After the captain throws the switch, at first the only thing that happens is that Willie’s hands—the long, cold fingers, all those slender bones—clench into tight fists. Or maybe other things happen, too, but this is what Hannigan looks at: Willie’s fists. Only when he hears Willie groan does Hannigan look for the boy’s face, covered in its awful hood. There is a mouth slit in the hood; the pink flesh of Willie’s lips puffs out, so grossly have they swelled. Next the boy’s body begins to strain and writhe, so violently that the enormous chair lurches across the floor, propelled by the force of Willie’s convulsions. Hannigan watches in horror.
Then, just as quickly as it started, the current stops. Willie’s thrashing body slumps. The witnesses are quiet. Seward stands up from where he’d crouched down over the electrical panel. He is breathing heavily through his nose with what seems to Hannigan perverse satisfaction. The parish coroner and his assistant step forward to examine Willie’s body. Hannigan shuts his eyes. He thinks of Willie’s lips; he doesn’t want to see what might have happened to the rest of the boy’s face.
Eyes closed, Hannigan is aware that he is trembling. Surely, he thinks, in a world where such a thing as this exists, surely there can be no God. And yet despite this thought, he finds that he is praying anyway—not a prayer of words, not a plea to any God, but a prayer of focused feeling. He keeps his eyes closed and concentrates. It is all that he can do.
“He’s breathing,” he hears, in a moment. Voices gasp and mutter. Hannigan opens his eyes.
“Well damn it, we’ll give him another one!” the executioner sputters angrily, and before anyone can stop him or say otherwise, he flips the switch again, and again, Willie’s body starts to convulse, just as it did before. Hannigan holds his fists to his temples, forcing himself to watch what Willie is being forced to endure. “Give me more juice down there!” the executioner shouts angrily out the window. “More juice, damn it!”
But nothing changes; Willie’s body jerks and writhes against the restraints, the chair skitters, the gag comes loose, smoke rises from the cables where they connect to the back of the chair, and then, all of a sudden, Willie gasps, a desperate, strangled suck of air, and stutters through his torture, “I am not dying!”
Sheriff Grazer steps forward at this, strides across the floor toward the chair. “Turn it off, man!” he yells at the executioner. Seward turns the switch, and again Willie’s body slumps into the chair. A few seconds later, the generator shuts down, and the room is quiet.