Stephen King - The Library Policeman

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The Library Policeman

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

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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.'

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'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

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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.

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'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?'

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'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?'

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'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.

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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.

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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?

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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,

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TheLibraryPolicemanTHREEPASTMIDNIGHT:Anoteon'TheLibraryPoliceman'Onthemorningwhenthisstorystartedtohappen,Iwassittingattheb\reakfasttablewithmysonOwen.Mywifehadalreadygoneupstairstoshoweranddress.Thosetwovitalseveno'clock\divisionshadbeenmade:thescrambledeggsandthenewspaper.WillardScott,whovisitsour...

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Stephen King - The Library Policeman

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