Four Past Midnight

by Stephen King

  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 tree-branch dropped to the pavement not three feet from the Datsun's trunk, exploding chunks of bark and rot-infested wood in every direction. If it had landed on top of the car, it would have smashed the roof in like a tomato-soup 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 loading-platform steps before he realized that, although he still had the snot-textured 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 arc-sodium security lamp was gone. It had been replaced by an old-fashioned mercury-vapor 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 book-cataloguing area which was dim but not entirely dark. A small table-lamp with a red-fringed 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 half-nelson, 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 half-turn 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, half-hearted reflex. He collided with the fire-extinguisher 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 chestnut-colored 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 five-dollar 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, thread-choked 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 ash-blonde. 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 gou."

  "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 fire-extinguisher's handle was printed on that side of his face in bright lines 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 freight-train 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?

  He 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 out 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 toe-holds, 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 jack-straw 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.