Then Mr Hanning broke their tight noose, shooed them away, and Miss Sidley began to sob weakly.
She didn’t go back to her third grade for a month. She told Mr Hanning calmly that she had not been feeling herself, and Mr Hanning suggested that she see a reputable doctor and discuss the matter with him. Miss Sidley agreed that this was the only sensible and rational course. She also said that if the school board wished for her resignation she would tender it immediately, although doing so would hurt her very much. Mr Hanning, looking uncomfortable, said he doubted if that would be necessary. The upshot was that Miss Sidley came back in late October, once again ready to play the game and now knowing how to play it.
For the first week she let things go on as ever. It seemed the whole class now regarded her with hostile, shielded eyes. Robert smiled distantly at her from his front-row seat, and she did not have the courage to take him to task.
Once, while she was on playground duty, Robert walked over to her, holding a dodgem. ball, smiling. ‘There’s so many of us now you wouldn’t believe it,’ he said. ‘And neither would anyone else.’ He stunned her by dropping a wink of infinite slyness. ‘If you, you know, tried to tell em.’
A girt on the swings looked across the playground into Miss Sidley’s eyes and laughed at her.
Miss Sidley smiled serenely down at Robert. ‘Why, Robert, whatever do you mean?’
But Robert only continued smiling as he went back to his game.
Miss Sidley brought the gun to school in her handbag. It had been her brother’s. He had taken it from a dead German shortly after the Battle of the Bulge. Jim had been gone ten years now. She hadn’t opened the box that held the gun in at least five, but when she did it was still there, gleaming dully. The clips of ammunition were still there, too, and she loaded the gun carefully, just as Jim had shown her.
She smiled pleasantly at her class; at Robert in particular. Robert smiled back and she could see the murky alienness swimming just below his skin, muddy, full of filth.
She had no idea what was now living inside Robert’s skin, and she didn’t care; she only hoped that the real little boy was entirely gone by now. She did not wish to be a murderess. She decided the real Robert must have died or gone insane, living inside the dirty, crawling thing that had chuckled at her in the classroom and sent her screaming into the street. So even if he was still alive, putting him out of his misery would be a mercy.
‘Today we’re going to have a Test,’ Miss Sidley said.
The class did not groan or shift apprehensively; they merely looked at her. She could feel their eyes, like weights. Heavy, smothering.
‘It’s a very special Test. I will call you down to the mimeograph room one by one and give it to you. Then you may have a candy and go home for the day. Won’t that be nice?’
They smiled empty smiles and said nothing.
‘Robert, will you come first?’
Robert got up, smiling his little smile. He wrinkled his nose quite openly at her. ‘Yes, Miss Sidley.’
Miss Sidley took her bag and they went down the empty, echoing corridor together, past the sleepy drone of classes reciting behind closed doors. The mimeograph room was at the far end of the hall, past the lavatories. 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.