It

in stacks and stacks and stacks of school composition books. Then he uncapped his pen and wrote May 31st two lines below the end of his last entry. He paused, looking vaguely across the empty library, and then began to write about everything that had happened during the last three days, beginning with his telephone call to Stanley Uris.
He wrote carefully for fifteen minutes, and then his concentration began to come unravelled. He paused more and more frequently. The image of Stan Uris’s severed head in the refrigerator tried to intrude, Stan’s bloody head, the mouth open and full of feathers, falling out of the refrigerator and rolling across the floor toward him. He banished it with an effort and went on writing. Five minutes later he jerked upright and whirled around, convinced he would see that head rolling across the old black and red tiles of the main floor, eyes as glassy and avid as the eyes in the mounted head of a deer. There was nothing. No head, no sound except the muffled drum of his own heart.
Got to get ahold of yourself, Mikey. It’s the jim-jams, that’s all. Nothing else to it.
But it was no use. The words began to get away from him, the thoughts seemed to dangle just out of reach. There was a pressure on the back of his neck, and it seemed to grow heavier.
Being watched.
He put his pen down and got up from the table. ‘Is anyone here?’ he called, and his voice echoed back from the rotunda, giving him a jolt. He licked his lips and tried again. ‘Bill? . . . Ben?’
Bill-ill-ill . . . Ben-en-en . . .
Suddenly Mike decided he wanted to be home. He would simply take the notebook with him. He reached for it . . . and heard a faint sliding footstep.
He looked up again. Pools of light surrounded by deepening lagoons of shadow. Nothing else . . . at least nothing he could see. He waited, heart beating hard.
The footstep came again, and this time he pinpointed the location. The glassed-in passageway that connected the adult library to the Children’s Library. In there. Someone. Something.
Moving quietly, Mike walked across to the checkout desk. The double doors leading into the passageway were held open by wooden chocks, and he could see a little way in. He could see what looked like feet, and with sudden swooning horror he wondered if maybe Stan had come after all, if maybe Stan was going to step out of the shadows with his bird encyclopedia in one hand, his face white, his lips purple, his wrists and forearms cut open. I finally came,
Stan would say. It took me awhile because I had to pull myself out of a hole in the ground, but I finally came . . .
There was another footstep and now Mike could see shoes for sure — shoes and ragged pantslegs — denim, with strings hanging down against sockless ankles. And, in the darkness almost six feet above those ankles, he could see glittering eyes.
He groped over the surface of the semicircular checkout desk and felt along the other side without taking his gaze from those moveless, glittering eyes. His fingers felt one wooden corner of a small box — the overdue cards. A paper box — paper clips and rubber bands. They happened on something that was metal and seized it. It was a letter-opener with the words JESUSSAVES stamped on the handle. A flimsy thing that had come in the mail from the Grace Baptist Church as part of a fund-raising drive. Mike had not attended services in fifteen years, but Grace Baptist had been his mother’s church and he had sent them five dollars he could not really afford. He had meant to throw the letter –opener out but it had stayed here, amid the clutter on his side of the desk (Carole’s side was always spotlessly clean) until now.
He clutched it with feverish strength and stared into the shadowy hallway.
There was another step . . . another. Now the ragged denim pants were visible up to the knees. He could see the shape these lower legs belonged to: it was big, hulking. The shoulders were rounded. There was a suggestion of ragged hair. The figure was ape-like.
‘Who are you?’
There was no answer. The shape merely stood there, contemplating him.
Although still afraid, Mike had gotten over the debilitating idea that it might be Stan Uris, returned from the grave, called back by the scars on his palms, some eldritch magnetism which had brought him back like a zombie in a Hammer horror film. Whoever this was, it wasn’t Stan Uris, who