Four Past Midnight

by Stephen King

  "That's good," Dave said. "Then I can come back next month?"

  "Sure. You took the papers to the Recycling Center, right?"

  "Uh-huh." Dirty Dave pointed with a finger which ended in a yellow, ragged nail. "Right over there. But they're closed."

  Sam nodded. "What are you doing?" he asked.

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

  It showed a picture of a smiling woman holding a platter of fried chicken, and the first thing that struck Sam was that it was good--really good. Wino or not, Dirty Dave had a natural touch. Above the picture, the following was neatly printed: CHICKEN DINNER AT THE 1ST METHODIST CHURCH

  TO BENEFIT "ANGEL STREET" HOMELESS SHELTER

  SUNDAY APRIL 15TH

  6:00 TO 8:00 P.M.

  COME ONE COME ALL

  "It's before the AA meeting," Dave said, "but you can't put nothing on the poster about AA. That's because it's sort of secret."

  "I know," Sam said. He paused, then asked: "Do you go to AA? You don't have to answer if you don't want to. I know it's really none of my business."

  "I go," Dave said, "but it's hard, Mr. Peebles. I got more white chips than Carter has got liver pills. I'm good for a month, sometimes two, and once I went sober almost a whole year. But it's hard." He shook his head. "Some people can't never get with the program, they say. I must be one of those. But I keep tryin."

  Sam's eyes were drawn back to the woman with her platter of chicken. The picture was too detailed to be a cartoon or a sketch, but it wasn't a painting, either. It was clear that Dirty Dave had done it in a hurry, but he had caught a kindness about the eyes and a faint slant of humor, like one last sunbeam at the close of the day, in the mouth. And the oddest thing was that the woman looked familiar to Sam.

  "Is that a real person?" he asked Dave.

  Dave's smile widened. He nodded. "That's Sarah. She's a great gal, Mr. Peebles. This place would have closed down five years ago except for her. She finds people to give money just when it seems the taxes will be too much or we won't be able to fix the place up enough to satisfy the building inspectors when they come. She calls the people who give the money angels, but she's the angel. We named the place for Sarah. Of course, Tommy St. John spelled part of it wrong when he made the sign, but he meant well." Dirty Dave fell silent for a moment, looking at his poster. Without looking up, he added: "Tommy's dead now, a course. Died this last winter. His liver busted."

  "Oh," Sam said, and then he added lamely, "I'm sorry."

  "Don't be. He's well out of it."

  "Chow-de-dow!" Lukey exclaimed, getting up. "Chow-de-dow! Ain't that some fuckin chow-de-dow!" He brought his poster over to Dave. Below the orange squiggles he had drawn a monster woman whose legs ended in sharkfins Sam thought were meant to be shoes. Balanced on one hand was a misshapen plate which appeared to be loaded with blue snakes. Clutched in the other was a cylindrical brown object.

  Dave took the poster from Lukey and examined it. "This is good, Lukey."

  Lukey's lips peeled back in a gleeful smile. He pointed at the brown thing. "Look, Dave! She got her a Slim Fuckin Slim Jim!"

  "She sure does. Purty good. Go on inside and turn on the TV, if you want. Star Trek's on right away. How you doin, Dolph?"

  "I draw better when I'm stewed," Rudolph said, and gave his poster to Dave. On it was a gigantic chicken leg with stick men and women standing around and looking up at it. "It's the fantasy approach," Rudolph said to Sam. He spoke with some truculence.

  "I like it," Sam said. He did, actually. Rudolph's poster reminded him of a New Yorker cartoon, one of the ones he sometimes couldn't understand because they were so surreal.

  "Good." Rudolph studied him closely. "You sure you ain't got a quarter?"

  "No," Sam said.

  Rudolph nodded. "In a way, that's good," he said. "But in another way, it really shits the bed." He followed Lukey inside, and soon the Star Trek theme drifted out through the open door. William Shatner told the winos and burnouts of Angle Street that their mission was to boldly go where no man had gone before. Sam guessed that several members of this audience were already there.

  "Nobody much comes to the dinners but us guys and some of the AA's from town," Dave said, "but it gives us something to do. Lukey hardly talks at all anymore, 'less he's drawing."

  "You're awfully good," Sam told him. "You really are, Dave. Why don't you--" He stopped.

  "Why don't I what, Mr. Peebles?" Dave asked gently. "Why don't I use my right hand to turn a buck? The same reason I don't get myself a regular job. The day got late while I was doin other things."

  Sam couldn't think of a thing to say.

  "I had a shot at it, though. Do you know I went to the Lorillard School in Des Moines on full scholarship? The best art school in the Midwest. I flunked out my first semester. Booze. It don't matter. Do you want to come in and have a cup of coffee, Mr. Peebles? Wait around? You could meet Sarah."

  "No, I better get back. I've got an errand to run."

  He did, too.

  "All right. Are you sure you're not mad at me?"

  "Not a bit."

  Dave stood up. "I guess I'll go in awhile, then," he said. "It was a beautiful day, but it's gettin nippy now. You have a nice night, Mr. Peebles."

  "Okay," Sam said, although he doubted that he was going to enjoy himself very much this Saturday evening. But his mother had had another saying: the way to make the best of bad medicine is to swallow it just as fast as you can. And that was what he intended to do.

  He walked back down the steps of Angle Street, and Dirty Dave Duncan went on inside.

  2

  Sam got almost all the way back to his car, then detoured in the direction of the Recycling Center. He walked across the weedy, cindery ground slowly, watching the long freight disappear in the direction of Camden and Omaha. The red lamps on the caboose twinkled like dying stars. Freight trains always made him feel lonely for some reason, and now, following his conversation with Dirty Dave, he felt lonelier than ever. On the few occasions when he had met Dave while Dave was collecting his papers, he had seemed a jolly, almost clownish man. Tonight Sam thought he had seen behind the make-up, and what he had seen made him feel unhappy and helpless. Dave was a lost man, calm but totally lost, using what was clearly a talent of some size to make posters for a church supper.

  One approached the Recycling Center through zones of litter--first the yellowing ad supplements which had escaped old copies of the Gazette, then the torn plastic garbage bags, finally an asteroid belt of busted bottles and squashed cans. The shades of the small clapboard building were drawn. The sign hanging in the door simply read CLOSED.

  Sam lit a cigarette and started back to his car. He had gone only half a dozen steps when he saw something familiar lying on the ground. He picked it up. It was the bookjacket of Best Loved Poems of the American People. The words PROPERTY OF THE JUNCTION CITY-PUBLIC LIBRARY were stamped across it.

  So now he knew for sure. He had set the books on top of the papers in the Johnnie Walker box and then forgotten them. He had put other papers--Tuesday's, Wednesday's, and Thursday's--on top of the books. Then Dirty Dave had come along late Thursday morning and had dumped the whole shebang into his plastic collection bag. The bag had gone into his shopping-cart, the shopping-cart had come here, and this was all that was left--a bookjacket with a muddy sneaker-print tattooed on it.

  Sam let the bookjacket flutter out of his fingers and walked slowly back to his car. He had an errand to run, and it was fitting that he should run it at the dinner hour.

  It seemed he had some crow to eat.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE LIBRARY (II)

  11

  Halfway to the library, an idea suddenly struck him--it was so obvious he could hardly believe it hadn't occurred to him already. He had lost a couple of library books; he had since discovered they had been destroyed; he would have to pay for them.

  And that was all. />
  It occurred to him that Ardelia Lortz had been more successful in getting him to think like a fourth-grader than he had realized. When a kid lost a book, it was the end of the world; powerless, he cringed beneath the shadow of bureaucracy and waited for the Library Policeman to show up. But there were no Library Police, and Sam, as an adult, knew that perfectly well. There were only town employees like Ms. Lortz, who sometimes got overinflated ideas of their place in the scheme of things, and taxpayers like him, who sometimes forgot they were the dog which wagged the tail, and not the other way around.

  I'm going to go in, I'm going to apologize, and then I'm going to ask her to send me a bill for the replacement copies, Sam thought. And that's all. That's the end.

  It was so simple it was amazing.

  Still feeling a little nervous and a little embarrassed (but much more in control of this teapot tempest), Sam parked across the street from the Library. The carriage lamps which flanked the main entrance were on, casting soft white radiance down the steps and across the building's granite facade. Evening lent the building a kindness and a welcoming air it had definitely been lacking on his first visit--or maybe it was just that spring was clearly on the rise now, something which had not been the case on the overcast March day when he had first met the resident dragon. The forbidding face of the stone robot was gone. It was just the public library again.

  Sam started to get out of the car and then stopped. He had been granted one revelation; now he was suddenly afforded another.

  The face of the woman in Dirty Dave's poster came back to him, the woman with the platter of fried chicken. The one Dave had called Sarah. That woman had looked familiar to Sam, and all at once some obscure circuit fired off in his brain and he knew why.

  It had been Naomi Higgins.

  2

  He passed two kids in JCHS jackets on the steps and caught the door before it could swing all the way closed. He stepped into the foyer. The first thing that struck him was the sound. The reading room beyond the marble steps was by no means rowdy, but neither was it the smooth pit of silence which had greeted Sam on Friday noon just over a week ago.

  Well, but it's Saturday evening now, he thought. There are kids here, maybe studying for their midterm exams.

  But would Ardelia Lortz condone such chatter, muted as it was? The answer seemed to be yes, judging from the sound, but it surely didn't seem in character.

  The second thing had to do with that single mute adjuration which had been mounted on the easel. SILENCE!

  was gone. In its place was a picture of Thomas Jefferson. Below it was this quotation: "I cannot live without books. " --Thomas Jefferson (in a letter to John Adams) June 10th, 1815

  Sam studied this for a moment, thinking that it changed the whole flavor in one's mouth as one prepared to enter the library. SILENCE!

  induced feelings of trepidation and disquiet (what if one's belly was rumbling, for instance, or if one felt an attack of not necessarily silent flatulence might be imminent?). "I cannot live without books, "

  on the other hand, induced feelings of pleasure and anticipation--it made one feel as hungry men and women feel when the food is finally arriving.

  Puzzling over how such a small thing could make such an essential difference, Sam entered the Library ... and stopped dead.

  3

  It was much brighter in the main room than it had been on his first visit, but that was only one of the changes. The ladders which had stretched up to the dim reaches of the upper shelves were gone. There was no need of them, because the ceiling was now only eight or nine feet above the floor instead of thirty or forty. If you wanted to take a book from one of the higher shelves, all you needed was one of the stools which were scattered about. The magazines were placed in an inviting fan on a wide table by the circulation desk. The oak rack from which they had hung like the skins of dead animals was gone. So was the sign reading RETURN ALL MAGAZINES TO THEIR PROPER PLACES!

  The shelf of new novels was still there, but the 7-DAY RENTALS sign had been replaced with one which said READ A BEST SELLER--JUST FOR THE FUN OF IT!

  People--mostly young people--came and went, talking in low tones. Someone chuckled. It was an easy, unselfconscious sound.

  Sam looked up at the ceiling, trying desperately to understand what in hell had happened here. The slanted skylights were gone. The upper reaches of the room had been hidden by a modern suspended ceiling. The old-fashioned hanging globes had been replaced by panelled fluorescent lighting set into the new ceiling.

  A woman on her way up to the main desk with a handful of mystery novels followed Sam's gaze up to the ceiling, saw nothing unusual there, and looked curiously at Sam instead. One of the boys sitting at a long desk to the right of the magazine table nudged his fellows and pointed Sam out. Another tapped his temple and they all snickered.

  Sam noticed neither the stares nor the snickers. He was unaware that he was simply standing in the entrance to the main reading room, gawking up at the ceiling with his mouth open. He was trying to get this major change straight in his mind.

  Well, they've put in a suspended ceiling since you were here last. So what? It's probably more heat-efficient.

  Yes, but the Lortz woman never said anything about changes.

  No, but why would she say anything to him? Sam was hardly a library regular, was he?

  She should have been upset, though. She struck me as a rock-ribbed traditionalist. She wouldn't like this. Not at all.

  That was true, but there was something else, something even more troubling. Putting in a suspended ceiling was a major renovation. Sam didn't see how it could have been accomplished in just a week. And what about the high shelves, and all the books which had been on them? Where had the shelves gone? Where had the books gone?

  Other people were looking at Sam now; even one of the library assistants was staring at him from the other side of the circulation desk. Most of the lively, hushed chatter in the big room had stilled.

  Sam rubbed his eyes--actually rubbed his eyes--and looked up at the suspended ceiling with its inset fluorescent squares again. It was still there.

  I'm in the wrong libary! he thought wildly. That's what it is!

  His confused mind first jumped at this idea and then backed away again, like a kitten that has been tricked into pouncing on a shadow. Junction City was fairly large by central Iowa standards, with a population of thirty-five thousand or so, but it was ridiculous to think it could support two libraries. Besides, the location of the building and the configuration of the room were right ... it was just everything else that was wrong.

  Sam wondered for just a moment if he might be going insane, and then dismissed the thought. He looked around and noticed for the first time that everyone had stopped what they were doing. They were all looking at him. He felt a momentary, mad urge to say, "Go back to what you were doing--I was just noticing that the whole library is different this week." Instead, he sauntered over to the magazine table and picked up a copy of U.S. News & World Report. He began leafing through it with a show of great interest, and watched out of the comers of his eyes as the people in the room went back to what they had been doing.

  When he felt that he could move without attracting undue attention, Sam replaced the magazine on the table and sauntered toward the Children's Library. He felt a little like a spy crossing enemy territory. The sign over the door was exactly the same, gold letters on warm dark oak, but the poster was different. Little Red Riding Hood at the moment of her terrible realization had been replaced by Donald Duck's nephews, Huey, Dewey, and Louie. They were wearing bathing trunks and diving into a swimming pool filled with books. The tag-line beneath read: COME ON IN! THE READING'S FINE!

  "What's going on here?" Sam muttered. His heart had begun to beat too fast; he could feel a fine sweat breaking out on his arms and back. If it had been just the poster, he could have assumed that La Lortz had been fired ... but it wasn't just the poster. It was everything.

  He opened
the door of the Children's Library and peeked inside. He saw the same agreeable small world with its low tables and chairs, the same bright-blue curtains, the same water fountain mounted on the wall. Only now the suspended ceiling in here matched the suspended ceiling in the main reading room, and all the posters had been changed. The screaming child in the black sedan (Simple Simon they call him Simple Simon they feel contempt for him I think that's very healthy, don't you)

  was gone, and so was the Library Policeman with his trenchcoat and his strange star of many points. Sam drew back, turned around, and walked slowly to the main circulation desk. He felt as if his whole body had turned to glass.

  Two library assistants--a college-age boy and girl--watched him approach. Sam was not too upset himself to see that they looked a trifle nervous.

  Be careful. No ... be NORMAL. They already think you're halfway to being nuts.

  He suddenly thought of Lukey and a horrible, destructive impulse tried to seize him. He could see himself opening his mouth and yelling at these two nervous young people, demanding at the top of his voice that they give him a few Slim Fucking Slim Jims, because that was chow, that was chow, that was chow-de-dow.

  He spoke in a calm, low voice instead.

  "Perhaps you could help me. I need to speak to the librarian."

  "Gee, I'm sorry," the girl said. "Mr. Price doesn't come in on Saturday nights."

  Sam glanced down at the desk. As on his previous trip to the library, there was a small name-plaque standing next to the microfilm recorder, but it no longer said A. LORTZ.

  Now it said MR. PRICE.

  In his mind he heard Naomi say, Tall man? About fifty? "No," he said. "Not Mr. Price. Not Mr. Peckham, either. The other one. Ardelia Lortz."

  The boy and girl exchanged a puzzled glance. "No one named Ardelia Lord works here," the boy said. "You must be thinking of some other library."

  "Not Lord," Sam told them. His voice seemed to be coming from a great distance. "Lortz."