Four Past Midnight (83 page)

He looked soberly at Sam and Naomi. “But she'd never been in there, you see. Never for a minute.”

Naomi brought Dave a fresh glass of water, and when she came back, Sam noticed that her face was very pale and that the corners of her eyes looked red. But she sat down very quietly and motioned for Dave to go on.

“I did what alcoholics do best,” he said. “I drank the drink and did what I was told. A kind of ... of frenzy, I suppose you'd say ... fell over me. I spent two hours at her desk, workin with a box of five-and-dime watercolors, sloppin water and paint all over her desk, not givin a shit what flew where. What I came out with was somethin I don't like to remember ... but I do remember. It was a little boy splattered all over Rampole Street with his shoes knocked off and his head all spread out like a pat of butter that's melted in the sun. The man drivin the steamroller was just a silhouette, but he was lookin back, and you could see the grin on his face. That guy showed up again and again in the posters I did for her. He was drivin the car in the poster you mentioned, Sam, the one about never takin rides from strangers.

“My father left my mom about a year after I was born, just left her flat, and I got an idea now that was who I was tryin to draw in all those posters. I used to call him the dark man, and I think it was my dad. I think maybe Ardelia prodded him out of me somehow. And when I took the second one out, she liked it fine. She laughed over it. ‘It's
perfect
, Davey!' she said. ‘It'll scare a whole
mountain
of do-right into the little snotnoses! I'll put it up right away!' She did, too, on the front of the checkout desk in the Children's Room. And when she did, I saw somethin that really chilled my blood. I
knew
the little boy I'd drawn, you see. It was Willy Klemmart. I'd drawn him without even knowin it, and the expression on what was left of his face was the one I'd seen that day when she took his hand and led him into the Children's Room.

“I was there when the kids came in for Story Hour and saw that poster for the first time. They were scared. Their eyes got big, and one little girl started to cry. And I
liked
it that they were scared. I thought, ‘That'll pound the do-right into em, all right. That'll teach em what'll happen if they cross her, if they don't do what she says.' And part of me thought,
You're gettin to think like her, Dave. Pretty soon you'll get to be like her, and then you'll be lost. You'll be lost forever.

“But I went on, just the same. I felt like I had a one-way ticket and I wasn't goin to get off until I rode all the way to the end of the line. Ardelia hired some college kids, but she always put em in the circulation room and the reference room and on the main desk.
She
kept complete charge of the kids ... they were the easiest to scare, you see. And I think they were the
best
scares, the ones that fed her the best. Because that's what she lived on, you know—she fed on their fright. And I made more posters. I can't remember them all, but I remember the Library Policeman. He was in a lot of them. In one—it was called LIBRARY POLICEMEN GO ON VACATION, Too—he was standin on the edge of a stream and fishin. Only what he'd baited his hook with was that little boy the kids called Simple Simon. In another one, he had Simple Simon strapped to the nose of a rocket and was pullin the switch that would send him into outer space. That one said LEARN MORE ABOUT SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY AT THE LIBRARY—BUT BE SURE TO DO RIGHT AND GET YOUR BOOKS BACK ON TIME.

“We turned the Children's Room into a house of horrors for the kids who came there,” Dave said. He spoke slowly, and his voice was full of tears. “She and I. We did that to the children. But do you know what? They always came back. They always came back for more. And they never, never told.
She
saw to that.”

“But the parents!” Naomi exclaimed suddenly, and so sharply that Sam jumped. “Surely when the parents saw—”

“No!” Dave told her. “Their parents never saw
nothing.
The only scary poster they ever saw was the one of Little Red Ridin Hood and the wolf. Ardelia left that one up all the time, but the others only went up during Story Hour—after school, on Thursday nights, and Saturday mornings. She wasn't a human bein, Sarah. You've got to get that straight in your mind.
She was not human.
She
knew
when grownups was comin, and she always got the posters I'd drawn off the walls and other ones—regular posters that said things like READ BOOKS JUST FOR THE FUN OF IT—up before they came.

“I can remember times when I'd be there for Story Hour—in those days I never left her if I could stay close, and I had lots of time to stay close, because I'd quit paintin pictures, all my regular jobs had fell through, and I was livin on the little I'd managed to save up. Before long the money was gone, too, and I had to start sellin things—my TV, my guitar, my truck, finally my house. But that don't matter. What matters is that I was there a lot, and I saw what went on. The little ones would have their chairs drawn up in a circle with Ardelia sittin in the middle. I'd be in the back of the room, sittin in one of those kid-sized chairs myself, wearing my old paint-spotted duster more often than not, drunk as a skunk, needin a shave, reekin of Scotch. And she'd be readin—readin one of her special Ardelia-stories—and then she'd break off and cock her head to one side, like she was listenin. The kids would stir around and look uneasy. They looked another way, too—like they was wakin out of a deep sleep she'd put em into.

“ ‘We're going to have company,' she'd say, smiling. ‘Isn't that special, children? Do I have some Good-Baby volunteers to help me get ready for our Big People company?' They'd
all
raise their hands when she said that, because they all wanted to be Good Babies. The posters I'd made showed em what happened to Bad Babies who didn't do right. Even I'd raise my hand, sittin drunk in the back
of
the room in my filthy old duster, lookin like the world's oldest, tiredest kid. And then they'd get up and some would take down my posters and others would take the regular posters out of the bottom drawer of her desk. They'd swap em. Then they'd sit down and she'd switch from whatever horrible thing she'd been tellin em to a story like ‘The Princess and the Pea,' and sure enough, a few minutes later some mother'd poke her head in and see all the do-right Good Babies listenin to that nice Miss Lortz readin em a story, and they'd smile at whatever kid was theirs, and the kid would smile back, and things would go on.”

“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,

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 grown-ups 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.' ”

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.'