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 fivedollar 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 you.'
'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 fines of blood and bruise. It looked like a tattoo.
'We've got to get him to a hospital, Sam!'