Four Past Midnight - Stephen King [304]
Naomi looked up at him. Her face was white and shocked and streaked with tears. 'Sam, I think he's dying.'
He knelt beside Dave. The old man's eyes were shut and he was breathing in harsh, almost random gasps. Thin trickles of blood spilled from both nostrils and from one ear. There was a deep, crushed dent in his forehead, just above the right eyebrow. Looking at it made Sam's stomach clench. One of Dave's cheekbones was clearly broken, and the fire-extinguisher's handle was printed on that side of his face in bright fines of blood and bruise. It looked like a tattoo.
'We've got to get him to a hospital, Sam!'
'Do you think she'd let us out of here now?' he asked, and, as if in answer to this question, a huge book - the T volume of The Oxford English Dictionary -came flying at them from beyond the rough circle of light thrown by the emergency unit mounted on the wall. Sam pulled Naomi backward and they both went sprawling in the dusty aisle. Seven pounds of tabasco, tendril, tomcat and trepan slammed through the space where Naomi's head had been a moment before, hit the wall, and splashed to the floor in an untidy, tented heap.
From the shadows came shrill laughter. Sam rose to his knees in time to see a hunched shape flit down the aisle beyond the fallen bookcase. It's still changing, Sam thought. Into what, God only knows. It buttonhooked to the left and was gone.
'Get her, Sam,' Naomi said hoarsely. She gripped one of his hands. 'Get her, please get her.'
'I'll try,' he said. He stepped over Dave's sprawled legs and entered the deeper shadows beyond the overturned bookcase.
10
The smell freaked him out - the smell of lavender sachet mixed with the dusty aroma of books from all those latter years. That smell, mingled with the freight-train whoop of the wind outside, made him feel like H. G. Wells's Time Traveller ... and the Library itself, bulking all around him, was his time machine.
He walked slowly down the aisle, squeezing the ball of red licorice nervously in his left hand. Books surrounded him, seemed to frown down at him. They climbed to a height that was twice his own. He could hear the click and squeak of his shoes on the old linoleum.
'Where are you?' he shouted. 'If you want me, Ardelia, why don't you come on and get me? I'm right here!'
No answer. But she would have to come out soon, wouldn't she? If Dave was right, her change was upon her, and her time was short.
Midnight, he thought. The Library Policeman gave me until midnight, so maybe that's how long she has. But that's over three and a half hours away .
Dave can't possibly wait that long.
Then another thought, even less pleasant, occurred: suppose that, while he was mucking around back here in these dark aisles, Ardelia was circling her way back to Naomi and Dave?
lie came to the end of the aisle, listened, heard nothing, and slipped over into the next. It was empty. He heard a low whispering sound from above him and looked up just in time to see half a dozen heavy books sliding oat from one of the shelves above his head. He lunged backward with a cry as the books fell, striking his thighs, and heard Ardelia's crazy laughter from the other side of the bookcase.
He could imagine her up there, clinging to the shelves like a spider bloated with poison, and his body seemed to act before his brain could think. He slewed around on his heels like a drunken soldier trying to do an about face and threw his back against the shelf. The laughter turned to a scream of fear and surprise as the stack tilted under Sam's weight. He heard a meaty thud as the thing hurled itself from its perch. A second later the stack went over.
What happened then was something Sam had not foreseen: the stack he had pushed toppled across the aisle, shedding its books in a waterfall as it went, and struck the next one. The