In most conditions, a girl probably would shy away from killing her best friend. But, given the chance as she was, Emily’s choices were clear, though mentally wracking.
“Do you know why you’re here?” The tall ragged man with a revolver asked them in his filthy hovel. The two were unbounded, ungagged, wholly free to engage in aught. The question that descends into one’s mind is most likely why they didn’t attempt to overpower or escape from their captor. The answer, one would find, was in the man’s delirious faces. Each spontaneous spasm of his visage was a grotesque mask of mental turmoil, not only for him, but also for his prisoners. Both escape and yelling the two girls were physically able to perform, but those vague and bleared features of that man had such a grip on their minds as to render them still and quiet.
“You’re here to try and bring me back to the hospital, but what you weren’t counting on was this,” he babbled to the two shivering girls as he brandished his revolver.
The real reason they were in the backroom of the lunatic’s sheet-metal cabin was that they strayed too near to the edge of the woods on their way home. Claudia wanted to go their secret way after school was over so she could have a cigarette without being seen by the school authorities. The great misfortune was that the woods lay near there, the black woods that they were drug into after a blow to the respective head.
The paranoiac continued his fractured dissertation. “You think you can drag me back to the hospital? I’m not a fool, I know who you are! Can’t you hear me? Doctor Pfizer sent you, didn’t he? He’s a clever one, but these are my woods, and I know what goes on in it all!” He nearly yelled. “I don’t want to hurt you two girls,” he said unconvincingly. “But I can’t let you leave if you know where I hide. I can’t do that; I’m a man of action! Don’t either of you try to scream, or run, because I know these woods more than you ever can hope to!” His ramblings, simultaneously terrifying and boring, made little impact on the already frightened girls.
During a pause, while he tried to collect his smashed and amorphous thoughts, Claudia asked, meekly, “What do you want?”
“Shut up!” He howled. “I want quiet from you two! I’ll let you go if you cooperate with me!” He gave no clue as to when he would end his detention, or what his plan for his inmates included besides a worthless string of suspicious anger.