Four Past Midnight

CHAPTER 7

Night Terrors

1

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

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

Don't listen to it, then, another part of his mind spoke up, and Sam was now so confused he couldn't tell if that was a reasonable idea or not. It seemed reasonable, but it also seemed a little cowardly. In fact, he realized that he was standing here in a sweat, gnawing his fingernails, and suddenly grunted - a soft, exasperated noise.

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

He pushed the button.

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

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

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

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

For safekeeping.

So he wouldn't lose it.

Great. Just great.

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

2

He was heating a can of soup on the stove fifteen minutes later, hoping a little hot food would do something for his head, when he thought of Naomi again - Naomi, who looked so much like the woman in Dirty Dave's poster. The question of whether or not Naomi was leading a secret life of some sort under the name of Sarah had taken a back seat to something that seemed a lot more important, at least right now: Naomi had known who Ardelia Lortz was. But her reaction to the name ... it had been a little odd, hadn't it? It had startled her for a moment or two, and she'd started to make a joke, and then the phone had rung and it had been Burt Iverson, and Sam tried to replay the conversation in his mind and was chagrined at how little he remembered. Naomi had said Ardelia was peculiar, all right; he was sure of that, but not much else. It hadn't seemed important then. The important thing then was that his career seemed to have taken a quantum leap forward. And that was still important, but this other thing seemed to dwarf it. In truth, it seemed to dwarf everything. His mind kept going back to that modern no-nonsense suspended ceiling and the short bookcases. He didn't believe he was crazy, not at all, but he was beginning to feel that if he didn't get this thing sorted out, he might go crazy. It was as if he had uncovered a hole in the middle of his head, one so deep you could throw things into it and not hear a splash no matter how big the things you threw were or how long you waited with your ear cocked for the sound. He supposed the feeling would pass - maybe - but in the meantime it was horrible.

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

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

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

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

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

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

He settled for asking if he could speak to Naomi.

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

'Could you ask her to call me?'

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

Sam sighed. 'I'll call tomorrow.'

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

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

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

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

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

3

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

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

But sleep didn't come.

The horrors came instead.

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

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

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

LOSING MY MIND.

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

LOST YOUR MIND.

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

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

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

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

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

No! Stop it! Just . . . STOP it!

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

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

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

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

He lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply.

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

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

Or arrows, he thought. Long black arrows. Ardelia and the Library Policeman creeping up the stairs with long black arrows clamped between their teeth. How about that image, friends and neighbors?

Arrows?

Why arrows?

He didn't want to think about it. He was tired of thoughts which came whizzing out of the previously unsuspected darkness inside him like horrid, stinking Frisbees.

I don't want to think about it, I won't think about it.

He finished the laced milk and went back to bed.

4

He left the bedside lamp on, and that made him feel a little calmer. He actually began to think he might go to sleep at some point before the heat-death of the universe. He pulled the comforter up to his chin, laced his hands behind his head, and looked at the ceiling.

SOME Of it must have really happened, he thought. It can't ALL have been a hallucination ... unless this is Part of It, and I'm really in one of the rubber rooms up in Cedar Rapids, wrapped in a straitjacket and only imagining I'm lying here in my own bed.

He had delivered the speech. He had used the jokes from The Speaker's Companion, and Spencer Michael Free's verse from Best Loved Poems of the American People. And since he had neither volume in his own small collection of books, he must have gotten them from the Library. Naomi had known Ardelia Lortz - had known her name, anyway - and so had Naomi's mother. Had she! It was as if he'd set a fire-cracker off under her easy chair.

I can check around, he thought. If Mrs Higgins knows the name, other people will, too. Not work-study kids from Chapelton, maybe, but people who've been in Junction City a long time. Frank Stephens, maybe. Or Dirty Dave ...

At this point, Sam finally drifted off. He crossed the almost seamless border between waking and sleeping without knowing it; his thoughts never ceased but began instead to twist themselves into ever more strange and fabulous shapes. The shapes became a dream. And the dream became a nightmare. He was at Angle Street again, and the three alkies were on the porch, laboring over their posters. He asked Dirty Dave what he was doing.

Aw, just passin the time, Dave said, and then, shyly, he turned the poster around so Sam could see it.

It was a picture of Simple Simon. He had been impaled on a spit over an open fire. He was clutching a great bundle of melting red licorice in one hand. His clothes were burning but he was still alive. He was screaming. The words written above this terrible image were:

CHILDREN DINNER IN THE PUBLIC LIBRARY BUSHES

TO BENEFIT THE LIBRARY POLICE FUND

MIDNITE TO 2 A. M.

COME ONE COME ALL

'THAT'S CHOW-DE-DOW!'

Dave, that's horrible, Sam said in the dream.

Not at all. Dirty Dave replied. The children call him Simple Simon. They love to eat him. I think that's very healthy, don't you?

Look! Rudolph cried. Look, it's Sarah!

Sam looked up and saw Naomi crossing the littered, weedy ground between Angle Street and the Recycling Center. She was moving very slowly, because she was pushing a shopping cart filled with copies of The Speaker's Companion and Best Loved Poems of the American People. Behind her, the sun was going down in a sullen furnace glare of red light and a long passenger train was rumbling slowly along the track, headed out into the emptiness of western Iowa. It was at least thirty coaches long, and every car was black. Crepe hung and swung in the windows. It was a funeral train, Sam realized.

Sam turned back to Dirty Dave and said, Her name isn't Sarah. That's Naomi. Naomi Higgins from Proverbia.

Not at all, Dirty Dave said. It's Death coming, Mr Peebles. Death is a woman.

Lukey began to squeal then. In the extremity of his terror he sounded like a human pig. She got Slim Jims! She got Slim Jims! Oh my God, she got all Slim Fuckin Slim Jims!

Sam turned back to see what Lukey was talking about. The woman was closer, but it was no longer Naomi. It was Ardelia. She was dressed in a trenchcoat the color of a winter stormcloud. The shopping cart was not full of Slim Jims, as Lukey had said, but thousands of intertwined red licorice whips. While Sam watched, Ardelia snatched up handfuls of them and began to cram them into her mouth. Her teeth were no longer dentures; they were long and discolored. They looked like vampire teeth to Sam, both sharp and horribly strong. Grimacing, she bit down on her mouthful of candy. Bright blood squirted out, spraying a pink cloud in the sunset air and dribbling down her chin. Severed chunks of licorice tumbled to the weedy earth, still jetting blood.

She raised hands which had become hooked talons.

'Youuuu losst the BOOOOOKS!' she screamed at Sam, and charged at him.

5

Sam came awake in a breathless jerk. He had pulled all the bedclothes loose from their moorings, and was huddled beneath them near the foot of the bed in a sweaty ball. Outside, the first thin light of a new day was peeking under the drawn shade. The bedside clock said it was 5:53 A.M.

He got up, the bedroom air cool and refreshing on his sweaty skin, went into the bathroom, and urinated. His head ached vaguely, either as a result of the early-morning shot of brandy or stress from the dream. He opened the medicine cabinet, took two aspirin, and then shambled back to the bed. He pulled the covers up as best he could, feeling the residue of his nightmare in every damp fold of sheet. He wouldn't go back to sleep again - he knew that - but he could at least lie here until the nightmare started to dissolve.

As his head touched the pillow, he suddenly realized he knew something else, something as surprising and unexpected as his sudden understanding that the woman in Dirty Dave's poster had been his part-time secretary. This new understanding also had to do with Dirty Dave ... and with Ardelia Lortz.

It was a dream, he thought. That's where I found out.

Sam fell into a deep, natural sleep. There were no more dreams and when he woke up it was almost eleven o'clock. Churchbells were calling the faithful to worship, and outside it was a beautiful day. The sight of all that sunshine lying on all that bright new grass did more than make him feel good; it made him feel almost reborn.