But who would have ever believed the Mad Hatters would have, could have, let him down so badly?
It was almost enough to make a man wonder if he was starting to slip a little.
God forbid.
CHAPTER 9
Back in September, he hadn't even bothered to wonder if he would sell the Polaroid; the only questions were how soon and how much. The Delevans had bandied the word supernatural about, and Pop hadn't corrected them, although he knew that what the Sun was doing would be more properly classed by psychic investigators as a paranormal rather than supernatural phenomenon. He could have told them that, but if he had, they might both have wondered how come the owner of a small-town used-goods store (and part-time usurer) knew so much about the subject. The fact was this: he knew a lot because it was profitable to know a lot, and it was profitable to know a lot because of the people he thought of as 'my Mad Hatters.'
Mad Hatters were people who recorded empty rooms on expensive audio equipment not for a lark or a drunken party stunt, but either because they believed passionately in an unseen world and wanted to prove its existence, or because they wanted passionately to get in touch with friends and/or relatives who had 'passed on' ('passed on': that's what they always called it; Mad Hatters never had relatives who did something so simple as die).
Mad Hatters not only owned and used Ouija Boards, they had regular conversations with 'spirit guides' in the 'other world' (never 'heaven,' 'hell,' or even 'the rest area of the dead' but the 'other world') who put them in touch with friends, relatives, queens, dead rock-and-roll singers, even arch-villains. Pop knew of a Mad Hatter in Vermont who had twice-weekly conversations with Hitler. Hitler had told him it was all a bum rap, he had sued for peace in January of 1943 and that son of a bitch Churchill had turned him down. Hitler had also told him Paul Newman was a space alien who had been born in a cave on the moon.
Mad Hatters went to seances as regularly (and as compulsively) as drug addicts visited their pushers. They bought crystal balls and amulets guaranteed to bring good luck; they organized their own little societies and investigated reputedly haunted houses for all the usual phenomena: teleplasma, table-rappings, floating tables and beds, cold spots, and, of course, ghosts.
They noted all of these, real or imagined, with the enthusiasm of dedicated bird-watchers.
Most of them had a ripping good time. Some did not. There was that fellow from Wolfeboro, for instance. He hanged himself in the notorious Tecumseh House, where a gentleman farmer had, in the 1880s and '90s, helped his fellow men by day and helped himself to them by night, dining on them at a formal table in his cellar. The table stood upon a floor of sour packed dirt which had yielded the bones and decomposed bodies of at least twelve and perhaps as many as thirty-five young men, all vagabonds. The fellow from Wolfeboro had left this brief note on a pad of papers beside his Ouija Board: Can't leave the house. Doors all locked. I hear him eating. Tried cotton. Does no good.
And the poor deluded asshole probably thought he really did, Pop had mused after hearing this story from a source he trusted.
Then there was a fellow in Dunwich, Massachusetts, to whom Pop had once sold a so-called 'spirit trumpet' for ninety dollars; the fellow had taken the trumpet to the Dunwich Cemetery and must have heard something exceedingly unpleasant, because he had been raving in a padded cell in Arkham for almost six years now, totally insane. When he had gone into the boneyard, his hair had been black; when his screams awoke the few neighbors who lived close enough to the cemetery to hear them and the police were summoned, it was as white as his howling face.
And there was the woman in Portland who lost an eye when a session with the Ouija Board went cataclysmically wrong ... the man in Kingston, Rhode Island, who lost three fingers on his right hand when the rear door of a car in which two teenagers had committed suicide closed on it ... the old lady who landed in Massachusetts Memorial Hospital short most of one ear when her equally elderly cat, Claudette, supposedly went on a rampage during a seance ...
Pop believed some of these things, disbelieved others, and mostly held no opinion - not because he didn't have enough hard evidence one way or the other, but because he didn't give a fart in a high wind about ghosts, seances, crystal balls, spirit trumpets, rampaging cats, or the fabled John the Conquerer Root. As far as Reginald Marion 'Pop' Merrill was concerned, the Mad Hatters could all take a flying fuck at the moon. As long, of course, as one of them handed over some mighty tall tickets for Kevin Delevan's camera before taking passage on the next shuttle.
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 fulltime 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.