Pleasure Reading 4

Part 4

The Bad Death of Eduard Delacroix

When the narrator walked back up the path twenty minutes later, he would go up to the solarium and write about the execution of Eduard Delacroix. So his thoughts, like a river that takes an oxbow turn, finally led back to where they had been when Delacroix had been throwing the colored spool he had - the one Mr. Jingles would fetch - and it bounced out of the cell and into the corridor. That was all it took; Percy saw his chance. Just as Mr. Jingles reached the spool - too intent on it to realize his old enemy was at hand - Percy brought the sole of one hard black workshoe down on him. Delacroix screamed with horror and grief. The next day was the thickest yet, and the last of our strange October heat. Everything went just fine to begin with. Del had spent a quiet day in his cell, sometimes playing with Mr. Jingles but mostly just lying on his bunk and petting him. At eleven-thirty, the narrator approached Delacroix's cell with Brutal and Dean walking slightly behind me. Del was sitting on his bunk, with Mr. Jingles in his lap. Brutal and the narrator reached automatically for Delacroix's elbows as he stepped up onto the platform. Percy stepped grandly around to the front of the electric chair. Taking the sponge from the bucket and putting it in the cap was the next, and it was here that Percy diverged from the routine for the first time: instead of just bending over and fishing the sponge out, he took the steel cap from the back of the chair, and bent over with it in his hands. Instead of bringing the sponge to the cap, in other words - which would have been the natural way to do it - he brought the cap to the sponge. It wasn't the look of poison triumph on Percy Wetmore's face as he stepped away from the capped, clamped, and hooded figure sitting there in Old Sparky; it was what the narrator should have seen and didn't. There was no water running down Del's cheeks from out of the cap. That was when the narrator finally got it. He looked over at Brutal in an agony that made my urinary infection seem like a bumped finger. The sponge is dry! The mask burst into flame on Delacroix's face. The smell of cooking hair and sponge was now joined by the smell of cooking flesh. The narrator wiped at the foam on Delacroix's chest, then had to gag back vomit as a large, hot section of his skin simply slid away from the flesh beneath.