It had been soundproofed two years ago; the big machine was very old and very noisy.
Miss Sidley closed the door behind them and locked it.
‘No one can hear you,’ she said calmly. She took the gun from her bag. ‘You or this.’
Robert smiled innocently. ‘There are lots of us, though. Lots more than here.’ He put one small scrubbed
hand on the paper-tray of the mimeograph machine. ‘Would you like to see me change again?’
Before she could speak, Robert’s face began to shimmer into the grotesqueness beneath and Miss Sidley shot
him. Once. In the head. He fell back against the paper-lined shelves and slid down to the floor, a little dead boy with a round black hole above his right eye.
He looked very pathetic.
Miss Sidley stood over him, panting. Her cheeks were pale.
The huddled figure didn’t move.
It was human.
It was Robert.
No!
It was all in your mind, Emily. All in your mind.
No! No, no, no!
She went back up to the room and began to lead them down, one by one. She killed twelve of them and
would have killed them all if Mrs Crossen hadn’t comedown for a package of composition paper.
Mrs Crossen’s eyes got very big; one hand crept up and clutched her mouth. She began to scream and she was
still screaming when Miss Sidley reached her and put a hand on her shoulder. ‘It had to be done, Margaret,’
she told the screaming Mrs Crossen. ‘It’s terrible, but it had to. They are all monsters.’
Mrs Crossen stared at the gaily-clothed little bodies scattered around the mimeograph and continued to
scream. The little girl whose hand Miss Sidley was holding began to cry steadily and
monotonously: ‘Waahhh … waahhhh … waahhhh.’
‘Change,’ Miss Sidley said. ‘Change for Mrs Crossen. Show her it had to be done.’
The girl continued to weep uncomprehendingly.
‘Damn you, change!’ Miss Sidley screamed. ‘Dirty bitch, dirty crawling, filthy unnatural bitch! Change! God damn you, change!’ She raised the gun. The little girl cringed, and then Mrs Crossen was on her like a cat, and Miss Sidley’s back gave way.
No trial.
The papers screamed for one, bereaved parents Swore hysterical oaths against Miss Sidley, and the city sat
back on its haunches in numb shock, but in the end, cooler heads prevailed and there was no trial. The State Legislature called for more stringent teacher exams, Summer Street School closed for a week of mourning,
and Miss Sidley went quietly to juniper Hill in Augusta. She was put in deep analysis, given the most modem
drugs, introduced into daily work-therapy sessions. A year later, under strictly controlled conditions, Miss Sidley was put in an experimental encounter-therapy situation.
Buddy Jenkins was his name, psychiatry was his game.
He sat behind a one-way glass with a clipboard, looking into a room which had been outfitted as a nursery.
On the far wall, the cow was jumping over the moon and the mouse ran up the clock. Miss Sidley sat in her
wheelchair with a story book, surrounded by a group of trusting, drooling, smiling, cataclysmically retarded children. They smiled at her and drooled and touched her with small wet fingers while attendants at the next window watched for the first sign of an aggressive move.
For a time Buddy thought she responded well. She read aloud, stroked a girl’s head, consoled a small boy
when he fell over a toy block. Then she seemed to see something which disturbed her; a frown creased her
brow and she looked away from the children.
‘Take me away, please,’ Miss Sidley said, softly and tonelessly, to no one in particular.
And so they took her away. Buddy Jenkins watched the children watch her go, their eyes wide and empty,
but somehow deep. One smiled, and another put his fingers in his mouth slyly. Two little girls clutched each other and giggled.
That night Miss Sidley cut her throat with a bit of broken mirror-glass, and after that Buddy Jenkins began to watch the children more and more. In the end, he was hardly able to take his eyes off them.