Four Past Midnight

'Yes, thanks.'

'All right. If I can help you further, I'll be right upstairs. Don't hesitate to ask.'

'Are you - ' he began, and then snapped his mouth shut on the rest: - going to leave me here alone?

She raised her eyebrows.

'Nothing,' he said, and watched her go back upstairs. He had to resist a strong urge to pelt up the stairs behind her. Because, cushy blue carpet or not, this was another Junction City Library.

And this one was called the morgue.

2

Sam walked slowly toward the shelves with their weight of square microfilm boxes, unsure of where to begin. He was very glad that the overhead fluorescents were bright enough to banish most of the troubling shadows in the corners.

He hadn't dared ask Doreen McGill if the name Ardelia Lortz rang a bell, or even if she knew roughly when the City Library had last undergone renovations. You have been athking questions, the Library Policeman had said. Don't pry into things that don't conthern you. Do you underthand?

Yes, he understood. And he supposed he was risking the Library Policeman's wrath by prying anyway ... but he wasn't asking questions, at least not exactly, and these were things that concerned him. They concerned him desperately.

I will be watching. And I am not alone.

Sam looked nervously over his shoulder. Saw nothing. And still found it impossible to move with any decision. He had gotten this far, but he didn't know if he could get any further. He felt more than intimidated, more than frightened. He felt shattered.

'You've got to,' he muttered harshly, and wiped at his lips with a shaking hand. 'You've just got to.'

He made his left foot move forward. He stood that way a moment, legs apart, like a man caught in the act of fording a small stream. Then he made his right foot catch up with his left one. He made his way across to the shelf nearest the bound folios in this hesitant, reluctant fashion. A card on the end of the shelf read:

1987 - 1989.

That was almost certainly too recent - in fact, the Library renovations must have taken place before the spring of 1984, when he had moved to Junction City. If it had happened since, he would have noticed the workmen, heard people talking about it, and read about it in the Gazette. But, other than guessing that it must have happened in the last fifteen or twenty years (the suspended ceilings had not looked any older than that), he could narrow it down no further. If only he could think more clearly! But he couldn't. What had happened that morning screwed up any normal, rational effort to think the way heavy sunspot activity screwed up radio and TV transmissions. Reality and unreality had come together like vast stones, and Sam Peebles, one tiny, screaming, struggling speck of humanity, had had the bad luck to get caught between them.

He moved two aisles to the left, mostly because he was afraid that if he stopped moving for too long he might freeze up entirely, and walked down the aisle marked

1981 - 1983.

He picked a box almost at random and took it over to one of the microfilm readers. He snapped it on and tried to concentrate on the spool of microfilm (the spool was also blue, and Sam wondered if there was any reason why everything in this clean, well-lighted place was color coordinated) and nothing else. First you had to mount it on one of the spindles, right; then you had to thread it, check; then you had to secure the leader in the core of the take-up reel, okay. The machine was so simple an eight-year-old could have executed these little tasks, but it took Sam almost five minutes; he had his shaking hands and shocked, wandering mind to deal with. When he finally got the microfilm mounted and scrolled to the first frame, he discovered he had mounted the reel backward. The printed matter was upside down.

He patiently rewound the microfilm, turned it around, and rethreaded it. He discovered he didn't mind this little setback in the least; repeating the operation, one simple step at a time, seemed to calm him. This time the front page of the April 1, 1981, issue of the Junction City Gazette appeared before him, right side up. The headline bannered the surprise resignation of a town official Sam had never heard of, but his eyes were quickly drawn to a box at the bottom of the page. Inside the box was this message:

RICHARD PRICE AND THE ENTIRE STAFF OF THE JUNCTION CITY PUBLIC LIBRARY REMIND YOU THAT APRIL 6TH - 13TH IS NATIONAL LIBRARY WEEK COME AND SEE US!

Did I know that? Sam wondered. Is that why I grabbed this particular box? Did I subconsciously remember that the second week of April is National Library Week?

Come with me, a tenebrous, whispering voice answered. Come with me, son ... I'm a poleethman.

Gooseflesh gripped him; a shudder shook him. Sam pushed both the question and that phantom voice away. After all, it didn't really matter why he had picked the April 1981 issues of the Gazette; the important thing was that he had, and it was a lucky break.

Might be a lucky break.

He advanced the reel quickly to April 6th, and saw exactly what he had hoped for. Over the Gazette masthead, in red ink, it said:

SPECIAL LIBRARY SUPPLEMENT ENCLOSED!

Sam advanced to the supplement. There were two photos on the first page of the supplement. One was of the Library's exterior. The other showed Richard Price, the head librarian, standing at the circulation desk and smiling nervously into the camera. He looked exactly as Naomi Higgins had described him - a tall, bespectacled man of about forty with a narrow little mustache. Sam was more interested in the background. He could see the suspended ceiling which had so shocked him on his second trip to the Library. So the renovations had been done prior to April of 1981.

The stories were exactly the sort of self-congratulatory puff-pieces he expected - he had been reading the Gazette for six years now and was very familiar with its ain't-we-a-jolly-bunch-of-JayCees editorial slant. There were informative (and rather breathless) items about National Library Week, the Summer Reading Program, the Junction County Bookmobile, and the new fund drive which had just commenced. Sam glanced over these quickly. On the last page of the supplement he found a much more interesting story, one written by Price himself. It was titled.

THE JUNCTION CITY PUBLIC LIBRARY

One Hundred Years of History

Sam's eagerness did not last long. Ardelia's name wasn't there. He reached for the power switch to rewind the microfilm and then stopped. He saw a mention of the renovation project - it had happened in 1970 - and there was something else. Something just a little off-key. Sam began to read the last part of Mr Price's chatty historical note again, this time more carefully.

With the end of the Great Depression, our Council voted $5,000 to repair the extensive water damage the Library sustained during the Flood Of '32, and Mrs Felicia Culpepper took on the job of Head Librarian, donating her time without recompense. She never lost sight of her goal: a completely renovated Library, serving a Town which was rapidly becoming a City.

Mrs Culpepper stepped down in 1951, giving way to Christopher Lavin, the first Junction City Librarian with a degree in Library Science. Mr Lavin inaugurated the Culpepper Memorial Fund, which raised over $15,000 for the acquisition of new books in its first year, and the Junction City Public Library was on its way into the modern age!