Four Past Midnight

The Library couldn't have changed so radically in just over a week. He couldn't have seen the skylights from the reading room. The girl, Cynthia Berrigan, had said they were boarded over, had been since she had arrived, at least a year ago. So this was some sort of a mental breakdown. Or a brain tumor. Or what about Alzheimer's disease? There was a pleasant thought. He had read someplace - Newsweek, perhaps - that Alzheimer's victims were getting younger and younger. Maybe the whole weird episode was a signal of creeping, premature senility.

An unpleasant billboard began to fill his thoughts, a billboard with three words written on it in greasy letters the color of red licorice. These words were

LOSING MY MIND.

He had lived an ordinary life, full of ordinary pleasures and ordinary regrets; a pretty-much-unexamined life. He had never seen his name in lights, true, but he had never had any reason to question his sanity, either. Now he found himself lying in his rumpled bed and wondering if this was how you came untethered from the real, rational world. If this was how it started when you

LOST YOUR MIND.

The idea that the angel of Junction City's homeless shelter was Naomi - Naomi going under an alias - was another nutso idea. It just couldn't be ... could it? He even began to question the strong upsurge in his business. Maybe he had hallucinated the whole thing.

Toward midnight, his thoughts turned to Ardelia Lortz, and that was when things really began to get bad. He began to think of how awful it would be if Ardelia Lortz was in his closet, or even under his bed. He saw her grinning happily, secretly, in the dark, wriggling fingers tipped with long, sharp nails, her hair sprayed out all around her face in a weird fright-wig. He imagined how his bones would turn to jelly if she began to whisper to him.

You lost the books, Sam, so it will have to be the Library Policeman ... you lost the books ... you looosssst them ...

At last, around twelve-thirty, Sam couldn't stand it any longer. He sat up and fumbled in the dark for the bedside lamp. And as he did, he was gripped by a new fantasy, one so vivid it was almost a certainty: he was not alone in his bedroom, but his visitor was not Ardelia Lortz. Oh no. His visitor was the Library Policeman from the poster that was no longer in the Children's Library. He was standing here in the dark, a tall, pale man wrapped in a trenchcoat, a man with a bad complexion and a white, jagged scar lying across his left cheek, below his left eye and over the bridge of his nose. Sam hadn't seen that scar on the face in the poster, but that was only because the artist hadn't wanted to put it in. It was there. Sam knew it was there.

You were wrong about the bushes, the Library Policeman would say in his lightly lisping voice. There are bushes growing along the sideth. Loth of bushes. And we're going to ecthplore them. We're going to ecthplore them together.

No! Stop it! Just . . . STOP it!

As his trembling hand finally found the lamp, a board creaked in the room and he uttered a breathless little scream. His hand clenched, squeezing the switch. The light came on. For a moment he actually thought he saw the tall man, and then he realized it was only a shadow cast on the wall by the bureau.

Sam swung his feet out onto the floor and put his face in his hands for a moment. Then he reached for the pack of Kents on the nightstand.

'You've got to get hold of yourself,' he muttered. 'What the fuck were you thinking about?'

I don't know, the voice inside responded promptly. Furthermore, I don't want to know. Ever. The bushes were a long time ago, I never have to remember the bushes again. Or the taste. That sweet sweet taste.

He lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply.

The worst thing was this: Next time he might really see the man in the trenchcoat. Or Ardelia. Or Gorgo, High Emperor of Pellucidar. Because if he'd been able to create a hallucination as complete as his visit to the Library and his meeting with Ardelia Lortz, he could hallucinate anything. Once you started thinking about skylights that weren't there, and people who weren't there, and even bushes that weren't there, everything seemed possible. How did you quell a rebellion in your own mind?

He went down to the kitchen, turning on lights as he went, resisting an urge to look over his shoulder and see if anyone was creeping after him. A man with a badge in his hand, for instance. He supposed that what he needed was a sleeping pill, but since he didn't have any - not even one of the over-the-counter preparations like Sominex - he would just have to improvise. He splashed milk into a saucepan, heated it, poured it into a coffee mug, and then added a healthy shot of brandy. This was something else he had seen in the movies. He took a taste, grimaced, almost poured the evil mixture down the sink, and then looked at the clock on the microwave. Quarter to one in the morning. It was a long time until dawn, a long time to spend imagining Ardelia Lortz and the Library Policeman creeping up the stairs with knives gripped between their teeth.

Or arrows, he thought. Long black arrows. Ardelia and the Library Policeman creeping up the stairs with long black arrows clamped between their teeth. How about that image, friends and neighbors?

Arrows?

Why arrows?

He didn't want to think about it. He was tired of thoughts which came whizzing out of the previously unsuspected darkness inside him like horrid, stinking Frisbees.

I don't want to think about it, I won't think about it.

He finished the laced milk and went back to bed.

4

He left the bedside lamp on, and that made him feel a little calmer. He actually began to think he might go to sleep at some point before the heat-death of the universe. He pulled the comforter up to his chin, laced his hands behind his head, and looked at the ceiling.

SOME Of it must have really happened, he thought. It can't ALL have been a hallucination ... unless this is Part of It, and I'm really in one of the rubber rooms up in Cedar Rapids, wrapped in a straitjacket and only imagining I'm lying here in my own bed.

He had delivered the speech. He had used the jokes from The Speaker's Companion, and Spencer Michael Free's verse from Best Loved Poems of the American People. And since he had neither volume in his own small collection of books, he must have gotten them from the Library. Naomi had known Ardelia Lortz - had known her name, anyway - and so had Naomi's mother. Had she! It was as if he'd set a fire-cracker off under her easy chair.

I can check around, he thought. If Mrs Higgins knows the name, other people will, too. Not work-study kids from Chapelton, maybe, but people who've been in Junction City a long time. Frank Stephens, maybe. Or Dirty Dave ...

At this point, Sam finally drifted off. He crossed the almost seamless border between waking and sleeping without knowing it; his thoughts never ceased but began instead to twist themselves into ever more strange and fabulous shapes. The shapes became a dream. And the dream became a nightmare. He was at Angle Street again, and the three alkies were on the porch, laboring over their posters. He asked Dirty Dave what he was doing.

Aw, just passin the time, Dave said, and then, shyly, he turned the poster around so Sam could see it.