Four Past Midnight - Stephen King [253]
Sam looked up thoughtfully. He believed there was something missing from Richard Price's careful, droning history of the town Library. No; on second thought, missing was the wrong word. The essay made Sam decide Price was a fussbudget of the first water - probably a nice man, but a fussbudget just the same - and such men did not miss things, especially when they were dealing with subjects which were clearly close to their hearts.
So - not missing. Concealed.
It didn't quite add up, chron-o-lodge-ick-a-lee speaking. In 1951, a man named Christopher Lavin had succeeded that saint Felicia Culpepper as head librarian. In 1964, Richard Price had become city librarian. Had Price succeeded Lavin? Sam didn't think so. He thought that at some point during those thirteen blank years, a woman named Ardelia Lortz had succeeded Lavin. Price, Sam thought, had succeeded her. She wasn't in Mr Price's fussbudgety account of the Library because she had done ... something. Sam was no closer to knowing what that something might have been, but he had a better idea of the magnitude. Whatever it was, it had been bad enough for Price to make her an unperson in spite of his very obvious love of detail and continuity.
Murder, Sam thought. It must have been murder. It's really the only thing bad enough to f-
At that second a hand dropped on Sam's shoulder.
3
If he had screamed, he would undoubtedly have terrified the hand's owner almost as much as she had already terrorized him, but Sam was unable to scream. Instead, all the air whooshed out of him and the world went gray again. His chest felt like an accordion being slowly crushed under an elephant's foot. All of his muscles seemed to have turned to macaroni. He did not wet his pants again. That was perhaps the only saving grace.
'Sam?' he heard a voice ask. It seemed to come from quite a distance -somewhere in Kansas, say. 'Is that you?'
He swung around, almost falling out of his chair in front of the microfilm reader, and saw Naomi. He tried to get his breath back so he could say something. Nothing but a tired wheeze came out. The room seemed to waver in front of his eyes. The grayness came and went.
Then he saw Naomi take a stumble-step backward, her eyes widening in alarm, her hand going to her mouth. She struck one of the microfilm shelves almost hard enough to knock it over. It rocked, two or three of the boxes tumbled to the capet with soft thumps, and then it settled back again.
'Omes,' he managed at last. His voice came out in a whispery squeak. He remembered once, as a boy in St Louis, trapping a mouse under his baseball cap. It had made a sound like that as it scurried about, looking for an escape hatch.
'Sam, what's happened to you?' She also sounded like someone who would have been screaming if shock hadn't whipped the breath out of her. We make quite a pair, Sam thought. Abbot and Costello Meet the Monsters.
'What are you doing here?' he said. 'You scared the living shit out of me!'
There, he thought. I went and used the s-word again. Called you Omes again, too. Sorry about that. He felt a little better, and thought of getting up, but decided against it. No sense pressing his luck. He was still not entirely sure his heart wasn't going to vapor-lock.
'I went to the office to see you,' she said. 'Cammy Harrington said she thought she saw you come in here. I wanted to apologize. Maybe. I thought at first you must have played some cruel trick on Dave. He said you'd never do a thing like that, and I started to think that it didn't seem like you. You've always been so nice . - .'
'Thanks,' Sam said. 'I guess.'
' . . . and you seemed so ... so bewildered on the telephone. I asked Dave what it was about, but he wouldn't tell me anything else. All I know is what I heard ... and how he looked when he was talking to you. He looked like he'd seen a ghost.'
No, Sam thought of telling her. I was the one who saw the ghost. And this morning I saw something even worse.
'Sam, you have to understand something about Dave ... and about me. Well, I guess