with the huge, shocked eyes of a terrified child, of some poor fourth-grade Simple Simon.
But it was no nightmare. It was terrifying, but it was no nightmare. Sam had time to hope he had gone crazy after all. Insanity was no day at the beach, but nothing could be as awful as this man-shaped thing which had come into his house, this thing which walked in its own wedge of winter.
Sam's house was old and the ceilings were high, but the Library Policeman had to duck his head in the entry, and even in the kitchen the crown of his gray felt hat almost brushed the ceiling. That meant he was over seven feet tall.
His body was wrapped in a trenchcoat the leaden color of fog at twilight. His skin was paper white. His face was dead, as if he could understand neither kindness nor love nor mercy. His mouth was set in lines of ultimate, passionless authority and Sam thought for one confused moment of how the closed library door had looked, like the slotted mouth in the face of a granite robot. The Library Policeman's eyes appeared to be silver circles which had been punctured by tiny shotgun pellets. They were rimmed with pinkish-red flesh that looked ready to bleed. They were lashless. And the worst thing of all was this: it was a face Sam
The scar overlaid the geography of that face exactly as it had in Sam's imagination - across the left cheek, below the left eye, across the bridge of the nose. Except for the scar, it was the man in the poster ... or was it? He could no longer be sure.
Sam Peebles, darling of the Junction City Rotary Club, wet his pants. He felt his bladder let go in a warm gush, but that seemed far away and unimportant. What was important was that there was a monster in his kitchen, and the most terrible thing about this monster was that Sam almost knew his face. Sam felt a triplelocked door far back in his mind straining to burst open. He never thought of running. The idea of flight was beyond his capacity to imagine. He was a child again, a child who has been caught red-handed
doing some awful bad thing. Instead of running
he folded slowly over his own wet crotch and collapsed between the two stools which stood at the counter, holding his hands up blindly above his head.
'No,' he said in a husky, strengthless voice. 'No, please - no, please, please don't do it to me, please, I'll be good, please don't hurt me that way.'
He was reduced to this. But it didn't matter; the giant in the fog-colored trenchcoat
now stood directly over him.
Sam dropped his head. It seemed to weigh a thousand pounds. He looked at the floor and prayed incoherently that when he looked up - when he had the stre
'Look at me,' the distant, thudding voice instructed. It was the voice of an evil god.
'No,' Sam cried in a shrieky, breathless voice, and then burst into helpless tears. It was not just terror, although the terror was real enough, bad enough. Separate from it was a cold deep drift of childish fright and childish shame. Those feelings clung like poison syrup to whatever it was he dared not remember, the thing that had something to do with a book he had never read:
Something struck Sam's head and he screamed.
'No, please don't make me,' Sam begged.
He looked up, shielding his streaming eyes with one rubbery arm, just in time to see the Library Policeman's arm come down again.
He was hitting Sam with Sam's own rolled-up copy of the
'That'th better,' said the Library Policeman. He grinned, lips parting to reveal the points of sharp teeth, teeth which were almost fangs. He reached into the pocket of his trenchcoat and brought out a leather folder. He flipped it open and revealed the strange star of many points. It glinted in the clean morning light.
Sam was now helpless to look away from that merciless face, those silver eyes with their tiny birdshot pupils. He was slobbering and knew it but was helpless to stop that, either.
'You have two books which belong to uth,' the Library Policeman said. His voice still seemed to be coming from a distance, or from behind a thick pane of glass. 'Mith Lorth is very upthet with you, Mr Peebles.'
'I lost them,' Sam said, beginning to cry harder. The thought of lying to this man about
the books, about
'I … I ... I ... I ... I'
'I don't want to hear your thick ecthcuses,' the Library Policeman said. He flipped his leather folder closed and stuffed it into his right pocket. At the same time he reached into his left pocket and drew out a knife with a long, sharp blade. Sam, who had spent three summers earning money for college as a stockboy, recognized it. It was a carton-slitter. There was undoubtedly a knife like that in every library in America. 'You have until midnight. Then. . .'
He leaned down, extending the knife in one white, corpselike hand. That freezing envelope of air struck Sam's face, numbed it. He tried to scream and could produce only a glassy whisper of silent air.
The tip of the blade pricked the flesh of his throat. It was like being pricked with an icicle. A single bead of scarlet oozed out and then froze solid, a tiny seed-pearl of blood.
' . . . then I come again,' the Library Policeman said in his odd, lisprounded voice. 'You better find what you lotht, Mr Peebles.'
The knife disappeared back into the pocket. The Library Policeman drew back up to his full height.
'There is another thing,' he said. 'You have been athking questions, Mr Peebles. Don't athk any more. Do you underthand me?'
Sam tried to answer and could only utter a deep groan.
The Library Policeman began to bend down, pushing chill air ahead of him the way the flat prow of a barge might push a chunk of river-ice. 'Don't pry into things that don't conthern you. Do you
'Good. Because I will be watching. And I am not alone.'
He turned, his trenchcoat rustling, and recrossed the kitchen toward the entry. He spared not a single backward
