"Now I'm feeling persecuted," said McClean. "Let's get out of here. I never have cared for these damned rooms. Make me nervous."
"The lions look real, don't they?" said George Hadley. I don't suppose there's any way—"
"What?"
"—that they could become real?"
"Not that I know."
"Some flaw in the machinery, a tampering or something?"
"No."
They went to the door.
"I don't imagine the room will like being turned off," said the father.
"Nothing ever likes to die—even a room."
"I wonder if it hates me for wanting to switch it off?"
"Paranoia is thick around here today," said David McClean. "You can follow it like a spoor. Hello." He bent and picked up a bloody scarf. "This yours?"
"No." George Hadley's face was rigid. "It belongs to Lydia."
They went to the fuse box together and threw the switch that killed the nursery.
The two children were in hysterics. They screamed and pranced and threw things. They yelled and sobbed and swore and jumped at the furniture.
"You can't do that to the nursery, you can't!"
"Now, children."
The children flung themselves onto a couch, weeping.
"George," said Lydia Hadley, "turn on the nursery, just for a few moments. You can't be so abrupt."
"No."
"You can't be so cruel … "
"Lydia, it's off, and it stays off. And the whole damn house dies as of here and now. The more I see of the mess we've put ourselves in, the more it sickens me. We've been contemplating our mechanical, electronic navels for too long. My God, how we need a breath of honest air!"
And he marched about the house turning off the voice clocks, the stoves, the heaters, the shoe shiners, the shoe lacers, the body scrubbers and swabbers and massagers, and every other machine he could put his hand to.
The house was full of dead bodies, it seemed. It felt like a mechanical cemetery. So silent. None of the humming hidden energy of machines waiting to function at the tap of a button.
"Don't let them do it!" wailed Peter at the ceiling, as if he was talking to the house, the nursery. "Don't let Father kill everything." He turned to his father. "Oh, I hate you!"
"Insults won't get you anywhere."
"I wish you were dead!"
"We were, for a long while. Now we're going to really start living. Instead of being handled and massaged, we're going to live."
Wendy was still crying and Peter joined her again. "Just a moment, just one moment, just another moment of nursery," they wailed.
"Oh, George," said the wife, "it can't hurt."