them much, nor had I ever looked closely at the images these cameras produce. The more I thought about them, the stranger

they seemed. They are, after all, not just images but moments of time ... and there is something so peculiar about them.

This story came almost all at once one night in the summer of 1987, but the thinking which made it possible went on for

almost a year. And that's enough out of me, I think. It's been great to be with all of you again, but that doesn't mean I'm

letting you go home just yet.

file:///F|/rah/Stephen%20King/King,%20Stephen%20-%20FPM4%20The%20Sun%20Dog.html (2 of 108) [1/20/03 12:13:16 AM]

The Sun Dog

I think we have a birthday party to attend in the little town of Castle Rock.

CHAPTER 1

September 15th was Kevin's birthday, and he got exactly what he wanted: a Sun.

The Kevin in question was Kevin Delevan, the birthday was his fifteenth, and the Sun was a Sun 660, a Polaroid camera

which does everything for the novice photographer except make bologna sandwiches.

There were other gifts, of course; his sister, Meg, gave him a pair of mittens she had knitted herself, there was ten dollars

from his grandmother in Des Moines, and his Aunt Hilda sent - as she always did - a string tie with a horrible clasp. She

had sent the first of these when Kevin was three, which meant he already had twelve unused string ties with horrible clasps

in a drawer of his bureau, to which this would be added - lucky thirteen. He had never worn any of them but was not

allowed to throw them away. Aunt Hilda lived in Portland. She had never come to one of Kevin's or Meg's birthday parties,

but she might decide to do just that one of these years. God knew she could; Portland was only fifty miles south of Castle

Rock. And suppose she did come ... and asked to see Kevin in one of his other ties (or Meg in one of her other scarves, for

that matter)? With some relatives, an excuse might do. Aunt Hilda, however, was different. Aunt Hilda presented a certain

golden possibility at a point where two essential facts about her crossed: she was Rich, and she was Old.

Someday, Kevin's Mom was convinced, she might DO SOMETHING for Kevin and Meg. It was understood that the

SOMETHING would probably come after Aunt Hilda finally kicked it, in the form of a clause in her will. In the meantime,

it was thought wise to keep the horrible string ties and the equally horrible scarves. So this thirteenth string tie (on the clasp

of which was a bird Kevin thought was a woodpecker) would join the others, and Kevin would write Aunt Hilda a thank-

you note, not because his mother would insist on it and not because he thought or even cared that Aunt Hilda might DO

SOMETHING for him and his kid sister someday, but because he was a generally thoughtful boy with good habits and no

real vices.

He thanked his family for all his gifts (his mother and father had, of course, supplied a number of lesser ones, although the

Polaroid was clearly the centerpiece, and they were delighted with his delight), not forgetting to give Meg a kiss (she

giggled and pretended to rub it off but her own delight was equally clear) and to tell her he was sure the mittens would

come in handy on the ski team this winter - but most of his attention was reserved for the Polaroid box, and the extra film

packs which had come with it.

He was a good sport about the birthday cake and the ice cream, although it was clear he was itching to get at the camera

and try it out. And as soon as he decently could, he did.

That was when the trouble started.

He read the instruction booklet as thoroughly as his eagerness to begin would allow, then loaded the camera while the

family watched with anticipation and unacknowledged dread (for some reason, the gifts which seem the most wanted are

the ones which so often don't work). There was a little collective sigh - more puff than gust - when the camera obediently

spat out the cardboard square on top of the film packet, just as the instruction booklet had promised it would.

There were two small dots, one red and one green, separated by a zig-zag lightning-bolt on the housing of the camera.

When Kevin loaded the camera, the red light came on. It stayed on for a couple of seconds. The family watched in silent

fascination as the Sun 660 sniffed for light. Then the red light went out and the green light began to blink rapidly.

file:///F|/rah/Stephen%20King/King,%20Stephen%20-%20FPM4%20The%20Sun%20Dog.html (3 of 108) [1/20/03 12:13:16 AM]

The Sun Dog

'It's ready,' Kevin said, in the same straining-to-be-offhand-but-not-quite-making-it tone with which Neil Armstrong had

reported his first step upon the surface of Luna. 'Why don't all you guys stand together?'

'I hate having my picture taken!' Meg cried, covering her face with the theatrical anxiety and pleasure which only sub-

teenage girls and really bad actresses can manage.

'Come on, Meg,' Mr Delevan said.

'Don't be a goose, Meg,' Mrs Delevan said.

Meg dropped her hands (and her objections), and the three of them stood at the end of the table with the diminished

birthday cake in the foreground.

Kevin looked through the viewfinder. 'Squeeze a little closer to Meg, Mom,' he said, motioning with his left hand. 'You too,

Dad.' This time he motioned with his right.

'You're squishing me!' Meg said to her parents.

Kevin put his finger on the button which would fire the camera, then remembered a briefly glimpsed note in the

instructions about how easy it was to cut off your subjects' heads in a photograph. Off with their heads, he thought, and it

should have been funny, but for some reason he felt a little tingle at the base of his spine, gone and forgotten almost before

it was noticed. He raised the camera a little. There. They were all in the frame. Good.

'Okay!' he sang. 'Smile and say Intercourse!'

'Kevin!' his mother cried out.

His father burst out laughing, and Meg screeched the sort of mad laughter not even bad actresses often essay; girls between

the ages of ten and twelve own sole title to that particular laugh.

Kevin pushed the button.

The flashbulb, powered by the battery in the film pack, washed the room in a moment of righteous white light.

It's mine, Kevin thought, and it should have been the surpassing moment of his fifteenth birthday. Instead, the thought

brought back that odd little tingle. It was more noticeable this time.

The camera made a noise, something between a squeal and a whirr, a sound just a little beyond description but familiar

enough to most people, just the same: the sound of a Polaroid camera squirting out what may not be art but what is often

serviceable and almost always provides instant gratification.

'Lemme see it!' Meg cried.

'Hold your horses, muffin,' Mr Delevan said. 'They take a little time to develop.'

file:///F|/rah/Stephen%20King/King,%20Stephen%20-%20FPM4%20The%20Sun%20Dog.html (4 of 108) [1/20/03 12:13:16 AM]

The Sun Dog

Meg was staring at the stiff gray surface of what was not yet a photograph with the rapt attention of a woman gazing into a

crystal ball.

The rest of the family gathered around, and there was that same feeling of anxiety which had attended the ceremony of

Loading the Camera: still life of the American Family waiting to let out its breath.

Kevin felt a terrible tenseness stealing into his muscles, and this time there was no question of ignoring it. He could not

explain it ... but it was there. He could not seem to take his eyes from that solid gray square within the white frame which

would form the borders of the photograph.

'I think I see me!' Meg cried brightly. Then, a moment later: 'No. I guess I don't. I think I see -'

They watched in utter silence as the gray cleared, as the mists are reputed to do in a seer's crystal when the vibrations or

feelings or whatever they are are right, and the picture became visible to them.

Mr Delevan was the first to break the silence.

'What is this?' he asked no one in particular. 'Some kind of joke?'

Kevin had absently put the camera down rather too close to the edge of the table in order to watch the picture develop. Meg

saw what the picture was and took a single step away. The expression on her face was neither fright nor awe but just

ordinary surprise. One of her hands came up as she turned toward her father. The rising hand struck the camera and

knocked it off the table onto the floor. Mrs Delevan had been looking at the emerging picture in a kind of trance, the

expression on her face either that of a woman who is deeply puzzled or who is feeling the onset of a migraine headache.

The sound of the camera hitting the floor startled her. She uttered a little scream and recoiled. In doing this, she tripped

over Meg's foot and lost her balance. Mr Delevan reached for her, propelling Meg, who was still between them, forward

again, quite forcefully. Mr Delevan not only caught his wife, but did so with some grace; for a moment they would have

made a pretty picture indeed: Mom and Dad, showing they still know how to Cut A Rug, caught at the end of a spirited

tango, she with one hand thrown up and her back deeply bowed, he bent over her in that ambiguous male posture which

may be seen, when divorced from circumstance, as either solicitude or lust.

Meg was eleven, and less graceful. She went flying back toward the table and smacked into it with her stomach. The hit

was hard enough to have injured her, but for the last year and a half she had been taking ballet lessons at the YWCA three

afternoons a week. She did not dance with much grace, but she enjoyed ballet, and the dancing had fortunately toughened

the muscles of her stomach enough for them to absorb the blow as efficiently as good shock absorbers absorb the pounding

a road full of potholes can administer to a car. Still, there was a band of black and blue just above her hips the next day.

These bruises took almost two weeks to first purple, then yellow, then fade ... like a Polaroid picture in reverse.

At the moment this Rube Goldberg accident happened, she didn't even feel it; she simply banged into the table and cried

out. The table tipped. The birthday cake, which should have been in the foreground of Kevin's first picture with his new

camera, slid off the table. Mrs Delevan didn't even have time to start her Meg, are you all right? before the remaining half

of the cake fell on top of the Sun 660 with a juicy splat! that sent frosting all over their shoes and the baseboard of the wall.

The viewfinder, heavily smeared with Dutch chocolate, peered out like a periscope. That was all.

Happy birthday, Kevin.

file:///F|/rah/Stephen%20King/King,%20Stephen%20-%20FPM4%20The%20Sun%20Dog.html (5 of 108) [1/20/03 12:13:16 AM]

The Sun Dog

Kevin and Mr Delevan were sitting on the couch in the living room that evening when Mrs Delevan came in, waving two

dog-eared sheets of paper which had been stapled together. Kevin and Mr Delevan both had open books in their laps (The

Best and the Brightest for the father; ShootOut at Laredo for the son), but what they were mostly doing was staring at the

Sun camera, which sat in disgrace on the coffee table amid a litter of Polaroid pictures. All the pictures appeared to show

exactly the same thing.

Meg was sitting on the floor in front of them, using the VCR to watch a rented movie. Kevin wasn't sure which one it was,

but there were a lot of people running around and screaming, so he guessed it was a horror picture. Megan had a passion for

them. Both parents considered this a low taste (Mr Delevan in particular was often outraged by what he called 'that useless

junk'), but tonight neither of them had said a word. Kevin guessed they were just grateful she had quit complaining about

her bruised stomach and wondering aloud what the exact symptoms of a ruptured spleen might be.

'Here they are,' Mrs Delevan said. 'I found them at the bottom of my purse the second time through.' She handed the papers -

a sales slip from J. C. Penney's and a MasterCard receipt - to her husband. 'I can never find anything like this the first time.

I don't think anyone can. It's like a law of nature.'

She surveyed her husband and son, hands on her hips.

'You two look like someone just killed the family cat.'

'We don't have a cat,' Kevin said.

'Well, you know what I mean. It's a shame, of course, but we'll get it sorted out in no time. Penney's will be happy to

exchange it -'

'I'm not so sure of that,' John Delevan said. He picked up the camera, looked at it with distaste (almost sneered at it, in fact),

and then set it down again. 'It got chipped when it hit the floor. See?'

Mrs Delevan took only a cursory glance. 'Well, if Penney's won't, I'm positive that the Polaroid company will. I mean, the

fall obviously didn't cause whatever is wrong with it. The first picture looked just like all these, and Kevin took that one

before Meg knocked it off the table.'

'I didn't mean to,' Meg said without turning around. On the screen, a pint-sized figure - a malevolent doll named Chuckie, if

Kevin had it right - was chasing a small boy. Chuckie was dressed in blue overalls and waving a knife.

'I know, dear. How's your stomach?'

'Hurts,' Meg said. 'A little ice cream might help. Is there any left over?'

'Yes, I think so.'

Meg gifted her mother with her most winning smile. 'Would you get some for me?'

'Not at all,' Mrs Delevan said pleasantly. 'Get it yourself. And what's that horrible thing you're watching?'

'Child's Play,' Megan said. 'There's this doll named Chuckie that comes to life. It's neat.'

file:///F|/rah/Stephen%20King/King,%20Stephen%20-%20FPM4%20The%20Sun%20Dog.html (6 of 108) [1/20/03 12:13:16 AM]

The Sun Dog

Mrs Delevan wrinkled her nose.

'Dolls don't come to life, Meg,' her father said. He spoke heavily, as if knowing this was a lost cause.

'Chuckie did,' Meg said. 'In movies, anything can happen.' She used the remote control to freeze the movie and went to get

her ice cream.

'Why does she want to watch that crap?' Mr Delevan asked his wife, almost plaintively.

'I don't know, dear.'

Kevin had picked up the camera in one hand and several of the exposed Polaroids in the other - they had taken almost a

dozen in all. 'I'm not so sure I want a refund,' he said.

His father stared at him. 'What? Jesus wept!'

'Well,' Kevin said, a little defensively, 'I'm just saying that maybe we ought to think about it. I mean, it's not exactly an

ordinary defect, is it? I mean, if the pictures came out overexposed ... or underexposed ... or just plain blank ... that would

be one thing. But how do you get a thing like this? The same picture, over and over? I mean, look! And they're outdoors,

even though we took every one of these pictures inside!'

'It's a practical joke,' his father said. 'It must be. The thing to do is just exchange the damned thing and forget about it.'

'I don't think it's a practical joke,' Kevin said. 'First, it's too complicated to be a practical joke. How do you rig a camera to

take the same picture over and over? Plus, the psychology is all wrong.'

'Psychology, yet,' Mr Delevan said, rolling his eyes at his wife.

'Yes, psychology!' Kevin replied firmly. 'When a guy loads your cigarette or hands you a stick of pepper gum, he hangs

around to watch the fun, doesn't he? But unless you or Mom have been pulling my leg -'

'Your father isn't much of a leg-puller, dear,' Mrs Delevan said, stating the obvious gently.

Mr Delevan was looking at Kevin with his lips pressed together. It was the look he always got when he perceived his son

drifting toward that area of the ballpark where Kevin seemed most at home: left field. Far left field. There was a hunchy,

intuitive streak in Kevin that had always puzzled and confounded him. He didn't know where it had come from, but he was

sure it hadn't been his side of the family.

He sighed and looked at the camera again. A piece of black plastic had been chipped from the left side of the housing, and

there was a crack, surely no thicker than a human hair, down the center of the viewfinder lens. The crack was so thin it

disappeared completely when you raised the camera to your eye to set the shot you would not get - what you would get was

on the coffee table, and there were nearly a dozen other examples in the dining room.

What you got was something that looked like a refugee from the local animal shelter.

file:///F|/rah/Stephen%20King/King,%20Stephen%20-%20FPM4%20The%20Sun%20Dog.html (7 of 108) [1/20/03 12:13:16 AM]

The Sun Dog

'All right, what in the devil are you going to do with it?' he asked. 'I mean, let's think this over reasonably, Kevin. What

practical good is a camera that takes the same picture over and over?'

But it was not practical good Kevin was thinking about. In fact, he was not thinking at all. He was feeling ... and

remembering. In the instant when he had pushed the shutter release, one clear idea

(it's mine)

had filled his mind as completely as the momentary white flash had filled his eyes. That idea, complete yet somehow

inexplicable, had been accompanied by a powerful mixture of emotions which he could still not identify completely ... but

he thought fear and excitement had predominated.

And besides - his father always wanted to look at things reasonably. He would never be able to understand Kevin's

intuitions or Meg's interest in killer dolls named Chuckie.

Meg came back in with a huge dish of ice cream and started the movie again. Someone was now attempting to toast

Chuckie with a blowtorch, but he went right on waving his knife. 'Are you two still arguing?'

'We're having a discussion,' Mr Delevan said. His lips were pressed more tightly together than ever.

'Yeah, right,' Meg said, sitting down on the floor again and crossing her legs. 'You always say that.'

'Meg?' Kevin said kindly.

'What?'

'If you dump that much ice cream on top of a ruptured spleen, you'll die horribly in the night. Of course, your spleen might

not actually be ruptured, but -'

Meg stuck her tongue out at him and turned back to the movie.

Mr Delevan was looking at his son with an expression of mingled affection and exasperation. 'Look, Kev - it's your camera.

No argument about that. You can do whatever you want with it. But -'

'Dad, aren't you even the least bit interested in why it's doing what it's doing?'

'Nope,' John Delevan said.

It was Kevin's turn to roll his eyes. Meanwhile, Mrs Delevan was looking from one to the other like someone who is

enjoying a pretty good tennis match. Nor was this far from the truth. She had spent years watching her son and her husband

sharpen themselves on each other, and she was not bored with it yet. She sometimes wondered if they would ever discover

how much alike they really were.

'Well, I want to think it over.'

file:///F|/rah/Stephen%20King/King,%20Stephen%20-%20FPM4%20The%20Sun%20Dog.html (8 of 108) [1/20/03 12:13:16 AM]

The Sun Dog

'Fine. I just want you to know that I can swing by Penney's tomorrow and exchange the thing - if you want me to and they

agree to swap a piece of chipped merchandise, that is. If you want to keep it, that's fine, too. I wash my hands of it.' He

dusted his palms briskly together to illustrate.

'I suppose you don't want my opinion,' Meg said.

'Right,' Kevin said.

'Of course we do, Meg,' Mrs Delevan said.

'I think it's a supernatural camera,' Meg said. She licked ice cream from her spoon. 'I think it's a Manifestation.'

'That's utterly ridiculous,' Mr Delevan said at once.

'No, it's not,' Meg said. 'It happens to be the only explanation that fits. You just don't think so because you don't believe in

stuff like that. If a ghost ever floated up to you, Dad, you wouldn't even see it. What do you think, Kev?'

For a moment Kevin didn't - couldn't - answer. He felt as if another flashbulb had gone off, this one behind his eyes instead

of in front of them.

'Kev? Earth to Kevin!'

'I think you might just have something there, squirt,' he said slowly.

'Oh my dear God,' John Delevan said, getting up. 'It's the revenge of Freddy and Jason - my kid thinks his birthday camera's

haunted. I'm going to bed, but before I do, I want to say just one more thing. A camera that takes photographs of the same

thing over and over again - especially something as ordinary as what's in these pictures - is a boring manifestation of the

supernatural.'

'Still . . .' Kevin said. He held up the photos like a dubious poker hand.

'I think it's time we all went to bed,' Mrs Delevan said briskly. 'Meg, if you absolutely need to finish that cinematic

masterpiece, you can do it in the morning.'

'But it's almost over!' Meg cried.

'I'll come up with her, Mom,' Kevin said, and, fifteen minutes later, with the malevolent Chuckie disposed of (at least until

the sequel), he did. But sleep did not come easily for Kevin that night. He lay long awake in his bedroom, listening to a

strong late-summer wind rustle the leaves outside into whispery conversation, thinking about what might make a camera

take the same picture over and over and over again, and what such a thing might mean. He only began to slip toward sleep

when he realized his decision had been made; he would keep the Polaroid Sun at least a little while longer.

It's mine, he thought again. He rolled over on his side, closed his eyes, and was sleeping deeply forty seconds later.

CHAPTER 2

file:///F|/rah/Stephen%20King/King,%20Stephen%20-%20FPM4%20The%20Sun%20Dog.html (9 of 108) [1/20/03 12:13:16 AM]

The Sun Dog

Amid the tickings and tockings of what sounded like at least fifty thousand clocks and totally undisturbed by them,

Reginald 'Pop' Merrill shone a pencil-beam of light from a gadget even more slender than a doctor's ophthalmoscope into

Kevin's Polaroid 660 while Kevin stood by. Pop's eyeglasses, which he didn't need for close work, were propped on the

bald dome of his head.

'Uh-huh,' he said, and clicked the light off.

'Does that mean you know what's wrong with it?' Kevin asked.

'Nope,' Pop Merrill said, and snapped the Sun's film compartment, now empty, closed. 'Don't have a clue.' And before

Kevin could say anything else, the clocks began to strike four o'clock, and for a few moments conversation, although

possible, seemed absurd.

I want to think it over, he had told his father on the evening he had turned fifteen - three days ago now - and it was a

statement which had surprised both of them. As a child he had made a career of not thinking about things, and Mr Delevan

had in his heart of hearts come to believe Kevin never would think about things, whether he ought to or not. They had been

seduced, as fathers and sons often are, by the idea that their behavior and very different modes of thinking would never

change, thus fixing their relationship eternally ... and childhood would thus go on forever. I want to think it over: there was

a world of potential change implicit in that statement.

Further, as a human being who had gone through his life to that point making most decisions on instinct rather than reason

(and he was one of those lucky ones whose instincts were almost always good - the sort of person, in other words, who

drives reasonable people mad), Kevin was surprised and intrigued to find that he was actually on the Horns of a Dilemma.

Horn #1: he had wanted a Polaroid camera and he had gotten one for his birthday, but, dammit, he had wanted a Polaroid

camera that worked.

Horn #2: he was deeply intrigued by Meg's use of the word supernatural.

His younger sister had a daffy streak a mile wide, but she wasn't stupid, and Kevin didn't think she had used the word

lightly or thoughtlessly. His father, who was of the Reasonable rather than Instinctive tribe, had scoffed, but Kevin found

he wasn't ready to go and do likewise . . . at least, not yet. That word. That fascinating, exotic word. It became a plinth

which his mind couldn't help circling.

I think it's a Manifestation.

Kevin was amused (and a little chagrined) that only Meg had been smart enough - or brave enough - to actually say what

should have occurred to all of them, given the oddity of the pictures the Sun produced, but in truth, it wasn't really that

amazing. They were not a religious family; they went to church on the Christmas Day every third year when Aunt Hilda

came to spend the holiday with them instead of her other remaining relatives, but except for the occasional wedding or

funeral, that was about all. If any of them truly believed in the invisible world it was Megan, who couldn't get enough of

walking corpses, living dolls, and cars that came to life and ran down people they didn't like.

Neither of Kevin's parents had much taste for the bizarre. They didn't read their horoscopes in the daily paper; they would

never mistake comets or falling stars for signs from the Almighty; where one couple might see the face of Jesus on the

bottom of an enchilada, John and Mary Delevan would see only an overcooked enchilada. It was not surprising that Kevin,

who had never seen the man in the moon because neither mother nor father had bothered to point it out to him, had been

file:///F|/rah/Stephen%20King/King,%20Stephen%20-%20FPM4%20The%20Sun%20Dog.html (10 of 108) [1/20/03 12:13:16 AM]

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

TheSunDogANoteon'TheSunDog'Everynowandthensomeonewillaskme,'Whenareyougoingtogettired\ofthishorrorstuff,Steve,andwritesomethingserious?'Iusedtobelievetheimpliedinsultinthisquestionwasaccidental,bu\tastheyearsgobyIhavebecomemoreandmoreconvincedthatitisnot.Iwatchthefacesofthepeoplewhodropthat\particul...

展开>> 收起<<

Stephen King - The Sun Dog.pdf

共108页,预览22页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Stephen King - The Sun Dog

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: