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Show 42 I had been beating rats with the rest of them, but when I looked at the savage, feverish faces of even the smallest children, and the sticky, foul-smelling slime on the riverbank, my stomach turned sick. A sour, choking vomit rose in my throat. Gast noticed my wretchedness and shrugged, looking away and stroking his lip as though he had no part in the butchery. In a way that was true, because he hadn't touched a rat since the first one. When Gunther and the twins piled rats' bodies in a mound and set fire to it, and the other children began to dance around the stinking flames singing and shaking their sticks, I crept away from the murder and crossed the bridge to get out of Hamelin. Although I spent several hours in a farmer's field beyond the city walls, curled up beneath the branches of a sweet-blossomed cherry tree, I could still hear the faint shrieks of rampaging children which went on and on. My clothes reeked from the sickening smell of slaughter, and I began to cry. Even though Gast had thought up the plan that made the children turn so wild and cruel, I'd been a part of it too. My mind filled with the faces of the nuns at St. Gervase. What would they have thought of me? |