Stan Soames didn't seem to be worried, however; he bawled out such hoary old ballads as 'Sweet Sue' and 'The Sidewalks of New York' at the top of his voice as the Navajo lurched toward Des Moines. Naomi was transfixed, peering out of her window at the roads and fields and houses below with her hands cupped to the sides of her face to cut the glare. At last Sam tapped her on the shoulder. 'You act like you've never flown before!' he yelled over the mosquitodrone of the engine. She turned briefly toward him and grinned like an enraptured schoolgirl. 'I haven't!' she said, and returned at once to the view. 'I'll be damned,' Sam said, and then tightened his seatbelt as the plane took another of its gigantic, bucking leaps. 6 It was twenty past four when the Navajo skittered down from the sky and landed at County Airport in Des Moines. Soames taxied to the Civil Air Terminal, killed the engine, then opened the door. Sam was a little amused at the twinge of jealousy he felt as Soames put his hands on Naomi's waist to help her down. 'Thank you!' she gasped. Her cheeks were now deeply flushed and her eyes were dancing. 'That was wonderful!' Soames smiled, and suddenly he looked forty instead of sixty. 'I've always liked it myself,' he said, 'and it beats spendin an afternoon abusin my kidneys on that Rototiller ... I have to admit that.' He looked from Naomi to Sam. 'Can you tell me what this big emergency is? I'll help if I can  I owe Dave a little more'n a puddlejump from Proverbia to Des Moines and back again.' 'We need to go into town,' Sam said. 'To a place called Pell's Book Shop. They're holding a couple of books for us.' Stan Soames looked at them, eyes wide. 'Come again?' 'Pell's ' 'I know Pell's,' he said. 'New books out front, old books in the back. Biggest Selection in the Midwest, the ads say. What I'm tryin to get straight is this you took me away from my garden and got me to fly you all the way across the state to get a couple of books?' 'They're very important books, Mr Soames,' Naomi said. She touched one of his rough farmer's hands. 'Right now, they're just about the most important things in my life . . . or Sam's.' 'Dave's, too,' Sam said. 'If you told me what was going on,' Soames asked, 'would I be apt to understand it?' 'No,' Sam said. 'No,' Naomi agreed, and smiled a little. Soames blew a deep sigh out of his wide nostrils and stuffed his hands into the pockets of his pants. 'Well, I guess it don't matter that much, anyway. I've owed Dave this one for ten years, and there have been times when it's weighed on my mind pretty heavy.' He brightened. 'And I got to give a pretty young lady her first airplane ride. The only thing prettier than a girl after her first plane ride is a girl after her first ' He stopped abruptly and scuffed at the tar with his shoes. Naomi looked discreetly off toward the horizon. Just then a fuel truck drove up. Soames walked over quickly and fell into deep conversation with the driver. Sam said, 'You had quite an effect on our fearless pilot.' 'Maybe I did, at that,' she said. 'I feel wonderful, Sam. Isn't that crazy?' He stroked an errant lock of her hair back into place behind her ear. 'It's been a crazy day. The craziest day I can ever remember.' But the inside voice spoke then  it drifted up from that deep place where great objects were still in motion  and told him that wasn't quite true. There was one other that had been just as crazy. More crazy. The day of The Black Arrow and the red licorice. That strange, stifled panic rose in him again, and he closed his ears to that voice. If you want to save Sarah from Ardelia, Sam, forget about bein a hero and start rememberin who your Library Policeman was. I don't! I can't! I ... I mustn't! You have to get that memory back. I mustn't! It's not allowed! You have to try harder or there's no hope. 'I really have to go home now,' Sam Peebles muttered. Naomi, who had strolled away to look at the Navajo's wingflaps, heard him and came back. 'Did you say something?' 'Nothing. It doesn't matter.' 'You look very pale.' 'I'm very tense,' he said edgily. Stan Soames returned. He cocked a thumb at the driver of the fuel truck. 'Dawson says I can borrow his car. I'll run you into town.' 'We could call a cab ' Sam began. Naomi was shaking her head. 'Time's too short for that,' she said. 'Thank you very much, Mr Soames.' 'Aw, hell,' Soames said, and then flashed her a littleboy grin. 'You go on and call me Stan. Let's go. Dawson says there's low pressure movin in from Colorado. I want to get back to Junction City before the rain starts.' 7 Pell's was a big barnlike structure on the edge of the Des Moines business district  the very antithesis of the mallbred chain bookstore. Naomi asked for Mike. She was directed to the customerservice desk, a kiosk which stood like a customs booth between the section which sold new books and the larger one which sold old books. 'My name is Naomi Higgins. I talked to you on the telephone earlier?' 'Ah, yes,' Mike said. He rummaged on one of his cluttered shelves and brought out two books. One was Best Loved Poems of the American People; the other was The Speaker's Companion, edited by Kent Adelmen. Sam Peebles had never been so glad to see two books in his life, and he found himself fighting an impulse to snatch them from the clerk's hands and hug them to his chest. 'Best Loved Poems is easy,' Mike said, 'but The Speaker's Companion is out of print. I'd guess Pell's is the only bookshop between here and Denver with a copy as nice as this one ... except for library copies, of course.' 'They both look great to me,' Sam said with deep feeling. 'Is it a gift?' 'Sort of.' 'I can have it giftwrapped for you, if you like; it would only take a second.' 'That won't be necessary,' Naomi said. The combined price of the books was twentytwo dollars and fiftyseven cents. 'I can't believe it,' Sam said as they left the store and walked towards the place where Stan Soames had parked the borrowed car. He held the bag tightly in one hand. 'I can't believe it's as simple as just ... just returning the books.' 'Don't worry,' Naomi said. 'It won't be.' 8 As they drove back to the airport, Sam asked Stan Soames if he could tell them about Dave and the baseballs. 'If it's personal, that's okay. I'm just curious.' Soames glanced at the bag Sam held in his lap. 'I'm sorta curious about those, too,' he said. 'I'll make you a deal. The thing with the baseballs happened ten years ago. I'll tell you about that if you'll tell me about the books ten years from now.' 'Deal,' Naomi said from the back seat, and then added what Sam himself had been thinking. 'If we're all still around, of course.' Soames laughed. 'Yeah . . . I suppose there's always that possibility, isn't there?' Sam nodded. 'Lousy things sometimes happen.' 'They sure do. One of em happened to my only boy in 1980. The doctors called it leukemia, but it's really just what you said  one of those lousy things that sometimes happens.' 'Oh, I'm so sorry,' Naomi said. 'Thanks. Every now and then I start to think I'm over it, and then it gets on my blind side and hits me again. I guess some things take a long time to shake out, and some things don't ever shake out.' Some things don't ever shake out. Come with me, son ... I'm a poleethman. I really have to go home now ... is my fine paid? Sam touched the corner of his mouth with a trembling hand. 'Well, hell, I'd known Dave a long time before it ever happened,' Stan Soames said. They passed a sign which read AIRPORT 3 MI. 'We grew up together, went to school together, sowed a mess of wild oats together. The only thing was, I reaped my crop and quit. Dave just went on sowin.' Soames shook his head. 'Drunk or sober, he was one of the sweetest fellows I ever met. But it got so he was drunk more'n he was sober, and we kinda fell out of touch. It seemed like the worst time for him was in the late fifties. During those years he was drunk all the time. After that he started going to AA, and he seemed to get a little better ... but he'd always fall off the wagon with a crash. 'I got married in '68, and I wanted to ask him to be my best man, but I didn't dare. As it happened, he turned up sober  that time  but you couldn't trust him to turn up sober.' 'I know what you mean,' Naomi said quietly. Stan Soames laughed. 'Well, I sort of doubt that  a little sweetie like you wouldn't know what miseries a dedicated boozehound can get himself into  but take it from me. If I'd asked Dave to stand up for me at the wedding, Laura  that's my ex  would have shit bricks. But Dave did come, and I saw him a little more frequently after our boy Joe was born in 1970. Dave seemed to have a special feeling for all kids during those years when he was trying to pull himself out of the bottle. 'The thing Joey loved most was baseball. He was nuts for it  he collected sticker books, chewinggum cards ... he even pestered me to get a satellite dish so we could watch all the Royals games  the Royals were his favorites  and the Cubs, too, on WGN from Chicago. By the time he was eight, he knew the averages of all the Royals starting players, and the wonlost records of damn near every pitcher in the American League. Dave and I took him to games three or four times. It was a lot like taking a kid on a guided tour of heaven. Dave took him alone twice, when I had to work. Laura had a cow about that  said he'd show up drunk as a skunk, with the boy left behind, wandering the streets of KC or sitting in a police station somewhere, waiting for someone to come and get him. But nothing like that ever happened. So far as I know, Dave never took a drink when he was around the boy. 'When Joe got the leukemia, the worst part for him was the doctors telling him he wouldn't be able to go to any games that year at least until June and maybe not at all. He was more depressed about that than he was about having cancer. When Dave came to see him, Joe cried about it. Dave hugged him and said, "If you can't go to the games, Joey, that's okay; I'll bring the Royals to you." 'Joe stared up at him and says, "You mean in person, Uncle Dave?" That's what he called him  Uncle Dave. "'I can't do that," Dave said, "but I can do somethin almost as good."' Soames drove up to the Civil Air Terminal gate and blew the horn. The gate rumbled back on its track and he drove out to where the Navajo was parked. He turned off the engine and just sat behind the wheel for a moment, looking down at his hands. 'I always knew Dave was a talented bastard,' he said finally. 'What I don't know is how he did what he did so damned fast. All I can figure is that he must have worked days and nights both, because he was done in ten days ... and those suckers were good. 'He knew he had to go fast, though. The doctors had told me and Laura the truth, you see, and I'd told Dave. Joe didn't have much chance of pulling through. They'd caught onto what was wrong with him too late. It was roaring in his blood like a grassfire. 'About ten days after Dave made that promise, he comes into my son's hospital room with a paper shoppingbag in each arm. "What you got there, Uncle Dave?" Joe asks, sitting up in bed. He had been pretty low all that day  mostly because he was losing his hair, I think; in those days if a kid didn't have hair most of the way down his back, he was considered to be pretty lowclass  but when Dave came in, he brightened right up. 'The Royals, a course," Dave says back. "Didn't I tell you?" 'Then he put those two shoppingbags down on the bed and spilled em out. And you never, ever, in your whole life, saw such an expression on a little boy's face. It lit up like a Christmas tree ... and ... and shit, I dunno . . .' Stan Soames's voice had been growing steadily thicker. Now he leaned forward against the steering wheel of Dawson's Buick so hard that the horn honked. He pulled a large bandanna from his back pocket, wiped his eyes with it. then blew his nose. Naomi had also leaned forward. She pressed one of her hands against Soames's cheek. 'If this is too hard for you, Mr Soames ' 'No,' he said, and smiled a little. Sam watched as a tear Stan Soames had missed ran its sparkling, unnoticed course down his cheek in the lateafternoon sun. 'It's just that it brings him back so. How he was. That hurts, miss, but it feels good, too. Those two feelings are all wrapped up together.' 'I understand,' she said. 'When Dave tipped over those bags, what spilled out was baseballs  over two dozen of them. But they weren't just baseballs, because there was a face painted on every one, and each one was the face of a player on the 1980 Kansas City Royals baseball team. They weren't those whatdoyoucallums, caricatures, either. They were as good as the faces Norman Rockwell used to paint for the covers of the Saturday Evening Post. I've seen Dave's work  the work he did before he got drinking real heavy  and it was good, but none of it was as good as this. There was Willie Aikens and Frank White and U. L. Washington and George Brett ... Willie Wilson and Amos Otis . . . Dan Quisenberry, lookin as fierce as a gunslinger in an old Western movie ... Paul Splittorff and Ken Brett ... I can't remember all the names, but it was the whole damned roster, including Jim Frey, the field manager. 'And sometime between when he finished em and when he gave em to my son, he took em to KC and got all the players but one to sign em. The one who didn't was Darrell Porter, the catcher. He was out with the flu, and he promised to sign the ball with his face on it as soon as he could. He did, too.' 'Wow,' Sam said softly. 'And it was all Dave's doing  the man I hear people in town laugh about and call Dirty Dave. I tell you, sometimes when I hear people say that and I remember what he did for Joe when Joey was dying of the leukemia, I could ' Soames didn't finish, but his hands curled themselves into fists on his broad thighs. And Sam  who had used the name himself until today, and laughed with Craig Jones and Frank Stephens over the old drunk with his shoppingcart full of newspapers  felt a dull and shameful heat mount into his cheeks. 'That was a wonderful thing to do, wasn't it?' Naomi asked, and touched Stan Soames's cheek again. She was crying. 'You shoulda seen his face,' Soames said dreamily. 'You wouldn't have believed how he looked, sitting up in his bed and looking down at all those faces with their KC baseball caps on their round heads. I can't describe it, but I'll never forget it. 'You shoulda seen his face. 'Joe got pretty sick before the end, but he didn't ever get too sick to watch the Royals on TV  or listen to em on the radio  and he kept those balls all over his room. The windowsill by his bed was the special place of honor, though. That's where he'd line up the nine men who were playing in the game he was watching or listening to on the radio. If Frey took out the pitcher, Joe would take that one down from the windowsill and put up the relief pitcher in his place. And when each man batted, Joe would hold that ball in his hands. So ' Stan Soames broke off abruptly and hid his face in his bandanna. His chest hitched twice, and Sam could see his throat locked against a sob. Then he wiped his eyes again and stuffed the bandanna briskly into his back pocket. 'So now you know why I took you two to Des Moines today, and why I would have taken you to New York to pick up those two books if that's where you'd needed to go. It wasn't my treat; it was Dave's. He's a special sort of man.' 'I think maybe you are, too,' Sam said. Soames gave him a smile  a strange, crooked smile  and opened the door of Dawson's Buick. 'Well, thank you,' he said. 'Thank you kindly. And now I think we ought to be rolling along if we want to beat the rain. Don't forget the books, Miss Higgins.' 'I won't,' Naomi said as she got out with the top of the bag wrapped tightly in her hand. 'Believe me, I won't.' CHAPTER 13 The Library Policeman (II) 1 Twenty minutes after they took off from Des Moines, Naomi tore herself away from the view  she had been tracing Route 79 and marvelling at the toy cars bustling back and forth along it  and turned to Sam. What she saw frightened her. He had fallen asleep with his head resting against one of the windows, but there was no peace on his face; he looked like a man suffering from deep and private pain. Tears trickled slowly from beneath his closed lids and ran down his face. She leaned forward to shake him awake and heard him say in a trembling littleboy's voice 'Am I in trouble, sir?' The Navajo arrowed its way into the clouds now massing over western Iowa and began to buck, but Naomi barely noticed. Her hand paused just above Sam's shoulder for a moment, then withdrew. Who was YOUR Library Policeman, Sam? Whoever it was, Naomi thought, he's found him again, I think. I think he's with him now. I'm sorry, Sam ... but I can't wake you. Not now. Right now I think you're where you're supposed to be ... where you have to be. I'm sorry, but dream on. And remember what you dreamed when you wake up. Remember. Remember. 2 In his dream, Sam Peebles watched as Little Red Riding Hood set off from a gingerbread house with a covered basket over one arm; she was bound for Gramma's house, where the wolf was waiting to eat her from the feet up. It would finish by scalping her and then eating her brains out of her skull with a long wooden spoon. Except none of that was right, because Little Red Riding Hood was a boy in this dream and the gingerbread house was the twostory duplex in St Louis where he had lived with his mother after Dad died and there was no food in the covered basket. There was a book in the basket, The Black Arrow by Robert Louis Stevenson, and he had read it, every word, and he was not bound for Gramma's house but for the Briggs Avenue Branch of the St Louis Public Library, and he had to hurry because his book was already four days overdue. This was a watching dream. He watched as Little White Walking Sam waited at the comer of Dunbar Street and Johnstown Avenue for the light to change. He watched as he scampered across the street with the book in his hand ... the basket was gone now. He watched as Little White Walking Sam went into the Dunbar Street News and then he was inside, too, smelling the old mingled smells of camphor, candy, and pipe tobacco, watching as Little White Walking Sam approached the counter with a nickle package of Bull's Eye red licorice  his favorite. He watched as the little boy carefully removed the dollar bill his mother had tucked into the cardpocket in the back of The Black Arrow. He watched as the clerk took the dollar and returned ninetyfive cents ... more than enough to pay the fine. He watched as Little White Walking Sam left the store and paused on the street outside long enough to put the change in his pocket and tear open the package of licorice with his teeth. He watched as Little White Walking Sam went on his way  only three blocks to the Library now  munching the long red whips of candy as he went. He tried to scream at the boy. Beware! Beware! The wolf is waiting, little boy! Beware the wolf! Beware the wolf! But the boy walked on, eating his red licorice; now he was on Briggs Avenue and the Library, a great pile of red brick, loomed ahead. At this point Sam  Big White PlaneRiding Sam  tried to pull himself out of the dream. He sensed that Naomi and Stan Soames and the world of real things were just outside this hellish egg of nightmare in which he found himself. He could hear the drone of the Navajo's engine behind the sounds of the dream the traffic on Briggs Avenue, the brisk brrrinnng!brrrinnng! of some kid's bikebell, the birds squabbling in the rich leaves of the midsummer elms. He closed his dreaming eyes and yearned toward that world outside the shell, the world of real things. And more he sensed he could reach it, that he could hammer through the shell No, Dave said. No, Sam, don't do that. You mustn't do that. If you want to save Sarah from Ardelia, forget about breaking out of this dream. There's only one coincidence in this business, but it's a killer once You had a Library Policeman, too. And you have to get that memory back. I don't want to see. I don't want to know. Once was bad enough. Nothing is as bad as what's watting for you, Sam. Nothing. He opened his eyes  not his outer eyes but the inside ones; the dreaming eyes. Now Little White. Walking Sam is on the concrete path which approaches the east side of the Public Library, the concrete path which leads to the Children's Wing. He moves in a kind of portentous slow motion, each step the soft swish of a pendulum in the glass throat of a grandfather clock, and everything is clear the tiny sparks of mica and quartz gleaming in the concrete walk; the cheerful roses which border the concrete walk; the thick drift of green bushes along the side of the building; the climbing ivy on the red brick wall; the strange and somehow frightening Latin motto, Fuimus, non sumus, carved in a brief semicircle over the green doors with their thick panes of wirereinforced glass. And the Library Policeman standing by the steps is clear, too. He is not pale. He is flushed. There are pimples on his forehead, red and flaring. He is not tall but of medium height with extremely broad shoulders. He is wearing not a trenchcoat but an overcoat, and that's very odd because this is a summer day, a hot St Louis summer day. His eyes might be silver; Little White Walking Sam cannot see what color they are, because the Library Policeman is wearing little round black glasses  blind man's glasses. He's not a Library Policeman! He's the wolf! Beware! He's the wolf! The Library WOLF! But Little White Walking Sam doesn't hear. Little White Walking Sam isn't afraid. It is, after all, bright daylight, and the city is full of strange  and sometimes amusing  people. He has lived all his life in St Louis, and he's not afraid of it. That is about to change. He approaches the man, and as he draws closer he notices the scar a tiny white thread which starts high on the left cheek, dips beneath the left eye, and peters out on the bridge of the nose. Hello there, son, the man in the round black glasses says. Hello, says Little White Walking Sam. Do you mind telling me thomething about the book you have before you go inthide? the man asks. His voice is soft and polite, not a bit threatening. A faint lisp clips lightly along the top of his speech, turning some of his ssounds into diphthongs. I work for the Library, you thee. It's called The Black Arrow, Little White Walking Sam says politely, and it's by Mr Robert Louis Stevenson. He's dead. He died of toobercluerosis. It was very good. There were some great battles. The boy waits for the man in the little round black glasses to step aside and let him go in, but the man in the little round black glasses does not stand aside. The man only bends down to look at him more closely. Grandpa, what little round black eyes you have. One other question, the man says. Is your book overdue? Now Little White Walking Sam is more afraid. Yes ... but only a little. Only four days. It was very long, you see, and I have Little League, and day camp, and Come with me' son ... I'm a poleethman. The man in the black glasses and the overcoat extends a hand. For a moment Sam almost runs. But he is a kid; this man is an adult. This man works for the Library. This man is a policeman. Suddenly this man  this scary man with his scar and his round black glasses  is all Authority. One cannot run from Authority; it is everywhere. Sam timidly approaches the man. He begins to lift his hand  the one holding the package of red licorice, which is now almost empty  and then tries to pull it back at the last second. He is too late. The man seizes it. The package of Bull's Eye licorice falls to the walk. Little White Walking Sam will never eat red licorice again. The man pulls Sam toward him, reels him in the way a fisherman would reel in a trout. The hand clamped over Sam's is very strong. It hurts. Sam begins to cry. The sun is still out, the grass is still green, but suddenly the whole world seems distant, no more than a cruel mirage in which he was for a little while allowed to believe. He can smell SenSen on the man's breath. Am I in trouble, sir? he asks, hoping with every fiber of his being that the man will say no. Yes, the man says. Yes, you are. In a LOT of trouble. And if you want to get out of trouble, son, you have to do eahactly as I thay. Do you underthand? Sam cannot reply. He has never been so afraid. He can only look up at the man with wide, streaming eyes. The man shakes him. Do you underthand or not? Ye yes! Sam gasps. He feels an almost irresistible heaviness in his bladder. Let me tell you ectliactly who I am, the man says, breathing little puffs of SenSen in Sam's face. I am the Briggth Avenue Library Cop, and I am in charge of punishing boyth and girlth who bring their books back late. Little White Walking Sam begins to cry harder. I've got the money! he manages through his sobs. I've got ninetyfive cents! You can have it! You can have it all! He tries to pull the change out of his pocket. At the same moment the Library Cop looks around and his broad face suddenly seems sharp, suddenly the face of a fox or wolf who has successfully broken into the chicken house but now smells danger. Come on, he says, and jerks Little White Walking Sam off the path and into the thick bushes which grow along the side of the Library. When the poleethman tellth you to come, you COME! It is dark in here; dark and mysterious. The air smells of pungent juniper berries. The ground is dark with mulch. Sam is crying very loudly now. Thut up! the Library Policeman grunts, and gives Sam a hard shake. The bones in Sam's hand grind together painfully. His head wobbles on his neck. They have reached a little clearing in the jungle of bushes now, a cove where the junipers have been smashed flat and the ferns broken off, and Sam understands that this is more than a place the Library Cop knows; it is a place he has made. Thut up, or the fine will only be the beginning! I'll have to call your mother and tell her what a bad bay you've been! Do you want that? No! Sam weeps. I'll pay the fine! I'll pay it, mister, but please don't hurt me! The Library Policeman spins Little White Walking Sam around. Put your hands up on the wall! Thpread your feet! Now! Quick! Still sobbing, but terrified that his mother may find out he has done something bad enough to merit this sort of treatment, Little White Walking Sam does as the Library Cop tells him. The red bricks are cool, cool in the shade of the bushes which lie against this side of the building in a tangled, untidy heap. He sees a narrow window at ground level. It looks down into the Library's boiler room. Bare bulbs shaded with rounds of tin like Chinese coolie hats hang over the giant boiler; the ductpipes throw weird octopustangles of shadow. He sees a janitor standing at the far wall, his back to the window, reading dials and making notes on a clipboard. The Library Cop seizes Sam's pants and pulls them down. His underpants come with them. He jerks as the cool air strikes his bum. Thdeady, the Library Policeman pants. Don't move. Once you pay the fine, son, it's over ... and no one needth to know. Something heavy and hot presses itself against his bottom. Little White Walking Sam jerks again. Thdeady, the Library Policeman says. He is panting harder now; Sam feels hot blurts of breath on his left shoulder and smells SenSen. He is lost in terror now, but terror isn't all that he feels there is shame, as well. He has been dragged into the shadows, is being forced to submit to this grotesque, unknown punishment, because he has been late returning The Black Arrow. If he had only known that fines could run this high ! The heavy thing jabs into his bottom, thrusting his buttocks apart. A horrible, tearing pain laces upward from Little White Walking Sam's vitals. There has never been pain like this, never in the world. He drops The Black Arrow and shoves his wrist sideways into his mouth, gagging his own cries. Thdeady, the Library Wolf pants, and now his hands descend on Sam's shoulders and he is rocking back and forth, in and out, back and forth, in and out. Thdeady ... thdeaady ... oooh! Thdeeeaaaaaaddyyyyy Gasping and rocking, the Library Cop pounds what feels like a huge hot bar of steel in and out of Sam's bum; Sam stares with wide eyes into the Library basement, which is in another universe, an orderly universe where gruesome things like this don't ever happen. He watches the janitor nod, tuck his clipboard under his arm, and walk toward the door at the far end of the room. If the janitor turned his head just a little and raised his eyes slightly, he would see a face peering in the window at him, the pallid, wideeyed face of a little boy with red licorice on his lips. Part of Sam wants the janitor to do just that  to rescue him the way the woodcutter rescued Little Red Riding Hood  but most of him knows the janitor would only turn away, disgusted, at the sight of another bad little boy submitting to his just punishment at the hands of the Briggs Avenue Library Cop. Thdeadeeeeeeeeeee! the Library Wolf whisperscreams as the janitor goes out the door and into the rest of his orderly universe without looking around. The Wolf thrusts even further forward and for one agonized second the pain becomes so bad Little White Walking Sam is sure his belly will explode, that whatever it is the Library Cop has stuck up his bottom will simply come raving out the front of him, pushing his guts ahead of it. The Library Cop collapses against him in a smear of rancid sweat, panting harshly, and Sam slips to his knees under his weight. As he does, the massive object  no longer quite so massive  pulls out of him, but Sam can feel wetness all over his bottom. He is afraid to put his hands back there. He is afraid that when they come back he will discover he has become Little Red Bleeding Sam. The Library Cop suddenly grasps Sam's arm and pulls him around to face him. His face is redder than ever, flushed in puffy, hectic bands like warpaint across his cheeks and forehead. Look at you! the Library Cop says. His face pulls together in a knot of contempt and disgust. Look at you with your panth down and your little dingle out! You liked it, didn't you? YOU LIKED It! Sam cannot reply. He can only weep. He pulls his underwear and his pants up together, as they were pulled down. He can feel mulch inside them, prickling his violated bottom, but he doesn't care. He squirms backward from the Library Cop until his back is to the Library's red brick wall. He can feel tough branches of ivy, like the bones of a large, fleshless hand, poking into his back. He doesn't care about this, either. All he cares about is the shame and terror and the sense of worthlessness that now abide in him, and of these three the shame is the greatest. The shame is beyond comprehension. Dirty boy! the Library Cop spits at him. Dirty little boy! I really have to go home now, Little White Walking Sam says, and the words come out minced into segments by his hoarse sobs Is my fine paid? The Library Cop crawls toward Sam on his hands and knees, his little round black eyes peering into Sam's face like the blind eyes of a mole, and this is somehow the final grotesquerie. Sam thinks, He is going to puntsh me again, and at this idea something in his mind, some overstressed strut or armature, gives way with a soggy snap he can almost hear. He does not cry or protest; he is now past that. He only looks at the Library Cop with silent apathy. No, the Library Cop says. I'm letting you go, thatth all. I'm taking pity on you, but if you ever tell anyone ... ever ... I'll come back and do it again. I'll do it until the fine is paid.


And don't you ever let me catch you around here again, son. Do you underthand? Yes, Sam says. Of course he will come back and do it again if Sam tells. He will be in the closet late at night; under the bed; perched in a tree like some gigantic, misshapen crow. When Sam looks up into a troubled sky, he will see the Library Policeman's twisted, contemptuous face in the clouds. He will be anywhere; he will be everywhere. This thought makes Sam tired, and he closes his eyes against that lunatic moleface, against everything. The Library Cop grabs him, shakes him again. Yeth, what? he hisses. Yeth what, son? Yes, I understand, Sam tells him without opening his eyes. The Library Policeman withdraws his hand. Good, he says. You better not forget. When bad boys and girls forget, I kill them. Little White Walking Sam sits against the wall with his eyes closed for a long time, waiting for the Library Cop to begin punishing him again, or to simply kill him. He wants to cry, but there are no tears. It will be years before he cries again, over anything. At last he opens his eyes and sees he is alone in the Library Cop's den in the bushes. The Library Cop is gone. There is only Sam, and his copy of The Black Arrow, lying open on its spine. Sam begins to crawl toward daylight on his hands and knees. Leaves tickle his sweaty, tearstreaked face, branches scrape his back and spank against his hurt bottom. He takes The Black Arrow with him, but he will not bring it into the Library. He will never go into the Library, any Library, ever again this is the promise he makes to himself as he crawls away from the place of his punishment. He makes another promise, as well nobody will ever find out about this terrible thing, because he intends to forget it ever happened. He senses he can do this. He can do it if he tries very, very hard, and he intends to start trying very, very hard right now. When he reaches the edge of the bushes, he looks out like a small hunted animal. He sees kids crossing the lawn. He doesn't see the Library Cop, but of course this doesn't matter; the Library Cop sees him. From today on, the Library Cop will always be close. At last the lawn is empty. A small, dishevelled boy, Little White Crawling Sam, wriggles out of the bushes with leaves in his hair and dirt on his face. His untucked shirt billows below him. His eyes are wide and staring and no longer completely sane. He sidles over to the concrete steps, casts one cringing, terrified look up at the cryptic Latin motto inscribed over the door, and then lays his book down on one of the steps with all the care and terror of an orphan girl leaving her nameless child on some stranger's doorstep. Then Little White Walking Sam becomes Little White Running Sam he runs across the lawn, he sets the Briggs Avenue Branch of the St Louis Public Library to his back and runs, but it doesn't matter how fast he runs because he can't outrun the taste of red licorice on his tongue and down his throat, sweet and sugarslimy, and no matter how fast he runs the Library Wolf of course runs with him, the Library Wolf is just behind his shoulder where he cannot see, and the Library Wolf is whispering Come with me, son ... I'm a poleethman, and he will always whisper that, through all the years he will whisper that, in those dark dreams Sam dares not remember he will whisper that, Sam will always run from that voice screaming Is it paid yet? Is the fine paid yet? Oh dear God please, IS MY FINE PAID YET? And the answer which comes back is always the same It will never be paid, son; it will never be paid. Never. Nev CHAPTER 14 The Library (III) 1 The final approach to the dirt runway which Stan called the Proverbia Airport was bumpy and scary. The Navajo came down, feeling its way through stacks of angry air, and landed with a final jarring thump. When it did, Sam uttered a pinched scream. His eyes flew open. Naomi had been waiting patiently for something like this. She leaned forward at once, ignoring the seatbelt which cut into her middle, and put her arms around him. She ignored his raised arms and first instinctive drawing away, just as she ignored the first hot and unpleasant outrush of horrified breath. She had comforted a great many drunks in the grip of the d.t.'s; this wasn't much different. She could feel his heart as she pressed against him. It seemed to leap and skitter just below his shirt. 'It's okay. Sam, it's okay  it's just me, and you're back. It was a dream. You're back.' For a moment he continued trying to push himself into his scat. Then he collapsed, limp. His hands came up and hugged her with panicky tightness. 'Naomi,' he said in a harsh, choked voice. 'Naomi, oh Naomi, oh dear Jesus, what a nightmare I had, what a terrible dream.' Stan had radioed ahead, and someone had come out to turn on the runway landing lights. They were taxiing between them toward the end of the runway now. They had not beaten the rain after all; it drummed hollowly on the body of the plane. Up front, Stan Soames was bellowing out something which might have been 'Camptown Races.' 'Was it a nightmare?' Naomi asked, drawing back from Sam so she could look into his bloodshot eyes. 'Yes. But it was also true. All true.' 'Was it the Library Policeman, Sam? Your Library Policeman?' 'Yes,' he whispered, and pressed his face into her hair. 'Do you know who he is? Do you know who he is now, Sam?' After a long, long moment, Sam whispered 'I know.' 2 Stan Soames took a look at Sam's face as he and Naomi stepped from the plane and was instantly contrite. 'Sorry it was so rough. I really thought we'd beat the rain. It's just that with a headwind ' 'I'll be okay,' Sam said. He was, in fact, looking better already. 'Yes,' Naomi said. 'He'll be fine. Thank you, Stan. Thank you so much. And Dave thanks you, too.' 'Well, as long as you got what you needed?' 'We did,' Sam assured him. 'We really did.' 'Let's walk around the end of the runway,' Stan told them. 'That boggy place'd suck you right in to your waist if you tried the shortcut this evening. Come on into the house. We'll have coffee. There's some apple pie, too, I think.' Sam glanced at his watch. It was quarter past seven. 'We'll have to take a raincheck, Stan,' he said. 'Naomi and I have to get these books into town right away.' 'You ought to at least come in and dry off. You're gonna be soaked by the time you get to your car.' Naomi shook her head. 'It's very important.' 'Yeah,' Stan said. 'From the look of you two, I'd say it is. Just remember that you promised to tell me the story.' 'We will, too,' Sam said. He glanced at Naomi and saw his own thought reflected in her eyes If we're still alive to tell it. 3 Sam drove, resisting an urge to tromp the gas pedal all the way to the floor. He was worried about Dave. Driving off the road and turning Naomi's car over in the ditch wasn't a very effective way of showing concern, however, and the rain in which they had landed was now a downpour driven by a freshening wind. The wipers could not keep up with it, even on high, and the headlights petered out after twenty feet. Sam dared drive no more than twentyfive. He glanced at his watch, then looked over at where Naomi sat, with the bookshop bag in her lap. 'I hope we can make it by eight,' he said, 'but I don't know.' 'Just do the best you can, Sam.' Headlights, wavery as the lights of an undersea diving bell, loomed ahead. Sam slowed to ten miles an hour and squeezed left as a tenwheeler rumbled by  a halfglimpsed hulk in the rainy darkness. 'Can you talk about it? The dream you had?' 'I could, but I'm not going to,' he said. 'Not now. It's the wrong time.' Naomi considered, this, then nodded her head. 'All right.' 'I can tell you this much  Dave was right when he said children made the best meal, and he was right when he said that what she really lived on is fear.' They had reached the outskirts of town. A block further on, they drove through their first lightcontrolled intersection. Through the Datsun's windshield, the signal was only a brightgreen smear dancing in the air above them. A corresponding smear danced across the smooth wet hide of the pavement. 'I need to make one stop before we get to the Library,' Sam said. 'The Piggly Wiggly's on the way, isn't it?' 'Yes, but if we're going to meet Dave behind the Library at eight, we really don't have much time to spare. Like it or not, this is goslow weather.' 'I know  but this won't take long.' 'What do you need?' 'I'm not sure,' he said, 'but I think I'll know it when I see it.' She glanced at him, and for the second time he found himself amazed by the foxlike, fragile quality of her beauty, and unable to understand why he had never seen it before today. Well, you dated her, didn't you? You must have seen SOMETHING. Except he hadn't. He had dated her because she was pretty, presentable, unattached, and approximately his own age. He had dated her because bachelors in cities which were really just overgrown small towns were supposed to date ... if they were bachelors interested in making a place for themselves in the local business community, that was. If you didn't date, people ... some people ... might think you were (a poleethman) a little bit funny. I WAS a little funny, he thought. On second thought, I was a LOT funny. But whatever I was, I think Pm a little different now. And I am seeing her. There's that. I'm really SEEING her. For Naomi's part, she was struck by the strained whiteness of his face and the look of tension around his eyes and mouth. He looked strange ... but he no longer looked terrified. Naomi thought He looks like a man who has been granted the opportunity to return to his worst nightmare ... with some Powerful weapon in his hands. She thought it was a face she might be falling in love with, and this made her deeply uneasy. 'This stop ... it's important, isn't it?' 'I think so, yes.' Five minutes later he stopped in the parking lot of the Piggly Wiggly store. Sam was out at once and dashing for the door through the rain. Halfway there, he stopped. A telephone booth stood at the side of the parking lot  the same booth, undoubtedly, where Dave had made his call to the Junction City Sheriffs Office all those years before. The call made from that booth had not killed Ardelia . . . but it had driven her off for a good long while. Sam stepped into it. The light went on. There was nothing to see; it was just a phone booth with numbers and graffiti scribbled on the steel walls. The telephone book was gone, and Sam remembered Dave saying, This was back in the days when you could sometimes still find a telephone book in a telephone booth, if you were lucky. Then he glanced at the floor, and saw what he had been looking for. It was a wrapper. He picked it up, smoothed it out, and read what was written there in the dingy overhead light Bull's Eye Red Licorice. From behind him, Naomi beat an impatient tattoo on the Datsun's horn. Sam left the booth with the wrapper in his hand, waved to her, and ran into the store through the pouring rain. 4 The Piggly Wiggly clerk looked like a young man who had been cryogenically frozen in 1969 and thawed out just that week. His eyes had the red and slightly glazed look of the veteran dopesmoker. His hair was long and held with a rawhide jesus thong. On one pinky he wore a silver ring beaten into the shape of the peace sign. Beneath his Piggly Wiggly tunic was a billowy shirt in an extravagant flower print. Pinned to the collar was a button which read MY FACE IS LEAVING IN 5 MINUTES BE ON IT! Sam doubted if this was a sentiment of which the store manager would have approved ... but it was a rainy night, and the store manager was nowhere in sight. Sam was the only customer in the place, and the clerk watched him with a bemused and uninvolved eye as he went to the candy rack and began to pick up packages of Bull's Eye Red Licorice. Sam took the entire stock  about twenty packages. 'You sure you got enough, dude?' the clerk asked him as Sam approached the counter and laid his trove upon it. 'I think there might be another carton or two of the stuff out back in the storeroom. I know how it is when you get a serious case of the munchies.' 'This should do. Ring it up, would you? I'm in a hurry.' 'Yeah, it's a hurryass world,' the clerk said. His fingers tripped over the keys of the NCR register with the dreamy slowness of the habitually stoned. There was a rubber band lying on the counter beside a baseballcard display. Sam picked it up. 'Could I have this?' 'Be my guest, dude  consider it a gift from me, the Prince of Piggly Wiggly, to you, the Lord of Licorice, on a rainy Monday evening.' As Sam slipped the rubber band over his wrist (it hung there like a loose bracelet), a gust of wind strong enough to rattle the windows shook the building. The lights overhead flickered. 'Whoa, dude,' the Prince of Piggly Wiggly said, looking up. 'That wasn't in the forecast. Just showers, they said.' He looked back down at the register. 'Fifteen fortyone.' Sam handed him a twenty with a small, bitter smile. 'This stuff was a hell of a lot cheaper when I was a kid.' '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 sportcoat 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 selfhelp 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 fivedollar 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, waxytextured 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 bloodsucking 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 byGod 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 757. 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, juniorhighschoolers 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, nastysmelling 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 tailpipe 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 806 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 rainkerchief 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 Uturned 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 loadingunloading area. A single orange arcsodium 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 treebranch dropped to the pavement not three feet from the Datsun's trunk, exploding chunks of bark and rotinfested wood in every direction. If it had landed on top of the car, it would have smashed the roof in like a tomatosoup 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 loadingplatform steps before he realized that, although he still had the snottextured 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 arcsodium security lamp was gone. It had been replaced by an oldfashioned mercuryvapor 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 bookcataloguing area which was dim but not entirely dark. A small table lamp with a redfringed 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 halfnelson, 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 halfturn 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, halfhearted reflex. He collided with the fireextinguisher 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.


'Dave!' Naomi shrieked, and darted toward him. 'Naomi, no!' But she paid no attention. The Library Policeman's grin reappeared; he grabbed Naomi by the arm as she tried to go past and curled her to him. His face came down and was for a moment hidden by the chestnutcolored hair at the nape of her neck. He uttered a strange, muffled cough against her flesh and then began kissing her  or so it appeared. His long white hand dug into her upper arm. Naomi screamed again, and then seemed to slump a little in his grip. Sam had reached the entrance to the stacks now. He seized the first book his hand touched, yanked it off the shelf, cocked his arm back, and threw it. It flew end over end, the boards spreading, the pages riffling, and struck the Library Policeman on the side of the head. He uttered a cry of rage and surprise and looked up. Naomi tore free of his grasp and staggered sideways into one of the high shelves, flagging her arms for balance. The shelf rocked backward as she rebounded, and then fell with a gigantic echoing crash. Books flew off shelves where they might have stood undisturbed for years and struck the floor in a rain of slaps that sounded oddly like applause. Naomi ignored this. She reached Dave and fell on her knees beside him, crying his name over and over. The Library Policeman turned in that direction. 'Your argument isn't with her, either,' Sam said. The Library Policeman turned back to him. His silver eyes had been replaced with small black glasses that gave his face a blind, molelike look. 'I should have killed you the firtht time,' he said, and began to walk toward Sam. His walk was accompanied by a queer brushing sound. Sam looked down and saw the hem of the Library Cop's trenchcoat was now brushing the floor. He was growing shorter. 'The fine is paid,' Sam said quietly. The Library Policeman stopped. Sam held up the books with the fivedollar bill beneath the elastic. 'The fine is paid and the books are returned. It's all over, you bitch ... or bastard ... or whatever you are.' Outside, the wind rose in a long, hollow cry which ran beneath the eaves like glass. The Library Policeman's tongue crept out and slicked his lips. It was very red, very pointed. Blemishes had begun to appear on his cheeks and forehead. There was a greasy lens of sweat on his skin. And the smell of lavender sachet was much stronger. 'Wrong!' the Library Policeman cried. 'Wrong! Those aren't the bookth you borrowed! I know! That drunk old cockthucker took the bookth you borrowed! They were ' ' destroyed,' Sam finished. He began to walk again, closing in on the Library Policeman, and the lavender smell grew stronger with every step he took. His heart was racing in his chest. 'I know whose idea that was, too. But these are perfectly acceptable replacements. Take them.' His voice rose into a stern shout. 'Take them, damn you!' He held the books out, and the Library Policeman, looking confused and afraid, reached for them. 'No, not like that,' Sam said, raising the books above the white, grasping hand. 'Like this.' He brought the books down in the Library Policeman's face  brought them down hard. He could not remember ever feeling such sublime satisfaction in his life as that which he felt when Best Loved Poems of the American People and The Speaker's Companion struck and broke the Library Policeman's nose. The round black glasses flew off his face and fell to the floor. Beneath them were black sockets lined with a bed of whitish fluid. Tiny threads floated up from this oozy stuff, and Sam thought about Dave's story  looked like it was startin to grow its own skin, he had said. The Library Policeman screamed. 'You can't!' it screamed. 'You can't hurt me! You're afraid of me! Besides, you liked it! YOU LIKED it! YOU DIRTY LITTLE BOY, YOU LIKED IT!' 'Wrong,' Sam said. 'I fucking hated it. Now take these books. Take them and get out of here. Because the fine is paid.' He slammed the books into the Library Policeman's chest. And, as the Library Policeman's hands closed on them, Sam hoicked one knee squarely into the Library Policeman's crotch. 'That's for all the other kids,' he said. 'The ones you fucked and the ones she ate.' The creature wailed with pain. His flailing hands dropped the books as he bent to cup his groin. His greasy black hair fell over his face, mercifully hiding those blank, threadchoked sockets. Of course they are blank, Sam had time to think. I never saw the eyes behind the glasses he wore that day ... so SHE couldn't see them, either. 'That doesn't pay your fine,' Sam said, 'but it's a step in the right direction, isn't it?' The Library Policeman's trenchcoat began to writhe and ripple, as if some unimaginable transformation had begun beneath it. And when he ... It ... looked up, Sam saw something which drove him back a step in horror and revulsion. The man who had come half from Dave's poster and half from Sam's own mind had become a misshapen dwarf. The dwarf was becoming something else, a dreadful hermaphroditic creature. A sexual storm was happening on its face and beneath the bunching, twitching trenchcoat. Half the hair was still black; the other half was ashblonde. One socket was still empty; a savage blue eye glittered hate from the other. 'I want you,' the dwarfish creature hissed. 'I want you, and I'll have you.' 'Try me, Ardelia,' Sam said. 'Let's rock and r ' He reached for the thing before him, but screamed and withdrew his hand as soon as it snagged in the trenchcoat. It wasn't a coat at all; it was some sort of dreadful loose skin, and it was like trying to grip a mass of freshly used teabags. It scuttered up the canted side of the fallen bookshelf and thumped into the shadows on the far side. The smell of lavender sachet was suddenly much stronger. A brutal laugh drifted up from the shadows. A woman's laugh. 'Too late, Sam,' she said. 'It's already too late. The deed is done.' Ardelia's back, Sam thought, and from outside there was a tremendous, rending crash. The building shuddered as a tree fell against it, and the lights went out. 9 They were in total darkness only for a second, but it seemed much longer. Ardelia laughed again, and this time her laughter had a strange, hooting quality, like laughter broadcast through a megaphone. Then a single emergency bulb high up on one wall went on, throwing a pallid sheaf of light over this section of the stacks and flinging shadows everywhere like tangles of black yarn. Sam could hear the light's battery buzzing noisily. He made his way to where Naomi still knelt beside Dave, twice almost falling as his feet slid in piles of books which had spilled from the overturned case. Naomi looked up at him. Her face was white and shocked and streaked with tears. 'Sam, I think he's dying.' He knelt beside Dave. The old man's eyes were shut and he was breathing in harsh, almost random gasps. Thin trickles of blood spilled from both nostrils and from one ear. There was a deep, crushed dent in his forehead, just above the right eyebrow. Looking at it made Sam's stomach clench. One of Dave's cheekbones was clearly broken, and the fireextinguisher's handle was printed on that side of his face in bright fines of blood and bruise. It looked like a tattoo. 'We've got to get him to a hospital, Sam!' 'Do you think she'd let us out of here now?' he asked, and, as if in answer to this question, a huge book  the T volume of The Oxford English Dictionary came flying at them from beyond the rough circle of light thrown by the emergency unit mounted on the wall. Sam pulled Naomi backward and they both went sprawling in the dusty aisle. Seven pounds of tabasco, tendril, tomcat and trepan slammed through the space where Naomi's head had been a moment before, hit the wall, and splashed to the floor in an untidy, tented heap. From the shadows came shrill laughter. Sam rose to his knees in time to see a hunched shape flit down the aisle beyond the fallen bookcase. It's still changing, Sam thought. Into what, God only knows. It buttonhooked to the left and was gone. 'Get her, Sam,' Naomi said hoarsely. She gripped one of his hands. 'Get her, please get her.' 'I'll try,' he said. He stepped over Dave's sprawled legs and entered the deeper shadows beyond the overturned bookcase. 10 The smell freaked him out  the smell of lavender sachet mixed with the dusty aroma of books from all those latter years. That smell, mingled with the freighttrain whoop of the wind outside, made him feel like H. G. Wells's Time Traveller ... and the Library itself, bulking all around him, was his time machine. He walked slowly down the aisle, squeezing the ball of red licorice nervously in his left hand. Books surrounded him, seemed to frown down at him. They climbed to a height that was twice his own. He could hear the click and squeak of his shoes on the old linoleum. 'Where are you?' he shouted. 'If you want me, Ardelia, why don't you come on and get me? I'm right here!' No answer. But she would have to come out soon, wouldn't she? If Dave was right, her change was upon her, and her time was short. Midnight, he thought. The Library Policeman gave me until midnight, so maybe that's how long she has. But that's over three and a half hours away . Dave can't possibly wait that long. Then another thought, even less pleasant, occurred suppose that, while he was mucking around back here in these dark aisles, Ardelia was circling her way back to Naomi and Dave? lie came to the end of the aisle, listened, heard nothing, and slipped over into the next. It was empty. He heard a low whispering sound from above him and looked up just in time to see half a dozen heavy books sliding oat from one of the shelves above his head. He lunged backward with a cry as the books fell, striking his thighs, and heard Ardelia's crazy laughter from the other side of the bookcase. He could imagine her up there, clinging to the shelves like a spider bloated with poison, and his body seemed to act before his brain could think. He slewed around on his heels like a drunken soldier trying to do an about face and threw his back against the shelf. The laughter turned to a scream of fear and surprise as the stack tilted under Sam's weight. He heard a meaty thud as the thing hurled itself from its perch. A second later the stack went over. What happened then was something Sam had not foreseen the stack he had pushed toppled across the aisle, shedding its books in a waterfall as it went, and struck the next one. The second fell against a third, the third against a fourth, and then they were all falling like dominoes, all the way across this huge, shadowy storage area, crashing and clanging and spilling everything from Marryat's works to The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales. He heard Ardelia scream again and then Sam launched himself at the tilted bookcase he had pushed over. He climbed it like a ladder, kicking books out of his way in search of toeholds, yanking himself upward with one hand. He threw himself down on the far side and saw a white, hellishly misshapen creature pulling itself from beneath a jackstraw tumble of atlases and travel volumes. It had blonde hair and blue eyes, but any resemblance to humanity ceased there. Its illusions were gone. The creature was a fat, naked thing with arms and legs that appeared to end in jointed claws. A sac of flesh hung below its neck like a deflated goiter. Thin white fibers stormed around its body. There was something horridly beetlelike about it, and Sam was suddenly screaming inside  silent, atavistic screams which seemed to radiate out along his bones. This is it. God help me, this is it. He felt revulsion, but suddenly his terror was gone; now that he could actually see the thing, it was not so bad. Then it began to change again, and Sam's feeling of relief faded. It did not have a face, exactly, but below the bulging blue eyes, a horn shape began to extrude itself, pushing out of the horrorshow face like a stubby elephant's trunk. The eyes stretched away to either side, becoming first Chinese and then insectile. Sam could hear it sniffing as it stretched toward him. It was covered with wavering, dusty threads. Part of him wanted to pull back  was screaming at him to pull back  but most of him wanted to stand his ground. And as the thing's fleshy proboscis touched him, Sam felt its deep power. A sense of lethargy filled him, a feeling that it would be better if he just stood still and let it happen. The wind had become a distant, dreamy howl. It was soothing, in a way, as the sound of the vacuum cleaner had been soothing when he was very small. 'Sam?' Naomi called, but her voice was distant, unimportant. 'Sam, are you all right?' Had he thought he loved her? That was silly. Quite ridiculous, when you thought about it ... when you got right down to it, this was much better. This creature had ... stories to tell. Very interesting stories. The white thing's entire plastic body now yearned toward the proboscis; it fed itself into itself, and the proboscis elongated. The creature became a single tubeshaped thing, the rest of its body hanging as useless and forgotten as that sac below its neck had hung. All its vitality was invested in the horn of flesh, the conduit through which it would suck Sam's vitality and essence into itself. And it was nice. The proboscis slipped gently up Sam's legs, pressed briefly against his groin, then rose higher, caressing his belly. Sam fell on his knees to give it access to his face. He felt his eyes sting briefly and pleasantly as some fluid  not tears, this was thicker than tears  began to ooze from them. The proboscis closed in on his eyes; he could see a pink petal of flesh opening and closing hungrily inside there. Each time it opened, it revealed a deeper darkness beyond. Then it clenched, forming a hole in the petal, a tube within a tube, and it slipped with sensual slowness across his lips and cheek toward that sticky outflow. Misshapen darkblue eyes gazed at him hungrily. But the fine was paid. Summoning every last bit of his strength, Sam clamped his right hand over the proboscis. It was hot and noxious. The tiny threads of flesh which covered it stung his palm. It jerked and tried to draw back. For a moment Sam almost lost it and then he closed his hand in a fist, digging his fingernails into the meat of the thing. 'Here!' he shouted. 'Here, I've got something for you, bitch! I brought it all the way from East St Louis!' He brought his left hand around and slammed the sticky ball of red licorice into the end of the proboscis, plugging it the way the kids in that longago parking lot had plugged the tailpipe of Tommy Reed's Pontiac. It tried to shriek and could produce only a blocked humming sound. Then it tried again to pull itself away from Sam. The ball of red licorice bulged from the end of its convulsing snout like a bloodblister. Sam struggled to his knees, still holding the twitching, noisome flesh in his hand, and threw himself on top of the Ardeliathing. It twisted and pulsed beneath him, trying to throw him off. They rolled over and over in the heaped pile of books. It was dreadfully strong. Once Sam was eye to eye with it, and he was nearly frozen by the hate and panic in that gaze. Then he felt it begin to swell. He let go and scrambled backward, gasping. The thing in the booklittere aisle now looked like a grotesque beachball with a trunk, a beachball covered with fine hair which wavered like tendrils of seaweed in a running tide. It rolled over in the aisle, its proboscis swelling like a firehose which has been tied in a knot. Sam watched, frozen with horror and fascination, as the thing which had called itself Ardelia Lortz strangled on its own fuming guts. Bright red roadmap lines of blood popped out on its straining hide. Its eyes bulged, now staring at Sam in an expression of dazed surprise. It made one final effort to expel the soft blob of licorice, but its proboscis had been wide open in its anticipation of food, and the licorice stayed put. Sam saw what was going to happen and threw an arm over his face an instant before it exploded. Chunks of alien flesh flew in every direction. Ropes of thick blood splattered Sam's arms, chest, and legs. He cried out in mingled revulsion and relief. An instant later the emergency light winked out, plunging them into darkness again. Once more the interval of darkness was very brief, but it was long enough for Sam to sense the change. He felt it in his head  a clear sensation of things which had been out of joint snapping back into place. When the emergency lights came back on, there were four of them. Their batteries made a low, selfsatisfied humming sound instead of a loud buzz, and they were very bright, banishing the shadows to the furthest corners of the room. He did not know if the world of 1960 they had entered when the arcsodium light became a mercuryvapor lamp had been real or an illusion, but he knew it was gone. The overturned bookcases were upright again. There was a litter of books in this aisle  a dozen or so  but he might have knocked those off himself in his struggle to get on his feet. And outside, the sound of the storm had fallen from a shout to a mutter. Sam could hear what sounded like a very sedate rain falling on the roof. The Ardeliathing was gone. There were no splatters of blood or chunks of flesh on the floor, on the books, or on him. There was only one sign of her a single golden earring, glinting up at him. Sam got shakily to his feet and kicked it away. Then a grayness came over his sight and he swayed on his feet, eyes closed, waiting to see if he would faint or not. 'Sam!' It was Naomi, and she sounded as if she were crying. 'Sam, where are you?' 'Here!' He reached up, grabbed a handful of his hair, and pulled it hard. Stupid, probably, but it worked. The wavery grayness didn't go away entirely, but it retreated. He began moving back toward the cataloguing area, walking in large, careful strides. The same desk, a graceless block of wood on stubby legs, stood in the cataloguing area, but the lamp with its oldfashioned, tasselled shade had been replaced with a fluorescent bar. The battered typewriter and Rolodex had been replaced by an Apple computer. And, if he had not already been sure of what time he was now in, a glance at the cardboard cartons on the floor would have convinced him they were full of poppers and plastic bubblestrips. Naomi was still kneeling beside Dave at the end of the aisle, and when Sam reached her side he saw that the fireextinguisher (although thirty years had passed, it appeared to be the same one) was firmly mounted on its post again . . . but the shape of its handle was still imprinted on Dave's cheek and forehead. His eyes were open, and when he saw Sam, he smiled. 'Not ... bad,' he whispered. 'I bet you ... didn't know you had it ... in you.' Sam felt a tremendous, buoyant sense of relief. 'No,' he said. 'I didn't.' He bent down and held three fingers in front of Dave's eyes. 'How many fingers do you see?' 'About ... seventyfour,' Dave whispered. 'I'll call the ambulance,' Naomi said, and started to get up. Dave's left hand grasped her wrist before she could. 'No. Not yet.' His eyes shifted to Sam. 'Bend down. I need to whisper.' Sam bent over the old man. Dave put a trembling hand on the back of his neck. His lips tickled the cup of Sam's ear and Sam had to force himself to hold steady it tickled. 'Sam,' he whispered. 'She waits. Remember ... she waits.' 'What?' Sam asked. He felt almost totally unstrung. 'Dave, what do you mean?' But Dave's hand had fallen away. He stared up at Sam, through Sam, his chest rising shallowly and rapidly. 'I'm going,' Naomi said, clearly upset. 'There's a telephone down there on the cataloguing desk.' 'No,' Sam said. She turned toward him, eyes glaring, mouth pulled back from neat white teeth in a fury. 'What do you mean, no? Are you crazy? His skull is fractured, at the very least! He's ' 'He's going, Sarah,' Sam said gently. 'Very soon. Stay with him. Be his friend.' She looked down, and this time she saw what Sam had seen. The pupil of Dave's left eye had drawn down to a pinpoint; the pupil of his right was huge and fixed. 'Dave?' she whispered, frightened. 'Dave?' But Dave was looking at Sam again. 'Remember,' he whispered. 'She W ... ' His eyes grew still and fixed. His chest rose once more ... dropped ... and did not rise again. Naomi began to sob. She put his hand against her cheek and closed his eyes. Sam knelt down painfully and put his arm around her waist. CHAPTER 15 Angle Street (III) 1 That night and the next were sleepless ones for Sam Peebles. He lay awake in his bed, all the secondfloor lights turned on, and thought about Dave Duncan's last words She waits. Toward dawn of the second night, he began to believe he understood what the old man had been trying to say. 2 Sam thought that Dave would be buried out of the Baptist Church in Proverbia, and was a little surprised to find that he had converted to Catholicism at some point between 1960 and 1990. The services were held at St Martin's on April 11th, a blustery day that alternated between clouds and cold earlyspring sunshine. Following the graveside service, there was a reception at Angle Street. There were almost seventy people there, wandering through the downstairs rooms or clustered in little groups, by the time Sam arrived. They had all known Dave, and spoke of him with humor, respect, and unfailing love. They drank ginger ale from Styrofoam cups and ate small finger sandwiches. Sam moved from group to group, passing a word with someone he knew from time to time but not stopping to chat. He rarely took his hand from the pocket of his dark coat. He had made a stop at the Piggly Wiggly store on his way from the church, and now there were half a dozen cellophane packages in there, four of them long and thin, two of them rectangular. Sarah was not here. He was about to leave when he spotted Lukey and Rudolph sitting together in a corner. There was a cribbage board between them, but they didn't seem to be playing. 'Hello, you guys,' Sam said, walking over. 'I guess you probably don't remember me ' 'Sure we do,' Rudolph said. 'Whatcha think we are? Coupla feebs? You're Dave's friend. You came over the day we was making the posters.' 'Right!' Lukey said. 'Did you find those books you were lookin for?' Rudolph asked. 'Yes,' Sam said, smiling. 'I did, eventually.' 'Right!' Lukey exclaimed. Sam brought out the four slender cellophane packages. 'I brought you guys something,' he said. Lukey glanced down, and his eyes lit up. 'Slim Jims, Dolph!' he said, grinning delightedly. 'Look! Sarah's boyfriend brought us all fuckin Slim Jims! Beautiful!' 'Here, gimme those, you old rummy,' Rudolph said, and snatched them. 'Fuckhead'd eat em all at once and then shit the bed tonight, you know,' he told Sam. He stripped one of the Slim Jims and gave it to Lukey. 'Here you go, dinkweed. I'll hang onto the rest of em for you.' 'You can have one, Dolph. Go ahead.' 'You know better, Lukey. Those things burn me at both ends.' Sam ignored this byplay. He was looking hard at Lukey. 'Sarah's boyfriend? Where did you hear that?' Lukey snatched down half a Slim Jim in one bite, then looked up. His expression was both goodhumored and sly. He laid a finger against the side of his nose and said, 'Word gets around when you're in the Program, Sunny Jim. Oh yes indeed, it do.' 'He don't know nothing, mister,' Rudolph said, draining his cup of ginger ale. 'He's just beating his gums cause he likes the sound.' 'That ain't nothin but bullshit!' Lukey cried, taking another giant bite of Slim Jim. 'I know because Dave told me! Last night! I had a dream, and Dave was in it, and he told me this fella was Sarah's sweetie!' 'Where is Sarah?' Sam asked. 'I thought she'd be here.' 'She spoke to me after the benediction,' Rudolph said. 'Told me you'd know where to find her later on, if you wanted to see her. She said you'd seen her there once already.' 'She liked Dave awful much,' Lukey said. A sudden tear grew on the rim of one eye and spilled down his cheek. He wiped it away with the back of his hand. 'We all did. Dave always tried so goddam hard. It's too bad, you know. It's really too bad.' And Lukey suddenly burst into tears. 'Well, let me tell you something,' Sam said. He hunkered beside Lukey and handed him his handkerchief. He was near tears himself, and terrified by what he now had to do ... or try to do. 'He made it in the end. He died sober. Whatever talk you hear, you hold onto that, because I know it's true. He died sober.' 'Amen,' Rudolph said reverently. 'Amen,' Lukey agreed. He handed Sam his handkerchief. 'Thanks.' 'Don't mention it, Lukey.' 'Say  you don't have any more of those fuckin Slim Jims, do you?' 'Nope,' Sam said, and smiled. 'You know what they say, Lukey  one's too many and a thousand are never enough.' Rudolph laughed. Lukey smiled ... and then laid the tip of his finger against the side of his nose again. 'How about a quarter ... wouldn't have an extra quarter, wouldja?' 3 Sam's first thought was that she might have gone back to the Library, but that didn't fit with what Dolph had said  he had been at the Library with Sarah once, on the terrible night that already seemed a decade ago, but they had been there together; he hadn't 'seen' her there, the way you saw someone through a window, or Then he remembered when he had seen Sarah through a window, right here at Angle Street. She had been part of the group out on the back lawn, doing whatever it was they did to keep themselves sober. He now walked through the kitchen as he had done on that day, saying hello to a few more people. Burt Iverson and Elmer Baskin stood in one of the little groups, drinking icecream punch as they listened gravely to an elderly woman Sam didn't know. He stepped through the kitchen door and out onto the rear porch. The day had turned gray and blustery again. The back yard was deserted, but Sam thought he saw a flash of pastel color beyond the bushes that marked the yard's rear boundary. He walked down the steps and crossed the back lawn, aware that his heart had begun to thud very hard again. His hand stole back into his pocket, and this time came out with the remaining two cellophane packages. They contained Bull's Eye Red Licorice. He tore them open and began to knead them into a ball, much smaller than the one he'd made in the Datsun on Monday night. The sweet, sugary smell was just as sickening as ever. In the distance he could hear a train coming, and it made him think of his dream  the one where Naomi had turned into Ardelia. Too late, Sam. It's already too late. The deed is done. She waits. Remember, Sam  she waits. There was a lot of truth in dreams, sometimes. How had she survived the years between? All the years between? They had never asked themselves that question, had they? How did she make the transition from one person to another? They had never asked that one, either. Perhaps the thing which looked like a woman named Ardelia Lortz was, beneath its glamours and illusions, like one of those larvae that spin their cocoons in the fork of a tree, cover them with Protective webbing, and then fly away to their place of dying. The larvae in the cocoons lie silent, waiting ... changing ... She waits. . Sam walked on, still kneading his smelly little ball made of that stuff the Library Policeman  his Library Policeman  had stolen and turned into the stuff of nightmares. The stuff he had somehow changed again, with the help of Naomi and Dave, into the stuff of salvation. The Library Policeman, curling Naomi against him. Placing his mouth on the nape of her neck, as if to kiss her. And coughing instead. The bag hanging under the Ardeliathing's neck. Limp. Spent. Empty. Please don't let it be too late. He walked into the thin stand of bushes. Naomi Sarah Higgins was standing on the other side of them, her arms clasped over her bosom. She glanced briefly at him and he was shocked by the pallor of her cheeks and the haggard look in her eyes. Then she looked back at the railroad tracks. The train was closer now. Soon they would see it. 'Hello, Sam.' 'Hello, Sarah.' Sam put an arm around her waist. She let him, but the shape of her body against his was stiff, inflexible, ungiving. Please don't let it be too late, he thought again, and found himself thinking of Dave. They had left him there, at the Library, after propping the door to the loading platform open with a rubber wedge. Sam had used a pay phone two blocks away to report the open door. He hung up when the dispatcher asked for his name. So Dave had been found, and of course the verdict had been accidental death, and those people in town who cared enough to assume anything at all would make the expected assumption one more old sot had gone to that great ginmill in the sky. They would assume he had gone up the lane with a jug, had seen the open door, wandered in, and had fallen against the fireextinguisher in the dark. End of story. The postmortem results, showing zero alcohol in Dave's blood, would not change the assumptions one bit  probably not even for the police. People just expect a drunk to die like a drunk, Sam thought, even when he's not. 'How have you been, Sarah?' he asked. She looked at him tiredly. 'Not so well, Sam. Not so well at all. I can't sleep ... can't eat ... my mind seems full of the most horrible thoughts ... they don't feel like my thoughts at all ... and I want to drink. That's the worst of it. I want to drink ... and drink ... and drink. The meetings don't help. For the first time in my life, the meetings don't help.' She closed her eyes and began to cry. The sound was strengthless and dreadfully lost. 'No,' he agreed softly. 'They wouldn't. They can't. And I imagine she'd like it if you started drinking again. She's waiting . . . but that doesn't mean she isn't hungry.' She opened her eyes and looked at him. 'What ... Sam, what are you talking about?' 'Persistence, I think,' he said. 'The persistence of evil. How it waits. How it can be so cunning and so baffling and so powerful.' He raised his hand slowly and opened it. 'Do you recognize this, Sarah?' She flinched away from the ball of red licorice which lay on his palm. For a moment her eyes were wide and fully awake. They glinted with hate and fear. And the glints were silver. 'Throw that away!' she whispered. 'Throw that damned thing away!' Her hand jerked protectively toward the back of her neck, where her brownishred hair hung against her shoulders. 'I'm talking to you,' he said steadily. 'Not to her but to you. I love you, Sarah.' She looked at him again, and that look of terrible weariness was back. 'Yes,' she said. 'Maybe you do. And maybe you should learn not to.' 'I want you to do something for me, Sarah. I want you to turn your back to me. There's a train coming. I want you to watch that train and not look back at me until I tell you. Can you do that?' Her upper lip lifted. That expression of hate and fear animated her haggard face again. 'No! Leave me alone! Go away!' 'Is that what you want?' he asked. 'Is it really? You told Dolph where I could find you, Sarah. Do you really want me to go?' Her eyes closed again. Her mouth drew down in a trembling bow of anguish. When her eyes opened again, they were full of haunted terror and brimming with tears. 'Oh, Sam,. help me! Something is wrong and I don't know what it is or what to do!' 'I know what to do,' he told her. 'Trust in me, Sarah, and trust in what you said when we were on our way to the Library Monday night. Honesty and belief. Those things are the opposite of fear. Honesty and belief.' 'It's hard, though,' she whispered. 'Hard to trust. Hard to believe.' He looked at her steadily. Naomi's upper lip lifted suddenly, and her lower lip curled out, turning her mouth momentarily into a shape that was almost like a horn. 'Fuck yourself!' she said.