Suffer the Little Children
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| Author | Stephen King |
|---|---|
| Country |  USA |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Horror short story |
| Released in | Nightmares and Dreamscapes |
| Publication type | Anthology |
| Publisher | Viking Adult |
| Media Type | Print (Paperback) |
| Released | 1993 |
"Suffer the Little Children" is a short horror story by Stephen King, published as part of the Nightmares and Dreamscapes collection. He described the story in the Afterword of that collection as an homage to Ray Bradbury. It is one of several different Stephen King stories which dwell on the ideal of demonic or alien children; in this sense, it is related in theme to Children of the Corn and Pet Sematary.
[edit] Plot summary
The main character is a middle aged, primary school teacher named Miss Sidley, who has visions that her students are not really humans. This drives her to insanity and mass murder.
The first hint that all is not well is when one student, Robert, when asked to use the word "tomorrow" comes up with the phrase "Tomorrow a bad thing will happen," and Miss Sidley sees something in the reflection on the inside of her glasses - Robert "...changing into something...different." Later, as the class leaves, Robert gives Miss Sidley a strange look, as if to suggest that they shared a secret. Later that night, as she goes to sleep, she sees Robert's face changing, but before she sees what it changes into, she falls asleep.
The next day, Miss Sidley seems to be on edge, thinking about what she almost saw, but only being able to think of "...something bulbous. Something that shimmered. Something that stared at me, yes, stared and grinned and wasn't a child at all. It was old and it was evil..." At this point, another teacher asks her to check the paper towels in the girls' bathroom. While doing this, she muses that the children had "a kind of hypocrisy" and "a quiet contempt that was upsetting and unnerving". She then hears a pair of girls giggling to each other, seemingly talking about her ("She knows, but-", "Miss Sidley is-") and the fact that they know she is there. She imagines attacking them, and then notices that their shadows are changing, getting longer, flowing like wax, and hunching over. Their voices change as well, becoming "sexless and soulless, and quite, quite evil." She then faints.
When she comes to, the two girls are still there, quite human, and give her the same strange look Robert did. She also realises she has hurt her back in the fall.
At the next opportunity, she keeps Robert behind to try and find out what he is. It is obvious that Robert knows the pain her back is giving her. Robert then remarks that there are "11 of us right here in this school," offers to let Miss Sidley see him change, and says that what is left of the real Robert is still in his head. He then changes:
- "His face suddenly ran together like melting wax, the eyes flattening and spreading like knife-struck egg yolks, nose widening and yawning, mouth disappearing. The head elongated, and the hair was suddenly not hair but straggling, twitching growths.
- "Robert began to chuckle.
- "The slow, cavernous sound came from what had been his nose, but the nose was eating into the lower half of his face, nostrils meeting and merging into a central blackness like a huge, shouting mouth."[1]
Robert gets up, and Miss Sidley can still see the remains of the original Robert trying to get out, howling in terror. She flees, and runs screaming down to corridors only to run onto the road and narrowly avoid being hit by a bus. She makes her excuses and leaves school for a month. When she comes back, she goes on as normal. However, at one point Robert tells her that "there's so many of us now you wouldn't believe it" and neither would anyone else if she told them. The next day, she brings her brother's gun to school, and under the pretense that she will be giving everyone a personal test, takes them one by one into an abandoned mimeograph room, with Robert first. She shows him the gun, and tells him that no one could hear it. He mentions that "there are lots of us, though. Lots more than here", and starts to change. She shoots him, and after a brief battle of conscience over whether or not to continue, kills twelve other students before being found by another teacher.
She is sent to a psychiatric hospital named Juniper Hill (which is also mentioned in another of King's books, It), and eventually put on an experimental program where she is slowly re-introduced to "cataclysmically retarded" children. After a while, she asks to be taken away, and the eyes of the children are described as "wide and empty, but somehow deep." That night, she kills herself with a piece of broken glass, and the story ends by describing how the Psychiatrist who was caring for her "began to watch the children more and more. In the end, he was hardly able to keep his eyes off them."
