Four Past Midnight - 5 - The Library Policeman Read online

  'Inflation sucks the big one, all right,' the clerk agreed. He was slowly returning to that soft spot in the ozone where he had been when Sam came in. 'You must really like that stuff, man. Me, I stick to good old Mars Bars.'

  'Like it?' Sam laughed as he pocketed his change. 'I hate it. This is for someone else.' He laughed again. 'Call it a present.'

  The clerk saw something in Sam's eyes then, and suddenly took a big, hurried step away from him, almost knocking over a display of Skoal Bandits.

  Sam looked at the clerk's face curiously and decided not to ask for a bag. He gathered up the packages, distributed them at random in the pockets of the sport-coat he had put on a thousand years ago, and left the store. Cellophane crackled busily in his pockets with every stride he took.

  5

  Naomi had slipped behind the wheel, and she drove the rest of the way to the Library. As she pulled out of the Piggly Wiggly's lot, Sam took the two books from the Pell's bag and looked at them ruefully for a moment. All this trouble, he thought. All this trouble over an outdated book of poems and a self-help manual for fledgling public speakers. Except, of course, that wasn't what it was about. It had never been about the books at all.

  He stripped the rubber band from his wrist and put it around the books. Then he took out his wallet, removed a five-dollar bill from his dwindling supply of ready cash, and slipped it beneath the elastic.

  'What's that for?'

  'The fine. What I owe on these two, and one other from a long time ago - The Black Arrow, by Robert Louis Stevenson. This ends it.'

  He put the books on the console between the two bucket seats and took a package of red licorice out of his pocket. He tore it open and that old, sugary smell struck him at once, with the force of a hard slap. From his nose it seemed to go directly into his head, and from his head it plummeted into his stomach, which immediately cramped into a slick, hard fist. For one awful moment he thought he was going to vomit in his own lap. Apparently some things never changed.

  Nonetheless, he continued opening packages of red licorice, making a bundle of limber, waxy-textured candy whips. Naomi slowed as the light at the next intersection turned red, then stopped, although Sam could not see another car moving in either direction. Rain and wind lashed at her little car. They were now only four blocks from the Library. 'Sam, what on earth are you doing?'

  And because he didn't really know what on earth he was doing, he said: 'If fear is Ardelia's meat, Naomi, we have to find the other thing - the thing that's the opposite of fear. Because that, whatever it is, will be her poison. So ... what do you think that thing might be?'

  'Well, I doubt if it's red licorice.'

  He gestured impatiently. 'How can you be so sure? Crosses are supposed to kill vampires - the blood-sucking kind - but a cross is only two sticks of wood or metal set at right angles to each other. Maybe a head of lettuce would work just as well ... if it was turned on.'

  The light turned green. 'If it was an organized head of lettuce,' Naomi said thoughtfully, driving on.

  'Right!' Sam held up half a dozen long red whips. 'All I know is that this is what I have. Maybe it's ludicrous. Probably is. But I don't care. It's a by-God symbol of all the things my Library Policeman took away from me - the love, the friendship, the sense of belonging. I've felt like an outsider all my life, Naomi, and never knew why. Now I do. This is just another of the things he took away. I used to love this stuff. Now I can barely stand the smell of it. That's okay; I can deal with that. But I have to know how to turn it on.'

  Sam began to roll the licorice whips between his palms, gradually turning them into a sticky ball. He had thought the smell was the worst thing with which the red licorice could test him, but he had been wrong. The texture was worse ... and the dye was coming off on his palms and fingers, turning them a sinister dark red. He went on nevertheless, stopping only to add the contents of another fresh package to the soft mass every thirty seconds or so.

  'Maybe I'm looking too hard,' he said. 'Maybe it's plain old bravery that's the opposite of fear. Courage, if you want a fancier word. Is that it? Is that all? Is bravery the difference between Naomi and Sarah?'

  She looked startled. 'Are you asking me if quitting drinking was an act of bravery?'

  'I don't know what I'm asking,' he said, 'but I think you're in the right neighborhood, at least. I don't need to ask about fear; I know what that is. Fear is an emotion which encloses and precludes change. Was it an act of bravery when you gave up drinking?'

  'I never really gave it up,' she said. 'That isn't how alcoholics do it. They can't do it that way. You employ a lot of sideways thinking instead. One day at a time, easy does it. live and let live, all that. But the center of it is this: you give up believing you can control your drinking. That idea was a myth you told yourself, and that's what you give up. The myth. You tell me - is that bravery?'

  'Of course. But it's sure not foxhole bravery.'

  'Foxhole bravery,' she said, and laughed. 'I like that. But you're right. What I do - what we do - to keep away from the first one ... it's not that kind of bravery. In spite of movies like The Lost Weekend, I think what we do is pretty undramatic.'

  Sam was remembering the dreadful apathy which had settled over him after he had been raped in the bushes at the side of the Briggs Avenue Branch of the St Louis Library. Raped by a man who had called himself a policeman. That had been pretty undramatic, too. just a dirty trick, that was all it had been - a dirty, brainless trick played on a little kid by a man with serious mental problems. Sam supposed that, when you counted up the whole score, he ought to call himself lucky; the Library Cop might have killed him.

  Ahead of them, the round white globes which marked the Junction City Public Library glimmered in the rain. Naomi said hesitantly, 'I think the real opposite of fear might be honesty. Honesty and belief. How does that sound?'

  'Honesty and belief,' he said quietly, tasting the words. He squeezed the sticky ball of red licorice in his right hand. 'Not bad, I guess. Anyway, they'll have to do. We're here.'

  6

  The glimmering green numbers of the car's dashboard clock read 7:57. They had made it before eight after all.

  'Maybe we better wait and make sure everybody's gone before we go around back,' she said.

  'I think that's a very good idea.'

  They cruised into an empty parking space across the street from the Library's entrance. The globes shimmered delicately in the rain. The rustle of the trees was a less delicate thing; the wind was still gaining strength. The oaks sounded as if they were dreaming, and all the dreams were bad.

  At two minutes past eight, a van with a stuffed Garfield cat and a mom's TAXI sign in its rear window pulled up across from them. The horn honked, and the Library's door - looking less grim even in this light than it had on Sam's first visit to the Library, less like the mouth in the head of a vast granite robot - opened at once. Three kids, junior-high-schoolers by the look of them, came out and hurried down the steps. As they ran down the walk to MOM'S TAXI, two of them pulled their jackets up to shield their heads from the rain. The van's side door rumbled open on its track, and the kids piled into it. Sam could hear the faint sound of their laughter, and envied the sound. He thought about how good it must be to come out of a library with laughter in your mouth. He had missed that experience, thanks to the man in the round black glasses.

  Honesty, he thought. Honesty and belief. And then he thought again: The fine is paid. The fine is paid, goddammit. He ripped open the last two packages of licorice and began kneading their contents into his sticky, nasty-smelling red ball. He glanced at the rear of MOM'S TAXI as he did so. He could see white exhaust drifting up and tattering in the windy air. Suddenly he began to realize what he was up to here.

  'Once, when I was in high school,' he said, 'I watched a bunch of kids play a prank on this other kid they didn't like. In those days, watching was what I did best. They took a wad of modelling clay from the Art Room and stuffed it in the tailpip
e of the kid's Pontiac. You know what happened?'

  She glanced at him doubtfully. 'No - what?'

  'Blew the muffler off in two pieces,' he said. 'One on each side of the car. They flew like shrapnel. The muffler was the weak point, you see. I suppose if the gases had backflowed all the way to the engine, they might have blown the cylinders right out of the block.'

  'Sam, what are you talking about?'

  'Hope,' he said. 'I'm talking about hope. I guess the honesty and belief have to come a little later.'

  Mom's TAXI pulled away from the curb, its headlights spearing through the silvery lines of rain.

  The green numbers on Naomi's dashboard clock read 8:06 when the Library's front door opened again. A man and a woman came out. The man, awkwardly buttoning his overcoat with an umbrella tucked under his arm, was unmistakably Richard Price; Sam knew him at once, even though he had only seen a single photo of the man in an old newspaper. The girl was Cynthia Berrigan, the library assistant he had spoken to on Saturday night.

  Price said something to the girl. Sam thought she laughed. He was suddenly aware that he was sitting bolt upright in the bucket seat of Naomi's Datsun, every muscle creaking with tension. He tried to make himself relax and discovered he couldn't do it.

  Now why doesn't that surprise me? he thought.

  Price raised his umbrella. The two of them hurried down the walk beneath it, the Berrigan girl tying a plastic rain-kerchief over her hair as they came. They separated at the foot of the walk, Price going to an old Impala the size of a cabin cruiser, the Berrigan girl to a Yugo parked half a block down. Price U-turned in the street (Naomi ducked down a little, startled, as the headlights shone briefly into her own car) and blipped his horn at the Yugo as he passed it. Cynthia Berrigan blipped hers in return, then drove away in the opposite direction.

  Now there was only them, the Library, and possibly Ardelia, waiting for them someplace inside.

  Along with Sam's old friend the Library Policeman.

  7

  Naomi drove slowly around the block to Wegman Street. About halfway down on the left, a discreet sign marked a small break in the hedge. It read

  LIBRARY DELIVERIES ONLY.

  A gust of wind strong enough to rock the Datsun on its springs struck them, rattling rain against the windows so hard that it sounded like sand. Somewhere nearby there was a splintering crack as either a large branch or a small tree gave way. This was followed by a thud as whatever it was fell into the street.

  'God!' Naomi said in a thin, distressed voice. 'I don't like this!'

  'I'm not crazy about it myself,' Sam agreed, but he had barely heard her. He was thinking about how that modelling clay had looked. How it had looked bulging out of the tailpipe of the kid's car. It had looked like a blister.

  Naomi turned in at the sign. They drove up a short lane into a small paved loading/unloading area. A single orange arc-sodium lamp hung over the little square of pavement. It cast a strong, penetrating light, and the moving branches of the oaks which ringed the loading zone danced crazy shadows onto the rear face of the building in its glow. For a moment two of these shadows seemed to coalesce at the foot of the platform, making a shape that was almost manlike: it looked as if someone had been waiting under there, someone who was now crawling out to greet them.

  In just a second or two, Sam thought, the orange glare from that overhead light will strike his glasses - his little round black glasses - and he will look through the windshield at me. Not at Naomi; just at me. He'll look at me and he'll say, 'Hello, son; I've been waiting for you. All theeth yearth, I've been waiting for you. Come with me now. Come with me, because I'm a poleethman.'

  There was another loud, splintering crack, and a tree-branch dropped to the pavement not three feet from the Datsun's trunk, exploding chunks of bark and rot-infested wood in every direction. If it had landed on top of the car, it would have smashed the roof in like a tomato-soup can.

  Naomi screamed.

  The wind, still rising, screamed back.

  Sam was reaching for her, meaning to put a comforting arm around her, when the door at the rear of the loading platform opened partway and Dave

  Duncan stepped into the gap. He was holding onto the door to keep the wind from snatching it out of his grasp. To Sam, the old man's face looked far too white and almost grotesquely frightened. He made frantic beckoning gestures with his free hand

  'Naomi, there's Dave.'

  'Where -? Oh yes, I see him.' Her eyes widened. 'My God, he looks horrible!'

  She began to open her door. The wind gusted, ripped it out of her grasp, and whooshed through the Datsun in a tight little tornado, lifting the licorice wrappers and dancing them around in dizzy circles.

  Naomi managed to get one hand down just in time to keep from being struck -and perhaps injured - by the rebound of her own car door. Then she was out, her hair blowing in its own storm about her head, her skirt soaked and painted against her thighs in a moment.

  Sam shoved his own door open - the wind was blowing the wrong way for him, and he did literally have to put his shoulder to it - and struggled out. He had time to wonder where in the hell this storm had come from; the Prince of Piggly Wiggly had said there had been no prediction for such a spectacular capful of wind and rain. Just showers, he'd said.

  Ardelia. Maybe it was Ardelia's storm.

  As if to confirm this, Dave's voice rose in a momentary lull. 'Hurry up! I can smell her goddam perfume everywhere!'

  Sam found the idea that the smell of Ardelia's perfume might somehow precede her materialization obscurely terrifying.

  He was halfway to the loading-platform steps before he realized that, although he still had the snot-textured ball of red licorice, he had left the books in the car. He turned back, muscled the door open, and got them. As he did, the quality of the light changed - it went from a bright, penetrating orange to white. Sam saw the change on the skin of his hands, and for a moment his eyes seemed to freeze in their sockets. He backed out of the car in a hurry, the books in his hand, and whirled around.

  The orange arc-sodium security lamp was gone. It had been replaced by an old-fashioned mercury-vapor streetlight. The trees dancing and groaning around the loading platform in the wind were thicker now; stately old elms predominated, easily overtopping the oaks. The shape of the loading platform had changed, and now tangled runners of ivy climbed the rear wall of the Library - a wall which had been bare just a moment ago.

  Welcome to 1960, Sam thought. Welcome to the Ardelia Lortz edition of the Junction City Public Library.

  Naomi had gained the platform. She was saying something to Dave. Dave replied, then looked back over his shoulder. His body jerked. At the same moment, Naomi screamed. Sam ran for the steps to the platform, the tail of his coat billowing out behind him. As he climbed the steps, he saw a white hand float out of the darkness and settle on Dave's shoulder. It yanked him back into the Library .

  'Grab the door!' Sam screamed. 'Naomi, grab the door! Don't let it lock!'

  But in this the wind helped them. It blew the door wide open, striking Naomi's shoulder and making her stagger backward. Sam reached it in time to catch it on the rebound.

  Naomi turned horrified dark eyes on him. 'It was the man who came to your house, Sam. The tall man with the silvery eyes. I saw him. He grabbed Dave!'

  No time to think about it. 'Come on.' He slipped an arm around Naomi's waist and pulled her forward into the Library. Behind them, the wind dropped and the door slammed shut with a thud.

  8

  They were in a book-cataloguing area which was dim but not entirely dark. A small table lamp with a red-fringed shade stood on the librarian's desk. Beyond this area, which was littered with boxes and packing materials (the latter consisted of crumpled newspapers, Sam saw; this was 1960, and those polyethylene popcorn balls hadn't been invented yet), the stacks began. Standing in one of the aisles, walled in with books on both sides, was the Library Policeman. He had Dave Duncan in a half-nelson,
and was holding him with almost absent ease three inches off the floor.

  He looked at Sam and Naomi. His silver eyes glinted, and a crescent grin rose on his white face. It looked like a chrome moon.

  'Not a thtep closer,' he said, 'or I'll thnap his neck like a chicken bone. You'll hear it go.'

  Sam considered this, but only for a moment. He could smell lavender sachet, thick and cloying. Outside the building, the wind whined and boomed. The Library Policeman's shadow danced up the wall, as gaunt as a gantry. He didn't have a shadow before, Sam realized. What does that mean?

  Maybe it meant the Library Policeman was more real now, more here ... because Ardelia and the Library Policeman and the dark man in the old car were really the same person. There was only one, and these were simply the faces it wore, putting them on and taking them off again with the ease of a kid trying on Halloween masks.

  'Am I supposed to think you'll let him live if we stand away from you?' he asked. 'Bullshit.'

  He began to walk toward the Library Policeman.

  An expression which sat oddly on the tall man's face now appeared. It was surprise. He took a step backward. His trenchcoat flapped around his shins and dragged against the folio volumes which formed the sides of the narrow aisle in which he stood.

  'I'm warning you!'

  'Warn and be damned,' Sam said. 'Your argument isn't with him. You've got a bone to pick with me, don't you? Okay - let's pick it.'

  'The Librarian has a score to thettle with the old man!' the Policeman said, and took another step backward. Something odd was happening to his face, and it took Sam an instant to see what it was. The silver light in the Library Policeman's eyes was fading.

  'Then let her settle it,' Sam said. 'My score is with you, big boy, and it goes back thirty years.'

  He passed beyond the pool of radiance thrown by the table lamp.

  'All right, then!' the Library Cop snarled. He made a half-turn and threw Dave Duncan down the aisle. Dave flew like a bag of laundry, a single croak of fear and surprise escaping him. He tried to raise one arm as he approached the wall, but it was only a dazed, half-hearted reflex. He collided with the fire-extinguisher mounted by the stairs, and Sam heard the dull crunch of a breaking bone. Dave fell, and the heavy red extinguisher fell off the wall on top of him.