Four Past Midnight

but just offered that one inarguable imperative:

SILENCE!

'Besides - it's all a matter of interpretation, isn't it?'

'I suppose,' Sam said. He felt that he was being maneuvered - and very efficiently - into a place where he would not have a moral leg to stand on, and the field of dialectic would belong to Ardelia Lortz. She gave him the impression that she was used to doing this, and that made him feel stubborn. 'But they struck me as extreme, those posters.'

'Did they?' she asked politely. They had halted by the outer door now.

'Yes. Scary.' He gathered himself and said what he really believed. 'Not appropriate to a place where small children gather.'

He found he still did not sound prissy or self-righteous, at least to himself, and this was a relief.

She was smiling, and the smile irritated him. 'You're not the first person who ever expressed that opinion, Sam. Childless adults aren't frequent visitors to the Children's Library, but they do come in from time to time - uncles, aunts, some single mother's boyfriend who got stuck with pick-up duty . . . or people like you, Sam, who are looking for me.'

People in a pinch, her cool blue-gray eyes said. People who come for help and then, once they HAVE been helped, stay to criticize the way we run things here at the Junction City Public Library. The way I run things at the Junction City Public Library.

'I guess you think I was wrong to put my two cents in,' Sam said good-naturedly. He didn't feel goodnatured, all of a sudden he didn't feel good-natured at all, but it was another trick of the trade, one he now wrapped around himself like a protective cloak.

'Not at all. It's just that you don't understand. We had a poll last summer, Sam -it was part of the annual Summer Reading Program. We call our program Junction City's Summer Sizzlers, and each child gets one vote for every book he or she read. It's one of the strategies we've developed over the years to encourage children to read. That is one of our most important responsibilities, you see.'

We know what we're doing, her steady gaze told him. And I'm being very polite, aren't I? Considering that you, who have never been here in your life before, have presumed to poke your head in once and start shotgunning criticisms.

Sam began to feel very much in the wrong. That dialectical battlefield did not belong to the Lortz woman yet - at least not entirely - but he recognized the fact that he was in retreat.

'According to the poll, last summer's favorite movie among the children was A Nightmare on Elm Street, Part 5. Their favorite rock group is called Guns n Roses - the runner-up was something named Ozzy Osbourne, who, I understand, has a reputation for biting the heads off live animals during his concerts. Their favorite novel was a paperback original called Swan Song. It's a horror novel by a man named Robert McCammon. We can't keep it in stock, Sam. They read each new copy to rags in weeks. I had a copy put in Vinabind, but of course it was stolen. By one of the bad children.'

Her lips pursed in a thin line.

'Runner-up was a horror novel about incest and infanticide called Flowers in the Attic. That one was the champ for five years running. Several of them even mentioned Peyton Place!'

She looked at him sternly.

'I myself have never seen any of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies. I have never heard an Ozzy Osbourne record and have no desire to do so, nor to read a novel by Robert McCammon, Stephen King, or V. C. Andrews. Do you see what I'm getting at, Sam?'

'I suppose. You're saying it wouldn't be fair to . He needed a word, groped for it, and found it. ' . . . to usurp the children's tastes.'

She smiled radiantly - everything but the eyes, which seemed to have nickels in them again.

'That's part of it, but that's not all of it. The posters in the Children's Library -both the nice, uncontroversial ones and the ones which put you off - came to us from the Iowa Library Association. The ILA is a member of the Midwest Library Association, and that is, in turn, a member of The National Library Association, which gets the majority of its funding from tax money. From John Q. Public -which is to say from me. And you.'

Sam shifted from one foot to the other. He didn't want to spend the afternoon listening to a lecture on How Your Library Works for You, but hadn't he invited it? He supposed so. The only thing he was absolutely sure of was that he was liking Ardelia Lortz less and less all the time.

'The Iowa Library Association sends us a sheet every other month, with reproductions of about forty posters,' Ms Lortz continued relentlessly. 'We can pick any five free; extras cost three dollars each. I see you're getting restless, Sam, but you do deserve an explanation, and we are finally reaching the nub of the matter.'

'Me? I'm not restless,' Sam said restlessly.

She smiled at him, revealing teeth too even to be anything but dentures. 'We have a Children's Library Committee,' she said. 'Who is on it? Why, children, of course! Nine of them. Four high-school students, three middleschool students, and two grammar-school students. Each child has to have an overall B average in his schoolwork to qualify. They pick some of the new books we order, they picked the new drapes and tables when we redecorated last fall ... and, of course, they pick the posters. That is, as one of our younger Committeemen once put it, 'the funnest part.' Now do you understand?'

'Yes,' Sam said. 'The kids picked out Little Red Riding Hood, and Simple Simon, and the Library Policeman. They like them because they're scary.'

'Correct!' she beamed.

Suddenly he'd had enough. It was something about the Library. Not the posters, not the librarian, exactly, but the Library itself. Suddenly the Library was like an aggravating, infuriating splinter jammed deep in one buttock. Whatever it was, it was ... enough.

'Ms Lortz, do you keep a videotape of A Nightmare on Elm Street, Part 5 in the Children's Library? Or a selection of albums by Guns n Roses and Ozzy Osbourne?'

'Sam, you miss the point,' she began patiently.

'What about Peyton Place? Do you keep a copy of that in the Children's Library just because some of the kids have read it?'

Even as he was speaking, he thought, Does ANYBODY still read that old thing?

'No,' she said, and he saw that an ill-tempered flush was rising in her cheeks. This was not a woman who was used to having her judgments called into question. 'But we do keep stories about housebreaking, parental abuse, and burglary. I am speaking, of course, of 'Goldilocks and the Three Bears,'

'Hansel and Gretel', and 'Jack and the Beanstalk.' I expected a man such as yourself to be a little more understanding, Sam.'

A man you helped out in a pinch is what you mean, Sam thought, but what the hell, lady - isn't that what the town pays you to do?

Then he got hold of himself. He didn't know exactly what she meant by la man such as himself,' wasn't sure he wanted to know, but he did understand that this discussion was on the edge of getting out of hand - of becoming an argument. He had come in here to find a little tenderizer to sprinkle over his speech, not to get in a hassle about the Children's Library with the head librarian.

'I apologize if I've said anything to offend you,' he said, 'and I really ought to be going.'

'Yes,' she said. 'I think you ought.' Your apology is not accepted, her eyes telegraphed.