Four Past Midnight

by Stephen King

  He opened the door and went out.

  A single frantic thought filled Sam's mind the minute the door closed again and he heard the Library Policeman's feet on the back porch: he had to lock the door.

  He got halfway to his feet and then grayness swam over him and he fell forward, unconscious.

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHRON-O-LODGE-ICK-A-LEE SPEAKING

  1

  "May I . . . help you?" the receptionist asked. The slight pause came as she took a second look at the man who had just approached the desk.

  "Yes," Sam said. "I want to look at some back issues of the Gazette, if that's possible."

  "Of course it is," she said. "But--pardon me if I'm out of line--do you feel all right, sir? Your color is very bad."

  "I think I may be coming down with something, at that," Sam said.

  "Spring colds are the worst, aren't they?" she said, getting up. "Come right through the gate at the end of the counter, Mr.--?"

  "Peebles. Sam Peebles."

  She stopped, a chubby woman of perhaps sixty, and cocked her head. She put one red-tipped nail to the corner of her mouth. "You sell insurance, don't you?"

  "Yes, ma'am," he said.

  "I thought I recognized you. Your picture was in the paper last week. Was it some sort of award?"

  "No, ma'am," Sam said, "I gave a speech. At the Rotary Club." And would give anything to be able to turn back the clock, he thought. I'd tell Craig Jones to go fuck himself.

  "Well, that's wonderful," she said . . . but she spoke as if there might be some doubt about it. "You looked different in the picture."

  Sam came in through the gate.

  "I'm Doreen McGill," the woman said, and put out a plump hand.

  Sam shook it and said he was pleased to meet her. It took an effort. He thought that speaking to people--and touching people, especially that--was going to be an effort for quite awhile to come. All of his old ease seemed to be gone.

  She led him toward a carpeted flight of stairs and flicked a light-switch. The stairway was narrow, the overhead bulb dim, and Sam felt the horrors begin to crowd in on him at once. They came eagerly, as fans might congregate around a person offering free tickets to some fabulous sold-out show. The Library Policeman could be down there, waiting in the dark. The Library Policeman with his dead white skin and red-rimmed silver eyes and small but hauntingly familiar lisp.

  Stop it, he told himself. And if you can't stop it, then for God's sake control it. You have to. Because this is your only chance. What will you do if you can't go down a flight of stairs to a simple office basement? Just cower in your house and wait for midnight?

  "That's the morgue," Doreen McGill said, pointing. This was clearly a lady who pointed every chance she got. "You only have to--"

  "Morgue?" Sam asked, turning toward her. His heart had begun to knock nastily against his ribs. "Morgue?"

  Doreen McGill laughed. "Everyone says it just like that. It's awful, isn't it? But that's what they call it. Some silly newspaper tradition, I guess. Don't worry, Mr. Peebles--there are no bodies down there; just reels and reels of microfilm."

  I wouldn't be so sure, Sam thought, following her down the carpeted stairs. He was very glad she was leading the way.

  She flicked on a line of switches at the foot of the stairs. A number of fluorescent lights, embedded in what looked like oversized inverted ice-cube trays, went on. They lit up a large low room carpeted in the same dark blue as the stairs. The room was lined with shelves of small boxes. Along the left wall were four microfilm readers that looked like futuristic hair-driers. They were the same blue as the carpet.

  "What I started to say was that you have to sign the book," Doreen said. She pointed again, this time at a large book chained to a stand by the door. "You also have to write the date, the time you came in, which is"--she checked her wristwatch--" twenty past ten, and the time you leave."

  Sam bent over and signed the book. The name above his was Arthur Meecham. Mr. Meecham had been down here on December 27th, 1989. Over three months ago. This was a well-lighted, well-stocked, efficient room that apparently did very little business.

  "It's nice down here, isn't it?" Doreen asked complacently. "That's because the federal government helps subsidize newspaper morgues--or libraries, if you like that word better. I know I do."

  A shadow danced in one of the aisles and Sam's heart began to knock again. But it was only Doreen McGill's shadow; she had bent over to make sure he had entered the correct time of day, and--

  --and HE didn't cast a shadow. The Library Policeman. Also . . .

  He tried to duck the rest and couldn't.

  Also, I can't live like this. I can't live with this kind of fear. I'd stick my head in a gas oven if it went on too long. And if it does, I will. It's not just fear of him--that man, or whatever he is. It's the way a person's mind feels, the way it screams when it feels everything it ever believed in slipping effortlessly away.

  Doreen pointed to the right wall, where three large folio volumes stood on a single shelf. "That's January, February, and March of 1990," she said. "Every July the paper sends the first six months of the year to Grand Island, Nebraska, to be microfilmed. The same thing when December is over." She extended the plump hand and pointed a red-tipped nail at the shelves, counting over from the shelf at the right toward the microfilm readers at the left. She appeared to be admiring her fingernail as she did it. "The microfilms go that way, chronologically," she said. She pronounced the word carefully, producing something mildly exotic: chron-o-lodge-ick-a-lee. "Modem times on your right; ancient days on your left."

  She smiled to show that this was a joke, and perhaps to convey a sense of how wonderful she thought all this was. Chron-o-lodge-ick-a-lee speaking, the smile said, it was all sort of a gas.

  "Thank you," Sam said.

  "Don't mention it. It's what we're here for. One of the things, anyway." She put her nail to the corner of her mouth and gave him her peek-a-boo smile again. "Do you know how to run a microfilm reader, Mr. Peebles?"

  "Yes, thanks."

  "All right. If I can help you further, I'll be right upstairs. Don't hesitate to ask."

  "Are you--" he began, and then snapped his mouth shut on the rest: --going to leave me here alone?

  She raised her eyebrows.

  "Nothing," he said, and watched her go back upstairs. He had to resist a strong urge to pelt up the stairs behind her. Because, cushy blue carpet or not, this was another Junction City library.

  And this one was called the morgue.

  2

  Sam walked slowly toward the shelves with their weight of square microfilm boxes, unsure of where to begin. He was very glad that the overhead fluorescents were bright enough to banish most of the troubling shadows in the corners.

  He hadn't dared ask Doreen McGill if the name Ardelia Lortz rang a bell, or even if she knew roughly when the city Library had last undergone renovations. You have been athking questions, the Library Policeman had said. Don't pry into things that don't concern you. Do you underthand?

  Yes, he understood. And he supposed he was risking the Library Policeman's wrath by prying anyway . . . but he wasn't asking questions, at least not exactly, and these were things that concerned him. They concerned him desperately.

  I will be watching. And I am not alone.

  Sam looked nervously over his shoulder. Saw nothing. And still found it impossible to move with any decision. He had gotten this far, but he didn't know if he could get any further. He felt more than intimidated, more than frightened. He felt shattered.

  "You've got to," he muttered harshly, and wiped at his lips with a shaking hand. "You've just got to."

  He made his left foot move forward. He stood that way a moment, legs apart, like a man caught in the act of fording a small stream. Then he made his right foot catch up with his left one. He made his way across to the shelf nearest the bound folios in this hesitant, reluctant fashion. A card on the end of the shelf read: 1987-1989.


  That was almost certainly too recent--in fact, the Library renovations must have taken place before the spring of 1984, when he had moved to Junction City. If it had happened since, he would have noticed the workmen, heard people talking about it, and read about it in the Gazette. But, other than guessing that it must have happened in the last fifteen or twenty years (the suspended ceilings had not looked any older than that), he could narrow it down no further. If only he could think more clearly! But he couldn't. What had happened that morning screwed up any normal, rational effort to think the way heavy sunspot activity screwed up radio and TV transmissions. Reality and unreality had come together like vast stones, and Sam Peebles, one tiny, screaming, struggling speck of humanity, had had the bad luck to get caught between them.

  He moved two aisles to the left, mostly because he was afraid that if he stopped moving for too long he might freeze up entirely, and walked down the aisle marked 1981-1983.

  He picked a box almost at random and took it over to one of the microfilm readers. He snapped it on and tried to concentrate on the spool of microfilm (the spool was also blue, and Sam wondered if there was any reason why everything in this clean, well-lighted place was color coordinated) and nothing else. First you had to mount it on one of the spindles, right; then you had to thread it, check; then you had to secure the leader in the core of the take-up reel, okay. The machine was so simple an eight-year-old could have executed these little tasks, but it took Sam almost five minutes; he had his shaking hands and shocked, wandering mind to deal with. When he finally got the microfilm mounted and scrolled to the first frame, he discovered he had mounted the reel backward. The printed matter was upside down.

  He patiently rewound the microfilm, turned it around, and rethreaded it. He discovered he didn't mind this little setback in the least; repeating the operation, one simple step at a time, seemed to calm him. This time the front page of the April 1, 1981, issue of the Junction city Gazette appeared before him, right side up. The headline bannered the surprise resignation of a town official Sam had never heard of, but his eyes were quickly drawn to a box at the bottom of the page. Inside the box was this message: RICHARD PRICE AND THE ENTIRE STAFF OF

  THE JUNCTION CITY PUBLIC LIBRARY

  REMIND YOU THAT

  APRIL 6TH-13TH IS

  NATIONAL LIBRARY WEEK

  COME AND SEE US!

  Did I know that? Sam wondered. Is that why I grabbed this particular box? Did I subconsciously remember that the second week of April is National Library Week?

  Come with me, a tenebrous, whispering voice answered. Come with me, son . . . I'm a poleethman.

  Gooseflesh gripped him; a shudder shook him. Sam pushed both the question and that phantom voice away. After all, it didn't really matter why he had picked the April, 1981, issues of the Gazette; the important thing was that he had, and it was a lucky break.

  Might be a lucky break.

  He advanced the reel quickly to April 6th, and saw exactly what he had hoped for. Over the Gazette masthead, in red ink, it said: SPECIAL LIBRARY SUPPLEMENT ENCLOSED!

  Sam advanced to the supplement. There were two photos on the first page of the supplement. One was of the Library's exterior. The other showed Richard Price, the head librarian, standing at the circulation desk and smiling nervously into the camera. He looked exactly as Naomi Higgins had described him--a tall, bespectacled man of about forty with a narrow little mustache. Sam was more interested in the background. He could see the suspended ceiling which had so shocked him on his second trip to the Library. So the renovations had been done prior to April of 1981.

  The stories were exactly the sort of self-congratulatory puff-pieces he expected--he had been reading the Gazette for six years now and was very familiar with its ain't-we-a-jolly-bunch-of-JayCees editorial slant. There were informative (and rather breathless) items about National Library Week, the Summer Reading Program, the Junction County Bookmobile, and the new fund drive which had just commenced. Sam glanced over these quickly. On the last page of the supplement he found a much more interesting story, one written by Price himself. It was titled THE JUNCTION CITY PUBLIC LIBRARY

  One Hundred Years of History

  Sam's eagerness did not last long. Ardelia's name wasn't there. He reached for the power switch to rewind the microfilm and then stopped. He saw a mention of the renovation project--it had happened in 1970--and there was something else. Something just a little off-key. Sam began to read the last part of Mr. Price's chatty historical note again, this time more carefully.

  With the end of the Great Depression our Library turned the corner. In 1942, the Junction City Town Council voted $5,000 to repair the extensive water damage the Library sustained during the Flood of '32, and Mrs. Felicia Culpepper took on the job of Head Librarian, donating her time without recompense. She never lost sight of her goal: a completely renovated Library, serving a Town which was rapidly becoming a City.

  Mrs. Culpepper stepped down in 1951, giving way to Christopher Lavin, the first Junction City Librarian with a degree in Library Science. Mr. Lavin inaugurated the Culpepper Memorial Fund, which raised over $15,000 for the acquisition of new books in its first year, and the Junction City Public Library was on its way into the modern age!

  Shortly after I became Head Librarian in 1964, I made major renovations my number one goal. The funds needed to achieve this goal were finally raised by the end of 1969, and while both City and Federal money helped in the construction of the splendid building Junction City "bookworms" enjoy today, this project could not have been completed without the help of all those volunteers who later showed up to swing a hammer or run a bench-saw during "Build Your Library Month" in August of 1970!

  Other notable projects during the 1970's and 1980's included ...

  Sam looked up thoughtfully. He believed there was something missing from Richard Price's careful, droning history of the town Library. No; on second thought, missing was the wrong word. The essay made Sam decide Price was a fussbudget of the first water--probably a nice man, but a fussbudget just the same--and such men did not miss things, especially when they were dealing with subjects which were clearly close to their hearts.

  So--not missing. Concealed.

  It didn't quite add up, chron-o-lodge-ick-a-lee speaking. In 1951, a man named Christopher Lavin had succeeded that saint Felicia Culpepper as head librarian. In 1964, Richard Price had become city librarian. Had Price succeeded Lavin? Sam didn't think so. He thought that at some point during those thirteen blank years, a woman named Ardelia Lortz had succeeded Lavin. Price, Sam thought, had succeeded her. She wasn't in Mr. Price's fussbudgety account of the Library because she had done ... something. Sam was no closer to knowing what that something might have been, but he had a better idea of the magnitude. Whatever it was, it had been bad enough for Price to make her an unperson in spite of his very obvious love of detail and continuity.

  Murder, Sam thought. It must have been murder. It's really the only thing bad enough to f--

  At that second a hand dropped on Sam's shoulder.

  3

  If he had screamed, he would undoubtedly have terrified the hand's owner almost as much as she had already terrorized him, but Sam was unable to scream. Instead, all the air whooshed out of him and the world went gray again. His chest felt like an accordion being slowly crushed under an elephant's foot. All of his muscles seemed to have turned to macaroni. He did not wet his pants again. That was perhaps the only saving grace.

  "Sam?" he heard a voice ask. It seemed to come from quite a distance--somewhere in Kansas, say. "Is that you?"

  He swung around, almost falling out of his chair in front of the microfilm reader, and saw Naomi. He tried to get his breath back so he could say something. Nothing but a tired wheeze came out. The room seemed to waver in front of his eyes. The grayness came and went.

  Then he saw Naomi take a stumble-step backward, her eyes widening in alarm, her hand going to her mouth. She struck one of the microfilm shelv
es almost hard enough to knock it over. It rocked, two or three of the boxes tumbled to the carpet with soft thumps, and then it settled back again.

  "Omes," he managed at last. His voice came out in a whispery squeak. He remembered once, as a boy in St. Louis, trapping a mouse under his baseball cap. It had made a sound like that as it scurried about, looking for an escape hatch.

  "Sam, what's happened to you?" She also sounded like someone who would have been screaming if shock hadn't whipped the breath out of her. We make quite a pair, Sam thought, Abbott and Costello Meet the Monsters.

  "What are you doing here?" he said. "You scared the living shit out of me!"

  There, he thought. I went and used the s-word again. Called you Omes again, too. Sorry about that. He felt a little better, and thought of getting up, but decided against it. No sense pressing his luck. He was still not entirely sure his heart wasn't going to vapor-lock.

  "I went to the office to see you," she said. "Cammy Harrington said she thought she saw you come in here. I wanted to apologize. Maybe. I thought at first you must have played some cruel trick on Dave. He said you'd never do a thing like that, and I started to think that it didn't seem like you. You've always been so nice . . ."

  "Thanks," Sam said. "I guess."

  "... and you seemed so ... so bewildered on the telephone. I asked Dave what it was about, but he wouldn't tell me anything else. All I know is what I heard . . . and how he looked when he was talking to you. He looked like he'd seen a ghost."

  No, Sam thought of telling her. I was the one who saw the ghost. And this morning I saw something even worse.

  "Sam, you have to understand something about Dave . . . and about me. Well, I guess you already know about Dave, but I'm--"

  "I guess I know," Sam told her. "I said in my note to Dave that I didn't see anyone at Angle Street, but that wasn't the truth. I didn't see anyone at first, but I walked through the downstairs, looking for Dave. I saw you guys out back. So . . . I know. But I don't know on purpose, if you see what I mean."