“May God have mercy on your soul,” he told the panting, terrified figure in the electric chair, then looked past him at the mesh-covered rectangle where Harry and Jack were standing, Jack with his hand on the switch marked MABEL’S HAIR DRIER. The doctor was standing to the right of that window, eyes fixed on the black bag between his feet, as silent and selfeffacing as ever. “Roll on two!”
At first it was the same as always – the humming that was a little louder than the original cycle-up, but not much, and the mindless forward surge of Del’s body as his muscles spasmed.
Then things started going wrong.
The humming lost its steadiness and began to waver. It was joined by a crackling sound, like cellophane being crinkled. I could smell something horrible that I didn’t identify as a mixture of burning hair and organic sponge until I saw blue tendrils of smoke curling out from beneath the edges of the cap. More smoke was streaming out of the hole in the top of the cap that the wire came in through; it looked like smoke coming out of the hole in an Indian’s teepee.
Delacroix began to jitter and twist in-the chair, his mask-covered face snapping from side to side as if in some vehement refusal. His legs began to piston up and down in short strokes that were hampered by the clamps on his ankles. Thunder banged overhead, and now the rain began to pour down harder.
I looked at Dean Stanton; he stared wildly back. There was a muffled pop from under the cap, like a pine knot exploding in a hot fire, and now I could see smoke coming through the mask, as well, seeping out in little curls.
I lunged toward the mesh between us and the switch room, but before I could open my mouth, Brutus Howell seized my elbow. His grip was hard enough to make the nerves in there tingle. He was as white as tallow but not in a panic – not even close to being in a panic. “Don’t you tell Jack to stop,” he said in a low voice. “Whatever you do, don’t tell him that. It’s too late to stop.”
At first, when Del began to scream, the witnesses didn’t hear him. The rain on the tin roof had swelled to a roar, and the thunder was damned near continuous. But those of us on the platform heard him, all right
– choked howls of pain from beneath the smoking mask, sounds an animal caught and mangled in a hay-baler might make.
The hum from the cap was ragged and wild now, broken by bursts of what sounded like radio static.
Delacroix began to slam back and forth in the chair like a kid doing a tantrum. The platform shook, and he hit the leather restraining belt almost hard enough to pop it. The current was also twisting him from side to side, and I heard the crunching snap as his right shoulder either broke or dislocated. It went with a sound like someone hitting a wooden crate with a sledgehammer. The crotch of his pants, no more than a blur because of the short pistoning strokes of his legs, darkened. Then he began to squeal, horrible sounds, high-pitched and ratlike, that were audible even over the rushing downpour.
“What the hell’s happening to him?” someone cried.
“Are those clamps going to hold?”
“Christ, the smell! Phew!”
Then, one of the two women: “Is this normal?”
Delacroix snapped forward, dropped back, snapped forward, fell back. Percy was staring at him with slack-jawed horror. He had expected something, sure, but not this.
The mask burst into flame on Delacroix’s face. The smell of cooking hair and sponge was now joined by the smell of cooking flesh. Brutal grabbed the bucket the sponge had been in – it was empty now, of course – and charged for the extra-deep janitor’s sink in the corner.
“Shouldn’t I kill the juice, Paul?” Van Hay called through the mesh. He sounded completely rattled.
“Shouldn’t-”
“No!” I shouted back. Brutal had understood it first, but I hadn’t been far behind: we had to finish it.