THE ACTION ON THE SCREEN HAS TAKEN TIME TO MEAN anything. A young boy and girl dressed in Victorian-looking clothes have peeked for a time through a partially opened door into a lighted room. Vernon has felt like he is coming out of himself, although he hasn’t shifted physically from his withdrawn posture in a seat he has taken near the wall. The boy and girl in the dark hallway are young; however the film may have made its way here, they look to be little more than twelve or thirteen.
His interest has begun to grow. Within the lighted room—it appears to be on an upper floor of a mysterious Victorian mansion—a young woman, naked and heavy-breasted, is tied with leather thongs, arms outstretched, to a wall. Of the two men standing by, one is holding a cat-o’nine-tails, the other a switch. The two men wear Victorian dandy clothes. The two children, to be sure, Vernon realizes, will shortly be discovered, bound, and similarly punished.
So it follows. First, though, as they spy through the door, the boy and girl become aroused. They rub into each other and utter how warm they feel. The girl asks what the bulge is pressing against her thigh and the boy tells her she will know soon enough. From behind her then, as she kneels on the floor to gaze into the room, the boy lifts her several ruffled skirts onto her back and gets down in a crouch to kiss and caress her openings. Making no move to resist, only to accommodate, the girl asks what he is doing and why it feels so hot down there.
It is after he has lowered his knee-length pants and entered her from behind and they become lost in their passion that their sighs give them away and they are discovered. “Well, what have we here?” one of the men says. Dragged and pushed into the room, the two children are ordered at once to undress to be punished for their transgression.
Vernon watches from his corner of the small cinder-block theater. The boy is tied first, with leather thongs, his wrists tied both together and between ankles, causing him to kneel in an exaggerated anal presentation. The two men all along offer comments and touches. One of the two men undresses from the waist down, removing velvet knee pants and white knee stockings, “to allow freedom of movement,” he says. His own nearly erect penis visible between his shirt ends, he takes up the switch to lay on the first swat.
Vernon stares, aware from breathing and movement that someone not far from him in the darkness of the theater is masturbating. His own desire is to rescue the boy on the screen. He would care for him and make him happy. He knows what it is to be happy. He would give him attention and toys, food and clothes. He would walk with him and listen to him. He would be his friend. Sensing someone is moving to the seat directly beside him, angered at the interruption, Vernon gets up and pushes his way to the aisle—“Well, sorry,” a man’s voice whispers—and a moment later, Vernon is outside in his car, rolling once more along the highway.
Was he actually in there? he wonders. Was it another time lapse? Was it himself he had run away from? Why was the interruption of his fantasy so maddening?