Four Past Midnight Read online

  "You don't think he created John Shooter just to punish you, do you?" Evans asked.

  "No. Shooter was there to punish Mort. I think ..." She paused and adjusted her shawl, pulling it a little more tightly about her shoulders. Then she picked up her teacup with a hand which wasn't quite steady. "I think that Mort stole somebody's work sometime in the past," she said. "Probably quite far in the past, because everything he wrote from The Organ-Grinder's Boy on was widely read. It would have come out, I think. I doubt that he even actually published what he stole. But I think that's what happened, and I think that's where John Shooter really came from. Not from the film company dropping his novel, or from my ... my time with Ted, and not from the divorce. Maybe all those things contributed, but I think the root goes back to a time before I knew him. Then, when he was alone at the lake house ..."

  "Shooter came," Evans said quietly. "He came and accused him of plagiarism. Whoever Mr. Rainey stole from never did, so in the end he had to punish himself. But I doubt if that was all, Amy. He did try to kill you."

  "No," she said. "That was Shooter."

  He raised his eyebrows. Ted looked at her carefully, and then drew the pipe out of his pocket again.

  "The real Shooter."

  "I don't understand you."

  She smiled her wan smile. "I don't understand myself. That's why I'm here. I don't think telling this serves any practical purpose--Mort's dead, and it's over--but it may help me. It may help me to sleep better."

  "Then tell us, by all means," Evans said.

  "You see, when we went down to clean out the house, we stopped at the little store in town--Bowie's. Ted filled the gas tank--it's always been self-service at Bowie's--and I went in to get some things. There was a man in there, Sonny Trotts, who used to work with Tom Greenleaf. Tom was the older of the two caretakers who were killed. Sonny wanted to tell me how sorry he was about Mort, and he wanted to tell me something else, too, because he saw Mort the day before Mort died, and meant to tell him. So he said. It was about Tom Greenleaf-something Tom told Sonny while they were painting the Methodist Parish Hall together. Sonny saw Mort after that, but didn't think to tell him right away, he said. Then he remembered that it had something to do with Greg Carstairs- "

  "The other dead man?"

  "Yes. So he turned around and called, but Mort didn't hear him. And the next day, Mort was dead."

  "What did Mr. Greenleaf tell this guy?"

  "That he thought he might have seen a ghost," Amy said calmly.

  They looked at her, not speaking.

  "Sonny said Tom had been getting forgetful lately, and that Tom was worried about it. Sonny thought it was no more than the ordinary sort of forgetfulness that settles in when a person gets a little older, but Tom had nursed his wife through Alzheimer's disease five or six years before, and he was terrified of getting it himself and going the same way. According to Sonny, if Tom forgot a paintbrush, he spent half the day obsessing about it. Tom said that was why, when Greg Carstairs asked him if he recognized the man he'd seen Mort Rainey talking to the day before, or if he would recognize him if he saw him again, Tom said he hadn't seen anyone with Mort--that Mort had been alone."

  There was the snap of a match. Ted Milner had decided to light his pipe after all. Evans ignored him. He was leaning forward in his chair, his gaze fixed intently on Amy Milner.

  "Let's get this straight. According to this Sonny Troots--"

  "Trotts."

  "Okay, Trotts. According to him, Tom Greenleaf did see Mort with someone?"

  "Not exactly," Amy said. "Sonny thought if Tom believed that, believed it for sure, he wouldn't have lied to Greg. What Tom said was that he didn't know what he'd seen. That he was confused. That it seemed safer to say nothing about it at all. He didn't want anybody--particularly Greg Carstairs, who was also in the caretaking business--to know how confused he was, and most of all he didn't want anybody to think that he might be getting sick the way his late wife had gotten sick."

  "I'm not sure I understand this--I'm sorry."

  "According to Sonny," she said, "Tom came down Lake Drive in his Scout and saw Mort, standing by himself where the lakeside path comes out."

  "Near where the bodies were found?"

  "Yes. Very near. Mort waved. Tom waved back. He drove by. Then, according to what Sonny says, Tom looked in his rear-view mirror and saw another man with Mort, and an old station wagon, although neither the man nor the car had been there ten seconds before. The man was wearing a black hat, he said ... but you could see right through him, and the car, too. "

  "Oh, Amy," Ted said softly. "The man was bullshitting you. Big time."

  She shook her head. "I don't think Sonny is smart enough to make up such a story. He told me Tom thought he ought to get in touch with Greg and tell him he might have seen such a man after all; that it would be all right if he left out the see-through part. But Sonny said the old man was terrified. He was convinced that it was one of two things: either he was coming down with Alzheimer's disease, or he'd seen a ghost."

  "Well, it's certainly creepy," Evans said, and it was--the skin on his arms and back had crinkled into gooseflesh for a moment or two. "But it's hearsay ... hearsay from a dead man, in fact."

  "Yes ... but there's the other thing." She set her teacup on the desk, picked up her purse, and began to rummage in it. "When I was cleaning out Mort's office, I found that hat--that awful black hat--behind his desk. It gave me a shock, because I wasn't expecting it. I thought the police must have taken it away as evidence, or something. I hooked it out from behind there with a stick. It came out upside down, with the stick inside it. I used the stick to carry it outside and dump it in the trash cabinet. Do you understand?"

  Ted clearly didn't; Evans clearly did. "You didn't want to touch it."

  "That's right. I didn't want to touch it. It landed right side up on one of the green trash bags--I'd swear to that. Then, about an hour later, I went out with a bag of old medicines and shampoos and things from the bathroom. When I opened the lid of the garbage cabinet to put it in, the hat was turned over again. And this was tucked into the sweatband." She pulled a folded sheet of paper from her purse and offered it to Evans with a hand that still trembled minutely. "It wasn't there when the hat came out from behind the desk. I know that."

  Evans took the folded sheet and just held it for a moment. He didn't like it. It felt too heavy, and the texture was somehow wrong.

  "I think there was a John Shooter," she said. "I think he was Mort's greatest creation--a character so vivid that he actually did become real.

  "And I think that this is a message from a ghost."

  He took the slip of paper and opened it. Written halfway down was this message: Missus-I am sorry for all the trouble. Things got out of hand. I am going back to my home now. I got my story, which is all I came for in the first place. It is called "Crowfoot Mile," and it is a crackerjack.

  Yours truly,

  The signature was a bald scrawl below the neat lines of script.

  "Is this your late husband's signature, Amy?" Evans asked.

  "No," she said. "Nothing like it."

  The three of them sat in the office, looking at one another. Fred Evans tried to think of something to say and could not. After awhile, the silence (and the smell of Ted Milner's pipe) became more than any of them could stand. So Mr. and Mrs. Milner offered their thanks, said their goodbyes, and left his office to get on with their lives as best they could, and Fred Evans got on with his own as best he could, and sometimes, late at night, both he and the woman who had been married to Morton Rainey woke from dreams in which a man in a round-crowned black hat looked at them from sun-faded eyes caught in nets of wrinkles. He looked at them with no love ... but, they both felt, with an odd kind of stern pity.

  It was not a kind expression, and it left no feeling of comfort, but they also both felt, in their different places, that they could find room to live with that look. And to tend their gardens.

  T
he The Library Policeman

  THIS IS FOR THE STAFF AND PATRONS OF THE PASADENA PUBLIC LIBRARY.

  THREE PAST MIDNIGHT

  A NOTE ON "THE LIBRARY POLICEMAN"

  On the morning when this story started to happen, I was sitting at the breakfast table with my son Owen. My wife had already gone upstairs to shower and dress. Those two vital seven o'clock divisions had been made: the scrambled eggs and the newspaper. Willard Scott, who visits our house five days out of every seven, was telling us about a lady in Nebraska who had just turned a hundred and four, and I think Owen and I had one whole pair of eyes open between us. A typical weekday morning chez King, in other words.

  Owen tore himself away from the sports section just long enough to ask me if I'd be going by the mall that day--there was a book he wanted me to pick up for a school report. I can't remember what it was--it might have been Johnny Tremain or April Morning, Howard Fast's novel of the American Revolution--but it was one of those tomes you can never quite lay your hands on in a bookshop; it's always just out of print or just about to come back into print or some damned thing.

  I suggested that Owen try the local library, which is a very good one. I was sure they'd have it. He muttered some reply. I only caught two words of it, but, given my interests, those two words were more than enough to pique my interest. They were "library police."

  I put my half of the newspaper aside, used the MUTE button on the remote control to strangle Willard in the middle of his ecstatic report on the Georgia Peach Festival, and asked Owen to kindly repeat himself.

  He was reluctant to do so, but I pressed him. Finally he told me that he didn't like to use the library because he worried about the Library Police. He knew there were no Library Police, he hastened to add, but it was one of those stories that burrowed down into your subconscious and just sort of lurked there. He had heard it from his Aunt Stephanie when he was seven or eight and much more gullible, and it had been lurking ever since.

  I, of course, was delighted, because I had been afraid of the Library Police myself as a kid--the faceless enforcers who would actually come to your house if you didn't bring your overdue books back. That would be bad enough... but what if you couldn't find the books in question when those strange lawmen turned up? What then? What would they do to you? What might they take to make up for the missing volumes? It had been years since I'd thought of the Library Police (although not since childhood; I can clearly remember discussing them with Peter Straub and his son, Ben, six or eight years ago), but now all those old questions, both dreadful and somehow enticing, recurred.

  I found myself musing on the Library Police over the next three or four days, and as I mused, I began to glimpse the outlines of the story which follows. This is the way stories usually happen for me, but the musing period usually lasts a lot longer than it did in this case. When I began, the story was titled "The Library Police," and I had no clear idea of where I was going with it. I thought it would probably be a funny story, sort of like the suburban nightmares the late Max Shulman used to bolt together. After all, the idea was funny, wasn't it? I mean, the Library Police! How absurd!

  What I realized, however, was something I knew already: the fears of childhood have a hideous persistence Writing is an act of self-hypnosis, and in that state a kind of total emotional recall often takes place and terrors which should have been long dead start to walk and talk again.

  As I worked on this story, that began to happen to me. I knew, going in, that I had loved the library as a kid--why not? It was the only place a relatively poor kid like me could get all the books he wanted--but as I continued to write, I became reacquainted with a deeper truth: I had also feared it. I feared becoming lost in the dark stacks, I feared being forgotten in a dark comer of the reading room and ending up locked in for the night, I feared the old librarian with the blue hair and the cat's-eye glasses and the almost lipless mouth who would pinch the backs of your hands with her long, pale fingers and hiss "Shhhh!" if you forgot where you were and started to talk too loud. And yes, I feared the Library Police.

  What happened with a much longer work, a novel called Christine, began to happen here. About thirty pages in, the humor began to go out of the situation. And about fifty pages in, the whole story took a screaming left turn into the dark places I have travelled so often and which I still know so little about. Eventually I found the guy I was looking for, and managed to raise my head enough to look into his merciless silver eyes. I have tried to bring back a sketch of him for you, Constant Reader, but it may not be very good.

  My hands were trembling quite badly when I made it, you see.

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE STAND-IN

  1

  Everything, Sam Peebles decided later, was the fault of the goddamned acrobat. If the acrobat hadn't gotten drunk at exactly the wrong time, Sam never would have ended up in such trouble.

  It is not bad enough, he thought with a perhaps justifiable bitterness, that life is like a narrow beam over an endless chasm, a beam we have to walk blindfolded. It's bad, but not bad enough. Sometimes, we also get pushed.

  But that was later. First, even before the Library Policeman, was the drunken acrobat.

  2

  In Junction City, the last Friday of every month was Speaker's Night at the local Rotarians' Hall. On the last Friday in March of 1990, the Rotarians were scheduled to hear--and to be entertained by--The Amazing Joe, an acrobat with Curry & Trembo's All-Star Circus and Travelling Carnival.

  The telephone on Sam Peebles's desk at Junction City Realty and Insurance rang at five past four on Thursday afternoon. Sam picked it up. It was always Sam who picked it up--either Sam in person or Sam on the answering machine, because he was Junction City Realty and Insurance's owner and sole employee. He was not a rich man, but he was a reasonably happy one. He liked to tell people that his first Mercedes was still quite a distance in the future, but he had a Ford which was almost new and owned his own home on Kelton Avenue. "Also, the business keeps me in beer and skittles," he liked to add ... although in truth, he hadn't drunk much beer since college and wasn't exactly sure what skittles were. He thought they might be pretzels.

  "Junction City Realty and In--"

  "Sam, this is Craig. The acrobat broke his neck."

  "What?"

  "You heard me!" Craig Jones cried in deeply aggrieved tones. "The acrobat broke his fucking neck!"

  "Oh," Sam said. "Gee." He thought about this for a moment and then asked cautiously, "Is he dead, Craig?"

  "No, he's not dead, but he might as well be as far as we're concerned. He's in the hospital over in Cedar Rapids with his' neck dipped in about twenty pounds of plaster. Billy Bright just called me. He said the guy came on drunk as a skunk at the matinee this afternoon, tried to do a back-over flip, and landed outside the center ring on the nape of his neck. Billy said he could hear it way up in the bleachers, where he was sitting. He said it sounded like when you step in a puddle that just iced over."

  "Ouch!" Sam exclaimed, wincing.

  "I'm not surprised. After all--The Amazing Joe. What kind of name is that for a circus performer? I mean, The Amazing Randix, okay. The Amazing Tortellini, still not bad. But The Amazing Joe? It sounds like a prime example of brain damage in action to me."

  "Jesus, that's too bad."

  "Fucking shit on toast is what it is. It leaves us without a speaker tomorrow night, good buddy."

  Sam began to wish he had left the office promptly at four. Craig would have been stuck with Sam the answering machine, and that would have given Sam the living being a little more time to think. He felt he would soon need time to think. He also felt that Craig Jones was not going to give him any.

  "Yes," he said, "I guess that's true enough." He hoped he sounded philosophical but helpless. "What a shame."

  "It sure is," Craig said, and then dropped the dime. "But I know you'll be happy to step in and fill the slot."

  "Me? Craig, you've got to be kidding! I can't even do a somers
ault, let alone a back-over fi--"

  "I thought you could talk about the importance of the independently owned business in small-town life," Craig Jones pressed on relentlessly. "If that doesn't do it for you, there's baseball. Lacking that, you could always drop your pants and wag your wing-wang at the audience. Sam, I am not just the head of the Speakers Committee--that would be bad enough. But since Kenny moved away and Carl quit coming, I am the Speakers Committee. Now, you've got to help me. I need a speaker tomorrow night. There are about five guys in the whole damn club I feel I can trust in a pinch, and you're one of them."

  "But--"

  "You're also the only one who hasn't filled in already in a situation like this, so you're elected, buddy-boy."

  "Frank Stephens--"

  "--pinch-hit for the guy from the trucking union last year when the grand jury indicted him for fraud and he couldn't show up. Sam--it's your turn in the barrel. You can't let me down, man. You owe me."

  "I run an insurance business!" Sam cried. "When I'm not writing insurance, I sell farms! Mostly to banks! Most people find it boring! The ones who don't find it boring find it disgusting!"

  "None of that matters." Craig was now moving in for the kill, marching over Sam's puny objection in grim hobnailed boots. "They'll all be drunk by the end of dinner and you know it. They won't remember a goddam word you said come Saturday morning, but in the meantime, I need someone to stand up and talk for half an hour and you're elected!"

  Sam continued to object a little longer, but Craig kept coming down on the imperatives, italicizing them mercilessly. Need. Gotta. Owe.

  "All right!" he said at last. "All right, all right! Enough!"

  "My man!" Craig exclaimed. His voice was suddenly full of sunshine and rainbows. "Remember, it doesn't have to be any longer than thirty minutes, plus maybe another ten for questions. If anybody has any questions. And you really can wag your wing-wang if you want to. I doubt that anybody could actually see it, but--"

  "Craig," Sam said, "that's enough."

  "Oh! Sorry! Shet mah mouf !" Craig, perhaps lightheaded with relief, cackled.