The next day Miss Sidley kept Robert after school. He did nothing to warrant the punishment, so she simply
accused him falsely. She felt no qualms; he was a monster, not a little boy. She must make him admit it.
Her back was in agony. She realized Robert knew; he expected that would help him. But it wouldn’t. That
was another of her little advantages. Her back had been a constant pain to her for the last twelve years, and there had been many times when it had been this bad – well, almost this bad.
She closed the door, shutting the two of them in.
For a moment she stood stiff, training her gaze on Robert. She waited for him to drop his eyes. He didn’t. He looked back at her, and presently a little smile began to play around the comers of his mouth.
‘Why are you smiling, Robert?’ she asked softly.
‘I don’t know,’ Robert said, and went on smiling.
‘Tell me, please.’
Robert said nothing.
And went on smiling.
The outside sounds of children at play were distant, dreamy. Only the hypnotic buzz of the wall clock was
real.
‘There’s quite a few of us,’ Robert said suddenly, as if he were commenting on the weather.
It was Miss Sidley’s turn to be silent.
‘Eleven right here in this school.’
Quite evil,
she thought, amazed. Very, incredibly evil.
‘Little boys who tell stories go to hell,’ she said clearly. ‘I know many parents no longer make their … their spawn … aware of that fact, but I assure you that it is a true fact, Robert. Little boys who tell stories go to hell.
Little girls too, for that matter.’
Robert’s smile grew wider; it became vulpine. ‘Do you want to see me change, Miss Sidley? Do you want a
really good look?’
Miss Sidley felt her back prickle. ‘Go away,’ she said curdy. ‘And bring your mother or your father to school with you tomorrow. We’ll get this business straightened out.’ There. On solid ground again. She waited for his face to crumple, waited for the tears.
Instead, Robert’s smile grew wider – wide enough to show his teeth. ‘It will be just like Show and Tell, won’t it, Miss Sidley? Robert – the other Robert – he liked Show and Tell. He’s still hiding way, way down in my head.’ The smile curled at the corners of his mouth like charring paper.
‘Sometimes he runs around … it itches. He wants me to let him out.
‘Go away,’ Miss Sidley said numbly. The buzzing of the clock seemed very loud.
Robert changed.
His face suddenly ran together like melting wax, the eyes flattening and spreading like knife-struck egg
yolks, nose widening and yawning, mouth disappearing. The head elongated, and the hair was suddenly not
hair but straggling, twitching growths.
Robert began to chuckle.
The slow, cavernous sound came from what had been his nose, but the nose was eating into the lower half of
his face, nostrils meeting and merging into a central blackness like a huge, shouting mouth.
Robert got up, still chuckling, and behind it all she could see the last shattered remains of the other Robert, the real little boy this alien thing had usurped, howling in maniac terror, screeching to be let out.
She ran.
She fled screaming down the corridor, and the few late-leaving pupils turned to look at her with large and
uncomprehending eyes. Mr Hanning jerked open his door and looked out just as she plunged through the
wide glass front doors, a wild, waving scarecrow silhouetted against the bright September sky.
He ran after her, Adam’s apple bobbing. ‘Miss Sidley! Miss Sidley!’
Robert came out of the classroom and watched curiously.
Miss Sidley neither heard nor saw. She clattered down the steps and across the sidewalk and into the street
with her screams trailing behind her. There was a huge, blatting horn and then the bus was looming over her, the bus driver’s face a plaster mask of fear. Air brakes whined and hissed like angry dragons.
Miss Sidley fell, and the huge wheels shuddered to a smoking stop just eight inches from her frail,
brace-armored body. She lay shuddering on the pavement, hearing the crowd gather around her.