She got up and switched on another light.
Later, just before she dropped off to sleep, Robert's face floated in front of her, smiling unpleasantly in the darkness behind her lids. The face began to change.
But before she saw exactly what it was changing into, darkness overtook her.
Miss Sidley spent an unrestful night and consequently the next day her temper was short. She waited, almost hoping for a whisperer, a giggler, perhaps a note-passer. But the class was quiet – very quiet. They all stared at her unresponsively, and it seemed that she could feel the weight of their eyes on her like blind, crawling ants.
Stop that! she told herself sternly. You're acting like a skittish girl just out of teachers' college!
Again the day seemed to drag, and she believed she was more relieved than the children when the last bell rang. The children lined up in orderly rows at the door, boys and girls by height, hands dutifully linked.
“Dismissed,” she said, and listened sourly as they shrieked their way down the hall and into the bright sunlight.
What was it I saw when he changed? Something bulbous. Something that shimmered. Something that stared at me, yes, stared and grinned and wasn't a child at all. It was old and it was evil and…
“Miss Sidley?”
Her head jerked up and a little Oh! hiccupped involuntarily from her throat.
It was Mr Hanning. He smiled apologetically. “Didn't mean to disturb you.”
“Quite all right,” she said, more curtly than she had intended. What had she been thinking? What was wrong with her?
“Would you mind checking the paper towels in the girls' lav?”
“Surely.” She got up, placing her hands against the small of her back. Mr Hanning looked at her sympathetically. Save it, she thought. The old maid is not amused. Or even interested.
She brushed by Mr Hanning and started down the hall to the girls' lavatory. A snigger of boys carrying scratched and pitted baseball equipment grew silent at the sight of her and leaked guiltily out the door, where their cries began again.
Miss Sidley frowned after them, reflecting that children had been different in her day. Not more polite – children have never had time for that – and not exactly more respectful of their elders; it was a kind of hypocrisy that had never been there before. A smiling quietness around adults that had never been there before. A kind of quiet contempt that was upsetting and unnerving. As if they were…
Hiding behind masks? Is that it?
She pushed the thought away and went into the lavatory. It was a small, L-shaped room. The toilets were ranged along one side of the longer bar, the sinks along both sides of the shorter one.
As she checked the paper-towel containers, she caught a glimpse of her face in one of the mirrors and was startled into looking at it closely. She didn't care for what she saw – not a bit. There was a look that hadn't been there two days before, a frightened, watching look. With sudden shock she realized that the blurred reflection in her glasses of Robert's pale, respectful face had gotten inside her and was festering.
The door opened and she heard two girls come in, giggling secretly about something. She was about to turn the comer and walk out past them when she heard her own name. She turned back to the washbowls and began checking the towel holders again.
“And then he…”
Soft giggles.
“She knows, but…”
More giggles, soft and sticky as melting soap.
“Miss Sidley is…”
Stop it! Stop that noise!
By moving slightly she could see their shadows, made fuzzy and W-defined by the diffuse light filtering through the frosted windows, holding onto each other with girlish glee.
Another thought crawled up out of her mind.
They knew she was there.
Yes. Yes they did. The little bitches knew.
She would shake them. Shake them until their teeth rattled and their giggles turned to wails, she would thump their heads against the tile walls and she would make them admit that they knew.
That was when the shadows changed. They seemed to elongate, to flow like dripping tallow, taking on strange hunched shapes that made Miss Sidley cringe back against the porcelain washstands, her heart swelling in her chest.
But they went on giggling.
The voices changed, no longer girlish, now sexless and soulless, and quite, quite evil. A slow, turgid sound of mindless humor that flowed around the corner to her like sewage.
She stared at the hunched shadows and suddenly screamed at them. The scream went on and on, swelling in her head until it attained a pitch of lunacy. And then she fainted. The giggling, like the laughter of demons, followed her down into darkness.
She could not, of course, tell them the truth.
Miss Sidley knew this even as she opened her eyes and looked up at the anxious faces of Mr Hanning and Mrs Crossen. Mrs Crossen was holding the bottle of smelling salts from the gymnasium first-aid kit under her nose. Mr Hanning turned around and told the two little girls who were looking curiously at Miss Sidley to go home now, please.
They both smiled at her – slow, we-have-a-secret smiles – and went out.
Very well, she would keep their secret. For awhile. She would not have people thinking her insane, or that the first feelers of senility had touched her early. She would play their game. Until she could expose their nastiness and rip it out by the roots.
“I'm afraid I slipped,” she said calmly, sitting up and ignoring the excruciating pain in her back. “A patch of wetness.”
“This is awful,” Mr Hanning said. “Terrible. Are you…”
“Did the fall hurt your back, Emily?” Mrs Crossen interrupted. Mr Hanning looked at her gratefully.
Miss Sidley got up, her spine screaming in her body.
“No,” she said. “In fact, the fall seems to have worked some minor chiropractic miracle. My back hasn't felt this well in years.”
“We can send for a doctor…” Mr Hanning began.
“Not necessary.” Miss Sidley smiled at him coolly.
“I'll call you a taxi from the office.”