You were wrong about the bushes, the Library Policeman would say in his lightly lisping voice. There are bushes growing along the sideth. Loth of bushes. And we’re going to ecthplore them. We’re going to ecthplore them together.
No! Stop it! Just . . . STOP it!
As his trembling hand finally found the lamp, a board creaked in the room and he uttered a breathless little scream. His hand clenched, squeezing the switch. The light came on. For a moment he actually thought he saw the tall man, and then he realized it was only a shadow cast on the wall by the bureau.
Sam swung his feet out onto the floor and put his face in his hands for a moment. Then he reached for the pack of Kents on the nightstand.
‘You’ve got to get hold of yourself,’ he muttered. ‘What the fuck were you thinking about?’
I don’t know, the voice inside responded promptly. Furthermore, I don’t want to know. Ever. The bushes were a long time ago, I never have to remember the bushes again. Or the taste. That sweet sweet taste.
He lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply.
The worst thing was this: Next time he might really see the man in the trenchcoat. Or Ardelia. Or Gorgo, High Emperor of Pellucidar. Because if he’d been able to create a hallucination as complete as his visit to the Library and his meeting with Ardelia Lortz, he could hallucinate anything. Once you started thinking about skylights that weren’t there, and people who weren’t there, and even bushes that weren’t there, everything seemed possible. How did you quell a rebellion in your own mind?
He went down to the kitchen, turning on lights as he went, resisting an urge to look over his shoulder and see if anyone was creeping after him. A man with a badge in his hand, for instance. He supposed that what he needed was a sleeping pill, but since he didn’t have any – not even one of the over-the-counter preparations like Sominex – he would just have to improvise. He splashed milk into a saucepan, heated it, poured it into a coffee mug, and then added a healthy shot of brandy. This was something else he had seen in the movies. He took a taste, grimaced, almost poured the evil mixture down the sink, and then looked at the clock on the microwave. Quarter to one in the morning. It was a long time until dawn, a long time to spend imagining Ardelia Lortz and the Library Policeman creeping up the stairs with knives gripped between their teeth.
Or arrows, he thought. Long black arrows. Ardelia and the Library Policeman creeping up the stairs with long black arrows clamped between their teeth. How about that image, friends and neighbors?
Arrows?
Why arrows?
He didn’t want to think about it. He was tired of thoughts which came whizzing out of the previously unsuspected darkness inside him like horrid, stinking Frisbees.
I don’t want to think about it, I won’t think about it.
He finished the laced milk and went back to bed.
4
He left the bedside lamp on, and that made him feel a little calmer. He actually began to think he might go to sleep at some point before the heat-death of the universe. He pulled the comforter up to his chin, laced his hands behind his head, and looked at the ceiling.
SOME Of it must have really happened, he thought. It can’t ALL have been a hallucination … unless this is Part of It, and I’m really in one of the rubber rooms up in Cedar Rapids, wrapped in a straitjacket and only imagining I’m lying here in my own bed.
He had delivered the speech. He had used the jokes from The Speaker’s Companion, and Spencer Michael Free’s verse from Best Loved Poems of the American People. And since he had neither volume in his own small collection of books, he must have gotten them from the Library. Naomi had known Ardelia Lortz –
had known her name, anyway – and so had Naomi’s mother. Had she! It was as if he’d set a fire-cracker off under her easy chair.
I can check around, he thought. If Mrs Higgins knows the name, other people will, too. Not work-study kids from Chapelton, maybe, but people who’ve been in Junction City a long time. Frank Stephens, maybe. Or Dirty Dave …
At this point, Sam finally drifted off. He crossed the almost seamless border between waking and sleeping without knowing it; his thoughts never ceased but began instead to twist themselves into ever more strange and fabulous shapes. The shapes became a dream. And the dream became a nightmare. He was at Angle Street again, and the three alkies were on the porch, laboring over their posters. He asked Dirty Dave what he was doing.
Aw, just passin the time, Dave said, and then, shyly, he turned the poster around so Sam could see it.
It was a picture of Simple Simon. He had been impaled on a spit over an open fire. He was clutching a great bundle of melting red licorice in one hand. His clothes were burning but he was still alive. He was screaming. The words written above this terrible image were: CHILDREN DINNER IN THE PUBLIC LIBRARY BUSHES
TO BENEFIT THE LIBRARY POLICE FUND
MIDNITE TO 2 A. M.
COME ONE COME ALL
‘THAT’S CHOW-DE-DOW!’
Dave, that’s horrible, Sam said in the dream.
Not at all. Dirty Dave replied. The children call him Simple Simon. They love to eat him. I think that’s very healthy, don’t you?
Look! Rudolph cried. Look, it’s Sarah!
Sam looked up and saw Naomi crossing the littered, weedy ground between Angle Street and the Recycling Center. She was moving very slowly, because she was pushing a shopping cart filled with copies of The Speaker’s Companion and Best Loved Poems of the American People. Behind her, the sun was going down in a sullen furnace glare of red light and a long passenger train was rumbling slowly along the track, headed out into the emptiness of western Iowa. It was at least thirty coaches long, and every car was black. Crepe hung and swung in the windows. It was a funeral train, Sam realized.
Sam turned back to Dirty Dave and said, Her name isn’t Sarah. That’s Naomi. Naomi Higgins from Proverbia.
Not at all, Dirty Dave said. It’s Death coming, Mr Peebles. Death is a woman.
Lukey began to squeal then. In the extremity of his terror he sounded like a human pig. She got Slim Jims!
She got Slim Jims! Oh my God, she got all Slim Fuckin Slim Jims!
Sam turned back to see what Lukey was talking about. The woman was closer, but it was no longer Naomi.
It was Ardelia. She was dressed in a trenchcoat the color of a winter stormcloud. The shopping cart was not full of Slim Jims, as Lukey had said, but thousands of intertwined red licorice whips. While Sam watched, Ardelia snatched up handfuls of them and began to cram them into her mouth. Her teeth were no longer dentures; they were long and discolored. They looked like vampire teeth to Sam, both sharp and horribly strong. Grimacing, she bit down on her mouthful of candy. Bright blood squirted out, spraying a pink cloud in the sunset air and dribbling down her chin. Severed chunks of licorice tumbled to the weedy earth, still jetting blood.
She raised hands which had become hooked talons.
‘Youuuu losst the BOOOOOKS!’ she screamed at Sam, and charged at him.
5
Sam came awake in a breathless jerk. He had pulled all the bedclothes loose from their moorings, and was huddled beneath them near the foot of the bed in a sweaty ball. Outside, the first thin light of a new day was peeking under the drawn shade. The bedside clock said it was 5:53 A.M.
He got up, the bedroom air cool and refreshing on his sweaty skin, went into the bathroom, and urinated.
His head ached vaguely, either as a result of the early-morning shot of brandy or stress from the dream. He opened the medicine cabinet, took two aspirin, and then shambled back to the bed. He pulled the covers up as best he could, feeling the residue of his nightmare in every damp fold of sheet. He wouldn’t go back to sleep again – he knew that – but he could at least lie here until the nightmare started to dissolve.
As his head touched the pillow, he suddenly realized he knew something else, something as surprising and unexpected as his sudden understanding that the woman in Dirty Dave’s poster had been his part-time secretary. This new understanding also had to do with Dirty Dave … and with Ardelia Lortz.
It was a dream, he thought. That’s where I found out.
Sam fell into a deep, natural sleep. There were no more dreams and when he woke up it was almost eleven o’clock. Churchbells were calling the faithful to worship, and outside it was a beautiful day. The sight of all that sunshine lying on all that bright new grass did more than make him feel good; it made him feel almost reborn.