Four Past Midnight

Dave. All the time now I'm sleepy. Soon it will be time for a long rest. When that time comes, I want you to sleep with me. I've grown fond of you, you see.'

'I was drunk, of course, but what she said still gave me a chill. I thought I knew what she was talkin about, but when I asked her, she only laughed.

' 'No, not that,' she said, and gave me a scornful, amused kind of look. 'I'm talking about sleep, not death. But you'll need to feed with me.'

'That sobered me up in a hurry. She didn't think I knew what she was talkin about, but I did. I'd seen.

'After that, she began to ask me questions about the kids. About which ones I didn't like, which ones I thought were sneaky, which ones were too loud, which ones were the brattiest. 'They're Bad Babies, and they don't deserve to live,' she'd say. 'They're rude, they're destructive, they bring their books back with pencil marks in them and ripped pages. Which ones do you think deserve to die, Davey?'

'That was when I knew I had to get away from her, and if killin myself was the only way, I'd have to take that way out. Something was happenin to her, you see. Her hair was gettin dull, and her skin, which had always been perfect, started to show up with blemishes. And there was something else - I could see that thing, that thing her mouth turned into - all the time, just under the surface of her skin. But it was starting to look all wrinkled and dewlapped, and there were strings like cobwebs on it.

'One night while we were in bed she saw me lookin at her hair and said, 'You see the change in me, don't you, Davey?' She patted my face. 'It's all right; it's perfectly natural. It's always this way when I'm getting ready to go to sleep again. I will have to do it soon, and if you mean to come with me, you will have to take one of the children soon. Or two. Or three. The more the merrier!' She laughed in the crazy way she had, and when she looked back at me, her eyes had gone red again. 'In any case, I don't mean to leave you behind. All else aside, it wouldn't be safe. You know that, don't you?'

'I said I did.

' 'So if you don't want to die, Davey, it has to be soon. Very soon. And if you've made up your mind not to, you should tell me now. We can end our time together pleasantly and painlessly, tonight.'

'She leaned over me and I could smell her breath. It was like spoiled dogfood, and I couldn't believe I'd ever kissed the mouth that smell was coming out of, sober or drunk. But there was some part of me - some little part - that must have still wanted to live, because I told her I did want to come with her, but I needed a little more time to get ready. To prepare my mind.

' 'To drink, you mean,' she said. 'You ought to get down on your knees and thank your miserable, unlucky stars for me, Dave Duncan. If not for me, you'd be dead in the gutter in a year, or even less. With me, you can live almost forever.

'Her mouth stretched out for just a second, stretched out until it touched my cheek. And somehow I managed to keep from screaming.'

Dave looked at them with his deep, haunted eyes. Then he smiled. Sam Peebles never forgot the eldritch quality of that smile; it haunted his dreams ever after.

'But that's all right,' he said. 'Somewhere, down deep inside of me, I have been screaming ever since.'

7

'I'd like to say that in the end I broke her hold over me, but that'd be a lie. It was just happenstance - or what Program people call a higher power. You have to understand that by 1960, I was entirely cut off from the rest of the town. Remember me tellin you that once I was a member of the Rotary Club, Sam? Well, by February of '60, those boys wouldn't have hired me to clean the urinals in their john. As far as Junction City was concerned, I was just another Bad Baby livin the life of a bum. People I'd known all my life would cross the street to get out of my way when they saw me comin. I had the constitution of a brass eagle in those days, but the booze was rustin me out just the same, and what the booze wasn't takin, Ardelia Lortz was.

'I wondered more'n once if she wouldn't turn to me for what she needed, but she never did. Maybe I was no good to her that way ... but I don't really think that was it. I don't think she loved me - I don't think Ardelia could love anybody -but think she was lonely. I think she's lived, if you can call what she does living, a very long time, and that she's had . . .'

Dave trailed off. His crooked fingers drummed restlessly on his knees and his eyes sought the grain elevator on the horizon again, as if for comfort.

'Companions seems like the word that comes closest to fittin. I think she's had companions for some of her long life, but I don't think she'd had one for a very long time when she came to Junction City. Don't ask what she said to make me feel that way, because I don't remember. It's lost, like so much of the rest. But I'm pretty sure it's true. And she had me tapped for the job. I'm pretty sure I would have gone with her, too, if she hadn't been found out.'

'Who found her out, Dave?' Naomi asked, leaning forward. 'Who?'

'Deputy Sheriff John Power. In those days, the Homestead County sheriff was Norman Beeman, and Norm's the best argument I know for why sheriffs should be appointed rather than elected. The voters gave him the job when he got back to Junction City in '45 with a suitcase full of medals he'd won when Patton's army was drivin into Germany. He was a hell of a scrapper, no one could take that away from him, but as county sheriff he wasn't worth a fart in a windstorm. What he had was the biggest, whitest smile you ever saw, and a load of bullshit two mules wide. And he was a Republican, of course. That's always been the most important thing in Homestead County.

I think Norm would be gettin elected still if he hadn't dropped dead of a stroke in Hughie's Barber Shop in the summer of 1963. I remember that real clear; by then Ardelia had been gone awhile and I'd come around a little bit.

'There were two secrets to Norm's success - other than that big grin and the line of bullshit, I mean. First, he was honest. So far as I know, he never took a dime. Second, he always made sure he had at least one deputy sheriff under him who could think fast and didn't have no interest in runnin for the top job himself. He always played square with those fellows; every one of them got a rock-solid recommendation when he was ready to move on and move up. Norm took care of his own. I think, if you looked, you'd find there are six or eight town police chiefs and State Police colonels scattered across the Midwest who spent two or three years here in Junction City, shovelling shit for Norm Beeman.

'Not john Power, though. He's dead. If you looked up his obituary, it'd say he died of a heart attack, although he wasn't yet thirty years old and with none of the bad habits that cause people's tickers to seize up early sometimes. I know the truth - it wasn't a heart attack killed john any more than it was a heart attack that killed Lavin. She killed him.'

'How do you know that, Dave?' Sam asked.

'I know because there were supposed to be three children killed in the Library on that last day.'

Dave's voice was still calm, but Sam heard the terror this man had lived with so long running just below the surface like a low-voltage electrical charge. Supposing that even half of what Dave had told them this afternoon was true, then he must have lived these last thirty years with terrors beyond Sam's capacity to imagine. No wonder he had used a bottle to keep the worst of them at bay.

'Two did die - Patsy Harrigan and Tom Gibson. The third was to be my price of admission to whatever circus it is that Ardelia Lortz is ringmaster of. That third was the one she really wanted, because she was the one who turned the spotlight on Ardelia just when Ardelia most needed to operate in the dark. That third had to be mine, because that one wasn't allowed to come to the Library anymore, and Ardelia couldn't be sure of gettin near her. That third Bad Baby was Tansy Power, Deputy Power's daughter.'

'You aren't talking about Tansy Ryan, are you?' Naomi asked, and her voice was almost pleading.

'Yeah, I am. Tansy Ryan from the post office, Tansy Ryan who goes to meetins with us, Tansy Ryan who used to