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 me to go?’
Her eyes closed again. Her mouth drew down in a trembling bow of anguish. When her eyes opened again, they were full of haunted terror and brimming with tears. ‘Oh, Sam,. help me! Something is wrong and I don’t know what it is or what to do!’
‘I know what to do,’ he told her. ‘Trust in me, Sarah, and trust in what you said when we were on our way to the Library Monday night. Honesty and belief. Those things are the opposite of fear. Honesty and belief.’
‘It’s hard, though,’ she whispered. ‘Hard to trust. Hard to believe.’
He looked at her steadily.
Naomi’s upper lip lifted suddenly, and her lower lip curled out, turning her mouth momentarily into a shape that was almost like a horn. ‘Fuck yourself!’ she said. ‘Go on and fuck yourself, Sam Peebles!’
He looked at her steadily.
She raised her hands and pressed them against her temples. ‘I didn’t mean it. I don’t know why I said it. I …
my head … Sam, my poor head! It feels like it’s splitting in two.’
The oncoming train whistled as it crossed the Proverbia River and rolled into Junction City. It was the mid-afternoon freight, the one that charged through without stopping on its way to the Omaha stockyards. Sam could see it now.
‘There’s not much time, Sarah. It has to be now. Turn around and look at the train. Watch it come.’
‘Yes,’ she said suddenly. ‘All right. Do what you want to do, Sam. And if you see … see it isn’t going to work … then push me. Push me in front of the train. Then you can tell the others that I jumped … that it was suicide.’ She looked at him pleadingly – deathly-tired eyes staring into his from her exhausted face. ‘They know I haven’t been feeling myself – the people in the Program. You can’t keep how you feel from them.
After awhile that’s just not possible. They’ll believe you if you say I jumped, and they’d be right, because I don’t want to go on like this. But the thing is . Sam, the thing is, I think that before long I will want to go on. ‘
‘Be quiet,’ he said. ‘We’re not going to talk about suicide. Look at the train, Sarah, and remember I love you.’
She turned toward the train, less than a mile away now and coming fast. Her hands went to the nape of her neck and lifted her hair. Sam bent forward . . . and what he was looking for was there, crouched high on the clean white flesh of her neck. He knew that her brain-stem began less than half an inch below that place, and he felt his stomach twist with revulsion.
He bent forward toward the blistery growth. It was covered in a spiderweb skein of crisscrossing white threads, but he could see it beneath, a lump of pinkish jelly that throbbed and pulsed with the beat of her heart.
‘Leave me alone!’ Ardelia Lortz suddenly screamed from the mouth of the woman Sam had come to love.
‘Leave me alone, you bastard!’ But Sarah’s hands were steady, holding her hair up, giving him access.
‘Can you see the numbers on the engine, Sarah?’ he murmured.
She moaned.
He drove his thumb into the soft glob of red licorice he held, making a well a little bigger than the parasite which lay on Sarah’s neck. ‘Read them to me, Sarah. Read me the numbers.’
‘Two … six … oh Sam, oh my head hurts … it feels like big hands pulling my brain into two pieces . . .’
‘Read the numbers, Sarah,’ he murmured, and brought the Bull’s Eye licorice down toward that pulsing, obscene growth.
‘Five … nine . . . five . . .’
He closed the licorice gently over it. He could feel it suddenly, wriggling and squirming under the sugary blanket. What if it breaks? What if it just breaks open before I can pull it off her? It’s all Ardelia’s concentrated poison … what if it breaks before I get it off?
The oncoming train whistled again. The sound buried Sarah’s shriek of pain.
‘Steady
He simultaneously pulled the licorice back and folded it over. He had it; it was caught in the candy, pulsing and throbbing like a tiny sick heart. On the back of Sarah’s neck were three tiny dark holes, no bigger than pinpricks.
‘It’s gone!’ she cried. ‘Sam, it’s gone!’
‘Not yet,’ Sam said grimly. The licorice lay on his palm again, and a bubble was pushing up its surface, straining to break through
The train was roaring past the Junction City depot now, the depot where a man named Brian Kelly had once tossed Dave Duncan four bits and then told him to get in the wind. Less than three hundred yards away and coming fast.