In the end, George Sanders was also the one who got rid of them. He had discovered he could keep the Children from reading his mind — for a little while, anyway — if he imagined a brick wall in his head, with all his most secret thoughts behind it. And after everyone had decided the Children must go (you could teach them math, but not why it was bad to punish someone by making him drive over a cliff), Sanders put a time-bomb into his briefcase and took it into the schoolroom. That was the only place where the Children — Bobby understood in some vague way that they were only supernatural versions of Jack Merridew and his hunters in Lord of the Flies — were all together.
They sensed that Sanders was hiding something from them. In the movie’s final
excruciating sequence, you could see bricks flying out of the wall Sanders had constructed in his head, flying faster and faster as the Children of the Damned pried into him, trying to find out what he was concealing. At last they uncovered the image of the bomb in the briefcase —
eight or nine sticks of dynamite wired up to an alarm clock. You saw their creepy golden eyes widen with understanding, but they didn’t have time to do anything. The bomb exploded.
Bobby was shocked that the hero died — Randolph Scott never died in the Saturday-matinee movies at the Empire, neither did Audie Murphy or Richard Carlson — but he understood that George Sanders had given his life For the Greater Good of All. He thought he understood something else, as well: Ted’s blank-outs.
While Ted and Bobby had been visiting Midwich, the day in southern Connecticut had turned hot and glaring. Bobby didn’t like the world much after a really good movie in any case; for a little while it felt like an unfair joke, full of people with dull eyes, small plans, and facial blemishes. He sometimes thought if the world had a plot it would be so much better.
‘Brautigan and Garfield hit the bricks!’ Ted exclaimed as they stepped from beneath the marquee (a banner reading COME IN IT’S KOOL INSIDE hung from the marquee’s front). ‘What did you think? Did you enjoy it?’
‘It was great,’ Bobby said. ‘Fantabulous. Thanks for taking me. It was practically the best movie I ever saw. How about when he had the dynamite? Did you think he’d be able to fool them?’
‘Well … I’d read the book, remember. Will you read it, do you think?’
‘Yes!’ Bobby felt, in fact, a sudden urge to bolt back to Harwich, running the whole distance down the Connecticut Pike and Asher Avenue in the hot sunshine so he could borrow The Midwich Cuckoos with his new adult library card at once. ‘Did he write any other science-fiction stories?’
‘John Wyndham? Oh yes, quite a few. And will no doubt write more. One nice thing about science-fiction and mystery writers is that they rarely dither five years between books. That is the prerogative of serious writers who drink whiskey and have affairs.’
‘Are the others as good as the one we just saw?’
‘The Day of the Triffids is as good. The Kraken Wakes is even better.’
‘What’s a kraken?’
They had reached a streetcorner and were waiting for the light to change. Ted made a spooky, big-eyed face and bent down toward Bobby with his hands on his knees. ‘It’s a monstah,’ he said, doing a pretty good Boris Karloff imitation.
They walked on, talking first about the movie and then about whether or not there really might be life in outer space, and then on to the special cool ties George Sanders had worn in the movie (Ted told him that kind of tie was called an ascot). When Bobby next took notice of their surroundings they had come to a part of Bridgeport he had never been in before —
when he came to the city with his mom, they stuck to downtown, where the big stores were.
The stores here were small and crammed together. None sold what the big department stores did: clothes and appliances and shoes and toys. Bobby saw signs for locksmiths, check-cashing services, used books. ROD’S GUNS, read one sign, wo FAT NOODLE co., read another.