Midnight Rain

by Newman,James

  I did not miss them at all.

  Once I would have given up every precious plaything I owned before I’d miss such a line-up. But I had seen enough terror, enough death, to last me the rest of my life.

  Nearly twenty years would pass before I watched another horror movie. And even then I covered my eyes through most of it, not caring whether my date at the time (who later became my first wife) noticed my craven reaction to the imaginary boogiemen onscreen.

  ****

  The first evening The Hills Have Eyes and its B-movie brethren came to my hometown (with little fanfare, where I was concerned), I turned in shortly after dark. I strongly suspect I set a new world record on the night in question, as no child could ever have willingly gone to bed so early during those last carefree days of August. It would have seemed like a waste of perfectly good summer!

  I had a reason for retiring by seven-thirty that night, however.

  The next day I planned to visit the Midnight Public Library the second it opened its doors.

  It was time, I had decided, to play Sherlock Holmes.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Something had come to me the morning after I discovered Burner was missing. It was one of those things that picks at the back of your brain, nags at you until you’re forced to acknowledge it or else it’ll drive you crazy.

  That night. In the Snake River Woods. Something Sheriff Baker said to his son.

  Once it finally rose out of the muddy quagmire of my subconscious, it wouldn’t let me go…

  “Didn’t you learn your lesson the last time?” Baker had asked Henry.

  And I couldn’t help wondering what that meant.

  My curiosity grew overwhelming…especially when I remembered Dan had said something very similar to me at the airport.

  “Make them pay for what they did,” my big brother told me. “Don’t let Henry get away with this a second time.”

  A second time…

  Had Henry done this before? Had there been another girl, before Cassie Belle Rourke?

  ****

  God, how I missed Burner that morning, as I headed to the library on foot. I restricted my trek across town to Midnight’s side roads and back alleys, creeping through backyards and vacant lots like a man on the run from the law.

  I felt so alone, like a social pariah without a friend in the world. As if I had done something wrong.

  Despite having always been an avid reader and lover of books, I had visited the Midnight Public Library only once or twice during the previous year. It had changed quite a bit since the last time I’d been there. The whole site had been remodeled the previous summer, and for a few minutes I couldn’t even find the new entrance to that white-brick building on Hyatt Street.

  I came face to face with the sole reason why I no longer patronized the place on a regular basis the second I walked through those fancy new automatic doors and into the library’s warm confines.

  Her name was Constance Schifford.

  We all called her Miss Shit-Bird.

  Behind her back, of course.

  Crabby old Mrs. Schifford was the Midnight Public Library’s head librarian, had been for as long as I could remember. She was also one of the meanest creatures to ever walk God’s Earth. I am only slightly exaggerating when I say that Constance Schifford was more disagreeable than a rabid Tasmanian Devil with a rusty knife up its butt and something in its eye.

  The librarian’s face reminded me of the gnarled wood of an ancient, weatherworn tree. Her hair was always pulled into a tight ball atop her skull the color of cobwebs and dust. Her hands were claw-like, covered in blotchy brown liver spots. I remember when I was much younger I always feared she would grab me with those hands and I would waste away to something gaunt and satanic just like her. Miss Shit-Bird always wore long, dark dresses—navy blue, black, storm-cloud gray—as if her perpetually antagonistic mood would never allow her to wear anything but the most depressing, funereal colors.

  Mrs. Schifford had despised me since one evening the previous autumn, when a boy named Teddy Worsham and I had disrupted the otherwise immaculate tranquility of her library. Our fifth-grade teacher had assigned us all a project in which we were to research a specific animal in teams of two. Teddy and I had chosen the Great White Shark. Problem was, on that windy October day we weren’t digging through the library’s card catalog for information on man-eating marine life, as our mothers had dropped us off to do. At some point we had stumbled on a tome of such greater interest we lost track of not only time, but our own civilized behavior as well.

  That oh-so-fascinating book which stole our pre-adolescent attention for so many minutes (and simultaneously sealed our fates as patrons of the Midnight Public Library for the remainder of that year) was called The Joy of Sex. My God, how Teddy Worsham and I giggled and poked at one another like fools there in our dark corner of the library, as we rifled through that how-to manual on making love. We laughed so hysterically we nearly cried at the explicit pictures inside. Teddy even tore several out of the book, swore he was going to tease all the girls at school with them. I begged for him to stop as he constructed himself a pair of paper glasses out of two large, stiff-nippled breasts, then proceeded to model them for me like some midget professor with sex on the brain instead of quantum physics.

  Unfortunately, Teddy had chosen to don his new double-D spectacles just as old Constance Shit-Bird rounded the corner and walked up on our hiding place.

  I saw her first. I gasped. Time seemed to stand still. Teddy’s makeshift glasses slipped off his nose, drifted to the floor like an autumn leaf falling to the ground in the dead of night.

  God, how tall and menacing old Miss Shit-Bird appeared during that moment. All we could do was admit we were busted, pray she would spare our lives and please not eat our souls. Teddy’s chubby hands trembled as he passed her the crumpled pages he had torn from the book, but even with so many stiff, veiny appendages and hairy pink places exposed in those explicit diagrams from The Joy of Sex, the librarian never blushed or batted an eye.

  Mom had grounded me for a few days after the incident. I wasn’t allowed to hang around Teddy anymore (after we finished our ill-prepared project on the Great White shark, of course). And old Miss Shit-Bird had hated me ever since.

  “Kyle Mackey,” she said to me that day I came looking for information on Henry Baker and the sins of his own sordid past. Her voice reminded me of something crawled from the grave to terrorize the living. “To what do we owe this dubious pleasure?”

  I swallowed, approached her desk slowly. Like one might approach a pissed-off cobra, if one were stupid enough to do such a thing.

  “Umm…hi,” I said, and no matter how hard I tried I could not look into her piercing, ocean-blue eyes. I feared I might fall in. I would drown.

  She cleared her throat, pursed her lips tighter than ever, and looked me up and down. Behind her, on the wall, a poster exclaimed in bright red letters SHHH! LIBRARIES ARE QUIET PLACES! Beneath those words a fat brown owl stood on a colorful stack of books, holding one wing up to its beak in the universal gesture of shushing.

  “How are you today, Mrs. Schifford?” I asked, as sweetly as I knew how.

  “I am splendid, thank you,” the librarian replied. I could tell she would rather step on me, squash me like a pesky insect crawling across the library’s recently vacuumed floors, than speak to me with any semblance of civility. “Is there something I can help you with? Or are you here to cause more trouble?”

  “N-no. Not at all, Mrs. Schifford. I just—”

  “If there is something you need, spit it out,” she said. “I have many things to do today. A number of hoodlums nearly destroyed the children’s section this morning, and there’s no telling how long it’s going to take to put everything back in its place.”

  I couldn’t help but notice the way she stressed the part about “hoodlums,” as if describing pint-sized literature vandals no less iniquitous than myself.

  That did it. I had
always been taught to respect my elders, but this was just unfair. Something snapped in me. I had paid for the sins I committed with Teddy Worsham—I had taken the grounding Mom gave me like a man, had stayed away from the library for the rest of that year as commanded—yet old Miss Shit-Bird didn’t ever want to let it go.

  I refused to take any more.

  “Look, Mrs. Schifford,” I said. “How come every time I come in here you look at me like I’m a piece of dog crap you just stepped in?”

  The old woman’s jaw dropped. Her eyes grew as wide as Teddy Worsham’s bulging boob spectacles.

  “I don’t think I heard you correctly, young man.”

  “You heard me,” I said. “It’s not fair.”

  “Why, I never—”

  “And you probably never will, with that attitude, lady.” That sly little quip I had learned from Dan, when he bumped into some fat lady once at the new K-Mart across town and she’d rudely berated him even after he apologized.

  I grinned at old Miss Shit-Bird.

  “I…I…you—” She couldn’t believe it. Never before had anyone dared speak to Constance Schifford in such a manner.

  I hoped I didn’t give her a heart attack. I needed her, to help me find the information I had come for.

  “I said I was sorry, Mrs. Schifford, for what I did that time with Teddy,” I said, one hand splayed out on the desk before us in a placating gesture. “I paid for the book. I have just as much right to come here as anyone else. I’ve grown up a lot since I did that.”

  Truth be told, it hadn’t even been a year since what happened, but when you’re young, always anticipating your next birthday as if it is some monumental occasion, the difference between eleven and twelve years old might as well encompass millennia.

  “I can’t believe what I’m hearing,” the librarian rasped.

  “I know you don’t like me,” I said, “but all I ask is that you do your job and help me find what I’m looking for.”

  Mrs. Schifford’s bony hands went to her hips. “You have quite the mouth on you, Kyle Mackey.”

  “I take after my big brother.”

  Her eyes grew watery. Her mouth worked soundlessly. She looked like a dying fish.

  “Please, Mrs. Schifford,” I said. “I’m not here to cause trouble. I just need to know where you keep all the old newspapers, stuff like that.”

  After what felt like forever old Miss Shit-Bird cleared her throat and looked down her nose at me. “Archived newspapers, you said?”

  “That’s right. Like old issues of the Midnight Sun.”

  “Follow me.”

  It couldn’t believe it. It had worked!

  Mrs. Schifford walked quickly around the desk then, led me through the library to the rear of the building. Her black dress swished audibly around her legs as she gestured toward a dimly lit room marked NORTH CAROLINA GENEALOGY.

  “Do you know how to use our microfiche machines?” she asked me.

  “Yes, ma’am, I do.”

  “Very well.”

  I genuinely meant it when I said, “Thank you so much for your help, Mrs. Schifford.”

  But the librarian was already gone. She had sauntered off to pick her dentures with the bones of small children or whatever it was she enjoyed doing in her spare time.

  Meanwhile, I was alone with Midnight’s past.

  ****

  The room was smaller than I expected. A long, rectangular painting of a lighthouse above roiling ocean waves hung slightly left of center along the back wall (THE OUTER BANKS, read the small brass plaque set in its wooden frame). A row of black file cabinets took up the wall to my left, and opposite those sat a wide shelf filled with various hefty tomes documenting North Carolina history. Beside the bookshelf a trio of oak desks was topped with three bulky black microfiche machines.

  20 MINUTE LIMIT—PLEASE RESPECT OTHERS WAITING TO USE MICROFICHE VIEWERS, read a sign on the wall behind the desks. It was the color of dried blood, shaped like a stop sign. An additional notice, written in black marker on a piece of notebook paper, was taped to the bottom of that sign: PLEASE PUT FILM BACK WHERE IT BELONGS!!!!!!!!!!!!

  The work of Old Miss Shit-Bird, I assumed.

  Outside the rain began to pick up again, tapping at the roof of the library like Mother Nature herself wishing to come in from the chill to read a good book. Thunder rumbled in the distance like an idle threat.

  I moved toward the closest desk, ready to begin my search. I still wasn’t sure what I needed to look for, specifically, but I planned to do my best. I took off my jacket, plopped down before a microfiche machine. My chair made a soft farting noise. I wondered if old Miss Shit-Bird knew about the graffiti etched into my cubicle. I hoped she didn’t try to blame me for it. SUPPERTRAMP, read someone’s misspelled ink-pen ode to his or her favorite band, and some other bored music aficionado had carved SUX below that with a sharp object.

  I switched desks, turned on the viewer to my right.

  My best bet, I guessed, would be to start with information pertaining to Sheriff Baker’s induction into office. Obviously the local newspapers would have covered such a story, and this might serve as my most reliable starting point from which to branch off toward other things I needed to know….

  The library’s microfiche files were categorized by publication, one periodical in each of the five file cabinets against the wall opposite the viewers. Available for perusal were not only archived issues of the Midnight Sun, but also the Asheville Citizen-Times, the Hendersonville Times-News, the Charlotte Observer, and even the New York Times. I moved quickly to the Midnight Sun cabinet, squatted down and read the dates on each drawer starting from the bottom. The oldest files were stored farthest down—those went all the way back to the Jan. 4, 1888 edition of the Midnight Sun—and each higher drawer contained, in chronological order, every subsequent issue leading up to the present. They were segregated in groups of about thirty years each.

  Burt Baker had been sheriff for just over two years, I mentally calculated, which meant he’d been elected in November 1975.

  I opened the top drawer. The microfiche film was stored in red and blue boxes about twice the size of a cigarette pack. The labels on the top edge of each box were typed, faded and peeling but still legible.

  After only a few seconds of digging through them, I found the box I needed: “MIDNIGHT SUN”/NOV. 1, 1975—JAN. 1, 1976.

  I took the box to the microfiche viewer. Opened it. Out fell a fat gray spool of film. I loaded the film into the machine, and then scrolled to the November 9, 1975 issue of the Midnight Sun. That would have been the one published the morning after Election Day. On its front page was a lengthy story about how President Ford had named George Bush as the new head of the CIA. On page two were articles about the civil war in Lebanon as well as a brief piece about a new software company starting up in Seattle, an outfit co-founded by a Harvard dropout named Bill Gates.

  Finally, beneath a LOCAL NEWS masthead, I found what I was looking for. It had been given equal space on page three with an article praising the Girl Scouts of Midnight, who had apparently raised $1000 selling cookies the previous summer. The Scouts planned to donate the money to a local children’s hospital during the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday with a little help from the Channel 5 News Team and local celebrity Mickey Marvin, of the Oakland Raiders.

  I frowned, adjusted the focus on the viewer.

  And there he was. That son-of-a-bitch.

  Burt Baker, I mean. Not Mickey Marvin.

  His hair was slightly longer in that grainy black-and-white photograph than it had been the last time I saw him. He wore a white cowboy hat, blue jeans and a bulky flannel shirt. He appeared to be a few pounds lighter back then. He smiled for the camera, waving to the fine citizens who had elected him Sheriff of Polk County.

  I adjusted the focus on the viewer again, started nibbling at my fingernails as I read about how Burt Baker had deceived us all…

  POLK COUNTY ELECTS NEW SHERIFF

&n
bsp; Polk County voters delivered a strong turnout to the polls Tuesday to elect a new sheriff for the first time in nearly thirty years.

  Republican Burt L. Baker tallied 8323 votes in Tuesday’s election, or 59 percent of the total. Democrat Fred K. Irvine received 5666 votes, or 41% percent.

  Baker, 42, expressed gratitude Tuesday night to Polk County voters. He also thanked former sheriff Irvine, 74, though he insisted, “(We) must strive to move forward, instead of living in the past.”

  Burt Baker, a widower, moved to Midnight two years ago with his son, Henry. He is a former Deputy Sheriff of Gaston County, North Carolina, and a member of the Midnight Masons (Lodge #133).

  Baker will be sworn into office on January 1.

  I sighed, leaned back in my chair. A brief tide of sadness washed over me as I read about former sheriff Freddy “Tex” Irvine and his loss to Burt Baker. Baker had won that year’s election based on a sleazy campaign consisting primarily of constant jabs at Irvine’s age, a far-from-subtle “out-with-the-old-in-with-the-new/you-can’t-teach-an-old-dog-new-tricks” mentality. I had been nine years old when Irvine last served as Sheriff of Polk County, but I remembered him well. He was a good man, an older fellow I always thought looked like a real cowboy. A true John Wayne type. Sheriff Irvine’s grandson, Jimmy, had been my next-door neighbor for several years, and Jimmy and I had been treated often to rides in the sheriff’s patrol car, wailing sirens and flashing lights and all.

  I rolled my eyes, realizing I had digressed from the task at hand. I shifted uncomfortably in my chair, cursed myself for getting off track before reading the article again…

  This time I focused on the brief biographical bit about Baker at the end. Burt Baker was a former Deputy Sheriff of Gaston County, North Carolina, it said. That was just outside of Charlotte, I was pretty sure. I had been to Charlotte a few times in the past to visit my aunt Jen, and the more I thought about it I was quite certain Gastonia sat within a few miles of what us North Carolinians call the “Queen City.”