Horribly ugly they seemed to Mary Anne. They were no larger than the white ivory pawns on the chessboard in her father's library but they did not resemble pawns in the least. They were wrinkled and old-looking and the cheapest doll she had would have cried with shame to be dressed as they were.
She could have made out of an old handkerchief a better dress, with more tucks and seams to it—and no Jack-in-the-Box could have popped up to shiver and sway with such toothless, evil-eyed malice.
A child can escape from a monster of the toymaker's craft simply by drawing a line between the real and the imaginary. But Mary Anne could not escape from the little men facing her. There was no line to be drawn and she knew it.
The little men were alive, and they were staring at her now as she had never been stared at before. As if she were a stick of wood about to be thrown into a blazing fire which had been kindled for Melvin as well.
Totally bald they were, with skins so shriveled that their small, slitted eyes were buried in a maze of wrinkles. Most pitiful of all was the fact that their skins were mottled brown and green—colors so enchanting when associated with budding leaves or the russet-and-gold splendors of an autumn landscape.
The little men were alive and they were warning her to be quiet. Just to make sure that she would not move or attempt to scream again they spoke to her again inside her head.
"We're going to use the beam on you too. But you won't be hurt if you don't try to wake up your father."
She could hardly keep from screaming when she saw what they were doing to her brother. The tallest of the three—they were not all of the same height—was turning Melvin slowly about in a blaze of light.
He was the thinnest of the three too—so thin and tall that she automatically found herself thinking of him as Tall-Thin. The light came from a tiny glowing tube which Tall-Thin was clasping in hands as small and brightly shining as the penpoints in her school stationery set.
She knew by the way she felt that Melvin wanted to scream too—to scream and struggle and fight back. But he couldn't even move his head and shoulders. He was all stiffened up and he turned as she'd seen him do in dreams when they'd been quarreling and she had wanted to punish him for making faces at her—to punish him by skipping away across the room and laughing because he couldn't follow her.