SEVENTEEN

The real end came quietly.

It came in the small, barred room where the voices had muttered and mingled for so long a time—the man’s voice, the woman’s voice, the child’s.

The voices had exploded when triggered into fission, but now, almost miraculously, a fusion took place.

So that there was only one voice. And that was right, because there was only one person in the room. There always had been one person and only one.

She knew it now.

She knew it, and she was glad.

It was so much better to be this way; to be fully and completely aware of one’s self as one really was. To be serenely strong, serenely confident, serenely secure.

She could look back upon the past as though it were all a bad dream, and that’s just what it had been: a bad dream, peopled with illusions.

There had been a bad boy in the bad dream, a bad boy who had killed her lover and tried to poison her. Somewhere in the dream was the strangling and the wheezing and the clawing at the throat and the faces that turned blue. Somewhere in the dream was the graveyard at night and the digging and the panting and the splintering of the coffin lid, and then the moment of discovery, the moment of staring at what lay within. But what lay within wasn’t really dead. Not any more. The bad boy was dead, instead, and that was as it should be.

There had been a bad man in the bad dream, too, and he was also a murderer. He had peeked through the wall and he drank, and he read filthy books and believed in all sorts of crazy nonsense. But worst of all, he was responsible for the deaths of two innocent people—a young girl with beautiful breasts and a man who wore a gray Stetson hat. She knew all about it, of course, and that’s why she could remember the details. Because she had been there at the time, watching. But all she did was watch.

The bad man had really committed the murders and then he tried to blame it on her.

Mother killed them. That’s what he said, but it was a lie.

How could she kill them when she was only watching, when she couldn’t even move because she had to pretend to be a stuffed figure, a harmless stuffed figure that couldn’t hurt or be hurt but merely exists forever?

She knew that nobody would believe the bad man, and he was dead now, too. The bad man and the bad boy were both dead, or else they were just part of the dream. And the dream had gone away for good.

She was the only one left, and she was real.

To be the only one, and to know that you are real—that’s sanity, isn’t it?

But just to be on the safe side, maybe it was best to keep pretending that one was a stuffed figure. Not to move. Never to move. Just to sit here in the tiny room, forever and ever.

If she sat there without moving, they wouldn’t punish her.

If she sat there without moving, they’d know that she was sane, sane, sane.

She sat there for quite a long time, and then a fly came buzzing through the bars.

It lighted on her hand.

If she wanted to, she could reach out and swat the fly.

But she didn’t swat it.

She didn’t swat it, and she hoped they were watching, because that proved what sort of a person she really was.

Why, she wouldn’t even harm a fly. . . .

THE END of a Crest Reprint by

Robert Bloch

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