Four Past Midnight

'She spoke to me after the benediction,' Rudolph said. 'Told me you'd know where to find her later on, if you wanted to see her. She said you'd seen her there once already.'

'She liked Dave awful much,' Lukey said. A sudden tear grew on the rim of one eye and spilled down his cheek. He wiped it away with the back of his hand. 'We all did. Dave always tried so goddam hard. It's too bad, you know. It's really too bad.' And Lukey suddenly burst into tears.

'Well, let me tell you something,' Sam said. He hunkered beside Lukey and handed him his handkerchief. He was near tears himself, and terrified by what he now had to do ... or try to do. 'He made it in the end. He died sober. Whatever talk you hear, you hold onto that, because I know it's true. He died sober.'

'Amen,' Rudolph said reverently.

'Amen,' Lukey agreed. He handed Sam his handkerchief. 'Thanks.'

'Don't mention it, Lukey.'

'Say - you don't have any more of those fuckin Slim Jims, do you?'

'Nope,' Sam said, and smiled. 'You know what they say, Lukey - one's too many and a thousand are never enough.'

Rudolph laughed. Lukey smiled ... and then laid the tip of his finger against the side of his nose again.

'How about a quarter ... wouldn't have an extra quarter, wouldja?'

3

Sam's first thought was that she might have gone back to the Library, but that didn't fit with what Dolph had said - he had been at the Library with Sarah once, on the terrible night that already seemed a decade ago, but they had been there together; he hadn't 'seen' her there, the way you saw someone through a window, or

Then he remembered when he had seen Sarah through a window, right here at Angle Street. She had been part of the group out on the back lawn, doing whatever it was they did to keep themselves sober. He now walked through the kitchen as he had done on that day, saying hello to a few more people. Burt Iverson and Elmer Baskin stood in one of the little groups, drinking ice-cream punch as they listened gravely to an elderly woman Sam didn't know.

He stepped through the kitchen door and out onto the rear porch. The day had turned gray and blustery again. The back yard was deserted, but Sam thought he saw a flash of pastel color beyond the bushes that marked the yard's rear boundary.

He walked down the steps and crossed the back lawn, aware that his heart had begun to thud very hard again. His hand stole back into his pocket, and this time came out with the remaining two cellophane packages. They contained Bull's Eye Red Licorice. He tore them open and began to knead them into a ball, much smaller than the one he'd made in the Datsun on Monday night. The sweet, sugary smell was just as sickening as ever. In the distance he could hear a train coming, and it made him think of his dream - the one where Naomi had turned into Ardelia.

Too late, Sam. It's already too late. The deed is done.

She waits. Remember, Sam - she waits.

There was a lot of truth in dreams, sometimes.

How had she survived the years between? All the years between? They had never asked themselves that question, had they? How did she make the transition from one person to another? They had never asked that one, either. Perhaps the thing which looked like a woman named Ardelia Lortz was, beneath its glamours and illusions, like one of those larvae that spin their cocoons in the fork of a tree, cover them with Protective webbing, and then fly away to their place of dying. The larvae in the cocoons lie silent, waiting ... changing ...

She waits. .

Sam walked on, still kneading his smelly little ball made of that stuff the Library Policeman - his Library Policeman - had stolen and turned into the stuff of nightmares. The stuff he had somehow changed again, with the help of Naomi and Dave, into the stuff of salvation.

The Library Policeman, curling Naomi against him. Placing his mouth on the nape of her neck, as if to kiss her. And coughing instead.

The bag hanging under the Ardelia-thing's neck. Limp. Spent. Empty.

Please don't let it be too late.

He walked into the thin stand of bushes. Naomi Sarah Higgins was standing on the other side of them, her arms clasped over her bosom. She glanced briefly at him and he was shocked by the pallor of her cheeks and the haggard look in her eyes. Then she looked back at the railroad tracks. The train was closer now. Soon they would see it.

'Hello, Sam.'

'Hello, Sarah.'

Sam put an arm around her waist. She let him, but the shape of her body against his was stiff, inflexible, ungiving. Please don't let it be too late, he thought again, and found himself thinking of Dave.

They had left him there, at the Library, after propping the door to the loading platform open with a rubber wedge. Sam had used a pay phone two blocks away to report the open door. He hung up when the dispatcher asked for his name. So Dave had been found, and of course the verdict had been accidental death, and those people in town who cared enough to assume anything at all would make the expected assumption: one more old sot had gone to that great ginmill in the sky. They would assume he had gone up the lane with a jug, had seen the open door, wandered in, and had fallen against the fire-extinguisher in the dark. End of story. The postmortem results, showing zero alcohol in Dave's blood, would not change the assumptions one bit - probably not even for the police. People just expect a drunk to die like a drunk, Sam thought, even when he's not.

'How have you been, Sarah?' he asked.

She looked at him tiredly. 'Not so well, Sam. Not so well at all. I can't sleep ... can't eat ... my mind seems full of the most horrible thoughts ... they don't feel like my thoughts at all ... and I want to drink. That's the worst of it. I want to drink ... and drink ... and drink. The meetings don't help. For the first time in my life, the meetings don't help.'

She closed her eyes and began to cry. The sound was strengthless and dreadfully lost.

'No,' he agreed softly. 'They wouldn't. They can't. And I imagine she'd like it if you started drinking again. She's waiting . . . but that doesn't mean she isn't hungry.'

She opened her eyes and looked at him. 'What ... Sam, what are you talking about?'

'Persistence, I think,' he said. 'The persistence of evil. How it waits. How it can be so cunning and so baffling and so powerful.'

He raised his hand slowly and opened it. 'Do you recognize this, Sarah?'

She flinched away from the ball of red licorice which lay on his palm. For a moment her eyes were wide and fully awake. They glinted with hate and fear.

And the glints were silver.

'Throw that away!' she whispered. 'Throw that damned thing away!' Her hand jerked protectively toward the back of her neck, where her brownish-red hair hung against her shoulders.

'I'm talking to you,' he said steadily. 'Not to her but to you. I love you, Sarah.'

She looked at him again, and that look of terrible weariness was back. 'Yes,' she said. 'Maybe you do. And maybe you should learn not to.'

'I want you to do something for me, Sarah. I want you to turn your back to me. There's a train coming. I want you to watch that train and not look back at me until I tell you. Can you do that?'

Her upper lip lifted. That expression of hate and fear animated her haggard face again. 'No! Leave me alone! Go away!'

'Is that what you want?' he asked. 'Is it really? You told Dolph where I could find you, Sarah. Do you really want