slack with fear and hate.
“Hi ho! Well, now Grendel, I must say I am… very… disappointed. It seems to me that we had an agreement. Back when all this started, you swore fealty to me.”
Grendel squinted up at him. The hate was fighting with the fear on his face.
“My will is stronger than yours is, my dear Grendel. Do you know how I know that? Because once you swore to me that you would not do this thing you are doing now. That means your desire is imperfect. Funny things, oaths. Why, do you remember that oath, my dear Grendel? Certainly you do? Of course you do. I see that you do.”
The hate melted away, and the fear grew. Grendel’s lip started trembling. His eyes blinked tears.
Boggin’s voice came smoothly: “We are all one big happy family, committed… may I say devoted?… devoted to the same goal. But from time to time we are tempted, and, yes, I see how one might be tempted, to pursue some private pleasure of our own at the expense of the group. We cannot have that, Grendel, can we? Do you think we can have that?”
Grendel fell to his knees. “Don’t kill me. Don’t kill me. Don’t kill me. I have a mother, she’s got no one but me. Please—oh please—”
I smelled urine on him. He had wet himself.
“Oh dear, now stop all this blubbering. It looks bad in front of the children. I will tell you what. I will let you off with a reminder. At some point during the next week or ten days—and you will not know when it is about to happen—you shall have an accident, Grendel. A bad one. You will chop your foot with a firewood axe, perhaps, or crush all your bones in your hand with a hammer. Or fall off a ladder and break your legs in three places. Or maybe you will slip while pouring the tea, and scald your crotch with a terrible, terrible third-degree burn. Something like that.
“Now, the thing is, Grendel, oh, and you will love this part… if you do something terrible, simply terrible, to yourself first, the accident won’t happen. You see? If you can get up the nerve to poke an eye out with an awl or stick your hand into the blades of a rotary fan, then you will get to pick where the damage will land. I mean, you would rather have your left hand maimed than your right hand, wouldn’t you? You’d rather have an eye splashed with acid than a testicle, I am sure.
“Well, think about your options, Grendel, and think about what you’ve done. We do not need to say anything more about this little incident, do we? You are sorry, very sorry, aren’t you? Yes, I thought you were. Now, run along. I will see to our Miss Windrose.”
Grendel turned, gave me one last sad, hopeless look, and ran away.
Immediately I began making a nasal yelling noise through the gag. My legs were suddenly tense with pain; certain sections of the rope now bit into my flesh uncomfortably; others had grown strangely slack. I started wiggling and wriggling to see if I could get out of them.
Boggin dropped down in front of the cave mouth. He looked down at me with a strange expression.
“Why Miss Windrose, you look quite, ah… fetching… at the moment. But I suppose it cannot be comfortable. I hope you will permit me to unlace you?”
2.
“Fetching” he called it. With my ankles and wrists two inches apart, my back was as arched as it could be. My elbows were pinned behind my back, practically touching. This combined to thrust my breasts out so far, that I finally knew, in that moment, how Vanity must feel at all times.
Maybe he thought the gag cutting into my lips was cute. Men must like it when girls can’t talk back.
I am sure that being mussed, and scared to death, and angry, somehow also added to my sex appeal. My hair had come unbound and loose during my adventures; I assume Mr. Glum did not like me wearing it braided up.
With Mr. Glum absent, I was able to crane my neck partway into the “other” direction, and push the gag with my tongue in that direction until it turned red and got less dense. Once it was an inch or two into four-space, the scarf (or, more specifically, the shadow cast by the scarf) lost the ability to interact with matter, became permeable, passed “through” my head without sensation, and landed with a soft noise on the pine needles beneath my cheek.
Well, I was glad the thing did not fall straight to the center of the Earth, though I was at a loss as to why it didn’t. It was my favorite scarf.
“Thank you, but no thank you, Headmaster,” I said in an irked tone of voice. “I think I can manage better without you!”
I turned my body a little sideways into the “blue” direction, so I was occupying a small 3-D cross-section, and the ropes seemed to turn red and recede from me in all directions. With a shimmer and a jerk I jumped to my feet, as the world flickered dark and then bright again as I passed briefly into and out of hyperspace. The world’s normal colors returned as I tilted back into full cross-section.
The ropes slid “through” my body in a spray of red sparks and landed in a heap on the pine needles.
With a soft thud, my boots and socks and pants and coat and blouse and bra and undies and everything else landed atop them. Suddenly, it felt very cold.
“Oh, you’re right, Miss Windrose,” said Boggin, an unreadable expression on his face, “that
He cleared his throat and ostentatiously turned his back on me. He spoke without turning his head. “While you are getting dressed, please allow me to ask a question or two. I must confess to being mildly surprised at your own lack of surprise. Did someone tell you, Miss Windrose, that I had wings?”
I have to admit that I had been relieved when Boggin, angel-like, splendid and handsome, had swept down from heaven to rescue me from Grendel Glum. Had I not been in the midst of trying to escape from his school, I would have felt more gratitude, I suppose. Boggin did not want me to be carried off and married to a man-sea monster; he did not even want me to be embarrassed.
I was grateful; he was my white knight; my rescuer. Except…
Except the others had all been caught by now. I was the only one left. I was the only one at liberty. If we all got caught, our chance of escape again was nearly zero. If one of us was still at large, able to move freely, learn to use her powers, to get help, to contact our parents in Chaos, then she would be able to sneak back and get the others out. Right?
Even if she didn’t want to. Even if all she wanted to do was be a good sport, admit she had lost this round, and go slinking back to her cold bed in her locked room at night, safe and sound, in the same room she had always slept in as a child. Cold and safe. Safe in Boggin’s keeping.
Because Victor would not want her to be a good sport about it. This was serious. This was not a cricket match. We were Indians and they were Cowboys. We were Jews and they were Nazi prison guards.
Dr. Fell was going to do something horrible to us if we did not get away, like erase our brains. He had already done it to Quentin once.
Even if Amelia’s body was going to stay alive, for all practical purposes, they were going to kill me. Part of me.
I was thinking of Victor. I was thinking of what Victor would have thought, a look of polite disbelief on his face, deepening to a never-to-be-erased disgust, when he asked, “An enemy in time of battle turns his back on you, offering you a perfect target, and you did what, again, exactly? Picked up a rock and then… what? Apologized for running away?”
Duty. Do what you have to do.
Think of Victor. Get angry.
Come to think of it, what business did Boggin have anyway, turning his back on me? It was so very polite, so Victorian, so proper.
So condescending. There are women in the military in Israel. Tough women, who do whatever they have to do to survive. No one turns their backs on them, I bet.
I picked up a heavy rock from the cave, one about the size of a softball, used my little trick to make it heavier instead of lighter, stepped up softly behind him, and brought it swift and hard into the back of his skull.
