Four Past Midnight

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 second-floor 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 early-spring 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 good-humored 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 ice-cream 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 Ardelia-thing'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 fire-extinguisher 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 brownish-red 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. 'Go on and fuck yourself, Sam Peebles!'

He looked at her steadily.

She raised her hands and pressed them against her temples. 'I didn't mean it. I don't know why I said it. I ... my head ... Sam, my poor head! It feels like it's splitting in two.'

The oncoming train whistled as it crossed the Proverbia River and rolled into Junction City. It was the midafternoon freight, the one that charged through without stopping on its way to the Omaha stockyards. Sam could see it now.

'There's not much time, Sarah. It has to be now. Turn around and look at the train. Watch it come.'

'Yes,' she said suddenly. 'All right. Do what you want to do, Sam. And if you see ... see it isn't going to work ... then push me. Push me in front of the train. Then you can tell the others that I jumped ... that it was suicide.' She looked at him pleadingly - deathly-tired eyes staring into his from her exhausted face. 'They know I haven't been feeling myself - the people in the Program. You can't keep how you feel from them. After awhile that's just not possible. They'll believe you if you say I jumped, and they'd be right, because I don't want to go on like this. But the thing is . Sam, the thing is, I think that before long I will want to go on. '

'Be quiet,' he said. 'We're not going to talk about suicide. Look at the train, Sarah, and remember I love you.'

She turned toward the train, less than a mile away now and coming fast. Her hands went to the nape of her neck and lifted her hair. Sam bent forward . . . and what he was looking for was there, crouched high on the clean white flesh of her neck. He knew that her brain-stem began less than half an inch below that place, and he felt his stomach twist with revulsion.

He bent forward toward the blistery growth. It was covered in a spiderweb skein of crisscrossing white threads, but he could see it beneath, a lump of pinkish jelly that throbbed and pulsed with the beat of her heart.

'Leave me alone!' Ardelia Lortz suddenly screamed from the mouth of the woman Sam had come to love. 'Leave me alone, you bastard!' But Sarah's hands were steady, holding her hair up, giving him access.

'Can you see the numbers on the engine, Sarah?' he murmured.

She moaned.

He drove his thumb into the soft glob of red licorice he held, making a well a little bigger than the parasite which lay on Sarah's neck. 'Read them to me, Sarah. Read me the numbers.'

'Two ... six ... oh Sam, oh my head hurts ... it feels like big hands pulling my brain into two pieces . . .'

'Read the numbers, Sarah,' he murmured, and brought the Bull's Eye licorice down toward that pulsing, obscene growth.

'Five ... nine . . . five . . .'

He closed the licorice gently over it. He could feel it suddenly, wriggling and squirming under the sugary blanket. What if it breaks? What if it just breaks open before I can pull it off her? It's all Ardelia's concentrated poison ... what if it breaks before I get it off?

The oncoming train whistled again. The sound buried Sarah's shriek of pain.

'Steady

He simultaneously pulled the licorice back and folded it over. He had it; it was caught in the candy, pulsing and throbbing like a tiny sick heart. On the back of Sarah's neck were three tiny dark holes, no bigger than pinpricks.

'It's gone!' she cried. 'Sam, it's gone!'

'Not yet,' Sam said grimly. The licorice lay on his palm again, and a bubble was pushing up its surface, straining to break through

The train was roaring past the Junction City depot now, the depot where a man named Brian Kelly had once tossed Dave Duncan four bits and then told him to get in the wind. Less than three hundred yards away and coming fast.

Sam pushed past Sarah and knelt by the tracks.

'Sam, what are you doing?'

'Here you go, Ardelia,' he murmured. 'Try this.' He slapped the pulsing, stretching blob of red licorice down on one of the gleaming steel rails.

In his mind he heard a shriek of unutterable fury and terror. He stood back, watching the thing trapped inside the licorice struggle and push. The candy split open ... he saw a darker red inside trying to push itself out ... and then the 2:20 to Omaha rushed over it in an organized storm of pounding rods and grinding wheels.

The licorice disappeared, and inside of Sam Peebles's mind, that drilling shriek was cut off as if with a knife.

He stepped back and turned to Sarah. She was swaying on her feet, her eyes wide and full of dazed joy. He slipped his arms around her waist and held her as the boxcars and flatcars and tankers thundered past them, blowing their hair back.

They stood like that until the caboose passed, trailing its small red lights off into the west. Then she drew away from him a little - but not out of the circle of his arms - and looked at him.

'Am I free, Sam? Am I really free of her? It feels like I am, but I can hardly believe it.'

'You're free,' Sam agreed. 'Your fine is paid, too, Sarah. Forever and ever, your fine is paid.'

She brought her face to his and began to cover his lips and cheeks and eyes with small kisses. Her own eyes did not close as she did this; she looked at him gravely all the while.

He took her hands at last and said, 'Why don't we go back inside, and finish paying our respects? Your friends will be wondering where you are.'

'They can be your friends, too, Sam ... if you want them to be.'

He nodded. 'I do. I want that a lot.'

'Honesty and belief,' she said, and touched his cheek.

'Those are the words.' He kissed her again, then offered his arm. 'Will you walk with me, lady?'

She linked her arm through his. 'Anywhere you want, sir. Anywhere at all.'

They walked slowly back across the lawn to Angle Street together, arm in arm.

A Note on 'The Sun Dog'

Every now and then someone will ask me, 'When are you going to get tired of this horror stuff, Steve, and write something serious?'

I used to believe the implied insult in this question was accidental, but as the years go by I have become more and more convinced that it is not. I watch the faces of the people who drop that particular dime, you see, and most of them look like bombardiers waiting to see if their last stick of bombs is going to fall wide or hit the targeted factory or munitions dump dead on.

The fact is, almost all of the stuff I have written - and that includes a lot of the funny stuff - was written in a serious frame of mind. I can remember very few occasions when I sat at the typewriter laughing

uncontrollably over some wild and crazy bit of fluff I had just finished churning out. I'm never going to be Reynolds Price or Larry Woiwode - it isn't in me - but that doesn't mean I don't care as deeply about what I do. I have to do what I can do, however - as Nils Lofgren once put it, 'I gotta be my dirty self ... I won't play no jive.'

If real meaning !!SOMETHING THAT COULD ACTUALLY HAPPEN!! - is your definition of serious, you are in the wrong place and you should by all means leave the building. But please remember as you go that I'm not the only one doing business at this particular site; Franz Kafka had an office here, and George Orwell, and Shirley Jackson, and Jorge Luis Borges, and Jonathan Swift, and Lewis Carroll. A glance at the directory in the lobby shows the present tenants include Thomas Berger, Ray Bradbury, Jonathan Carroll, Thomas Pynchon, Thomas Disch, Kurt Vonnegut, jr, Peter Straub, Joyce Carol Oates, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Katherine Dunn, and Mark Halpern.

I am doing what I do for the most serious reasons: love, money, and obsession. The tale of the irrational is the sanest way I know of expressing the world in which I live. These tales have served me as instruments of both metaphor and morality; they continue to offer the best window I know on the question of how we perceive things and the corollary question of how we do or do not behave on the basis of our perceptions. I have explored these questions as well as I can within the limits of my talent and intelligence. I am no one's National Book Award or Pulitzer Prize winner, but I'm serious, all right. If you don't believe anything else, believe this: when I take you by your hand and begin to talk, my friend, I believe every word I say.

A lot of the things I have to say - those Really Serious Things - have to do with the small-town world in which I was raised and where I still live. Stories and novels are scale models of what we laughingly call 'real life,' and I believe that lives as they are lived in small towns are scale models of what we laughingly call 'society.' This idea is certainly open to argument, and argument is perfectly fine (without it, a lot of literature teachers and critics would be looking for work); I'm just saying that a writer needs some sort of launching pad, and aside from the firm belief that a story may exist with honor for its own self, the idea of the small town as social and psychological microcosm is mine. I began experimenting with this sort of thing in Came, and continued on a more ambitious level with 'Salem's Lot. I never really hit my stride, however, until The Dead Zone.

That was, I think, the first of my Castle Rock stories (and Castle Rock is really just the town of Jerusalem's Lot without the vampires). In the years since it was written, Castle Rock has increasingly become 'my town,' in the sense that the mythical city of Isola is Ed McBain's town and the West Virginia village of Glory was Davis Grubb's town. I have been called back there time and time again to examine the lives of its residents and the geographies which seem to rule their lives - Castle Hill and Castle View, Castle Lake and the Town Roads which lie around it in a tangle at the western end of the town.

As the years passed, I became more and more interested in - almost entranced by - the secret life of this town, by the hidden relationships which seemed to come clearer and clearer to me. Much of this history remains either unwritten or unpublished:- how the late Sheriff George Bannerman lost his virginity in the back seat of his dead father's car, how Ophelia Todd's husband was killed by a walking windmill, how Deputy Andy Clutterbuck lost the index finger on his left hand (it was cut off in a fan and the family dog ate it).

Following The Dead Zone, which is partly the story of the psychotic Frank Dodd, I wrote a novella called 'The Body'; Cujo, the novel in which good old Sheriff Bannerman bit the dust; and a number of short stories and novelettes about the town (the best of them, at least in my mind, are 'Mrs Todd's Shortcut' and 'Uncle Otto's Truck'). All of which is very well, but a state of entrancement with a fictional setting may not be the best thing in the world for a writer. It was for Faulkner and J. R. R. Tolkien, but sometimes a couple of exceptions just prove the rule, and besides, I don't play in that league.

So at some point I decided - first in my subconscious mind, I think, where all that Really Serious Work takes place - that the time had come to close the book on Castle Rock, Maine, where so many of my own favorite characters have lived and died. Enough, after all, is enough. Time to move on (maybe all the way next door to Harlow, ha-ha). But I didn't just want to walk away; I wanted to finish things, and do it with a bang.

Little by little I began to grasp how that could be done, and over the last four years or so I have been engaged in writing a Castle Rock Trilogy, if you please -the last Castle Rock stories. They were not written in order (I sometimes think 'out of order' is the story of my life), but now they are written, and they are serious enough ... but I hope that doesn't mean that they are sober-sided or boring.

The first of these stories, The Dark Half, was published in 1989. While it is primarily the story of Thad Beaumont and is in large part set in a town called Ludlow (the town where the Creeds lived in Pet Sematary), the town of Castle Rock figures in the tale, and the book serves to introduce Sheriff

Bannerman's replacement, a fellow named Alan Pangborn. Sheriff Pangborn is at the center of the last story in this sequence, a long novel called Needful Things, which is scheduled to be published next year and will conclude my doings with what local people call The Rock.

The connective tissue between these longer works is the story which follows. You will meet few if any of Castle Rock's larger figures in 'The Sun Dog,' but it will serve to introduce you to Pop Merrill, whose nephew is town bad boy (and Gordie LaChance's bete noire in 'The Body') Ace Merrill. 'The Sun Dog' also sets the stage for the final fireworks display ... and, I hope, exists as a satisfying story on its own, one that can be read with pleasure even if you don't give a hang about The Dark Half or Needful Things.

One other thing needs to be said: every story has its own secret life, quite separate from its setting, and 'The Sun Dog' is a story about cameras and photographs. About five years ago, my wife, Tabitha, became interested in photography, discovered she was good at it, and began to pursue it in a serious way, through study, experiment, and practice-practice-practice. I myself take bad photos (I'm one of those guys who always manage to cut off my subjects' heads, get pictures of them with their mouths hanging open, or both), but I have a great deal of respect for those who take good ones ... and the whole process fascinates me.

In the course of her experiments, my wife got a Polaroid camera, a simple one accessible even to a doofus like me. I became fascinated with this camera. I had seen and used Polaroids before, of course, but I had never really thought about them much, nor had I ever looked closely at the images these cameras produce. The more I thought about them, the stranger they seemed. They are, after all, not just images but moments of time ... and there is something so peculiar about them.

This story came almost all at once one night in the summer of 1987, but the thinking which made it possible went on for almost a year. And that's enough out of me, I think. It's been great to be with all of you again, but that doesn't mean I'm letting you go home just yet.

I think we have a birthday party to attend in the little town of Castle Rock.