Six speech balloons
“Take your coat off,” Jack snapped. “Get out to the back and finish that job, or you get nothing to eat.”
Willy gaped at him—he had forgotten the whitewashing. “Ah … I’m not hungry. I don’t want nothin’ to eat.”
“That’s your business. But you’re going to paint the yard anyway.”
“But I’ve got to …”
“To what?”
“Nothin’,” Willy said sullenly.
Frames 64 to 81
He turned and hurried through the house, taking his coat off as he went. Outside in the yard he attacked the whitewashing with a ferocity that surprised his family, splashing the liquid on to the uneven bricks in long curving strokes, heedless of his clothes. Two hours later the job was done and Willy, aching and blistered, seized his coat. As he was going out through the kitchen Jack tried to make him sit down and eat, but Willy—his round face shiny with sweat—brushed on past him.
Outside in Ridgeway Street he stopped with a jerk. It was dark!
It was dark, the street was empty, and—down towards the river—the blackness seemed to be alive and crawling with menace.
Willy considered going back into the security of the house. But then the letter would not be posted till the next day, and the police would not receive it until the day after that—which might be too late. Taking a deep shuddering breath, Willy ran up the hill away from the river and turned right on to the main road, where he sped along trying to remember the whereabouts of the nearest post office.
Suddenly he saw a pillar box in the darkness of the first street on his right, the one which ran parallel to Ridgeway. With a grateful whimper he pulled the crumpled letter from his pocket, loped up to the pillar box and pushed it in.
Too late he remembered that he had never seen a pillar box there before.
Too late it occurred to him that a really fearsome comic book monster might be able to change its shape, to make itself look like anything it wanted.
And, much too late, he felt the hot breath issuing from the oblong mouth, as it closed greedily on his wrist.