Four Past Midnight

'What do you mean, 'whatever horrible thing she'd been telling them?'

Sam asked. His voice was husky and his mouth felt dry. He had been listening to Dave with a mounting sense of horror and revulsion.

'Fairy tales,' Dave said. 'But she'd change em into horror stories. You'd be surprised how little work she had to do on most of em to make the change.'

'I wouldn't,' Naomi said grimly. 'I remember those stories.'

'I'll bet you do,' he said, 'but you never heard em like Ardelia told em. And the kids liked them - part of them liked the stories, and they liked her, because she drew on them and fascinated them the same way she drew on me. Well, not exactly, because there was never the sex thing - at least, I don't think so - but the darkness in her called to the darkness in them. Do you understand me?'

And Sam, who remembered his dreadful fascination with the story of Bluebeard and the dancing brooms in Fantasia, thought he did understand. Children hated and feared the darkness ... but it drew them, didn't it? It beckoned to them,

(come with me, son)

didn't it? It sang to them,

(I'm a poleethman)

didn't it?

Didn't it?

'I know what you mean, Dave,' he said.

He nodded. 'Have you figured it out yet, Sam? Who your Library Policeman was?'

'I still don't understand that part,' Sam said, but he thought part of him did. It was as if his mind was some deep, dark body of water and there was a boat sunk at the bottom of it - but not just any boat. No - this was a pirate schooner, full of loot and dead bodies, and now it had begun to shift in the muck which had held it so long. Soon, he feared, this ghostly, glaring wreck would surface again, its blasted masts draped with black seaweed and a skeleton with a million-dollar grin still lashed to the rotting remains of the wheel.

'I think maybe you do,' Dave said, 'or that you're beginning to. And it will have to come out, Sam. Believe me.'

'I still don't really understand about the stories' 'Naomi said.

'One of her favorites, Sarah - and it was a favorite of the children, too; you have to understand that, and believe it - was 'Goldilocks and the Three Bears.' You know the story, but you don't know it the way some people in this town -people who are grownups now, bankers and lawyers and big-time farmers with whole fleets of John Deere tractors - know it. Deep in their hearts, it's the Ardelia Lortz version they keep, you see. It may be that some of them have told those same stories to their own children, never knowing there are other ways to tell them. I don't like to think that's so, but in my heart I know it is.

'In Ardelia's version, Goldilocks is a Bad Baby who won't do right. She comes into the house of the Three Bears and wrecks it on purpose - pulls down Mamma Bear's curtains and drags the washin through the mud and tears up all of Papa Bear's magazines and business papers and uses one of the steak-knives to cut holes in his favorite chair. Then she tears up all their books. That was Ardelia's favorite part, I think, when Goldilocks spoiled the books. And she don't eat the porridge, oh no! Not when Ardelia told the story! The way Ardelia told it, Goldilocks got some rat poison off a high shelf and shook it all over the porridge like powdered sugar. She didn't know anything about who lived in the house, but she wanted to kill them anyway, because that's the kind of Bad Baby she was.'

'That's horrible!' Naomi exclaimed. She had lost her composure - really lost it -for the first time. Her hands were pressed over her mouth, and her wide eyes regarded Dave from above them.

'Yes. It was. But it wasn't the end. Goldilocks was so tired from wreckin the house, you see, that when she went upstairs to tear their bedrooms apart, she fell asleep in Baby Bear's bed. And when the Three Bears came home and saw her, they fell upon her - that was just how Ardelia used to say it - they fell upon her and ate that wicked Bad Baby alive. They ate her from the feet up, while she screamed and struggled. All except for her head. They saved that, because they knew what she had done to their porridge. They smelled the poison. 'They could do that, children, because they were bears,' Ardelia used to say, and all the children - Ardelia's Good Babies - would nod their heads, because they saw how that could be. 'They took Goldilocks' head down to the kitchen and boiled it and ate her brains for their breakfast. They all agreed it was very tasty ... and they lived happily ever after.'

4

There was a thick, almost deathly silence on the porch. Dave reached for his glass of water and almost knocked it off the railing with his trembling fingers. He rescued it at the last moment, held it in both hands, and drank deeply. Then he put it down and said to Sam, 'Are you surprised that my boozing got a little bit out of control?'

Sam shook his head.

Dave looked at Naomi and said, 'Do you understand now why I was never able to tell this story? Why I put it in that room?'

'Yes,' she said in a trembling, sighing voice that was not much more than a whisper. 'And I think I understand why the kids never told, either. Some things are just too ... too monstrous.'

'For us, maybe,' Dave said. 'For kids? I don't know, Sarah. I don't think kids know monsters so well at first glance. It's their folks that tell em how to recognize the monsters. And she had somethin else goin for her. You remember me tellin you about how, when she told the kids a parent was comin, they looked like they were wakin up from a deep sleep? They were sleepin, in some funny way. It wasn't hypnosis - at least, I don't think it was - but it was like hypnosis. And when they went home, they didn't remember, in the top part of their minds, anyway, about the stories or the posters. Down underneath, I think they remembered plenty ... just like down underneath Sam knows who his Library Policeman is. I think they still remember today - the bankers and lawyers and big-time farmers who were once Ardelia's

Good Babies. I can. still see em, wearin pinafores and short pants, sittin in those little chairs, lookin at Ardelia in the middle of the circle, their eyes so big and round they looked like pie-plates. And I think that when it gets dark and the storms come, or when they are sleepin and the nightmares come, they go back to bein kids. I think the doors open and they see the Three Bears - Ardelia's Three Bears - eatin the brains out of Goldilocks' head with their wooden porridge-spoons, and Baby Bear wearin Goldilocks' scalp on his head like a long golden wig. I think they wake up sweaty, feelin sick and afraid. I think that's what she left this town. I think she left a legacy of secret nightmares.

'But I still haven't got to the worst thing. Those stories, you see - well, sometimes it was the posters, but mostly it was the stories - would scare one of them into a crying fit, or they'd start to faint or pass out or whatever. And when that happened, she'd tell the others, 'Put your heads down and rest while I take Billy ... or Sandra ... or Tommy ... to the bathroom and make him feel better.'

'They'd all drop their heads at the same instant. It was like they were dead. The first time I seen it happen, I waited about two minutes after she took some little girl out of the room, and then I got up and went over to the circle. I went to Willy Klemmart first.

' 'Willy!' I whispered, and poked him in the shoulder. 'You okay, Will?'

'He never moved, so I poked him harder and said his name again. He still didn't move. I could hear him breathin - kinda snotty and snory, the way kids are so much of the time, always runnin around with colds like they do - but it was still like he was dead. His eyelids were partway open, but I could only see the whites, and this long thread of spit was hangin off his lower lip. I got scared and went to three or four of the others, but wouldn't none of them look up at me or make a sound.'

'You're saying she enchanted them, aren't you?' Sam asked. 'That they were like Snow White after she ate the poisoned apple.'

'Yes,' Dave agreed. 'That's what they were like. In a different kind of way, that's what I was like, too. Then, just as I was gettin ready to take hold of Willy Klemmart and shake the shit out of him, I heard her comin back from the bathroom. I ran to my seat so she wouldn't catch me. Because I was more scared of what she might do to me than anything she might have done to them.