Sam struggled to his knees, still holding the twitching, noisome flesh in his hand, and threw himself on top of the Ardelia-thing. It twisted and pulsed beneath him, trying to throw him off. They rolled over and over in the heaped pile of books. It was dreadfully strong. Once Sam was eye to eye with it, and he was nearly frozen by the hate and panic in that gaze.
Then he felt it begin to swell.
He let go and scrambled backward, gasping. The thing in the book-littere aisle now looked like a grotesque beachball with a trunk, a beachball covered with fine hair which wavered like tendrils of seaweed in a running tide. It rolled over in the aisle, its proboscis swelling like a firehose which has been tied in a knot. Sam watched, frozen with horror and fascination, as the thing which had called itself Ardelia Lortz strangled on its own fuming guts.
Bright red roadmap lines of blood popped out on its straining hide. Its eyes bulged, now staring at Sam in an expression of dazed surprise. It made one final effort to expel the soft blob of licorice, but its proboscis had been wide open in its anticipation of food, and the licorice stayed put.
Sam saw what was going to happen and threw an arm over his face an instant before it exploded.
Chunks of alien flesh flew in every direction. Ropes of thick blood splattered Sam's arms, chest, and legs. He cried out in mingled revulsion and relief.
An instant later the emergency light winked out, plunging them into darkness again.
Once more the interval of darkness was very brief, but it was long enough for Sam to sense the change. He felt it in his head - a clear sensation of things which had been out of joint snapping back into place. When the emergency lights came back on, there were four of them. Their batteries made a low, self-satisfied humming sound instead of a loud buzz, and they were very bright, banishing the shadows to the furthest corners of the room. He did not know if the world of 1960 they had entered when the arc-sodium light became a mercury-vapor lamp had been real or an illusion, but he knew it was gone.
The overturned bookcases were upright again. There was a litter of books in this aisle - a dozen or so - but he might have knocked those off himself in his struggle to get on his feet. And outside, the sound of the storm had fallen from a shout to a mutter. Sam could hear what sounded like a very sedate rain falling on the roof.
The Ardelia-thing was gone. There were no splatters of blood or chunks of flesh on the floor, on the books, or on him.
There was only one sign of her: a single golden earring, glinting up at him.
Sam got shakily to his feet and kicked it away. Then a grayness came over his sight and he swayed on his feet, eyes closed, waiting to see if he would faint or not.
'Sam!' It was Naomi, and she sounded as if she were crying. 'Sam, where are you?'
'Here!' He reached up, grabbed a handful of his hair, and pulled it hard. Stupid, probably, but it worked. The wavery grayness didn't go away entirely, but it retreated. He began moving back toward the cataloguing area, walking in large, careful strides.
The same desk, a graceless block of wood on stubby legs, stood in the cataloguing area, but the lamp with its old-fashioned, tasselled shade had been replaced with a fluorescent bar. The battered typewriter and Rolodex had been replaced by an Apple computer. And, if he had not already been sure of what time he was now in, a glance at the cardboard cartons on the floor would have convinced him: they were full of poppers and plastic bubble-strips.
Naomi was still kneeling beside Dave at the end of the aisle, and when Sam reached her side he saw that the fire-extinguisher (although thirty years had passed, it appeared to be the same one) was firmly mounted on its post again . . . but the shape of its handle was still imprinted on Dave's cheek and forehead.
His eyes were open, and when he saw Sam, he smiled. 'Not ... bad,' he whispered. 'I bet you ... didn't know you had it ... in you.'
Sam felt a tremendous, buoyant sense of relief. 'No,' he said. 'I didn't.' He bent down and held three fingers in front of Dave's eyes. 'How many fingers do you see?'
'About ... seventy-four,' Dave whispered.
'I'll call the ambulance,' Naomi said, and started to get up. Dave's left hand grasped her wrist before she could.
'No. Not yet.' His eyes shifted to Sam. 'Bend down. I need to whisper.'
Sam bent over the old man. Dave put a trembling hand on the back of his neck. His lips tickled the cup of Sam's ear and Sam had to force himself to hold steady -it tickled. 'Sam,' he whispered. 'She waits. Remember ... she waits.'
'What?' Sam asked. He felt almost totally unstrung. 'Dave, what do you mean?'
But Dave's hand had fallen away. He stared up at Sam, through Sam, his chest rising shallowly and rapidly.
'I'm going,' Naomi said, clearly upset. 'There's a telephone down there on the cataloguing desk.'
'No,' Sam said.
She turned toward him, eyes glaring, mouth pulled back from neat white teeth in a fury. 'What do you mean, no? Are you crazy? His skull is fractured, at the very least! He's -'
'He's going, Sarah,' Sam said gently. 'Very soon. Stay with him. Be his friend.'
She looked down, and this time she saw what Sam had seen. The pupil of Dave's left eye had drawn down to a pinpoint; the pupil of his right was huge and fixed.
'Dave?' she whispered, frightened. 'Dave?'
But Dave was looking at Sam again. 'Remember,' he whispered. 'She W ... '
His eyes grew still and fixed. His chest rose once more ... dropped ... and did not rise again.
Naomi began to sob. She put his hand against her cheek and closed his eyes. Sam knelt down painfully and put his arm around her waist.
CHAPTER 15
Angle Street (III)
1
That night and the next were sleepless ones for Sam Peebles. He lay awake in his bed, all the second-floor lights turned on, and thought about Dave Duncan's last words: She waits.
Toward dawn of the second night, he began to believe he understood what the old man had been trying to say.
2
Sam thought that Dave would be buried out of the Baptist Church in Proverbia, and was a little surprised to find that he had converted to Catholicism at some point between 1960 and 1990. The services were held at St Martin's on April 11th, a blustery day that alternated between clouds and cold early-spring sunshine.
Following the graveside service, there was a reception at Angle Street. There were almost seventy people there, wandering through the downstairs rooms or clustered in little groups, by the time Sam arrived. They had all known Dave, and spoke of him with humor, respect, and unfailing love. They drank ginger ale from Styrofoam cups and ate small finger sandwiches. Sam moved from group to group, passing a word with someone he knew from time to time but not stopping to chat. He rarely took his hand from the pocket of his dark coat. He had made a stop at the Piggly Wiggly store on his way from the church, and now there were half a dozen cellophane packages in there, four of them long and thin, two of them rectangular.