Four Past Midnight (78 page)

Sam came in through the gate.

“I'm Doreen McGill,” the woman said, and put out a plump hand.

Sam shook it and said he was pleased to meet her. It took an effort. He thought that speaking to people—and touching people, especially that—was going to be an effort for quite awhile to come. All of his old ease seemed to be gone.

She led him toward a carpeted flight of stairs and flicked a light-switch. The stairway was narrow, the overhead bulb dim, and Sam felt the horrors begin to crowd in on him at once. They came eagerly, as fans might congregate around a person offering free tickets to some fabulous sold-out show. The Library Policeman could be down there, waiting in the dark. The Library Policeman with his dead white skin and red-rimmed silver eyes and small but hauntingly familiar lisp.

Stop it,
he told himself.
And if you can't stop it, then for God's sake control it. You have to. Because this is your only chance. What will you do if you can't go down a flight of stairs to a simple office basement? Just cower in your house and wait for midnight?

“That's the morgue,” Doreen McGill said, pointing. This was clearly a lady who pointed every chance she got. “You only have to—”

“Morgue?” Sam asked, turning toward her. His heart had begun to knock nastily against his ribs.
“Morgue?”

Doreen McGill laughed. “Everyone says it just like that. It's awful, isn't it? But that's what they call it. Some silly newspaper tradition, I guess. Don't worry, Mr. Peebles—there are no bodies down there; just reels and reels of microfilm.”

I wouldn't be so sure,
Sam thought, following her down the carpeted stairs. He was very glad she was leading the way.

She flicked on a line of switches at the foot of the stairs. A number of fluorescent lights, embedded in what looked like oversized inverted ice-cube trays, went on. They lit up a large low room carpeted in the same dark blue as the stairs. The room was lined with shelves of small boxes. Along the left wall were four microfilm readers that looked like futuristic hair-driers. They were the same blue as the carpet.

“What I started to say was that you have to sign the book,” Doreen said. She pointed again, this time at a large book chained to a stand by the door. “You also have to write the date, the time you came in, which is”—she checked her wristwatch—“ twenty past ten, and the time you leave.”

Sam bent over and signed the book. The name above his was Arthur Meecham. Mr. Meecham had been down here on December 27th, 1989. Over three months ago. This was a well-lighted, well-stocked, efficient room that apparently did very little business.

“It's nice down here, isn't it?” Doreen asked complacently. “That's because the federal government helps subsidize newspaper morgues—or libraries, if you like that word better. I know
I
do.”

A shadow danced in one of the aisles and Sam's heart began to knock again. But it was only Doreen McGill's shadow; she had bent over to make sure he had entered the correct time of day, and—

—
and HE didn't cast a shadow. The Library Policeman. Also . . .

He tried to duck the rest and couldn't.

Also, I can't live like this. I can't live with this kind of fear. I'd stick my head in a gas oven if it went on too long. And if it does, I will. It's not just fear of him—that man, or whatever he is. It's the way a person's
mind
feels, the way it screams when it feels everything it ever believed in slipping effortlessly away.

Doreen pointed to the right wall, where three large folio volumes stood on a single shelf. “That's January, February, and March of 1990,” she said. “Every July the paper sends the first six months of the year to Grand Island, Nebraska, to be microfilmed. The same thing when December is over.” She extended the plump hand and pointed a red-tipped nail at the shelves, counting over from the shelf at the right toward the microfilm readers at the left. She appeared to be admiring her fingernail as she did it. “The microfilms go that way, chronologically,” she said. She pronounced the word carefully, producing something mildly exotic:
chron-o-lodge-ick-a-lee.
“Modem times on your right; ancient days on your left.”

She smiled to show that this was a joke, and perhaps to convey a sense of how wonderful she thought all this was. Chron-o-lodge-ick-a-lee speaking, the smile said, it was all sort of a gas.

“Thank you,” Sam said.

“Don't mention it. It's what we're here for.
One
of the things, anyway.” She put her nail to the corner of her mouth and gave him her peek-a-boo smile again. “Do you know how to run a microfilm reader, Mr. Peebles?”

“Yes, thanks.”

“All right. If I can help you further, I'll be right upstairs. Don't hesitate to ask.”

“Are you—” he began, and then snapped his mouth shut on the rest:
—going to leave me here alone?

She raised her eyebrows.

“Nothing,” he said, and watched her go back upstairs. He had to resist a strong urge to pelt up the stairs behind her. Because, cushy blue carpet or not, this was another Junction City library.

And this one was called the morgue.

Sam walked slowly toward the shelves with their weight of square microfilm boxes, unsure of where to begin. He was very glad that the overhead fluorescents were bright enough to banish most of the troubling shadows in the corners.

He hadn't dared ask Doreen McGill if the name Ardelia Lortz rang a bell, or even if she knew roughly when the city Library had last undergone renovations.
You have been athking questions,
the Library Policeman had said.
Don't pry into things that don't concern you. Do you underthand?

Yes, he understood. And he supposed he was risking the Library Policeman's wrath by prying anyway . . . but he wasn't asking questions, at least not exactly, and these
were
things that concerned him. They concerned him desperately.

Sam looked nervously over his shoulder. Saw nothing. And still found it impossible to move with any decision. He had gotten this far, but he didn't know if he could get any further. He felt more than intimidated, more than frightened. He felt shattered.

“You've got to,” he muttered harshly, and wiped at his lips with a shaking hand. “You've just got to.”

He made his left foot move forward. He stood that way a moment, legs apart, like a man caught in the act of fording a small stream. Then he made his right foot catch up with his left one. He made his way across to the shelf nearest the bound folios in this hesitant, reluctant fashion. A card on the end of the shelf read:

That was almost certainly too recent—in fact, the Library renovations must have taken place before the spring of 1984, when he had moved to Junction City. If it had happened since, he would have noticed the workmen, heard people talking about it, and read about it in the
Gazette.
But, other than guessing that it must have happened in the last fifteen or twenty years (the suspended ceilings had not looked any older than that), he could narrow it down no further. If only he could
think
more clearly! But he couldn't. What had happened that morning screwed up any normal, rational effort to think the way heavy sunspot activity screwed up radio and TV transmissions. Reality and unreality had come together like vast stones, and Sam Peebles, one tiny, screaming, struggling speck of humanity, had had the bad luck to get caught between them.

He moved two aisles to the left, mostly because he was afraid that if he stopped moving for too long he might freeze up entirely, and walked down the aisle marked

He picked a box almost at random and took it over to one of the microfilm readers. He snapped it on and tried to concentrate on the spool of microfilm (the spool was also blue, and Sam wondered if there was any reason why everything in this clean, well-lighted place was color coordinated) and nothing else. First you had to mount it on one of the spindles, right; then you had to thread it, check; then you had to secure the leader in the core of the take-up reel, okay. The machine was so simple an eight-year-old could have executed these little tasks, but it took Sam almost five minutes; he had his shaking hands and shocked, wandering mind to deal with. When he finally got the microfilm mounted and scrolled to the first frame, he discovered he had mounted the reel backward. The printed matter was upside down.

He patiently rewound the microfilm, turned it around, and rethreaded it. He discovered he didn't mind this little setback in the least; repeating the operation, one simple step at a time, seemed to calm him. This time the front page of the April 1, 1981, issue of the Junction city
Gazette
appeared before him, right side up. The headline bannered the surprise resignation of a town official Sam had never heard of, but his eyes were quickly drawn to a box at the bottom of the page. Inside the box was this message:

Come with me,
a tenebrous, whispering voice answered.
Come with me, son . . . I'm a poleethman.

Gooseflesh gripped him; a shudder shook him. Sam pushed both the question and that phantom voice away. After all, it didn't really matter why he had picked the April, 1981, issues of the
Gazette;
the important thing was that he had, and it was a lucky break.

Might
be a lucky break.

He advanced the reel quickly to April 6th, and saw exactly what he had hoped for. Over the
Gazette
masthead, in red ink, it said:

Sam advanced to the supplement. There were two photos on the first page of the supplement. One was of the Library's exterior. The other showed Richard Price, the head librarian, standing at the circulation desk and smiling nervously into the camera. He looked exactly as Naomi Higgins had described him—a tall, bespectacled man of about forty with a narrow little mustache. Sam was more interested in the background. He could see the suspended ceiling which had so shocked him on his second trip to the Library. So the renovations had been done prior to April of 1981.

The stories were exactly the sort of self-congratulatory puff-pieces he expected—he had been reading the
Gazette
for six years now and was very familiar with its ain't-we-a-jolly-bunch-of-JayCees editorial slant. There were informative (and rather breathless) items about National Library Week, the Summer Reading Program, the Junction County Bookmobile, and the new fund drive which had just commenced. Sam glanced over these quickly. On the last page of the supplement he found a much more interesting story, one written by Price himself. It was titled

Sam's eagerness did not last long. Ardelia's name wasn't there. He reached for the power switch to rewind the microfilm and then stopped. He saw a mention of the renovation project—it had happened in 1970—and there was something else. Something just a little off-key. Sam began to read the last part of Mr. Price's chatty historical note again, this time more carefully.

Sam looked up thoughtfully. He believed there was something missing from Richard Price's careful, droning history of the town Library. No; on second thought, missing was the wrong word. The essay made Sam decide Price was a fuss-budget of the first water—probably a nice man, but a fuss-budget just the same—and such men did not miss things, especially when they were dealing with subjects which were clearly close to their hearts.

So—not missing. Concealed.

It didn't quite add up, chron-o-lodge-ick-a-lee speaking. In 1951, a man named Christopher Lavin had succeeded that saint Felicia Culpepper as head librarian. In 1964, Richard Price had become city librarian. Had Price succeeded Lavin? Sam didn't think so. He thought that at some point during those thirteen blank years, a woman named Ardelia Lortz had succeeded Lavin. Price, Sam thought, had succeeded her. She wasn't in Mr. Price's fussbudgety account of the Library because she had done ...
something.
Sam was no closer to knowing what that something might have been, but he had a better idea of the magnitude. Whatever it was, it had been bad enough for Price to make her an unperson in spite of his very obvious love of detail and continuity.