Four Past Midnight - Stephen King [303]
'- destroyed,' Sam finished. He began to walk again, closing in on the Library Policeman, and the lavender smell grew stronger with every step he took. His heart was racing in his chest. 'I know whose idea that was, too. But these are perfectly acceptable replacements. Take them.' His voice rose into a stern shout. 'Take them, damn you!'
He held the books out, and the Library Policeman, looking confused and afraid, reached for them.
'No, not like that,' Sam said, raising the books above the white, grasping hand. 'Like this.'
He brought the books down in the Library Policeman's face - brought them down hard. He could not remember ever feeling such sublime satisfaction in his life as that which he felt when Best Loved Poems of the American People and The Speaker's Companion struck and broke the Library Policeman's nose. The round black glasses flew off his face and fell to the floor. Beneath them were black sockets lined with a bed of whitish fluid. Tiny threads floated up from this oozy stuff, and Sam thought about Dave's story - looked like it was startin to grow its own skin, he had said.
The Library Policeman screamed.
'You can't!' it screamed. 'You can't hurt me! You're afraid of me! Besides, you liked it! YOU LIKED it! YOU DIRTY LITTLE BOY, YOU LIKED IT!'
'Wrong,' Sam said. 'I fucking hated it. Now take these books. Take them and get out of here. Because the fine is paid.'
He slammed the books into the Library Policeman's chest. And, as the Library Policeman's hands closed on them, Sam hoicked one knee squarely into the Library Policeman's crotch.
'That's for all the other kids,' he said. 'The ones you fucked and the ones she ate.'
The creature wailed with pain. His flailing hands dropped the books as he bent to cup his groin. His greasy black hair fell over his face, mercifully hiding those blank, thread-choked sockets.
Of course they are blank, Sam had time to think. I never saw the eyes behind the glasses he wore that day ... so SHE couldn't see them, either.
'That doesn't pay your fine,' Sam said, 'but it's a step in the right direction, isn't it?'
The Library Policeman's trenchcoat began to writhe and ripple, as if some unimaginable transformation had begun beneath it. And when he ... It ... looked up, Sam saw something which drove him back a step in horror and revulsion.
The man who had come half from Dave's poster and half from Sam's own mind had become a misshapen dwarf. The dwarf was becoming something else, a dreadful hermaphroditic creature. A sexual storm was happening on its face and beneath the bunching, twitching trenchcoat. Half the hair was still black; the other half was ash-blonde. One socket was still empty; a savage blue eye glittered hate from the other.
'I want you,' the dwarfish creature hissed. 'I want you, and I'll have you.'
'Try me, Ardelia,' Sam said. 'Let's rock and r -'
He reached for the thing before him, but screamed and withdrew his hand as soon as it snagged in the trenchcoat. It wasn't a coat at all; it was some sort of dreadful loose skin, and it was like trying to grip a mass of freshly used teabags.
It scuttered up the canted side of the fallen bookshelf and thumped into the shadows on the far side. The smell of lavender sachet was suddenly much stronger.
A brutal laugh drifted up from the shadows.
A woman's laugh.
'Too late, Sam,' she said. 'It's already too late. The deed is done.'
Ardelia's back, Sam thought, and from outside there was a tremendous, rending crash. The building shuddered as a tree fell against it, and the lights went out.
9
They were in total darkness only for a second, but it seemed much longer. Ardelia laughed again, and this time her laughter had a strange, hooting quality, like laughter broadcast through a megaphone.
Then a single emergency bulb high up on one wall went on, throwing a pallid sheaf of light over this section of the stacks and flinging shadows everywhere like tangles of black