If he could.
CHAPTER 9
The Library Policeman (I)
He did sleep well. There were no dreams, and an idea came to him naturally and easily in the shower the next morning, the way ideas sometimes did when your body was rested and your mind hadn't been awake long enough to get cluttered up with a load of shit. The Public Library was not the only place where information was available, and when it was local history - recent local history -you were interested in, it wasn't even the best place.
'The Gazette!' he cried, and stuck his head under the shower nozzle to rinse the soap out of it.
Twenty minutes later he was downstairs, dressed except for his coat and tie, and drinking coffee in his study. The legal pad was once more in front of him, and on it was the start of another list.
1. Ardelia Lortz - who is she? Or who was she?
2. Ardelia Lortz - what did she do?
3. Junction City Public Library - renovated? When? Pictures?
At this point the doorbell rang. Sam glanced at the clock as he got up to answer it. It was going on eightthirty, time to get to work. He could shoot over to the Gazette office at ten, the time he usually took his coffee break, and check some back issues. Which ones? He was still mulling this over - some would undoubtedly bear fruit quicker than others - as he dug in his pocket for the paperboy's money. The doorbell rang again.
'I'm coming as fast as I can, Keith!' he called, stepping into the kitchen entryway and grabbing the doorknob. 'Don't punch a hole in the damn d -'
At that moment he looked up and saw a shape much larger than Keith Jordan's bulking behind the sheer curtain hung across the window in the door. His mind had been preoccupied, more concerned with the day ahead than this Monday-morning ritual of paying the newsboy, but in that instant an icepick of pure terror stabbed its way through his scattered thoughts. He did not have to see the face; even through the sheer he recognized the shape, the set of the body . . . and the trenchcoat, of course.
The taste of red licorice, high, sweet, and sickening, flooded his mouth.
He let go of the doorknob, but an instant too late. The latch had clicked back, and the moment it did, the figure standing on the back porch rammed the door open. Sam was thrown backward into the kitchen. He flailed his arms to keep his balance and managed to knock all three coats hanging from the rod in the entryway to the floor.
The Library Policeman stepped in, wrapped in his own pocket of cold air. He stepped in slowly, as if he had all the time in the world, and closed the door behind him. In one hand he held Sam's copy of the Gazette, neatly rolled and folded. He raised it like a baton.
'I brought you your paper,' the Library Policeman said. His voice was strangely distant, as if it was coming to Sam through a heavy pane of glass. 'I was going to pay the boy as well, but he theemed in a hurry to get away. I wonder why.'
He advanced toward the kitchen - toward Sam, who was cowering against the counter and staring at the intruder with the huge, shocked eyes of a terrified child, of some poor fourth-grade Simple Simon.
I am imagining this, Sam thought, or I'm having a nightmare - a nightmare so horrible it makes the one I had two nights ago look like a sweet dream.
But it was no nightmare. It was terrifying, but it was no nightmare. Sam had time to hope he had gone crazy after all. Insanity was no day at the beach, but nothing could be as awful as this man-shaped thing which had come into his house, this thing which walked in its own wedge of winter.
Sam's house was old and the ceilings were high, but the Library Policeman had to duck his head in the entry, and even in the kitchen the crown of his gray felt hat almost brushed the ceiling. That meant he was over seven feet tall.
His body was wrapped in a trenchcoat the leaden color of fog at twilight. His skin was paper white. His face was dead, as if he could understand neither kindness nor love nor mercy. His mouth was set in lines of ultimate, passionless authority and Sam thought for one confused moment of how the closed library door had looked, like the slotted mouth in the face of a granite robot. The Library Policeman's eyes appeared to be silver circles which had been punctured by tiny shotgun pellets. They were rimmed with pinkish-red flesh that looked ready to bleed. They were lashless. And the worst thing of all was this: it was a face Sam knew. He did not think this was the first time he had cringed in terror beneath that black gaze, and far back in his mind, Sam heard a voice with the slightest trace of a lisp say: Come with me, son ... I'm a poleethman.
The scar overlaid the geography of that face exactly as it had in Sam's imagination - across the left cheek, below the left eye, across the bridge of the nose. Except for the scar, it was the man in the poster ... or was it? He could no longer be sure.
Come with me, son ... I'm a poleethman.
Sam Peebles, darling of the Junction City Rotary Club, wet his pants. He felt his bladder let go in a warm gush, but that seemed far away and unimportant. What was important was that there was a monster in his kitchen, and the most terrible thing about this monster was that Sam almost knew his face. Sam felt a triplelocked door far back in his mind straining to burst open. He never thought of running. The idea of flight was beyond his capacity to imagine. He was a child again, a child who has been caught red-handed
(the book isn't The Speaker's Companion)
doing some awful bad thing. Instead of running
(the book isn't Best Loved Poems of the American People)
he folded slowly over his own wet crotch and collapsed between the two stools which stood at the counter, holding his hands up blindly above his head.
(the book is)
'No,' he said in a husky, strengthless voice. 'No, please - no, please, please don't do it to me, please, I'll be good, please don't hurt me that way.'
He was reduced to this. But it didn't matter; the giant in the fog-colored trenchcoat
(the book is The Black Arrow by Robert Louts Stevenson)
now stood directly over him.
Sam dropped his head. It seemed to weigh a thousand pounds. He looked at the floor and prayed incoherently that when he looked up - when he had the strength to look up - the figure would be gone.
'Look at me,' the distant, thudding voice instructed. It was the voice of an evil god.
'No,' Sam cried in a shrieky, breathless voice, and then burst into helpless tears. It was not just terror, although the terror was real enough, bad enough. Separate from it was a cold deep drift of childish fright and childish shame. Those feelings clung like poison syrup to whatever it was he dared not remember, the thing that had something to do with a book he had never read: The Black Arrow, by Robert Louis Stevenson.
Whack!
Something struck Sam's head and he screamed.
'Look at me!'