'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?
lie 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 oat 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 jackstraw 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.
Then it began to change again, and Sam's feeling of relief faded. It did not have a face, exactly, but below the bulging blue eyes, a horn shape began to extrude itself, pushing out of the horror-show face like a stubby elephant's trunk. The eyes stretched away to either side, becoming first Chinese and then insectile. Sam could hear it sniffing as it stretched toward him.
It was covered with wavering, dusty threads.
Part of him wanted to pull back - was screaming at him to pull back - but most of him wanted to stand his ground. And as the thing's fleshy proboscis touched him, Sam felt its deep power. A sense of lethargy filled him, a feeling that it would be better if he just stood still and let it happen. The wind had become a distant, dreamy howl. It was soothing, in a way, as the sound of the vacuum cleaner had been soothing when he was very small.
'Sam?' Naomi called, but her voice was distant, unimportant. 'Sam, are you all right?'
Had he thought he loved her? That was silly. Quite ridiculous, when you thought about it ... when you got right down to it, this was much better.
This creature had ... stories to tell.
Very interesting stories.
The white thing's entire plastic body now yearned toward the proboscis; it fed itself into itself, and the proboscis elongated. The creature became a single tube-shaped thing, the rest of its body hanging as useless and forgotten as that sac below its neck had hung. All its vitality was invested in the horn of flesh, the conduit through which it would suck Sam's vitality and essence into itself.
And it was nice.
The proboscis slipped gently up Sam's legs, pressed briefly against his groin, then rose higher, caressing his belly.
Sam fell on his knees to give it access to his face. He felt his eyes sting briefly and pleasantly as some fluid - not tears, this was thicker than tears - began to ooze from them.
The proboscis closed in on his eyes; he could see a pink petal of flesh opening and closing hungrily inside there. Each time it opened, it revealed a deeper darkness beyond. Then it clenched, forming a hole in the petal, a tube within a tube, and it slipped with sensual slowness across his lips and cheek toward that sticky outflow. Misshapen dark-blue eyes gazed at him hungrily.
But the fine was paid.
Summoning every last bit of his strength, Sam clamped his right hand over the proboscis. It was hot and noxious. The tiny threads of flesh which covered it stung his palm.
It jerked and tried to draw back. For a moment Sam almost lost it and then he closed his hand in a fist, digging his fingernails into the meat of the thing.
'Here!' he shouted. 'Here, I've got something for you, bitch! I brought it all the way from East St Louis!'
He brought his left hand around and slammed the sticky ball of red licorice into the end of the proboscis, plugging it the way the kids in that long-ago parking lot had plugged the tailpipe of Tommy Reed's Pontiac. It tried to shriek and could produce only a blocked humming sound. Then it tried again to pull itself away from Sam. The ball of red licorice bulged from the end of its convulsing snout like a blood-blister.