Four Past Midnight

CHAPTER 8

Angle Street (II)

1

He made himself brunch - orange juice, a three-egg omelette loaded with green onions, lots of strong coffee - and thought about going back to Angle Street. He could still remember the moment of illumination he had experienced during his brief period of waking and was perfectly sure that his insight was true, but he wondered if he really wanted to pursue this crazy business any further.

In the bright light of a spring morning his fears of the previous night seemed both distant and absurd, and he felt a strong temptation - almost a need - to simply let the matter rest. Something had happened to him, he thought, something which had no reasonable, rational explanation. The question was, so what?

He had read about such things, about ghosts and premonitions and possessions, but they held only minimal interest for him. He liked a spooky movie once in awhile, but that was about as far as it went. He was a practical man, and he could see no practical use for paranormal episodes ... if they did indeed occur. He had experienced ... well, call it an event, for want of a better word. Now the event was over. Why not leave it at that?

Because she said she wanted the books back by tomorrow - what about that?

But this seemed to have no power over him now. In spite of the message she had left on his answering machine, Sam no longer exactly believed in Ardelia Lortz.

What did interest him was his own reaction to what had happened. He found himself remembering a college biology lecture. The instructor had begun by saying that the human body had an extremely efficient way of dealing with the incursion of alien organisms. Sam remembered the teacher saying that because the bad news - cancer, influenza, and sexually transmitted diseases such as syphilis - got all the headlines, people tended to believe they were a lot more vulnerable to disease than they really were. 'The human body,' the instructor had said, 'has its own Green Beret force at its disposal.

When the human body is attacked by an outsider, ladies and gentlemen, the response of this force is quick and without mercy. No quarter is given. Without this army of trained killers, each of you would have been dead twenty times over before the end of your first year.'

The prime technique the body employed to rid itself of invaders was isolation. The invaders were first surrounded, cut off from the nutrients they needed to live, then either eaten, beaten, or starved. Now Sam was discovering - or thought he was - that the mind employed exactly the same technique when it was attacked. He could remember many occasions when he had felt he was coming down with a cold only to wake up the next morning feeling fine. The body had done its work. A vicious war had been going on even as he slept, and the invaders had been wiped out to the last man ... or bug. They had been eaten, beaten, or starved.

Last night he had experienced the mental equivalent of an impending cold. This morning the invader, the threat to his clear, rational perceptions, had been surrounded. Cut off from its nutrients. Now it was only a matter of time. And part of him was warning the rest of him that, by investigating this business further, he might be feeding the enemy.

This is how it happens, he thought. This is why the world isn't full of reports of strange happenings and inexplicable phenomena. The mind experiences them ... reels around for awhile ... then counterattacks.

But he was curious. That was the thing. And didn't they say that, although curiosity killed the cat, satisfaction brought the beast back?

Who? Who says?

He didn't know ... but he supposed he could find out. At his local library. Sam smiled a little as he took his dishes over to the sink. And discovered he had already made his decision: he would pursue this crazy business just a little further.

Just a little bit.

2

Sam arrived back at Angle Street around twelve-thirty. He was not terribly surprised to see Naomi's old blue Datsun parked in the driveway. Sam parked behind it, got out, and climbed the rickety steps past the sign telling him he'd have to drop any bottles he might have in the trash barrel. He knocked, but there was no answer. He pushed the door open, revealing a wide hall that was barren of furniture ... unless the pay telephone halfway down counted. The wallpaper was clean but faded. Sam saw a place where it had been mended with Scotch tape.

'Hello?'

There was no answer. He went in, feeling like an intruder, and walked

down the hall. The first door on the left opened into the common room. Two signs had been thumbtacked to this door.

FRIENDS OF BILL ENTER HERE!

read the top one. Below this was another, which seemed at once utterly sensible and exquisitively dumb to Sam. It read:

TIME TAKES TIME.

The common room was furnished with mismatched, cast-off chairs and a long sofa which had also been mended with tape - electrician's tape, this time. More slogans had been hung on the wall. There was a coffeemaker on a little table by the TV. Both the TV and the coffeemaker were off.

Sam walked on down the hall past the stairs, feeling more like an intruder than ever. He glanced into the three other rooms which opened off the corridor. Each was furnished with two plain cots, and all were empty. The rooms were scrupulously clean, but they told their tales just the same. One smelled of Musterole. Another smelled unpleasantly of some deep sickness. Either someone has died recently in this room, Sam thought, or someone is going to.

The kitchen, also empty, was at the far end of the hall. It was a big, sunny room with faded linoleum covering the floor in uneven dunes and valleys. A gigantic stove, combination wood and gas, filled an alcove. The sink was old and deep, its enamel discolored with rust stains. The faucets were equipped with old-fashioned propeller handles. An ancient Maytag washing machine and a gas-fired Kenmore drier stood next to the pantry. The air smelled faintly of last night's baked beans. Sam liked the room. It spoke to him of pennies which had been pinched until they screamed, but it also spoke of love and care and some hardwon happiness. It reminded him of his grandmother's kitchen, and that had been a good place. A safe place.

On the old restaurant-sized Amana refrigerator was a magnetized plaque which read:

GOD BLESS OUR BOOZELESS HOME.

Sam heard faint voices outside. He crossed the kitchen and looked through one of the windows, which had been raised to admit as much of the warm spring day as the mild breeze could coax in.

The back lawn of Angle Street was showing the first touches of green; at the rear of the property, by a thin belt of just-budding trees, an idle vegetable garden waited for warmer days. To the left, a volleyball net sagged in a gentle arc. To the right were two horseshoe pits, just beginning to sprout a few weeds. It was not a prepossessing back yard - at this time of year, few country yards were - but Sam saw it had been raked at least once since the snow had released its winter grip, and there were no cinders, although he could see the steely shine of the railroad tracks less than fifty feet from the garden. The residents of Angle Street might not have a lot to take care of, he thought, but they were taking care of what they did have.

About a dozen people were sitting on folding camp chairs in a rough circle between the volleyball net and the horseshoe pits. Sam recognized Naomi, Dave, Lukey, and Rudolph. A moment later he realized he also recognized Burt Iverson, Junction City's most prosperous lawyer, and Elmer Baskin, the banker who hadn't gotten to his Rotary speech but who had called later to congratulate him just the same. The breeze gusted, blowing back the homely checked curtains which hung at the sides of the window through which Sam was looking. It also ruffled Elmer's silver hair. Elmer turned his face up to the sun and smiled. Sam was struck by the simple pleasure he saw, not on Elmer's face but in it. At that moment he was both more and less than a small city's richest banker; he was every man who ever greeted spring after a long, cold winter, happy to still be alive, whole, and free of pain.

Sam felt struck with unreality. It was weird enough that Naomi Higgins should be out here consorting with the unhomed winos of Junction City - and under another name, at that. To find that the town's most respected banker and one of its sharpest legal eagles were also here was a bit of a mind-blower.

A man in ragged green pants and a Cincinnati Bengals sweatshirt raised his hand. Rudolph pointed at him. 'My name's John, and I'm an alcoholic,' the man in the Bengals sweatshirt said.

Sam backed away from the window quickly. His face felt hot. Now he felt not only like an intruder but a spy. He supposed they usually held their Sunday-noon AA meeting in the common room - the coffeepot suggested it, anyway - but today the weather had been so nice that they had taken their chairs outside. He bet it had been Naomi's idea.

We'll be in church tomorrow morning, Mrs Higgins had said, and the first Baptist Youth Picnic of the season is tomorrow afternoon. Naomi has promised to help. He wondered if Mrs Higgins knew her daughter was spending the afternoon with the alkies instead of the Baptists and supposed she did. He thought he also understood why Naomi had abruptly decided two dates with Sam Peebles was enough. He had thought it was the religion thing at the time, and Naomi hadn't ever tried to suggest it was anything else. But after the first date, which had been a movie, she had agreed to go out with him again. After the second date, any romantic interest she'd had in him ceased. Or seemed to. The second date had been dinner. And he had ordered wine.

Well for Christ's sake - how was I supposed to know she's an alcoholic? Am I a mind-reader?

The answer, of course, was he couldn't have known ... but his face felt hotter, just the same.

Or maybe it's not booze ... or not just booze. Maybe she's got other problems, too.

He also found himself wondering what would happen if Burt Iverson and Elmer Baskin, both powerful men, found out that he knew they belonged to the world's largest secret society. Maybe nothing; he didn't know enough about AA to be sure. He did know two things, however: that the second A stood for Anonymous, and that these were men who could squash his rising business aspirations flat if they chose to do so.

Sam decided to leave as quickly and quietly as he could. To his credit, this decision was not based on personal considerations. The people sitting out there on the back lawn of Angle Street shared a serious problem. He had discovered this by accident; he had no intention of staying -and eavesdropping - on purpose.

As he went back down the hallway again, he saw a pile of cut-up paper resting on top of the pay phone. A stub of pencil had been tacked to the wall on a short length of string beside the phone. On impulse he took a sheet of the paper and printed a quick note on it.

Dave,

I stopped by this morning to see you, but nobody was around. I want to talk to you about a woman named Ardelia Lortz. I've got an idea you know who she is, and I'm anxious to find out about her. Will you give me a call this afternoon or this evening, if you get a chance? The number is 555-8699. Thanks very much.

He signed his name at the bottom, folded the sheet in half, and printed Dave's name on the fold. He thought briefly about taking it back down to the kitchen and putting it on the counter, but he didn't want any of them - Naomi most of all -worrying that he might have seen them at their odd but perhaps helpful devotions. He propped it on top of the TV in the common room instead, with Dave's name facing out. He thought about placing a quarter for the telephone beside the note and then didn't. Dave might take that wrong.

He left then, glad to be out in the sun again undiscovered. As he got back into his car, he saw the bumper sticker on Naomi's Datsun.

LET GO AND LET GOD,

it said.

'Better God than Ardelia,' Sam muttered, and backed out the driveway to the road.

3

By late afternoon, Sam's broken rest of the night before had begun to tell, and a vast sleepiness stole over him. He turned on the TV, found a Cincinnati-Boston exhibition baseball game wending its slow way into the eighth inning, lay down on the sofa to watch it, and almost immediately dozed off. The telephone rang before the doze had a chance to spiral down into real sleep, and Sam got up to answer it, feeling woozy and disoriented.

'Hello?'

'You don't want to be talking about that woman,' Dirty Dave said with no preamble whatsoever. His voice was trembling at the far edge of control. 'You don't even want to be thinking about her.'

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?

All of Sam's drowsiness was gone in an instant. 'Dave, what is it about that woman? Either people react as though she were the devil or they don't know anything about her. Who is she? What in the hell did she do to freak you out this way?'

There was a long period of silence. Sam waited through it, his heart beating heavily in his chest and throat. He would have thought the connection had been broken if not for the sound of Dave's broken breathing in his ear.

'Mr Peebles,' he said at last, 'you've been a real good help to me over the years. You and some others helped me stay alive when I wasn't even sure I wanted to myself. But I can't talk about that bitch. I can't. And if you know what's good for you, you won't talk to anybody else about her, neither.'

'That sounds like a threat.'

'No!' Dave said. He sounded more than surprised; he sounded shocked. 'No -I'm just warnin you, Mr Peebles, same as I'd do if I saw you wanderin around an old well where the weeds were all grown up so you couldn't see the hole. Don't talk about her and don't think about her. Let the dead stay dead.'

Let the dead stay dead.

In a way it didn't surprise him; everything that had happened (with, perhaps, the exception of the message left on his answering machine) pointed to the same conclusion: that Ardelia Lortz was no longer among the living. He - Sam Peebles, small-town realtor and insurance agent - had been speaking to a ghost without even knowing it. Spoken to her? Hell! Had done business with her! He had given her two bucks and she had given him a library card.

So he was not exactly surprised ... but a deep chill began to radiate out along the white highways of his skeleton just the same. He looked down and saw pale knobs of gooseflesh standing out on his arms.

You should have left it alone, part of his mind mourned. Didn't I tell you so?

'When did she die?' Sam asked. His voice sounded dull and listless to his own ears.

'I don't want to talk about it, Mr Peebles!' Dave sounded nearly frantic now. His voice trembled, skipped into a higher register which was almost falsetto. and splintered there. 'Please!'

Leave him alone, Sam cried angrily at himself. Doesn't he have enough problems without this crap to worry about?

Yes. And he could leave Dave alone - there must be other people in town who would talk to him about Ardelia Lortz ... if he could find a way to approach them that wouldn't make them want to call for the men with the butterfly nets, that was. But there was one other thing, a thing perhaps only Dirty Dave Duncan could tell him for sure.

'You drew some posters for the Library once, didn't you? I think I recognized your style from the poster you were doing yesterday on the porch. In fact, I'm almost sure. There was one showing a little boy in a black car. And a man in a trenchcoat - the Library Policeman. Did you - '

Before he could finish, Dave burst out with such a shriek of shame and grief and fear that Sam was silenced.

'Dave? I - '

'Leave it alone!' Dave wept. 'I couldn't help myself, so can't you just please leave - '

His cries abruptly diminished and there was a rattle as someone took the phone from him.

'Stop it,' Naomi said. She sounded near tears herself, but she also sounded furious. 'Can't you just stop it, you horrible man?'

'Naomi - '

'My name is Sarah when I'm here,' she said slowly, 'but I hate you equally under both names, Sam Peebles. I'm never going to set foot in your office again.' Her voice began to rise. 'Why couldn't you leave him alone? Why did you have to rake up all this old shit? Why?'

Unnerved, hardly in control of himself, Sam said: 'Why did you send me to the Library? If you didn't want me to meet her, Naomi, why did you send me to the goddam Library in the first place?'

There was a gasp on the other end of the line.

'Naomi? Can we -'

There was a click as she hung up the telephone.

Connection broken.

4

Sam sat in his study until almost nine-thirty, eating Tums and writing one name after another on the same legal pad he had used when composing the first draft of his speech, He would look at each name for a little while, then cross it off. Six years had seemed like a long time to spend in one place ... at least until tonight. Tonight it seemed like a much shorter period of time - a weekend, say.

Craig Jones, he wrote.

He stared at the name and thought, Craig might know about Ardelia ... but he'd want to know why I was interested.

Did he know Craig well enough to answer that question truthfully? The answer to that question was a firm no. Craig was one of Junction City's younger lawyers, a real wannabe. They'd had a few business lunches ... and there was Rotary Club, of course ... and Craig had invited him to his house for dinner once. When they happened to meet on the street they spoke cordially, sometimes about business, more often about the weather. None of that added up to friendship, though, and if Sam meant to spill this nutty business to someone, he wanted it to be to a friend, not an associate that called him ole buddy after the second sloe-gin fizz.

He scratched Craig's name off the list.

He'd made two fairly close friends since coming to Junction City, one a physician's assistant with Dr Melden's practice, the other a city cop. Russ Frame, his PA friend, had jumped to a better-paying family practice in Grand Rapids early in 1989. And since the first of January, Tom Wycliffe had been overseeing the Iowa State Patrol's new Traffic Control Board. He had fallen out of touch with both men since - he was slow making friends, and not good at keeping them, either.

Which left him just where?

Sam didn't know. He did know that Ardelia Lortz's name affected some people in Junction City like a satchel charge. He knew - or believed he knew - that he had met her even though she was dead. He couldn't even tell himself that he had met a relative, or some nutty woman calling herself Ardelia Lortz. Because

I think I met a ghost. In fact, I think I met a ghost inside of a ghost. I think that the library I entered was the Junction City Library as it was when Ardelia Lortz was alive and in charge of the place. I think that's why it felt so weird and off-kilter. It wasn't like time-travel, or the way I imagine time-travel would be. It was more like stepping into limbo for a little while. And it was real. I'm sure it was real.

He paused, drumming his fingers on the desk.

Where did she call me from? Do they have telephones in limbo?

He stared at the list of crossed-off names for a long moment, then tore the yellow sheet slowly off the pad. He crumpled it up and tossed it in the wastebasket.

You should have left it alone, part of him continued to mourn.

But he hadn't. So now what?

Call one of the guys you trust. Call Russ Frame or Tom Wycliffe. Just pick up the phone and make a call.

But he didn't want to do that. Not tonight, at least. He recognized this as an irrational, half-superstitious feeling - he had given and gotten a lot of unpleasant information over the phone just lately, or so it seemed - but he was too tired to grapple with it tonight. If he could get a good night's sleep (and he thought he could, if he left the bedside lamp on again), maybe something better, something more concrete, would occur to him tomorrow morning, when he was fresh. Further along, he supposed he would have to try and mend his fences with Naomi Higgins and Dave Duncan ... but first he wanted to find out just what kind of fences they were.

If he could.