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"There you are, Jim," said a voice.
And he was climbing, climbing, eyes closed, climbing metal-ringing ladder rungs, screaming, wailing, his throat raw.
Mr. Underhill opened his eyes.
He was on top of the slide. The gigantic, blue metal slide which seemed ten thousand feet high. Children crushed at his back, children beat him to go on, slide! slide!
And he looked, and there, going off across the field, was a man in a black overcoat. And there, at the gate, was a woman waving and the man standing there with the woman, both of them looking in at him, waving, and their voices calling, "Have a good time! Have a good time, Jim!"
He screamed. He looked at his hands, in a panic of realization. The small hands, the thin hands. He looked at the earth far below. He felt his nose bleeding and there was the Marshall boy next to him. "Hi!" cried the other, and bashed him in the mouth. "Only twelve years here!" cried the other in the uproar.
Twelve years! thought Mr. Underhill, trapped. And time is different to children. A year is like ten years. No, not twelve years of childhood ahead of him, but a century, a century of this.
"Slide!"
Behind him the stink of Musterole, Vick’s Vaporub, peanuts, chewed hot tar, spearmint gum and blue fountain-pen ink, the smell of kite-twine and glycerin soap, a pumpkin smell of Hallowe’en and a papier-mâché fragrance of skull masks, and the smell of dry scabs, as he was pinched, pummeled, shoved. Fists rose and fell, he saw the fox faces and beyond, at the fence, the man and woman standing there, waving. He shrieked, he covered his face, he felt himself pushed, bleeding, to the rim of nothingness. Headfirst, he careened down the slide, screeching, with ten thousand monsters behind. One thought jumped through his mind a moment before he hit bottom in a nauseous mound of claws.
This is hell, he thought, this is hell!
And no one in the hot, milling heap contradicted him.
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