Free Sybil by Flora Rheta Schreiber

patient said.
    "No blood," replied the doctor. "You didn't cut yourself."
    "Blood in the hayloft," the patient explained. "Tommy Ewald was killed. I was there."
    "You were there?" the doctor echoed. "Yes, I was. I was, too."
    "Where was the hayloft?"
    "In Willow Corners."
    "Did you live in Willow Corners?"
    "I live there," came the correction. "Jist everybody knows I live in Willow Corners."
    Jist. Sybil didn't talk that way. But, then, the Sybil the doctor knew didn't do any of the things that had been done since the patient jumped up from the chair. Gradually, as Sybil continued to relive what had transpired in the hayloft, the doctor was overtaken by an uncanny, eerie feeling.
    Since the patient had jumped up from the chair, the feeling had been there--muted yet insistent, like the traffic noises that trickled into the room through the broken windowpane. The more Sybil talked, the more insistent the feeling became.
    "My friend Rachel was sittin' with me in the hayloft," Sybil was saying. "And some other children. Tommy said, "Let's jump down into the barn." We jumped. One of the kids hit the cash register. There was a gun there. The gun went off. I went back, and Tommy was lyin' there, dead, a bullet through his heart. The other children ran away. Not Rachel and me. She went for Dr. Quinoness. I stayed with Tommy. Dr. Quinoness came and told us to go home. We didn't go. We helped him remove the gun and put a blanket over Tommy. Tommy was only ten years old."
    "You were two brave little girls," Dr.
    Wilbur said.
    "I know Tommy's dead," the childlike voice continued. "I understand. I do. I stayed because I didn't think it right to leave Tommy lyin' there dead."
     
    "Tell me," the doctor asked, "where are you now?"
    "There's blood," was the reply. "I see blood. Blood and death. I know what death is. I do."
    "Don't think about the blood," the doctor said. "It makes you sad."
    "You care how I feel?" Again there was the look of curious disbelief.
    "I care very much," the doctor replied. "You're not jist tryin' to trick me?"
    "Why should I?"
    "Lots of people trick me."
    The sense of being tricked. The anger. The terror. The feeling of entrapment. The profound distrust of people. The will, plaintive conviction that a window, a thing, was more important than she. These feelings and attitudes, expressed in the course of this hour, were symptoms of some profound disturbance. And all had turned up in the tortured mind of the patient like a dark deposit in a turbid well.
    From the moment the patient had dashed to the window, the doctor had been aware not only that her behavior was uncharacteristic but also that she actually looked and sounded different. She seemed smaller, shrunken. Sybil always stood as tall as she could because she considered herself small and didn't want to appear so. But now she seemed to have shrunk into herself.
    The voice was also quite different, childlike, not like Sybil's voice. Yet that little girl voice had uttered a woman's words in its denunciation of men: "Men are all alike. You just can't trust 'em." And the word jist. Sybil, perfectionist schoolteacher, strict grammarian, would never use a substandard word such as jist.
    The doctor had the distinct impression that she was dealing with someone younger than Sybil. But the denunciation of men? The doctor couldn't be sure. Then the thought she had reined back broke forth: "Who are you?"
    "Can't you tell the difference?" was the reply, accompanied by a resolutely independent tossing of the head. "I'm Peggy."
     
    The doctor didn't answer, and Peggy continued: "We don't look alike. You can see that. You can."
    When the doctor asked for her last name, Peggy replied airily, "I use Dorsett and sometimes Baldwin. I'm really Peggy Baldwin."
    "Tell me something about yourself," the doctor suggested.
    "All right," Peggy acquiesced. "Do you want to hear about my painting? I like to paint in black and white. I do charcoal and pencil sketches. I don't paint as much or