next. He had to do what he was doing.
Barbara, too, was thinking. Paul was glad he didn't know what. She still didn't seem very
much afraid-though she understood it well enough when he hurt her-and she was still
angry. But there was something else. She kept looking at him as if she just couldn't
understand any of this, as if she were trying to look inside of him and figure it all out. He
bore this
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uncomfortably while he regained his normal breathing: she was spoiling things. Then he
had an inspiration.
Going to the chest, he opened the drawers one after another until he found the one with
her own things in it. As he had hoped, there were several summer scarves neatly folded
and stacked to the side. Taking one and laying it on the bed, he refolded it from corner to
comer and then again and again until it was no wider than a belt. He had a blindfold.
Barbara saw him coming and would have no part of it. She shook her head no-no and
twisted away from him violently. Nonetheless, by putting the blindfold under her chin and
trapping the back of her head against his skinny chest, he was able to work the cloth up
over her eyes and tie it in place. It took several tries and some struggle, and when be had
finished, they were both breathing bard again. The change in things, however, was
remarkable.
Instead of Barbara's put-down looks, there was nothing. It was as if she bad left the room.
The prisoner was anonymous-like the ones they used to do things to down in the woods:
nonexistent-and the taboo over her was gone.
Taking his knife again, Paul McVeigh reopened his game, this time pressing in here and
there as if daring himself to break the skin and draw blood. Now. That ought to hurt for a
change. He even touched her breast. When lightning did not strike him dead-like John, he
rather saw lightning as the all-avenging blast that evened justice out-he put the point of his
knife on her breast and ran it luxuriously down to the nipple. Hers were bigger than his,
bigger even than Dianne's, and they had little bumps in the pink part and he bad a long
time to go yet, and so he toyed with his knife point.
/
John, too, was half-afraid when it came his turn to guard Barbara. Though be felt himself to
be the leader in most things, be was all the more shy about saying what he wanted done
with her. It would be like a pane of glass-everyone would know then-and he almost
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let the whole thing pass. Then he called himself coward, and faced the whole matter down.
"I want her back in bed. Like she always is." "OK," Paul twitched. He had just joined them
on the kitchen steps. He seemed pale and a little breathless.
"It's too early," Dianne said logically. "We'd only have to go to the trouble of getting her up
again to eat. And then put her down again."
"Yeah. Anyhow, that's no fun," Bobby said. "It's my turn to say."
"OK. All right," Dianne sighed and got up. The rest of them followed her.
This time Barbara resisted. When they released her from the chair and got her to her feet,
she refused to move, and when they pushed her, she knelt down on her knees and doubled
up and let them choke her with their halter. When they grabbed her upper arms and tried
to lift her, she squirmed free, rolled over and shot out her hobbled ankles, hitting John and
nearly knocking him down. Blindfolded, she continued to kick out in all directions until they
finally caught her bare legs and pinned her down. In the end, it took all five of them to drag
her up onto the bed and tie her wrists and ankles to its four corners again. Bobby and Paul
got knocked back several times; Dianne got scratched; and John nearly lost his hold on her
once or twice. When it was over and the other kids had left, he sat down to catch his
breath and think a moment. The fact was that he was still afraid of what he had dared
himself to do.
There were so many Barbaras in his mind. The first one, the one he had met when she first
came to sit for the Adams kids, was busy, athletic, and bright. She ticked him off the way
she whipped the Adams kids around in the station wagon as if she owned it. She wasn't
anywhere near a grown-up, and yet she acted more like a mother than Mrs. Adams did. She
ticked him off the way she let the old ladies at the church make over her and take her in.
Barbara could swim better, run as fast, manage twice as well, talk better she knew
everything-and all the time that she was
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being so smart-ass and bossy, she knew that she was pretty and that all the guys were
watching her out of the corner of their eyes. Even the old men. She had that look-and-eat-
your-heart-out manner. It made it easy to want to take her down a couple of notches-as,
indeed, they had-but remembering that girl did not make it any more easy to approach her.
Then there was Barbara the first day after they captured her, not stuck-up and busy
anymore, but finally silent, gagged, helpless, and bewildered. She was still recognizable,
but it was an improvement.
Yesterday there had been a friendlier Barbara. He now realized that she had been putting
him on with all that talk about his school and his girl and all-what did she care anyway?
That was all kid stuff to herbut, in fact, he had enjoyed it. He wished now that he had
kissed her when she gave up: he wished now that he dared ungag her and talk to her some
more, but her kicking around said enough for her mood.
So that he got down to Barbara today, naked for him to do anything with that he wished,
and he was still scared, actually scared. John Randall was also disgusted with himself.
When Dianne had cut off Barbara's nightgown this morning-I ohn, of course, consenting-he
had thought he would go blind. She was so pretty. A kind of blankness came over his mind;
he hardly seemed able to look. His legs were all sort of weak on the insides: he thought he
was going to do it again, right then and there. Did just looking at a girl do that to you?
Nobody had ever told him about that before, and he felt a little betrayed. It was unfair that
women had that advantage over you. It had dismanned him the rest of the day, right up
until now.
Now.
He swallowed with some noise.
Just now, as a matter of fact, he would have liked to get up and go out of the room, but he
couldn't. He was trapped. On the one hand were the rest of the kids who would laugh at
him: on the other there was the reason for it all-Barbara. OK, he managed to look at her
long and steadily from where he sat, and while he
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still felt a little bit of that heady, half-blindedness, he found that he had some self-control.
He even found, at length, that he could stand-a better view-and that he could walk as if in
a dream, half stuck to the floor, half gliding. He found that he was able to move to the side
of the bed and sit down on it beside her and endure that, too.
At such close range, he felt he was in the path of some kind of death ray. Something was
happening inside him. He was irresolute: it was difficult to breathe. Very hesitatingly, he
touched the inside of her calf and moved his fingers up her leg-John Randall enormously