"I can't help it," Barbara said more slowly and sleepily. "When people start to get too close
to me, it makes me feel-crawly." She paused, considering this fact.
The ache in her body that she had foreseen had set in now. Muscles must be extended and
tried--as a swimmer she had absorbed a lot of coaching-and then they must slack and relax
again. Her muscles could not. She was extended tightly, permanently, and immovably, and
now the muscles protested.
"That's silly." _Barbara drowsed. ''This shouldn't really hurt anyone in condition. But it does-
it hurts · like hell. Anyhow we were really talking about the children and I didn't really like
them, right?"
"Terry ... ?"
''I'm here." Terry turned off the bathroom light
56
and came out to finish undressing. Barbara was relieved that she was still there.
"So?"
"Well, you didn't like them, and you didn't land on them either. You just horsed around, and
you lost respect. They weren't afraid of you." Terry pulled her slip over her head and
dropped it negligently on the chair. "You were just a kind of super playmate, and so you got
pulled down into their games. You're just a Barbie Doll-you walk, you talk, you wet, you say
real words. If they want to tie you up and play monster, why not?'' A certain, ritual modesty
made Terry tum her back when she took off her bra and slipped on her nightgown. Only
then did she pull off her panties and toss them with everything else on the chair. "You're
more naive than they are and a lot less tough. You're just bigger, that's all."
Barbara was silent. Imagination's game, imagination's conversation, required more effort of
mind than she now had left to give.
Terry pulled down the covers and slipped into a largely unmade bed (she had only pulled
the bedspread up over it to hide the disorder on whatever morning it had been before).
"Anyhow you were in charge here last night, and now the kids are. Why?"
"They're a bunch of little animals." Barbara seemed to have to rise from a long way down
to even reply to this. Everything else was ache and oncoming exhaustion.
"You're going to make a lousy teacher."
"Monsters then. Let me alone. I want to sleep.
God, I want to sleep."
Terry said nothing. Released, blurred out somehow, she was silent at last. Barbara
imagined, however, that she was still over there, asleep in her own bed, and the
comforting fantasy made everything better.
"Good night .... "
"Wait a minute. You can't go anywhere looking like that," Barbara's mother said.
She was right.
57
Barbara had been going into town just to get away for a few hours-near/far away, she
could see where she wanted to go-but Mother was right. She was still in her nightgown,
and it was too small. It hurt. She'd have to change into something else as soon as the
car coming down the road had passed. Its headlights were too bright to do it here.
Then Barbara opened her eyes.
Young Bobby Adams, sleepy, sober, subdued looking, was standing beside the bed in
the light of the night lamp he had just turned on. He inspected her bonds carefully,
hand and foot, and then thoughtfully pulled the sheet up over her. Afterward he went
out to the kitchen. She could hear him rummaging around for a snack.
Oh, god, at least turn the light back off, she said.
58
3
The kids arrived earlier the next morning. Awake and squirming for hours, Barbara heard
them yelling their way through the woods, heard the morning's exchange of news on the
back steps and heard them come clumping into the kitchen. Anxiously, she watched them
fan into her room. She was frantic to be allowed some movement, and it was at the top of
her mind that she would not be allowed so much as a twitch if she frightened them. She lay
very still and very docile.
At once it was apparent that whatever else had happened in the twenty-four hours or so
that she had been captive, her jailers at least had lost their nervousness. To the extent that
this downgraded her in relation to the children, it was discouraging. To the extent that it
speeded things up, it was a godsend.
"Shall we do it the way we did yesterday?" John said.
"Yeah." Bobby was a little sleepy and out of tune, but he remained conscientious. "Only this
time, I'm going to put two turns of rope around her neck when she walks.',
"Why?"
"Oh,'-there was no malice in his tone-"it'd hurt more."
(Barbara agreed.)
"Let me pull her today." Paul's eyes darted with morning energy from Bobby to John.
59
"You don't pull. You just walk in front of her," Dianne said. "You only pull if she doesn't
follow."
"He wants to choke her." Cindy gave, for her, a
very sly and knowing smile.
"I do not!" "Do so."
"It's OK." Though he spoke to the bickerers, John turned his eyes squarely to the girl on
the bed. "Let him lead. He can. Bobby can follow; I don't care. Get the rope."
Far more quickly than yesterday, they had Barbara on her feet, elbows tied to her sides,
one hand tied up behind and almost between her shoulder blades, her ankles hobbled.
They were rougher, quicker, surer- they seemed to have no further fear that she might
somehow escape or overpower them-and Barbara made no resistance except that
when she finally sat up and before she stood up, she bent forward and eased her
hurting back a moment. This, they allowed her, and like any prisoner, she supposed,
she did not prolong her pleasure. She stood up stiffly; she moved as they wished; and
she cooperated fully. What had been humiliating and infuriating yesterday was simply
more expedient, less painful today. Moreover it avoided the futile defeat a one-handed
struggle would bring against
five determined youngsters.
·
Barbara began to realize how people could be broken. It would be just the way you read
about it in books. Everything would be brought down to the tiniest little pleasures
measured out by the cc. from the tiniest little eyedropper. Drop, pleasure; no drop,
misery. Someone else's hand would be on the little bulb, and you'd do anything to
please them. Even as the recognition occurred to her, moreover, she was padding out
of the room behind her captors.
They shuffled her to the bathroom where Dianne once more stood guard. Then they put
her in her chair with yards of cordage around her, and gave her the same breakfast of
cereal and juice except that they let her feed herself. Awkwardly. One hand was free
from 60
the elbow down, and she was gagged, of course. She had to bend and strain and more or
less slurp. Quite naturally she dribbled, and Dianne was there to wipe her gown as you
might wipe a baby's. She slid her hand inside the shortie top and held the cloth away so
that she could dab it with a dampened napkin. Barbara would have given up, bent over,
and wept for her own helplessness in all of this had it not been that she was now terribly
hungry and that this little meal was one of the pleasures she had been thinking about.
Afterward-and she pleaded for this-the children even allowed her to remain ungagged,
though her free hand was once again bound up with the other behind her back and the rag
and chloroform were left in plain sight to remind her of the children's power. It was another
little pleasure. Speech.
"Why are you doing it, Dianne?"
"Hrnnn?" Dianne' had finished her share of the morning's chores and settled down on
Barbara's bed (which she had neatly made) with her rather lewd book on ancient