Four Past Midnight

  "No," the girl said. "You really must be mistaken, sir."

  They were starting to look cautious again, and although Sam felt like insisting, telling them of course Ardelia Lortz worked here, he had met her only eight days ago, he made himself pull back. And in a way, it all made perfect sense, didn't it? It was perfect sense within a framework of utter lunacy, granted, but that didn't change the fact that the interior logic was intact. Like the posters, the skylights, and the magazine rack, Ardelia Lortz had simply ceased to exist.

  Naomi spoke up again inside his head. Oh? Miss Lortz, was it? That must have been fun.

  "Naomi recognized the name," he muttered.

  Now the library assistants were looking at him with identical expressions of consternation.

  "Pardon me," Sam said, and tried to smile. It felt crooked on his face. "I'm having one of those days."

  "Yes," the boy said.

  "You bet," the girl said.

  They think I'm crazy, Sam thought, and do you know what? I don't blame them a bit.

  "Was there anything else?" the boy asked.

  Sam opened his mouth to say no--after which he would beat a hasty retreat--and then changed his mind. He was in for a penny; he might as well go in for a pound.

  "How long has Mr. Price been the head librarian?"

  The two assistants exchanged another glance. The girl shrugged. "Since we've been here," she said, "but that's not very long, Mr.--?"

  "Peebles," Sam said, offering his hand. "Sam Peebles. I'm sorry. My manners seem to have flown away with the rest of my mind."

  They both relaxed a little--it was an indefinable thing, but it was there, and it helped Sam do the same. Upset or not, he had managed to hold onto at least some of his not inconsiderable ability to put people at ease. A real-estate-and-insurance salesman who couldn't do that was a fellow who ought to be looking for a new line of work.

  "I'm Cynthia Berrigan," she said, giving his hand a tentative shake. "This is Tom Stanford."

  "Pleased to meet you," Tom Stanford said. He didn't look entirely sure of this, but he also gave Sam's hand a quick shake.

  "Pardon me?" the woman with the mystery novels asked. "Could someone help me, please? I'll be late for my bridge game."

  "I'll do it," Tom told Cynthia, and walked down the desk to check out the woman's books.

  She said, "Tom and I go to Chapelton Junior College, Mr. Peebles. This is a work-study job. I've been here three semesters now--Mr. Price hired me last spring. Tom came during the summer."

  "Mr. Price is the only full-time employee?"

  "Uh-huh." She had lovely brown eyes and now he could see a touch of concern in them. "Is something wrong?"

  "I don't know." Sam looked up again. He couldn't help it. "Has this suspended ceiling been here since you came to work?"

  She followed his glance. "Well," she said, "I didn't know that was what it's called, but yes, it's been this way since I've been here."

  "I had an idea there were skylights, you see."

  Cynthia smiled. "Well, sure. I mean, you can see them from the outside, if you go around to the side of the building. And, of course, you can see them from the stacks, but they're boarded over. The skylights, I mean--not the stacks. I think they've been that way for years."

  For years.

  "And you've never heard of Ardelia Lortz."

  She shook her head. "Uh-uh. Sorry."

  "What about the Library Police?" Sam asked impulsively.

  She laughed. "Only from my old aunt. She used to tell me the Library Police would get me if I didn't bring my books back on time. But that was back in Providence, Rhode Island, when I was a little girl. A long time ago."

  Sure, Sam thought. Maybe as long as ten, twelve years ago. Back when dinosaurs walked the earth.

  "Well," he said, "thanks for the information. I didn't mean to freak you out."

  "You didn't."

  "I think I did, a little. I was just confused for a second."

  "Who is this Ardelia Lortz?" Tom Stanford asked, coming back. "That name rings a bell, but I'll be darned if I know why."

  "That's just it. I don't really know," Sam said.

  "Well, we're closed tomorrow, but Mr. Price will be in Monday afternoon and Monday evening," he said. "Maybe he can tell you what you want to know."

  Sam nodded. "I think I'll come and see him. Meantime, thanks again."

  "We're here to help if we can," Tom said. "I only wish we could have helped you more, Mr. Peebles."

  "Me too," Sam said.

  4

  He was okay until he got to the car, and then, as he was unlocking the driver's-side door, all the muscles in his belly and legs seemed to drop dead. He had to support himself with a hand on the roof of his car to keep from falling down while he swung the door open. He did not really get in; he simply collapsed behind the wheel and then sat there, breathing hard and wondering with some alarm if he was going to faint.

  What's going on here? I feel like a character in Rod Serling's old show. "Submitted for your examination, one Samuel Peebles, ex-resident of Junction City, now selling real estate and whole life in ... the Twilight Zone."

  Yes, that was what it was like. Only watching people cope with inexplicable happenings on TV was sort of fun. Sam was discovering that the inexplicable lost a lot of its charm when you were the one who had to struggle with it.

  He looked across the street at the Library, where people came and went beneath the soft glow of the carriage lamps. The old lady with the mystery novels was headed off down the street, presumably bound for her bridge game. A couple of girls were coming down the steps, talking and laughing together, books held to their blooming chests. Everything looked perfectly normal ... and of course it was. The abnormal Library had been the one he had entered a week ago. The only reason the oddities hadn't struck him more forcibly, he supposed, was because his mind had been on that damned speech of his.

  Don't think about it, he instructed himself, although he was afraid that this was going to be one of those times when his mind simply wouldn't take instruction. Do a Scarlett O'Hara and think about it tomorrow. Once the sun is up, all this will make a lot more sense.

  He put the car in gear and thought about it all the way home.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  NIGHT TERRORS

  1

  The first thing he did after letting himself in was to check the answering machine. His heartbeat cranked up a notch when he saw the MESSAGE WAITING lamp was lit.

  It'll be her. I don't know who she really is, but I'm beginning to think she won't be happy until she's driven me completely crackers.

  Don't listen to it, then, another part of his mind spoke up, and Sam was now so confused he couldn't tell if that was a reasonable idea or not. It seemed reasonable, but it also seemed a little cowardly. In fact--

  He realized that he was standing here in a sweat, gnawing his fingernails, and suddenly grunted--a soft, exasperated noise.

  From the fourth grade to the mental ward, he thought. Well, I'll be damned if it's going to work that way, hon.

  He pushed the button.

  "Hi!" a man's whiskey-roughened voice said. "This is Joseph Randowski, Mr. Peebles. My stage name is The Amazing Joe. I just called to thank you for filling in for me at that Kiwanis meeting or whatever it was. I wanted to tell you that I'm feeling a lot better--my neck was only sprained, not broke like they thought at first. I'm sending you a whole bunch of free tickets to the show. Pass em out to your friends. Take care of yourself. Thanks again. Bye."

  The tape stopped. The ALL MESSAGES PLAYED lamp came on. Sam snorted at his case of nerves--if Ardelia Lortz wanted him jumping at shadows, she was getting exactly what she wanted. He pushed the REWIND button, and a new thought struck him. Rewinding the tape that took his messages was a habit with him, but it meant that the old messages disappeared under the new ones. The Amazing Joe's message would have erased Ardelia's earlier message. His only evidence that the woman actually existed was gone.


  But that wasn't true, was it? There was his library card. He had stood in front of that goddamned circulation desk and watched her sign her name on it in large, flourishing letters.

  Sam pulled out his wallet and went through it three times before admitting to himself that the library card was gone, too. And he thought he knew why. He vaguely remembered tucking it into the inside pocket of Best Loved Poems of the American People.

  For safekeeping.

  So he wouldn't lose it.

  Great. Just great.

  Sam sat down on the couch and put his forehead in his hand. His head was starting to ache.

  2

  He was heating a can of soup on the stove fifteen minutes later, hoping a little hot food would do something for his head, when he thought of Naomi again--Naomi, who looked so much like the woman in Dirty Dave's poster. The question of whether or not Naomi was leading a secret life of some sort under the name of Sarah had taken a back seat to something that seemed a lot more important, at least right now: Naomi had known who Ardelia Lortz was. But her reaction to the name ... it had been a little odd, hadn't it? It had startled her for a moment or two, and she'd started to make a joke, and then the phone had rung and it had been Burt Iverson, and--

  Sam tried to replay the conversation in his mind and was chagrined at how little he remembered. Naomi had said Ardelia was peculiar, all right; he was sure of that, but not much else. It hadn't seemed important then. The important thing then was that his career seemed to have taken a quantum leap forward. And that was still important, but this other thing seemed to dwarf it. In truth, it seemed to dwarf everything. His mind kept going back to that modern no-nonsense suspended ceiling and the short bookcases. He didn't believe he was crazy, not at all, but he was beginning to feel that if he didn't get this thing sorted out, he might go crazy. It was as if he had uncovered a hole in the middle of his head, one so deep you could throw things into it and not hear a splash no matter how big the things you threw were or how long you waited with your ear cocked for the sound. He supposed the feeling would pass--maybe--but in the meantime it was horrible.

  He turned the burner under the soup to LO, went into the study, and found Naomi's telephone number. It rang three times and then a cracked, elderly voice said, "Who is it, please?" Sam recognized the voice at once, although he hadn't seen its owner in person for almost two years. It was Naomi's ramshackle mother.

  "Hello, Mrs. Higgins," he said. "It's Sam Peebles."

  He stopped, waited for her to say Oh, hello, Sam or maybe How are you? but there was only Mrs. Higgins's heavy, emphysemic breathing. Sam had never been one of her favorite people, and it seemed that absence had not made her heart grow fonder.

  Since she wasn't going to ask it, Sam decided he might as well. "How are you, Mrs. Higgins?"

  "I have my good days and my bad ones."

  For a moment Sam was nonplussed. It seemed to be one of those remarks to which there was no adequate reply. I'm sorry to hear that didn't fit, but That's great, Mrs. Higgins! would sound even worse.

  He settled for asking if he could speak to Naomi.

  "She's out this evening. I don't know when she'll be back."

  "Could you ask her to call me?"

  "I'm going to bed. And don't ask me to leave her a note, either. My arthritis is very bad."

  Sam sighed. "I'll call tomorrow."

  "We'll be in church tomorrow morning," Mrs. Higgins stated in the same flat, unhelpful voice, "and the first Baptist Youth Picnic of the season is tomorrow afternoon. Naomi has promised to help."

  Sam decided to call it off. It was clear that Mrs. Higgins was sticking as close to name, rank, and serial number as she possibly could. He started to say goodbye, then changed his mind. "Mrs. Higgins, does the name Lortz mean anything to you? Ardelia Lortz?"

  The heavy wheeze of her respiration stopped in mid-snuffle. For a moment there was total silence on the line and then Mrs. Higgins spoke in a low, vicious voice. "How long are you Godless heathens going to go on throwing that woman in our faces? Do you think it's funny? Do you think it's clever?"

  "Mrs. Higgins, you don't understand. I just want to know--"

  There was a sharp little click in his ear. It sounded as if Mrs. Higgins had broken a small dry stick over her knee. And then the line went dead.

  3

  Sam ate his soup, then spent half an hour trying to watch TV. It was no good. His mind kept wandering away. It might start with the woman in Dirty Dave's poster, or with the muddy footprint on the cover of Best Loved Poems of the American People, or with the missing poster of Little Red Riding Hood. But no matter where it started, it always ended up in the same place: that completely different ceiling above the main reading room of the Junction City Public Library.

  Finally he gave it up and crawled into bed. It had been one of the worst Saturdays he could remember, and might well have been the worst Saturday of his life. The only thing he wanted now was a quick trip into the land of dreamless unconsciousness.

  But sleep didn't come.

  The horrors came instead.

  Chief among them was the idea that he was losing his mind. Sam had never realized just how terrible such an idea could be. He had seen movies where some fellow would go to see a psychiatrist and say "I feel like I'm losing my mind, doc," while dramatically clutching his head, and he supposed he had come to equate the onset of mental instability with an Excedrin headache. It wasn't like that, he discovered as the long hours passed and April 7 gradually became April 8. It was more like reaching down to scratch your balls and finding a large lump there, a lump that was probably a tumor of some kind.

  The Library couldn't have changed so radically in just over a week. He couldn't have seen the skylights from the reading room. The girl, Cynthia Berrigan, had said they were boarded over, had been since she had arrived, at least a year ago. So this was some sort of a mental breakdown. Or a brain tumor. Or what about Alzheimer's disease? There was a pleasant thought. He had read someplace--Newsweek, perhaps--that Alzheimer's victims were getting younger and younger. Maybe the whole weird episode was a signal of creeping, premature senility.

  An unpleasant billboard began to fill his thoughts, a billboard with three words written on it in greasy letters the color of red licorice. These words were LOSING MY MIND.

  He had lived an ordinary life, full of ordinary pleasures and ordinary regrets; a pretty-much-unexamined life. He had never seen his name in lights, true, but he had never had any reason to question his sanity, either. Now he found himself lying in his rumpled bed and wondering if this was how you came untethered from the real, rational world. If this was how it started when you LOST YOUR MIND.

  The idea that the angel of Junction City's homeless shelter was Naomi--Naomi going under an alias--was another nutso idea. It just couldn't be ... could it? He even began to question the strong upsurge in his business. Maybe he had hallucinated the whole thing.

  Toward midnight, his thoughts turned to Ardelia Lortz, and that was when things really began to get bad. He began to think of how awful it would be if Ardelia Lortz was in his closet, or even under his bed. He saw her grinning happily, secretly, in the dark, wriggling fingers tipped with long, sharp nails, her hair sprayed out all around her face in a weird fright-wig. He imagined how his bones would turn to jelly if she began to whisper to him.

  You lost the books, Sam, so it will have to be the Library Policeman . . . you lost the books . . . you looosssst them . . .

  At last, around twelve-thirty, Sam couldn't stand it any longer. He sat up and fumbled in the dark for the bedside lamp. And as he did, he was gripped by a new fantasy, one so vivid it was almost a certainty: he was not alone in his bedroom, but his visitor was not Ardelia Lortz. Oh no. His visitor was the Library Policeman from the poster that was no longer in the Children's Library. He was standing here in the dark, a tall, pale man wrapped in a trenchcoat, a man with a bad complexion and a white, jagged scar lying across his left cheek, below his left eye, and over the
bridge of his nose. Sam hadn't seen that scar on the face in the poster, but that was only because the artist hadn't wanted to put it in. It was there. Sam knew it was there.

  You were wrong about the bushes, the Library Policeman would say in his lightly lisping voice. There are bushes growing along the sideth. Loth of bushes. And we're going to ecthplore them. We're going to ecthplore them together.

  No! Stop it! Just . . . STOP it!

  As his trembling hand finally found the lamp, a board creaked in the room and he uttered a breathless little scream. His hand clenched, squeezing the switch. The light came on. For a moment he actually thought he saw the tall man, and then he realized it was only a shadow cast on the wall by the bureau.

  Sam swung his feet out onto the floor and put his face in his hands for a moment. Then he reached for the pack of Kents on the nightstand.

  "You've got to get hold of yourself," he muttered. "What the fuck were you thinking about?"

  I don't know, the voice inside responded promptly. Furthermore, I don't want to know. Ever. The bushes were a long time ago. I never have to remember the bushes again. Or the taste. That sweet sweet taste.

  He lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply.

  The worst thing was this: Next time he might really see the man in the trenchcoat. Or Ardelia. Or Gorgo, High Emperor of Pellucidar. Because if he'd been able to create a hallucination as complete as his visit to the Library and his meeting with Ardelia Lortz, he could hallucinate anything. Once you started thinking about skylights that weren't there, and people who weren't there, and even bushes that weren't there, everything seemed possible. How did you quell a rebellion in your own mind?

  He went down to the kitchen, turning on lights as he went, resisting an urge to look over his shoulder and see if anyone was creeping after him. A man with a badge in his hand, for instance. He supposed that what he needed was a sleeping pill, but since he didn't have any--not even one of the over-the-counter preparations like Sominex--he would just have to improvise. He splashed milk into a saucepan, heated it, poured it into a coffee mug, and then added a healthy shot of brandy. This was something else he had seen in the movies. He took a taste, grimaced, almost poured the evil mixture down the sink, and then looked at the clock on the microwave. Quarter to one in the morning. It was a long time until dawn, a long time to spend imagining Ardelia Lortz and the Library Policeman creeping up the stairs with knives gripped between their teeth.