Four Past Midnight (77 page)

He paused, drumming his fingers on the desk.

He stared at the list of crossed-off names for a long moment, then tore the yellow sheet slowly off the pad. He crumpled it up and tossed it in the wastebasket.

You should have left it alone,
part of him continued to mourn.

But he hadn't. So now what?

But he didn't want to do that. Not tonight, at least. He recognized this as an irrational, half-superstitious feeling—he had given and gotten a lot of unpleasant information over the phone just lately, or so it seemed—but he was too tired to grapple with it tonight. If he could get a good night's sleep (and he thought he could, if he left the bedside lamp on again), maybe something better, something more concrete, would occur to him tomorrow morning, when he was fresh. Further along, he supposed he would have to try and mend his fences with Naomi Higgins and Dave Duncan—but first he wanted to find out just what kind of fences they were.

If he could.

He did sleep well. There were no dreams, and an idea came to him naturally and easily in the shower the next morning, the way ideas sometimes did when your body was rested and your mind hadn't been awake long enough to get cluttered up with a load of shit. The Public Library was not the only place where information was available, and when it was local history—
recent
local history—you were interested in, it wasn't even the best place.

“The
Gazette
!” he cried, and stuck his head under the shower nozzle to rinse the soap out of it.

Twenty minutes later he was downstairs, dressed except for his coat and tie, and drinking coffee in his study. The legal pad was once more in front of him, and on it was the start of another list.

1.
Ardelia Lortz—who is she? Or who was she?

2.
Ardelia Lortz—what did she do?

3.
Junction City Public Library—renovated? When? Pictures?

At this point the doorbell rang. Sam glanced at the clock as he got up to answer it. It was going on eight-thirty, time to get to work. He could shoot over to the
Gazette
office at ten, the time he usually took his coffee break, and check some back issues. Which ones? He was still mulling this over—some would undoubtedly bear fruit quicker than others—as he dug in his pocket for the paperboy's money. The doorbell rang again.

“I'm coming as fast as I can, Keith!” he called, stepping into the kitchen entryway and grabbing the doorknob. “Don't punch a hole in the damn d—”

At that moment he looked up and saw a shape much larger than Keith Jordan's bulking behind the sheer curtain hung across the window in the door. His mind had been preoccupied, more concerned with the day ahead than this Monday-morning ritual of paying the newsboy, but in that instant an icepick of pure terror stabbed its way through his scattered thoughts. He did not have to see the face; even through the sheer he recognized the shape, the set of the body ... and the trenchcoat, of course.

The taste of red licorice, high, sweet, and sickening, flooded his mouth.

He let go of the doorknob, but an instant too late. The latch had clicked back, and the moment it did, the figure standing on the back porch rammed the door open. Sam was thrown backward into the kitchen. He flailed his arms to keep his balance and managed to knock all three coats hanging from the rod in the entryway to the floor.

The Library Policeman stepped in, wrapped in his own pocket of cold air. He stepped in slowly, as if he had all the time in the world, and closed the door behind him. In one hand he held Sam's copy of the
Gazette
neatly rolled and folded. He raised it like a baton.

“I brought you your paper,” the Library Policeman said. His voice was strangely distant, as if it was coming to Sam through a heavy pane of glass. “I was going to pay the boy as well, but he theemed in a hurry to get away. I wonder why.”

He advanced toward the kitchen—toward Sam, who was cowering against the counter and staring at the intruder with the huge, shocked eyes of a terrified child, of some poor fourth-grade Simple Simon.

I am imagining this,
Sam thought,
or I'm having a nightmare—a nightmare so horrible it makes the one I had two nights ago look like a sweet dream.

But it was no nightmare. It was terrifying, but it was no nightmare. Sam had time to hope he had gone crazy after all. Insanity was no day at the beach, but nothing could be as awful as this man-shaped thing which had come into his house, this thing which walked in its own wedge of winter.

Sam's house was old and the ceilings were high, but the Library Policeman had to duck his head in the entry, and even in the kitchen the crown of his gray felt hat almost brushed the ceiling. That meant he was over seven feet tall.

His body was wrapped in a trenchcoat the leaden color of fog at twilight. His skin was paper white. His face was dead, as if he could understand neither kindness nor love nor mercy. His mouth was set in lines of ultimate, passionless authority and Sam thought for one confused moment of how the closed library door had looked, like the slotted mouth in the face of a granite robot. The Library Policeman's eyes appeared to be silver circles which had been punctured by tiny shotgun pellets. They were rimmed with pinkish-red flesh that looked ready to bleed. They were lashless. And the worst thing of all was this: it was a face Sam
knew.
He did not think this was the first time he had cringed in terror beneath that black gaze, and far back in his mind, Sam heard a voice with the slightest trace of a lisp say:
Come with me, son . . . I'm a poleethman.

The scar overlaid the geography of that face exactly as it had in Sam's imagination—across the left cheek, below the left eye, across the bridge of the nose. Except for the scar, it was the man in the poster . . . or was it? He could no longer be sure.

Sam Peebles, darling of the Junction City Rotary Club, wet his pants. He felt his bladder let go in a warm gush, but that seemed far away and unimportant. What was important was that there was a monster in his kitchen, and the most terrible thing about this monster was that Sam almost knew his face. Sam felt a triple-locked door far back in his mind straining to burst open. He never thought of running. The idea of flight was beyond his capacity to imagine. He was a child again, a child who has been caught red-handed

(the book isn't
The Speaker's Companion)

doing some awful bad thing. Instead of running

(the book isn't
Best Loved Poems of the American People)

he folded slowly over his own wet crotch and collapsed between the two stools which stood at the counter, holding his hands up blindly above his head.

“No,” he said in a husky, strengthless voice. “No, please—no, please, please don't do it to me, please, I'll be good, please don't hurt me that way.”

He was reduced to this. But it didn't matter; the giant in the fog-colored trenchcoat

(the book is
The Black Arrow
by Robert Louis Stevenson
)

now stood directly over him.

Sam dropped his head. It seemed to weigh a thousand pounds. He looked at the floor and prayed incoherently that when he looked up—when he had the
strength
to look up—the figure would be gone.

“Look at me,” the distant, thudding voice instructed. It was the voice of an evil god.

“No,” Sam cried in a shrieky, breathless voice, and then burst into helpless tears. It was not just terror, although the terror was real enough, bad enough. Separate from it was a cold deep drift of childish fright and childish shame. Those feelings clung like poison syrup to whatever it was he dared not remember, the thing that had something to do with a book he had never read:
The Black Arrow,
by Robert Louis Stevenson.

Something struck Sam's head and he screamed.

“No, please don't make me,” Sam begged.

He looked up, shielding his streaming eyes with one rubbery arm, just in time to see the Library Policeman's arm come down again.

He was hitting Sam with Sam's own rolled-up copy of the
Gazette,
whacking him the way you might a heedless puppy that has piddled on the floor.

“That'th better,” said the Library Policeman. He grinned, lips parting to reveal the points of sharp teeth, teeth which were almost fangs. He reached into the pocket of his trenchcoat and brought out a leather folder. He flipped it open and revealed the strange star of many points. It glinted in the clean morning light.

Sam was now helpless to look away from that merciless face, those silver eyes with their tiny birdshot pupils. He was slobbering and knew it but was helpless to stop that, either.

“You have two books which belong to uth,” the Library Policeman said. His voice still seemed to be coming from a distance, or from behind a thick pane of glass. “Mith Lorth is very upthet with you, Mr. Peebles.”

“I lost them,” Sam said, beginning to cry harder. The thought of lying to this man about
(The Black Arrow)

the books, about
anything,
was out of the question. He was all authority, all power, all force. He was judge, jury, and executioner.

Where's the janitor?
Sam wondered incoherently.
Where's the janitor who checks the dials and then goes back into the sane world? The sane world where things like this don't have to happen?

“I ... I ... I ...”

“I don't want to hear your thick ecthcuses,” the Library Policeman said. He flipped his leather folder closed and stuffed it into his right pocket. At the same time he reached into his left pocket and drew out a knife with a long, sharp blade. Sam, who had spent three summers earning money for college as a stockboy, recognized it. It was a carton-slitter. There was undoubtedly a knife like that in every library in America. “You have until midnight. Then . . .”

He leaned down, extending the knife in one white, corpse-like hand. That freezing envelope of air struck Sam's face, numbed it. He tried to scream and could produce only a glassy whisper of silent air.

The tip of the blade pricked the flesh of his throat. It was like being pricked with an icicle. A single bead of scarlet oozed out and then froze solid, a tiny seed-pearl of blood.

“ . . . then I come again,” the Library Policeman said in his odd, lisp-rounded voice. “You better find what you lotht, Mr. Peebles.”

The knife disappeared back into the pocket. The Library Policeman drew back up to his full height.

“There is another thing,” he said. “You have been athking questions, Mr. Peebles. Don't athk any more. Do you underthand me?”

Sam tried to answer and could only utter a deep groan.

The Library Policeman began to bend down, pushing chill air ahead of him the way the flat prow of a barge might push a chunk of river-ice. “Don't pry into things that don't conthern you.
Do you underthand me?”

“Yes!”
Sam screamed.
“Yes! Yes! Yes!”

“Good. Because I will be watching. And I am not alone.”

He turned, his trenchcoat rustling, and recrossed the kitchen toward the entry. He spared not a single backward glance for Sam. He passed through a bright patch of morning sun as he went, and Sam saw a wonderful, terrible thing: the Library Policeman cast no shadow.

He reached the back door. He grasped the knob. Without turning around he said in a low, terrible voice: “If you don't want to thee me again, Mr. Peebles,
find those bookth.
”

He opened the door and went out.

A single frantic thought filled Sam's mind the minute the door closed again and he heard the Library Policeman's feet on the back porch: he had to lock the door.

He got halfway to his feet and then grayness swam over him and he fell forward, unconscious.

“May I . . . help you?” the receptionist asked. The slight pause came as she took a second look at the man who had just approached the desk.

“Yes,” Sam said. “I want to look at some back issues of the
Gazette,
if that's possible.”

“Of course it is,” she said. “But—pardon me if I'm out of line—do you feel all right, sir? Your color is very bad.”

“I think I may be coming down with something, at that,” Sam said.

“Spring colds are the worst, aren't they?” she said, getting up. “Come right through the gate at the end of the counter, Mr.—?”

“Peebles. Sam Peebles.”

She stopped, a chubby woman of perhaps sixty, and cocked her head. She put one red-tipped nail to the corner of her mouth. “You sell insurance, don't you?”

“Yes, ma'am,” he said.

“I thought I recognized you. Your picture was in the paper last week. Was it some sort of award?”

“No, ma'am,” Sam said, “I gave a speech. At the Rotary Club.”
And would give anything to be able to turn back the clock,
he thought.
I'd tell Craig Jones to go fuck himself.

“Well, that's wonderful,” she said . . . but she spoke as if there might be some doubt about it. “You looked different in the picture.”