"That's right!" Dianne's voice sounded both surprised and pleased, that of a teacher with a
slow pupil who has managed to grasp something at last. "That's what I've been telling you.
That's the way it is."
Somehow in the end-or very nearly in the end Barbara bad made the girl happy.
It was later than noon. Because of the washed air and quiet breeze, it was a blinding, blue-
white afternoon and strangely cool, and now it was time for the children to come and get
her, and they came up the stairs and got ready. They had already regagged her,
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.
but in a different way. They had wrapped rope around and around her mouth until the
pressure of it forced her lips and teeth apart, and the rope slid into her mouth and held her
tongue down tightly.
"It's going to hurt," Dianne had said, "and you're going to cry a lot. You have to be able to
breathe through your mouth. I’m sorry."
Then, they had picked her up to go, and they had learned even since yesterday. Bobby had
invented the means and instructed them. They simply picked up the sleeping bag on which
she was lying-five pairs of hands-and she left the room of the tenant house as if on a litter.
When there was still even a little time left-she didn't know bow much, one hour, two--
Barbara desperately hoped. Her thoughts centered on the last three possibilities. The first
was that the prowler, the man she had never seen, was still around and would somehow
interrupt.
This was destroyed when she heard him. Below, outside, the children came chatting down
the path to the house and she heard the man's deep voice.
"Here?" He sounded odd. The re sound seemed to trail out to some length. There had been
a metal clanking sound.
"Yeah, that's OK." "Thanks."
"And come back tomorrow morning and help us clean up," this had been Dianne. "There'll
probably be a few more things to do."
"S!, I will." The ll was again a drawn-out, soft sound, and, then-how could Barbara know?-he
was gone. The children had him in tow as completely as they had her.
The second possibility, the one that had always been there and always been disappointed,
was the chance of outside visitors. She had listened for a car. Never in her life had she ever
so much wanted to hear the sound of a car, the sound of a horn, but none
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came. There were only the sounds of the country nearly asleep on a Saturday afternoon.
Then, with revulsion, she had heard brief flames and had smelled smoke, and this had
crossed out the last chance. There would be no last-second change of plans by Freedom
Five, not even any quick thing like
. shooting her. It too had all been thought out: it was
going to be like they always played. .
The children had done well not to feed Barbara.
Her bowels heaved but were empty. She retched interior, but it was only a dry convulsion.
Then they came and got her.
Freedom Five took Barbara down the stairs somewhat twisted around on the sleeping bag.
It bumped; she bumped; but they finally got her down into the space beside the tenant
house and got her to the big field gate that had blown down during the night. They bound
her to it, all four limbs spread-it took a while and a fight-and bound her to it tightly.
There was a surburban-pressed and painted metal type of barbeque grill set beside the
gate, and it was smoking, and on top of the coals was the living room poker from the
Adams house. Everything had the Picker's fingerprints on it, because he had been paid five
dollars from Barbara's meager change purse to clean the inside of the house (leave
fingerprints there) and bring the grill down. To preserve all this, Freedom Five had several
pairs of gardening and work gloves there.
The lazy white smoke rose and dissipated for a time, and they looked down into the grill.
Finally they were ready.
They squatted; they hunkered. They looked at Barbara and at her unmarked skin like
students on a field trip. Innocent curiosity. Something new. And then Paul picked up the
poker and found it nearly red-hot.
Cindy, in her ten-year-old judgment had been quite correct. Paul had a fetish: he lived
convinced that a woman's psyche was to be found in the bottoms of her bare feet. This
being the case and Paul having the 270
first "touch"-unanimously Freedom Five had granted it to the weakest-he put the poker
to the pale sole of the girl they had known as Barbara. The result was startling, even to
them.
The heated metal went in and in. It might have no end to its course. It went through the
skin, through the subcutaneous layer, through the nerve endings and blood vessels to
the swimmer's tendons and nearly into them. And when it came away, it came pulling
black flesh. Afterward the wound bled, but not as much as Freedom Five had expected.
It was nearly cauterized, and most of the blood came slowly and thickly.
Paul was rewarded in all of this.
The victim, whoever she was, spasmed in an unimaginable way and made a sound
utterly wonderful to him. He had never heard it before and would probably never hear it
again, but it was gratifying and altogether satisfying. He would have done it again, but
he had to pass the "touch'' to John, who returned the iron to the fire for a minute or two.
The other kids, excited faces alight with learning, squatted and leaned closer. Then
finally John was ready. He swallowed.
0 day, 0 day, Barbara said. When she had finished fighting, and the children had her
fast to the gate, she said, 0 day, 0 day. It's not only the last one, but it's the last minute
of the last and only one.
Oh, she said. I want to fall up off the earth into the sky and just disappear. It might hurt,
but then it would all be over, and I wouldn't have to be human anymore. No one can
bear to know humans and bear being human.
But it won't happen. It never happens when you need it.
So it began.
Barbara raised her head and saw most of what was going to occur.
Paul took the metal from the fire and looked at her with the clearest, the most curious
and terrifying eyes she had ever seen. Innocence is the most frightening sight of all
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He quite truly seemed to want to know what he didn't know, and he truly felt unsure
about the result. He turned and bent, and the iron disappeared behind her own foot,
which she moved-it could move a frantic inch or two-as best she could. If he did that,
then he and the others would do what she could not even imagine. And behind Paul all
the rest of them stood invisibly: the parking-lot sniggerers, Terry, Ted, the rest -the
practical ones-not as torturers but as notaries. However they might later hear of it-
really--she saw them impassively gather to certify what happened to people like her.
End, she thought. End, end, end.
But nobody ever comes to the real end, do they?
We talk about it, but it never really happens to really us, does it?
Then it all went swiftly.
She felt the poker touching, going through her, into her and then back out again, and