OCR Text |
Show 15 She left his crayons, a tattered coloring book, and his soldiers, and sewed the eyes back onto the bears. "I don't want you to touch them again," she told him. It was a week and a half before he escaped, and he went straight to the basement. But the old man was not there; the boy could feel the absence. The mattress was folded up against the wall, and there were no new objects in his corner. He tried to sit, just as he had done at first, doing nothing, but he could not, and he found that without the old man's presence he was somehow afraid of the basement, with its looming furnace, its sweating waterpipes, the frequent eerie flushing of the plumbing. He goes back upstairs. "I want," he says in perfectly ordered syllables, "to take the cat for a walk." His mother nearly drops the plate she is drying, and calls his father. "He said something!" she shrieks. "He can talk after all!" "I want to take the cat for a walk," the boy repeats, perfectly calmly. Trembling, the mother snatches the leash, whistles for the cat. "I'll go with you, darling," she cries. "Alone," says the boy. The mother hesitates, looks to the father. "He must be getting better," says the father, "let him." The boy hooks the leash to the cat's collar, and walks it down the hall to the elevator. But he does not stop at the ground floor; he rides the elevator |