Four Past Midnight - Stephen King [247]
'The Gazette!' he cried, and stuck his head under the shower nozzle to rinse the soap out of it.
Twenty minutes later he was downstairs, dressed except for his coat and tie, and drinking coffee in his study. The legal pad was once more in front of him, and on it was the start of another list.
1. Ardelia Lortz - who is she? Or who was she?
2. Ardelia Lortz - what did she do?
3. Junction City Public Library - renovated? When? Pictures?
At this point the doorbell rang. Sam glanced at the clock as he got up to answer it. It was going on eightthirty, time to get to work. He could shoot over to the Gazette office at ten, the time he usually took his coffee break, and check some back issues. Which ones? He was still mulling this over - some would undoubtedly bear fruit quicker than others - as he dug in his pocket for the paperboy's money. The doorbell rang again.
'I'm coming as fast as I can, Keith!' he called, stepping into the kitchen entryway and grabbing the doorknob. 'Don't punch a hole in the damn d -'
At that moment he looked up and saw a shape much larger than Keith Jordan's bulking behind the sheer curtain hung across the window in the door. His mind had been preoccupied, more concerned with the day ahead than this Monday-morning ritual of paying the newsboy, but in that instant an icepick of pure terror stabbed its way through his scattered thoughts. He did not have to see the face; even through the sheer he recognized the shape, the set of the body . . . and the trenchcoat, of course.
The taste of red licorice, high, sweet, and sickening, flooded his mouth.
He let go of the doorknob, but an instant too late. The latch had clicked back, and the moment it did, the figure standing on the back porch rammed the door open. Sam was thrown backward into the kitchen. He flailed his arms to keep his balance and managed to knock all three coats hanging from the rod in the entryway to the floor.
The Library Policeman stepped in, wrapped in his own pocket of cold air. He stepped in slowly, as if he had all the time in the world, and closed the door behind him. In one hand he held Sam's copy of the Gazette, neatly rolled and folded. He raised it like a baton.
'I brought you your paper,' the Library Policeman said. His voice was strangely distant, as if it was coming to Sam through a heavy pane of glass. 'I was going to pay the boy as well, but he theemed in a hurry to get away. I wonder why.'
He advanced toward the kitchen - toward Sam, who was cowering against the counter and staring at the intruder with the huge, shocked eyes of a terrified child, of some poor fourth-grade Simple Simon.
I am imagining this, Sam thought, or I'm having a nightmare - a nightmare so horrible it makes the one I had two nights ago look like a sweet dream.
But it was no nightmare. It was terrifying, but it was no nightmare. Sam had time to hope he had gone crazy after all. Insanity was no day at the beach, but nothing could be as awful as this man-shaped thing which had come into his house, this thing which walked in its own wedge of winter.
Sam's house was old and the ceilings were high, but the Library Policeman had to duck his head in the entry, and even in the kitchen the crown of his gray felt hat almost brushed the ceiling. That meant he was over seven feet tall.
His body was wrapped in a trenchcoat the leaden color of fog at twilight. His skin was paper white. His face was dead, as if he could understand neither kindness nor love nor mercy. His mouth was set in lines of ultimate, passionless authority and Sam thought for one confused moment of how the closed library door had looked, like the slotted mouth in the face of a granite robot. The Library Policeman's eyes appeared to be silver circles which