Four Past Midnight

CHAPTER 2

The Library (I)

1

Sam had gone by the Library hundreds of times during his years in Junction City, but this was the first time he had really looked at it, and he discovered a rather amazing thing: he hated the place on sight. The Junction City Public Library stood on the corner of State Street and Miller Avenue, a square granite box of a building with windows so narrow they looked like loopholes. A slate roof overhung all four sides of the building, and when one approached it from the front, the combination of the narrow windows and the line of shadow created by the roof made the building look like the frowning face of a stone robot. It was a fairly common style of Iowa architecture, common enough so Sam Peebles, who had been selling real estate for nearly twenty years, had given it a name: Midwestern Ugly. During spring, summer, and fall, the building's forbidding aspect was softened by the maples which stood around it in a kind of grove, but now, at the end of a hard Iowa winter, the maples were still bare and the Library looked like an oversized crypt.

He didn't like it; it made him uneasy; he didn't know why. It was, after all, just a library, not the dungeons of the Inquisition. just the same, another acidic burp rose up through his chest as he made his way along the flagstone walk. There was a funny sweet undertaste to the burp that reminded him of something ... something from a long time ago, perhaps. He put a Turn in his mouth, began to crunch it up, and came to an abrupt decision. His speech was good enough as it stood. Not great, but good enough. After all, they were talking Rotary Club here, not the United Nations. It was time to stop playing with it. He was going to go back to the office and do some of the correspondence he had neglected that morning.

He started to turn, then thought: That's dumb. Really dumb. You want to be dumb? Okay. But you agreed to give the goddam speech; why not give a good one?

He stood on the Library walk, frowning and undecided. He liked to make fun of Rotary. Craig did, too. And Frank Stephens. Most of the young business types in Junction City laughed about the meetings. But they rarely missed one, and Sam supposed he knew why: it was a place where connections could be made. A place where a fellow like him could meet some of the not-so-young business types in Junction City. Guys like Elmer Baskin, whose bank had helped float a strip shopping center in Beaverton two years ago. Guys like George Candy - who, it was said, could produce three million dollars in development money with one phone call ... if he chose to make it.

These were small-town fellows, high-school basketball fans, guys who got their hair cut at Jimmy's, guys who wore boxer shorts and strappy tee-shirts to bed instead of pajamas, guys who still drank their beer from the bottle, guys who didn't feel comfortable about a night on the town in Cedar Rapids unless they were turned out in Full Cleveland. They were also Junction City's movers and shakers, and when you came right down to it, wasn't that why Sam kept going on Friday nights? When you came right down to it, wasn't that why Craig had called in such a sweat after the stupid acrobat broke his stupid neck? You wanted to get noticed by the movers and shakers ... but not because you had fucked up. They'll all be drunk, Craig had said, and Naomi had seconded the motion, but it now occurred to Sam that he had never seen Elmer Baskin take anything stronger than coffee. Not once. And he probably wasn't the only one. Some of them might be drunk ... but not all of them. And the ones who weren't might well be the ones who really mattered.

Handle this right, Sam, and you might do yourself some good. It's not impossible.

No. It wasn't. Unlikely, of course, but not impossible. And there was something else, quite aside from the shadow politics which might or might not attend a Friday-night Rotary Club speaker's meeting: he had always prided himself on doing the best job possible. So it was just a dumb little speech. So what?

Also, it's just a dumb little small-town library. What's the big deal? There aren't even any bushes growing along the sides.

Sam had started up the walk again, but now he stopped with a frown creasing his forehead. That was a strange thought to have; it seemed to have come right out of nowhere. So there were no bushes growing along the sides of the Library -what difference did that make? He didn't know ... but he did know it had an almost magical effect on him. His uncharacteristic hesitation fell away and he began to move forward once more. He climbed the four stone steps and paused for a moment. The place felt deserted, somehow. He grasped the door-handle and thought, I bet it's locked. I bet the place is closed Friday afternoons. There was something strangely comforting in this thought.

But the old-fashioned latch-plate depressed under his thumb, and the heavy door swung noiselessly inward. Sam stepped into a small foyer with a marble floor in checkerboard black and white squares. An easel stood in the center of this antechamber. There was a sign propped on the easel; the message consisted of one word in very large letters.

SILENCE!

it read. Not

SILENCE IS GOLDEN

or

QUIET, PLEASE

but just that one staring, glaring word:

SILENCE!

'You bet,' Sam said. He only murmured the words, but the acoustics of the place were very good, and his low murmur was magnified into a grouchy grumble that made him cringe. It actually seemed to bounce back at him from the high ceiling. At that moment he felt as if he was in the fourth grade again, and about to be called to task by Mrs Glasters for cutting up rough at exactly the wrong moment. He looked around uneasily, half-expecting an ill-natured librarian to come swooping out of the main room to see who had dared profane the silence.

Stop it, for Christ's sake. You're forty years old. Fourth grade was a long time ago, buddy.

Except it didn't seem like a long time ago. Not in here. In here, fourth grade seemed almost close enough to reach out and touch.

He crossed the marble floor to the left of the easel, unconsciously walking with his weight thrown forward so the heels of his loafers would not click, and entered the main lobby of the Junction City Library.

There were a number of glass globes hanging down from the ceiling (which was at least twenty feet higher than the ceiling of the foyer), but none of them were on. The light was provided by two large, angled skylights. On a sunny day these would have been quite enough to light the room; they might even have rendered it cheery and welcoming. But this Friday was overcast and dreary, and the light was dim. The corners of the lobby were filled with gloomy webs of shadow.

What Sam Peebles felt was a sense of wrongness. It was as if he had done more than step through a door and cross a foyer; he felt as if he had entered another world, one which bore absolutely no resemblance to the small Iowa town that he sometimes liked, sometimes hated, but mostly just took for granted. The air in here seemed heavier than normal air, and did not seem to conduct light as well as normal air did. The silence was thick as a blanket, as cold as snow.

The library was deserted.

Shelves of books stretched above him on every side. Looking up toward the skylights with their crisscrosses of reinforcing wire made Sam a little dizzy, and he had a momentary illusion: he felt that he was upside down, that he had been hung by his heels over a deep square pit lined with books.

Ladders leaned against the walls here and there, the kind that were mounted on tracks and rolled along the floor on rubber wheels. Two wooden islands broke the lake of space between the place where he stood and the checkout desk on the far side of the large, high room. One was a long oak magazine rack. Periodicals, each encased in a clear plastic cover, hung from this rack on wooden dowels. They looked like the hides of strange animals which had been left to cure in this silent room. A sign mounted on top of the rack commanded:

RETURN ALL MAGAZINES TO THEIR PROPER PLACES!

To the left of the magazine rack was a shelf of brand-new novels and nonfiction books. The sign mounted on top of the shelf proclaimed them to be seven-day rentals.

Sam passed down the wide aisle between the magazines and the seven-day bookshelf, his heels rapping and echoing in spite of his effort to move quietly. He found himself wishing he had heeded his original impulse to just turn around and go back to the office. This place was spooky. Although there was a small, hooded microfilm camera alight and humming on the desk, there was no one manning - or womaning - it. A small plaque reading

A. LORTZ

stood on the desk, but there was no sign of A. Lortz or anyone else.

Probably taking a dump and checking out the new issue of Library journal.

Sam felt a crazy desire to open his mouth and yell, 'Everything coming out all right, A. Lortz?' It passed quickly. The Junction City Public Library was not the sort of place that encouraged amusing sallies.

Sam's thoughts suddenly spun back to a little rhyme from his childhood. NO more laughing, no more fun; Quaker meeting has begun. If you show your teeth or tongue, you must pay a forfeit.

If you show your teeth or tongue in here, does A. Lortz make you pay a forfeit?

he wondered. He looked around again, let his nerve-endings feel the frowning quality of the silence, and thought you could make book on it.

No longer interested in obtaining a joke-book or Best Loved Poems of the American People, but fascinated by the library's suspended, dreamy atmosphere in spite of himself, Sam walked toward a door to the right of the seven-day books. A sign over the door said this was the Children's Library. Had he used the Children's Library when he had been growing up in St Louis? He thought so, but those memories were hazy, distant, and hard to hold. All the same, approaching the door of the Children's Library gave him an odd and haunting feeling. It was almost like coming home.

The door was closed. On it was a picture of Little Red Riding Hood, looking down at the wolf in Grandma's bed. The wolf was wearing Grandma's nightgown and Grandma's nightcap. It was snarling. Foam dripped from between its bared fangs. An expression of almost exquisite horror had transfixed Little Red Riding Hood's face, and the poster seemed not just to suggest but to actually proclaim that the happy ending of this story - of all fairy tales - was a convenient lie. Parents might believe such guff, Red Riding Hood's ghastly-sick face said, but the little ones knew better, didn't they?

Nice, Sam thought. With a poster like that on the door, I bet lots of kids use the Children's Library. I bet the little ones are especially fond of it.

He opened the door and poked his head in.

His sense of unease left him; he was charmed at once. The poster on the door was all wrong, of course, but what was behind it seemed perfectly right. Of course he had used the library as a child; it only took one look into this scale-model world to refresh those memories. His father had died young; Sam had been an only child raised by a working mother he rarely saw except on Sundays and holidays. When he could not promote money for a movie after school - and that was often - the library had to do, and the room he saw now brought those days back in a sudden wave of nostalgia that was sweet and painful and obscurely frightening.

It had been a small world, and this was a small world; it had been a well-lighted world, even on the grimmest, rainiest days, and so was this one. No hanging glass globes for this room; there were shadowbanishing fluorescent lights behind frosted panels in the suspended ceiling, and all of them were on. The tops of the tables were only two feet from the floor; the seats of the chairs were even closer. In this world the adults would be the interlopers, the uncomfortable aliens. They would balance the tables on their knees if they tried to sit at them, and they would be apt to crack their skulls bending to drink from the water fountain which was mounted on the far wall.

Here the shelves did not stretch up in an unkind trick of perspective which made one giddy if one looked up too long; the ceiling was low enough to be cozy, but not low enough to make a child feel cramped. Here were no rows of gloomy bindings but books which fairly shouted with raucous primary colors: bright blues, reds, yellows. In this world Dr Seuss was king, Judy Blume was queen, and all the princes and princesses attended Sweet Valley High. Here Sam felt all that old sense of benevolent after-school welcome, a place where the books did all but beg to be touched, handled, looked at, explored. Yet these feelings had their own dark undertaste.

His clearest sense, however, was one of almost wistful pleasure. On one wall was a photograph of a puppy with large, thoughtful eyes. Written beneath the puppy's anxious-hopeful face was one of the world's great truths: IT IS HARD TO BE GOOD. On another wall was a drawing of mallards making their way down a riverbank to the reedy verge of the water. MAKE WAY FOR DUCKLINGS! the poster trumpeted.

Sam looked to his left, and the faint smile on his lips first faltered and then died. Here was a poster which showed a large, dark car speeding away from what he supposed was a school building. A little boy was looking out of the passenger window. His hands were plastered against the glass and his mouth was open in a scream. In the background, a man - only a vague, ominous shape - was hunched over the wheel, driving hell for leather. The words beneath this picture read:

NEVER TAKE RIDES FROM STRANGERS!

Sam recognized that this poster and the Little Red Riding Hood picture on the door of the Children's Library both appealed to the same primitive emotions of dread, but he found this one much more disturbing. Of course children shouldn't accept rides from strangers, and of course they had to be taught not to do so, but was this the right way to make the point?

How many kids, he wondered, have had a week's worth of nightmares thanks to that little public service announcement?

And there was another one, posted right on the front of the checkout desk, that struck a chill as deep as January down Sam's back. It showed a dismayed boy and girl, surely no older than eight, cringing back from a man in a trenchcoat and gray hat. The man looked at least eleven feet tall; his shadow fell on the upturned faces of the children. The brim of his 1940s-style fedora threw its own shadow, and the eyes of the man in the trenchcoat gleamed relentlessly from its black depths. They looked like chips of ice as they studied the children, marking them with the grim gaze of Authority. He was holding out an ID folder with a star pinned to it - an odd sort of star, with at least nine points on it. Maybe as many as a dozen. The message beneath read:

AVOID THE LIBRARY POLICE!

GOOD BOYS AND GIRLS RETURN THEIR BOOKS ON TIME!

That taste was in his mouth again. That sweet, unpleasant taste. And a queer. frightening thought occurred to him: I have seen this man before. But that was ridiculous, of course. Wasn't it?

Sam thought of how such a poster would have intimidated him as a child - of how much simple, unalloyed pleasure it would have stolen from the safe haven of the library - and felt indignation rise in his chest. He took a step toward the poster to examine the odd star more closely, taking his roll of Tums out of his pocket at the same time.

He was putting one of them into his mouth when a voice spoke up from behind him. 'Well, hello there!'

He jumped and turned around, ready to do battle with the library dragon, now that it had finally disclosed itself.

2

No dragon presented itself. There was only a plump, white-haired woman of about fifty-five, pushing a trolley of books on silent rubber tires. Her white hair fell around her pleasant, unlined face in neat beautyshop curls.

'I suppose you were looking for me,' she said. 'Did Mr Peckham direct you in here?'

'I didn't see anybody at all.'

'No? Then he's gone along home,' she said. 'I'm not really surprised, since it's Friday. Mr Peckham comes in to dust and read the paper every morning around eleven. He's the janitor - only part-time, of course. Sometimes he stays until one -one-thirty on most Mondays, because that's the day when both the dust and the paper are thickest - but you know how thin Friday's paper is.'

Sam smiled. 'I take it you're the librarian?'

'I am she,' Mrs Lortz said, and smiled at him. But Sam didn't think her eyes were smiling; her eyes seemed to be watching him carefully, almost coldly. 'And you are ... ?'

'Sam Peebles.'

'Oh yes! Real estate and insurance! That's your game!'

'Guilty as charged.'

'I'm sorry you found the main section of the library deserted - you must have thought we were closed and someone left the door open by mistake.'

'Actually,' he said, 'the idea did cross my mind.'

'From two until seven there are three of us on duty,' said Mrs Lortz. 'Two is when the schools begin to let out, you know - the grammar school at two, the middle school at two-thirty, the high school at two-fortyfive. The children are our most faithful clients, and the most welcome, as far as I am concerned. I love the little ones. I used to have an all-day assistant, but last year the Town Council cut our budget by eight hundred dollars and . . .' Mrs Lortz put her hands together and mimed a bird flying away. It was an amusing, charming gesture.

So why, Sam wondered, aren't I charmed or amused?

The posters, he supposed. He was still trying to make Red Riding Hood, the screaming child in the car, and the grim-eyed Library Policeman jibe with this smiling small-town librarian.

She put her left hand out - a small hand, as plump and round as the rest of her -with perfect unstudied confidence. He looked at the third finger and saw it was ringless; she wasn't Mrs Lortz after all. The fact of her spinsterhood struck him as utterly typical, utterly small-town. Almost a caricature, really. Sam shook it.

'You haven't been to our library before, have you, Mr Peebles?'

'No, I'm afraid not. And please make it Sam.' He did not know if he really wanted to be Sam to this woman or not, but he was a businessman in a small town - a salesman, when you got right down to it - and the offer of his first name was automatic.

'Why, thank you, Sam.'

He waited for her to respond by offering her own first name, but she only looked at him expectantly.

'I've gotten myself into a bit of a bind,' he said. 'Our scheduled speaker tonight at Rotary Club had an accident, and -'

'Oh, that's too bad!'

'For me as well as him. I got drafted to take his place.'

'Oh-oh!' Ms Lortz said. Her tone was alarmed, but her eyes crinkled with amusement. And still Sam did not find himself warming to her, although he was a person who warmed up to other people quickly (if superficially) as a rule; the kind of man who had few close friends but felt compelled nonetheless to start conversations with strangers in elevators.

'I wrote a speech last night and this morning I read it to the young woman who takes dictation and types up my correspondence -'

'Naomi Higgins, I'll bet.'

'Yes - how did you know that?'

'Naomi is a regular. She borrows a great many romance novels - Jennifer Blake, Rosemary Rogers, Paul Sheldon, people like that.' She lowered her voice and said, 'She says they're for her mother, but actually I think she reads them herself.'

Sam laughed. Naomi did have the dreamy eyes of a closet romance reader.

'Anyway, I know she's what would be called an office temporary in a big city. I imagine that here in Junction City she's the whole secretarial pool. It seemed reasonable that she was the young woman of whom you spoke.'

'Yes. She liked my speech - or so she said - but she thought it was a bit dry. She suggested - '

'The Speaker's Companion, I'll bet!'

'Well, she couldn't remember the exact title, but that sure sounds right.' He paused, then asked a little anxiously: 'Does it have jokes?'

'Only three hundred pages of them,' she said. She reached out her right hand - it was as innocent of rings as her left - and tugged at his sleeve with it. 'Right this way.' She led him toward the door by the sleeve. 'I am going to solve all your problems, Sam. I only hope it won't take a crisis to bring you back to our library. It's small, but it's very fine. I think so, anyway, although of course I'm prejudiced.'

They passed through the door into the frowning shadows of the Library's main room. Ms Lortz flicked three switches by the door, and the hanging globes lit up, casting a soft yellow glow that warmed and cheered the room considerably.

'It gets so gloomy in here when it's overcast,' she said in a confidential we're-in-the-real-Library-now voice. She was still tugging firmly on Sam's sleeve. 'But of course you know how the Town Council complains about the electricity bill in a place like this or perhaps you don't, but I'll bet you can guess.'

'I can,' Sam agreed, also dropping his voice to a near-whisper.

'But that's a holiday compared to what they have to say about the heating expenses in the winter.' She rolled her eyes. 'Oil is so dear. It's the fault of those Arabs ... and now look what they are up to - hiring religious hit-men to try and kill writers.'

'It does seem a little harsh,' Sam said, and for some reason he found himself thinking of the poster of the tall man again - the one with the odd star pinned to his ID case, the one whose shadow was falling so ominously over the upturned faces of the children. Falling over them like a stain.

'And of course, I've been fussing in the Children's Library. I lose all track of time when I'm in there.'

'That's an interesting place,' Sam said. He meant to go on, to ask her about the posters, but Ms Lortz forestalled him. It was clear to Sam exactly who was in charge of this peculiar little side-trip in an otherwise ordinary day.

'You bet it is! Now, you just give me one minute.' She reached up and put her hands on his shoulders - she had to stand on tiptoe to do it - and for one moment Sam had the absurd idea that she meant to kiss him. Instead she pressed him down onto a wooden bench which ran along the far side of the seven-day bookshelf. 'I know right where to find the books you need, Sam. I don't even have to check the card catalogue.'

'I could get them myself - '

'I'm sure,' she said, 'but they're in the Special Reference section, and I don't like to let people in there if I can help it. I'm very bossy about that, but I always know where to put my hand right on the things I need ... back there, anyway. People are so messy, they have so little regard for order, you know. Children are the worst, but even adults get up to didos if you let them. Don't worry about a thing. I'll be back in two shakes.' Sam had no intention of protesting further, but he wouldn't have had time even if he had wanted to. She was gone. He sat on the bench, once more feeling like a fourth-grader ... like a fourth-grader who had done something wrong this time, who had gotten up to didos and so couldn't go out and play with the other children at recess.

He could hear Ms Lortz moving about in the room behind the checkout desk, and he looked around thoughtfully. There was nothing to see except books -there was not even one old pensioner reading the paper or leafing through a magazine. It seemed odd. He wouldn't have expected a small-town library like this to be doing a booming business on a weekday afternoon, but no one at all?

Well, there was Mr Peckham, he thought, but he finished the paper and went home. Dreadfully thin paper on Friday, you know. Thin dust, too. And then he realized he only had the word of Ms Lortz that a Mr Peckham had ever been here at all.

True enough - but why would she lie?

He didn't know, and doubted very much that she had, but the fact that he was questioning the honesty of a sweet-faced woman he had just met highlighted the central puzzling fact of this meeting: he didn't like her. Sweet face or not, he didn't like her one bit.

It's the posters. You were prepared not to like ANYBODY that would put up posters like that in a children's reading room. But it doesn't matter, because a side-trip is all it is. Get the books and get out.

He shifted on the bench, looked up, and saw a motto on the wall:

If you would know how a man treats his wife and his children, see how he treats his books.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sam didn't care much for that little homily, either. He didn't know exactly why . . . except that maybe he thought a man, even a bookworm, might be expected to treat his family a little better than his reading matter. The motto, painted in gold leaf on a length of varnished oak, glared down at him nevertheless, seeming to suggest he better think again.

Before he could, Ms Lortz returned, lifting a gate in the checkout desk, stepping through it, and lowering it neatly behind her again.

'I think I've got what you need,' she said cheerfuly. 'I hope you'll agree.'

She handed him two books. One was The Speaker's Companion, edited by Kent Adelmen, and the other was Best Loved Poems of the American People. The contents of this latter book, according to the jacket (which was, in its turn, protected by a tough plastic overjacket), had not been edited, exactly, but selected by one Hazel Felleman. 'Poems of life!' the jacket promised. 'Poems of home and mother! Poems of laughter and whimsey! The poems most frequently asked for by the readers of the New York Times Book Review!' It further advised that Hazel Felleman 'has been able to keep her finger on the poetry pulse of the American people.'

Sam looked at her with some doubt, and she read his mind effortlessly.

'Yes, I know, they look old-fashioned,' she said. 'Especially nowadays, when self-help books are all the rage. I imagine if you went to one of the chain bookstores in the Cedar Rapids mall, you could find a dozen books designed to help the beginning public speaker. But none of them would be as good as these, Sam. I really believe these are the best helps there are for men and women who are new to the art of public speaking.'

'Amateurs, in other words,' Sam said, grinning.

'Well, yes. Take Best Loved Poems, for instance. The second section of the book - it begins on page sixtyfive, if memory serves - is called "Inspiration". You can almost surely find something there which will make a suitable climax to your little talk, Sam. And you're apt to find that your listeners will remember a well-chosen verse even if they forget everything else. Especially if they're a little-'

'Drunk,' he said.

'Tight was the word I would have used,' she said with gentle reproof, 'although I suppose you know them better than I do.' But the gaze she shot at him suggested that she was only saying this because she was polite.

She held up The Speaker's Companion. The jacket was a cartoonist's drawing of a bunting-draped hall. Small groups of men in old-fashioned evening dress were seated at tables with drinks in front of them. They were all yucking it up. The man behind the podium - also in evening dress and clearly the after-dinner speaker - was grinning triumphantly down at them. It was clear he was a roaring success.

'There's a section at the beginning on the theory of after-dinner speeches,' said Ms Lortz, 'but since you don't strike me as the sort of man who wants to make a career out of this - '

'You've got that right,' Sam agreed fervently.

'- I suggest you go directly to the middle section, which is called "Lively Speaking." There you will find jokes and stories divided into three categories: "Easing Them In," "Softening Them Up," and "Finishing Them Off."

Sounds like a manual for gigolos, Sam thought but did not say.

She read his mind again. 'A little suggestive, I suppose - but these books were published in a simpler, more innocent time. The late thirties, to be exact.'

'Much more innocent, right,' Sam said, thinking of deserted dust-bowl farms, little girls in flour-sack dresses, and rusty, thrown-together Hoovervilles surrounded by police wielding truncheons.

'But both books still work,' she said, tapping them for emphasis, 'and that's the important thing in business, isn't it, Sam? Results?'

'Yes ... I guess it is.'

He looked at her thoughtfully, and Ms Lortz raised her eyebrows - a trifle defensively, perhaps. 'A penny for your thoughts,' she said.

'I was thinking that this has been a fairly rare occurrence in my adult life,' he said. 'Not unheard-of, nothing like that, but rare. I came in here to get a couple of books to liven up my speech, and you seem to have given me exactly what I came for. How often does something like that happen in a world where you usually can't even get a couple of good lambchops at the grocery store when you've got your face fixed for them?' She smiled. It appeared to be a smile of genuine pleasure . . . except Sam noticed once again that her eyes did not smile. He didn't think they had changed expression since he had first come upon her - or she upon him - in the Children's Library. They just went on watching. 'I think I've just been paid a compliment!'

'Yes, ma'am. You have.'

'I thank you, Sam. I thank you very kindly. They say flattery will get you everywhere, but I'm afraid I'm still going to have to ask you for two dollars.'

'You are?'

'That's the charge for issuing an adult library card,' she said, 'but it's good for three years, and renewal is only fifty cents. Now, is that a deal, or what?'

'It sounds fine to me.'

'Then step right this way,' she said, and Sam followed her to the checkout desk.

3

She gave him a card to fill out - on it he wrote his name, address, telephone numbers, and place of business.

'I see you live on Kelton Avenue. Nice!'

'Well, I like it.'

'The houses are lovely and big - you should be married.'

He started a little. 'How did you know I wasn't married?'

'The same way you knew I wasn't,' she said. Her smile had become a trifle sly, a trifle catlike. 'Nothing on the third left.'

'Oh,' he said lamely, and smiled. He didn't think it was his usual sparkly smile, and his cheeks felt warm.

'Two dollars, please.'

He gave her two singles. She went over to a small desk where an aged, skeletal typewriter stood, and typed briefly on a bright-orange card. She brought it back to the checkout desk, signed her name at the bottom with a flourish, and then pushed it across to him.

'Check and make sure all the information's correct, please.'

Sam did so. 'It's all fine.' Her first name, he noted, was Ardelia. A pretty name, and rather unusual.

She took his new library card back - the first one he'd owned since college, now that he thought about it, and he had used that one precious little - and placed it under the microfilm recorder beside a card she took from the pocket of each book. 'You can only keep these out for a week, because they're from Special Reference. That's a category I invented myself for books which are in great demand.'

'Helps for the beginning speaker are in great demand?'

'Those, and books on things like plumbing repair, simple magic tricks, social etiquette ... you'd be surprised what books people call for in a pinch. But I know.'

'I'll bet you do.'

'I've been in the business a long, long time, Sam. And they're not renewable, so be sure to get them back by April sixth.' She raised her head, and the light caught in her eyes. Sam almost dismissed what he saw there as a twinkle . . . but that wasn't what it was. It was a shine. A flat, hard shine. For just a moment Ardelia Lortz looked as if she had a nickel in each eye.

'Or?' he asked, and his smile suddenly didn't feel like a smile - it felt like a mask.

'Or else I'll have to send the Library Policeman after you,' she said.

4

For a moment their gazes locked, and Sam thought he saw the real Ardelia Lortz, and there was nothing charming or soft or spinster-librarian about that woman at all.

This woman might actually be dangerous, he thought, and then dismissed it, a little embarrassed. The gloomy day - and perhaps the pressure of the impending speech - was getting to him. She's about as dangerous as a canned peach . . . and It isn't the gloomy day or the Rotarians tonight, either. It's those goddam posters.

He had The Speaker's Companion and Best Loved Poems of the American People under his arm and they were almost to the door before he realized she was showing him out. He planted his feet firmly and stopped. She looked at him, surprised.

'Can I ask you something, Ms Lortz?'

'Of course, Sam. That's what I'm here for - to answer questions.'

'It's about the Children's Library,' he said, 'and the posters. Some of them surprised me. Shocked me, almost.' He expected that to come out sounding like something a Baptist preacher might say about an issue of Playboy glimpsed beneath the other magazines on a parishioner's coffee table, but it didn't come out that way at all. Because, he thought, it's not just a conventional sentiment. I really was shocked. No almost about it.

'Posters?' she asked, frowning, and then her brow cleared. She laughed. 'Oh! You must mean the Library Policeman ... and Simple Simon, of course.'

'Simple Simon?'

'You know the poster that says NEVER TAKE RIDES FROM STRANGERS? That's what the kids call the little boy in the picture. The one who is yelling. They call him Simple Simon - I suppose they feel contempt for him because he did such a foolish thing. I think that's very healthy, don't you?'

'He's not yelling,' Sam said slowly. 'He's screaming.'

She shrugged. 'Yelling, screaming, what's the difference? We don't hear much of either in here. The children are very good - very respectful.'

'I'll bet,' Sam said. They were back in the foyer again now, and he glanced at the sign on the easel, the sign which didn't say

SILENCE IS GOLDEN

or

PLEASE TRY TO BE QUIET

but just offered that one inarguable imperative:

SILENCE!

'Besides - it's all a matter of interpretation, isn't it?'

'I suppose,' Sam said. He felt that he was being maneuvered - and very efficiently - into a place where he would not have a moral leg to stand on, and the field of dialectic would belong to Ardelia Lortz. She gave him the impression that she was used to doing this, and that made him feel stubborn. 'But they struck me as extreme, those posters.'

'Did they?' she asked politely. They had halted by the outer door now.

'Yes. Scary.' He gathered himself and said what he really believed. 'Not appropriate to a place where small children gather.'

He found he still did not sound prissy or self-righteous, at least to himself, and this was a relief.

She was smiling, and the smile irritated him. 'You're not the first person who ever expressed that opinion, Sam. Childless adults aren't frequent visitors to the Children's Library, but they do come in from time to time - uncles, aunts, some single mother's boyfriend who got stuck with pick-up duty . . . or people like you, Sam, who are looking for me.'

People in a pinch, her cool blue-gray eyes said. People who come for help and then, once they HAVE been helped, stay to criticize the way we run things here at the Junction City Public Library. The way I run things at the Junction City Public Library.

'I guess you think I was wrong to put my two cents in,' Sam said good-naturedly. He didn't feel goodnatured, all of a sudden he didn't feel good-natured at all, but it was another trick of the trade, one he now wrapped around himself like a protective cloak.

'Not at all. It's just that you don't understand. We had a poll last summer, Sam -it was part of the annual Summer Reading Program. We call our program Junction City's Summer Sizzlers, and each child gets one vote for every book he or she read. It's one of the strategies we've developed over the years to encourage children to read. That is one of our most important responsibilities, you see.'

We know what we're doing, her steady gaze told him. And I'm being very polite, aren't I? Considering that you, who have never been here in your life before, have presumed to poke your head in once and start shotgunning criticisms.

Sam began to feel very much in the wrong. That dialectical battlefield did not belong to the Lortz woman yet - at least not entirely - but he recognized the fact that he was in retreat.

'According to the poll, last summer's favorite movie among the children was A Nightmare on Elm Street, Part 5. Their favorite rock group is called Guns n Roses - the runner-up was something named Ozzy Osbourne, who, I understand, has a reputation for biting the heads off live animals during his concerts. Their favorite novel was a paperback original called Swan Song. It's a horror novel by a man named Robert McCammon. We can't keep it in stock, Sam. They read each new copy to rags in weeks. I had a copy put in Vinabind, but of course it was stolen. By one of the bad children.'

Her lips pursed in a thin line.

'Runner-up was a horror novel about incest and infanticide called Flowers in the Attic. That one was the champ for five years running. Several of them even mentioned Peyton Place!'

She looked at him sternly.

'I myself have never seen any of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies. I have never heard an Ozzy Osbourne record and have no desire to do so, nor to read a novel by Robert McCammon, Stephen King, or V. C. Andrews. Do you see what I'm getting at, Sam?'

'I suppose. You're saying it wouldn't be fair to . He needed a word, groped for it, and found it. ' . . . to usurp the children's tastes.'

She smiled radiantly - everything but the eyes, which seemed to have nickels in them again.

'That's part of it, but that's not all of it. The posters in the Children's Library -both the nice, uncontroversial ones and the ones which put you off - came to us from the Iowa Library Association. The ILA is a member of the Midwest Library Association, and that is, in turn, a member of The National Library Association, which gets the majority of its funding from tax money. From John Q. Public -which is to say from me. And you.'

Sam shifted from one foot to the other. He didn't want to spend the afternoon listening to a lecture on How Your Library Works for You, but hadn't he invited it? He supposed so. The only thing he was absolutely sure of was that he was liking Ardelia Lortz less and less all the time.

'The Iowa Library Association sends us a sheet every other month, with reproductions of about forty posters,' Ms Lortz continued relentlessly. 'We can pick any five free; extras cost three dollars each. I see you're getting restless, Sam, but you do deserve an explanation, and we are finally reaching the nub of the matter.'

'Me? I'm not restless,' Sam said restlessly.

She smiled at him, revealing teeth too even to be anything but dentures. 'We have a Children's Library Committee,' she said. 'Who is on it? Why, children, of course! Nine of them. Four high-school students, three middleschool students, and two grammar-school students. Each child has to have an overall B average in his schoolwork to qualify. They pick some of the new books we order, they picked the new drapes and tables when we redecorated last fall ... and, of course, they pick the posters. That is, as one of our younger Committeemen once put it, "the funnest part." Now do you understand?'

'Yes,' Sam said. 'The kids picked out Little Red Riding Hood, and Simple Simon, and the Library Policeman. They like them because they're scary.'

'Correct!' she beamed.

Suddenly he'd had enough. It was something about the Library. Not the posters, not the librarian, exactly, but the Library itself. Suddenly the Library was like an aggravating, infuriating splinter jammed deep in one buttock. Whatever it was, it was ... enough.

'Ms Lortz, do you keep a videotape of A Nightmare on Elm Street, Part 5 in the Children's Library? Or a selection of albums by Guns n Roses and Ozzy Osbourne?'

'Sam, you miss the point,' she began patiently.

'What about Peyton Place? Do you keep a copy of that in the Children's Library just because some of the kids have read it?'

Even as he was speaking, he thought, Does ANYBODY still read that old thing?

'No,' she said, and he saw that an ill-tempered flush was rising in her cheeks. This was not a woman who was used to having her judgments called into question. 'But we do keep stories about housebreaking, parental abuse, and burglary. I am speaking, of course, of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears,"

"Hansel and Gretel", and "Jack and the Beanstalk." I expected a man such as yourself to be a little more understanding, Sam.'

A man you helped out in a pinch is what you mean, Sam thought, but what the hell, lady - isn't that what the town pays you to do?

Then he got hold of himself. He didn't know exactly what she meant by la man such as himself,' wasn't sure he wanted to know, but he did understand that this discussion was on the edge of getting out of hand - of becoming an argument. He had come in here to find a little tenderizer to sprinkle over his speech, not to get in a hassle about the Children's Library with the head librarian.

'I apologize if I've said anything to offend you,' he said, 'and I really ought to be going.'

'Yes,' she said. 'I think you ought.' Your apology is not accepted, her eyes telegraphed. It is not accepted at all.

'I suppose,' he said, 'that I'm a little nervous about my speaking debut. And I was up late last night working on this.' He smiled his old good-natured Sam Peebles smile and hoisted the briefcase.

She stood down - a little - but her eyes were still snapping. 'That's understandable. We are here to serve, and, of course, we're always interested in constructive criticism from the taxpayers.' She accented the word constructive ever so slightly, to let him know, he supposed, that his had been anything but.

Now that it was over, he had an urge - almost a need - to make it all over, to smooth it down like the coverlet on a well-made bed. And this was also part of the businessman's habit, he supposed . . . or the businessman's protective coloration. An odd thought occurred to him - that what he should really talk about tonight was his encounter with Ardelia Lortz. It said more about the small-town heart and spirit than his whole written speech. Not all of it was flattering, but it surely wasn't dry. And it would offer a sound rarely heard during Friday-night Rotary speeches: the unmistakable ring of truth.

'Well, we got a little feisty there for a second or two,' he heard himself saying, and saw his hand go out. 'I expect I overstepped my bounds. I hope there are no hard feelings.'

She touched his hand. It was a brief, token touch. Cool, smooth flesh. Unpleasant, somehow. Like shaking hands with an umbrella stand. 'None at all,' she said, but her eyes continued to tell a different story. 'Well then . . . I'll be getting along.'

'Yes. Remember - one week on those, Sam.' She lifted a finger. Pointed a well-manicured nail at the books he was holding. And smiled. Sam found something extremely disturbing about that smile, but he could not for the life of him have said exactly what it was. 'I wouldn't want to have to send the Library Cop after you.'

'No,' Sam agreed. 'I wouldn't want that, either.'

'That's right,' said Ardelia Lortz, still smiling. 'You wouldn't.'

5

Halfway down the walk, the face of that screaming child

(Simple Simon, the kids call him Simple Simon I think that's very healthy, don't you)

recurred to him, and with it came a thought - one simple enough and practical enough to stop him in his tracks. It was this: given a chance to pick such a poster, a jury of kids might very well do so ... but would any Library Association, whether from Iowa, the Midwest, or the country as a whole, actually send one out?

Sam Peebles thought of the pleading hands plastered against the obdurate, imprisoning glass, the screaming, agonized mouth, and suddenly found that more than difficult to believe. He found it impossible to believe.

And Peyton Place. What about that? He guessed that most of the adults who used the Library had forgotten about it. Did he really believe that some of their children - the ones young enough to use the Children's Library - had rediscovered that old relic?

I don't believe that one, either.

He had no wish to incur a second dose of Ardelia Lortz's anger - the first had been enough, and he'd had a feeling her dial hadn't been turned up to anything near full volume - but these thoughts were strong enough to cause him to turn around.

She was gone.

The library doors stood shut, a vertical slot of mouth in that brooding granite face.

Sam stood where he was a moment longer, then hurried down to where his car was parked at the curb.