Stephen King - Three Past Midnight

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THREE PAST MIDNIGHT:

A note on 'The Library Policeman'

On the morning when this story started to happen, I was sitting at the breakfast table with my son Owen.

My wife had already gone upstairs to shower and dress. Those two vital seven o'clock divisions had been

made: the scrambled eggs and the newspaper. Willard Scott, who visits our house five days out of every

seven, was telling us about a lady in Nebraska who had just turned a hundred and four, and I think Owen

and I had one whole pair of eyes open between us. A typical weekday morning chez King, in other words.

Owen tore himself away from the sports section just long enough to ask me if I'd be going by the mall that

day - there was a book he wanted me to pick up for a school report. I can't remember what it was - it might

have been Johnny Tremain or April Morning, Howard Fast's novel of the American Revolution - but it was

one of those tomes you can never quite lay your hands on in a bookshop; it's always just out of print or just

about to come back into print or some damned thing.

I suggested that Owen try the local library, which is a very good one. I was sure they'd have it. He muttered

some reply. I only caught two words of it, but, given my interests, those two words were more than enough

to pique my interest. They were 'library police.'

I put my half of the newspaper aside, used the MUTE button on the remote control to strangle Willard in

the middle of his ecstatic report on the Georgia Peach Festival, and asked Owen to kindly repeat himself.

He was reluctant to do so, but I pressed him. Finally he told me that he didn't like to use the library because

he worried about the Library Police. He knew there were no Library Police, he hastened to add, but it was

one of those stories that burrowed down into your subconscious and just sort of lurked there. He had heard

it from his Aunt Stephanie when he was seven or eight and much more gullible, and it had been lurking

ever since.

I, of course, was delighted, because I had been afraid of the Library Police myself as a kid - the faceless

enforcers who would actually come to your house

if you didn't bring your overdue books back. That would be bad enough ... but what if you couldn't find the

books in question when those strange lawmen turned up? What then? What would they do to you? What

might they take to make up for the missing volumes? It had been years since I'd thought of the Library

Police (although not since childhood; I can clearly remember discussing them with Peter Straub and his

son, Ben, six or eight years ago), but now all those old questions, both dreadful and somehow enticing,

recurred.

I found myself musing on the Library Police over the next three or four days, and as I mused, I began to

glimpse the outlines of the story which follows. This is the way stories usually happen for me, but the

musing period usually lasts a lot longer than it did in this case. When I began, the story was titled 'The

Library Police,' and I had no clear idea of where I was going with it. I thought it would probably be a funny

story, sort of like the suburban nightmares the late Max Shulman used to bolt together. After all, the idea

was funny, wasn't it? I mean, the Library Police! How absurd!

What I realized, however, was something I knew already: the fears of childhood have a hideous persistence.

Writing is an act of self-hypnosis, and in that state a kind of total emotional recall often takes place and

terrors which should have been long dead start to walk and talk again.

As I worked on this story, that began to happen to me. I knew, going in, that I had loved the library as a kid

- why not? It was the only place a relatively poor kid like me could get all the books he wanted - but as I

continued to write, I became reacquainted with a deeper truth: I had also feared it. I feared becoming lost in

the dark stacks, I feared being forgotten in a dark corner of the reading room and ending up locked in for

the night, I feared the old librarian with the blue hair and the cat's-eye glasses and the almost lipless mouth

who would pinch the backs of your hands with her long, pale fingers and hiss 'Shhhh!' if you forgot where

you were and started to talk too loud. And yes, I feared the Library Police.

What happened with a much longer work, a novel called Christine, began to happen here. About thirty

pages in, the humor began to go out of the situation. And about fifty pages in, the whole story took a

screaming left turn into the dark places I have travelled so often and which I still know so little about.

Eventually I found the guy I was looking for, and managed to raise my head enough to look into his

merciless silver eyes. I have tried to bring back a sketch of him for you, Constant Reader, but it may not be

very good.

My hands were trembling quite badly when I made it, you see.

CHAPTER 1

The Stand-In

Everything, Sam Peebles decided later, was the fault of the goddamned acrobat. If the acrobat hadn't gotten

drunk at exactly the wrong time, Sam never would have ended up in such trouble.

It is not bad enough, he thought with a perhaps justifiable bitterness, that life is like a narrow beam over an

endless chasm, a beam we have to walk blindfolded. It's bad, but not bad enough. Sometimes, we also get

pushed.

But that was later. First, before the Library Policeman, was the drunken acrobat.

In Junction City, the last Friday of every month was Speaker's Night at the local Rotarians' Hall. On the last

Friday in March of 1990, the Rotarians were scheduled to hear - and to be entertained by - The Amazing

Joe, an acrobat with Curry & Trembo's All-Star Circus and Travelling Carnival.

The telephone on Sam Peebles's desk at Junction City Realty and Insurance rang at five past four on

Thursday afternoon. Sam picked it up. It was always Sam who picked it up - either Sam in person or Sam

on the answering machine, because he was Junction City Realty and Insurance's owner and sole employee.

He was not a rich man, but he was a reasonably happy one. He liked to tell people that his first Mercedes

was still quite a distance in the future, but he had a Ford which was almost new and owned his own home

on Kelton Avenue. 'Also, the business keeps me in beer and skittles,' he liked to add ... although in truth, he

hadn't drunk much beer since college and wasn't exactly sure what skittles were. He thought they might be

pretzels.

'Junction City Realty and In - '

'Sam, this is Craig. The acrobat broke his neck.'

'What?'

'You heard me!' Craig Jones cried in deeply aggrieved tones. 'The acrobat broke his fucking neck!'

'Oh,' Sam said. 'Gee.' He thought about this for a moment and then asked cautiously, 'Is he dead, Craig?'

'No, he's not dead, but he might as well be as far as we're concerned. He's in the hospital over in Cedar

Rapids with his neck dipped in about twenty pounds of plaster. Billy Bright just called me. He said the guy

came on drunk as a skunk at the matinee this afternoon, tried to do a back-over flip, and landed outside the

center ring on the nape of his neck. Billy said he could hear it way up in the bleachers, where he was

sitting. He said it sounded like when you step in a puddle that just iced over.'

'Ouch!' Sam exclaimed, wincing.

'I'm not surprised. After all - The Amazing Joe. What kind of name is that for a circus performer? I mean,

The Amazing Randix, okay. The Amazing Tortellini, still not bad. But The Amazing Joe? It sounds like a

prime example of brain damage in action to me.'

'Jesus, that's too bad.'

'Fucking shit on toast is what it is. It leaves us without a speaker tomorrow night, good buddy.'

Sam began to wish he had left the office promptly at four. Craig would have been stuck with Sam the

answering machine, and that would have given Sam the living being a little more time to think. He felt he

would soon need time to think. He also felt that Craig Jones was not going to give him any.

'Yes,' he said, 'I guess that's true enough.' He hoped he sounded philosophical but helpless. 'What a shame.'

'It sure is,' Craig said, and then dropped the dime. 'But I know you'll be happy to step in and fill the slot.'

'Me? Craig, you've got to be kidding! I can't even do a somersault, let alone a back-over fl - '

‘Thought you could talk about the importance of the independently owned business in small-town life,'

Craig Jones pressed on relentlessly. 'If that doesn't do it for you, there's baseball. Lacking that, you could

always drop your pants and wag your wing-wang at the audience. Sam, I am not just the head of the

Speaker's Committee - that would be bad enough. But since Kenny moved away and Carl quit coming, I am

the Speaker's Committee. Now, you've got to help me. I need a speaker tomorrow night. There are about

five guys in the whole damn club I feel I can trust in a pinch, and you're one of them.'

'But - '

'You're also the only one who hasn't filled in already in a situation like this, so you're elected, buddy-boy.'

'Frank Stephens pinch-hit for the guy from the trucking union last year when the grand jury indicted him

for fraud and he couldn't show up. Sam - it's your turn in the barrel. You can't let me down, man. You owe

me.'

'I run an insurance business!' Sam cried. 'When I'm not writing insurance, I sell farms! Mostly to banks!

Most people find it boring! The ones who don't find it boring find it disgusting!'

'None of that matters.' Craig was now moving in for the kill, marching over Sam's puny objections in grim

hobnailed boots. 'They'll all be drunk by the end of dinner and you know it. They won't remember a

goddam word you said come Saturday morning, but in the meantime, I need someone to stand up and talk

for half an hour and you're elected!'

Sam continued to object a little longer, but Craig kept coming down on the imperatives, italicizing them

mercilessly. Need. Gotta. Owe.

'All right!' he said at last. 'All right, all right! Enough!'

'My man!' Craig exclaimed. His voice was suddenly full of sunshine and rainbows. 'Remember, it doesn't

have to be any longer than thirty minutes, plus maybe another ten for questions. If anybody has any

questions. And you really can wag your wing-wang if you want to. I doubt that anybody could actually see

it, but - '

'Craig,' Sam said, 'that's enough.'

'Oh! Sorry! Shet mah mouf!' Craig, perhaps lightheaded with relief, cackled.

'Listen, why don't we terminate this discussion?' Sam reached for the roll of Turns he kept in his desk

drawer. He suddenly felt he might need quite a few Turns during the next twenty-eight hours or so. 'It looks

as if I've got a speech to write.'

'You got it,' Craig said. 'Just remember - dinner at six, speech at seventhirty. As they used to say on Hawaii

Five-0, be there! Aloha!'

'Aloha, Craig,' Sam said, and hung up. He stared at the phone. He felt hot gas rising slowly up through his

chest and into his throat. He opened his mouth and uttered a sour burp - the product of a stomach which had

been reasonably serene until five minutes ago.

He ate the first of what would prove to be a great many Tums indeed.

Instead of going bowling that night as he had planned, Sam Peebles shut himself in his study at home with

a yellow legal pad, three sharpened pencils, a package of Kent cigarettes, and a six-pack of Jolt. He

unplugged the telephone from the wall, lit a cigarette, and stared at the yellow pad. After five minutes of

staring, he wrote this on the top line of the top sheet:

SMALL-TOWN BUSINESSES: THE LIFEBLOOD OF AMERICA

He said it out loud and liked the sound of it. Well ... maybe he didn't exactly like it, but he could live with

it. He said it louder and liked it better. A little better. It actually wasn't that good; in fact, it probably sucked

the big hairy one, but it beat the shit out of 'Communism: Threat or Menace.' And Craig was right - most of

them would be too hung over on Saturday morning to remember what they'd heard on Friday night,

anyway.

Marginally encouraged, Sam began to write.

'When I moved to Junction City from the more or less thriving metropolis of Ames in 1984

and that is why I feel now, as I did on that bright September morn in 1984, that small businesses are not

just the lifeblood of America, but the bright and sparkly lifeblood of the entire Western world.'

Sam stopped, crushed out a cigarette in the ashtray on his office desk, and looked hopefully at Naomi

Higgins.

'Well? What do you think?'

Naomi was a pretty young woman from Proverbia, a town four miles west of Junction City. She lived in a

ramshackle house by the Proverbia River with her ramshackle mother. Most of the Rotarians knew Naomi,

and wagers had been offered from time to time on whether the house or the mother would fall apart first.

Sam didn't know if any of these wagers had ever been taken, but if so, their resolution was still pending.

Naomi had graduated from Iowa City Business College, and could actually retrieve whole legible sentences

from her shorthand. Since she was the only local woman who possessed such a skill, she was in great

demand among Junction City's limited business population. She also had extremely good legs, and that

didn't hurt. She worked mornings five days a week, for four men and one woman -two lawyers, one banker,

and two realtors. In the afternoons she went back to the ramshackle house, and when she was not caring for

her ramshackle mother, she typed up the dictation she had taken.

Sam Peebles engaged Naomi's services each Friday morning from ten until noon, but this morning he had

put aside his correspondence - even though some of it badly needed to be answered - and asked Naomi if

she would listen to something.

'Sure, I guess so,' Naomi had replied. She looked a little worried, as if she thought Sam - whom she had

briefly dated - might be planning to propose marriage. When he explained that Craig Jones had drafted him

to stand in for the wounded acrobat, and that he wanted her to listen to his speech, she'd relaxed and

listened to the whole thing - all twenty-six minutes of it - with flattering attention.

'Don't be afraid to be honest,' he added before Naomi could do more than open her mouth.

'It's good,' she said. 'Pretty interesting.'

'No, that's okay - you don't have to spare my feelings. Let it all hang out.'

'I am. It's really okay. Besides, by the time you start talking, they'll all be - '

'Yes, they'll all be hammered, I know.' This prospect had comforted Sam at first, but now it disappointed

him a little. Listening to himself read, he'd actually thought the speech was pretty good.

'There Is one thing,' Naomi said thoughtfully.

'Oh?'

'It's kind of ... you know . . . dry.'

'Oh,' Sam said. He sighed and rubbed his eyes. He had been up until nearly one o'clock this morning, first

writing and then revising.

'But that's easy to fix,' she assured him. 'Just go to the library and get a couple of those books.'

Sam felt a sudden sharp pain in his lower belly and grabbed his roll of Tums. Research for a stupid Rotary

Club speech? Library research? That was going a little overboard, wasn't it? He had never been to the

Junction City Library before, and he didn't see a reason to go there now. Still, Naomi had listened very

closely, Naomi was trying to help, and it would be rude not to at least listen to what she had to say.

'What books?'

'You know - books with stuff in them to liven up speeches. They're like . . .' Naomi groped. 'Well, you

know the hot sauce they give you at China Light, if you want it?'

'Yes - '

'They're like that. They have jokes. Also, there's this one book, Best Loved Poems of the American People.

You could probably find something in there for the end. Something sort of uplifting.'

'There are poems in this book about the importance of small businesses in American life?' Sam asked

doubtfully.

'When you quote poetry, people get uplifted,' Naomi said. 'Nobody cares what it's about, Sam, let alone

what it's for.'

'And they really have joke-books especially for speeches?' Sam found this almost impossible to believe,

although hearing that the library carried books on such esoterica as small-engine repair and wig-styling

wouldn't have surprised him in the least.

'Yes.'

'How do you know?'

'When Phil Brakeman was running for the State House, I used to type up speeches for him all the time,'

Naomi said. 'He had one of those books. I just can't remember what the name of it was. All I can think of is

Jokes for the John, and of course that's not right.'

'No,' Sam agreed, thinking that a few choice tidbits from Jokes for the John would probably make him a

howling success. But he began to see what Naomi was getting at and the idea appealed to him despite his

reluctance to visit the local library after all his years of cheerful neglect. A little spice for the old speech.

Dress up your leftovers, turn your meatloaf into a masterpiece. And a library, after all, was just a library. If

you didn't know how to find what you wanted, all you had to do was ask a librarian. Answering questions

was one of their jobs, right?

'Anyway, you could leave it just the way it is,' Naomi said. 'I mean, they will be drunk.' She looked at Sam

kindly but severely and then checked her watch. 'You have over an hour left - did you want to do some

letters?'

'No, I guess not. Why don't you type up my speech instead?' He had already decided to spend his lunch

hour at the library.

CHAPTER 2

The Library (I)

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

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 shadow-

banishing 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

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摘要：

THREEPASTMIDNIGHT:Anoteon'TheLibraryPoliceman'Onthemorningwhenthisstorystartedtohappen,IwassittingatthebreakfasttablewithmysonOwen.Mywifehadalreadygoneupstairstoshoweranddress.Thosetwovitalseveno'clockdivisionshadbeenmade:thescrambledeggsandthenewspaper.WillardScott,whovisitsourhousefivedaysoutofeve...

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Stephen King - Three Past Midnight

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