It's evening, and Paula's looking out the bedroom window, just staring at the stars. She's never seen them quite this way before... the view is different than it is back in her Twoson home. Paula is staying with a cousin in Happy Happy Village while her parents are away, which isn't bad, except that she's been having trouble sleeping. For the past two nights, she's awakened from terrible nightmares in which she sees Carpainter and Pokey and those creepy characters with the blue paint, everything blue, blue, blue. It frightens her, the memory of those days before Ness came to her rescue. She recalls whispers and cruelty and captivity.
The kidnapping... she knew it had happened, and yet she couldn't remember how. A chubby boy with yellow-blond hair that hung in his eyes was just turning the key in the prison cell when she came around. A little dazed, she had looked up at him fearfully. Paula didn't like how his hair covered his eyes; it made him less human somehow, if that were possible. She mostly felt confused -- who was this boy, and where had he taken her? Moreover, how had he taken her and left her without conscious memory of it? Her mind had been so foggy... she could remember the feeling. Confusion, bewilderment, all rushing in too fast for her to sort out.
The blond boy had left without a word, slamming the outside door behind him, and Paula recalled crying out in desperation, Wait, where are you going, where have you taken me, let me out!
But there was no response, just whispering outside the door between the boy and someone who was obviously his superior, an adult voice, a man. She only caught bits and pieces of their secret conversation... words like religion and priestess and sacred sacrifice. Much discussion, words that left her unsettled. Young psychic... she heard the man say. Paula swallowed hard. That was her... the young psychic. Was she... going to be made a priestess? Or a... sacred sacrifice? Paula shuddered. Maybe both.
Then finally, there was nothing... there was silence. The man and his chubby assistant would be back later... she had sensed it as the deafening silence filled the room. Suddenly feeling very alone, Paula sat down in the corner of her cell.
It was a small place, a small log cabin it looked like, walls plain and brown and bare, a barricade of iron bars separating it into two halves: captive and free. Paula remembered the absolute desperation she felt, the loneliness, the yearning for freedom... she'd had a teddy bear with her; she held it tightly to her chest. She had been on her way home from the department store when suddenly, she'd woken up here. She suspected she'd been enchanted somehow, put under hypnosis and drawn away to this place, to her prison.
The image was so clear in her mind now... Paula finds herself tiptoeing downstairs, slowly opening the front door just enough to squeeze through and venture out into the cool darkness of a summer night. She's moving more quickly now, almost running across the little town, hurrying through the little cave that is the passage to her jail of long ago. When she finally emerges, moonlight meets her again, moonlight and the back of the mountain cabin.
Paula's slowing her pace now, creeping around to the front of the old cabin. It looks somehow smaller, and even more weathered than it was when she was being held here. Inhaling deeply, she makes her way up to the steps and flings open the door, which swings easily despite the rustiness of the hinges.
It looks just as she left it -- bare brown walls, iron bars, everything exactly the same. Flipping a switch behind the door illuminates the room with a dim light -- luminous for a prison. The bars through which Paula handed Ness the Franklin Badge are still entact. The cell door is still open.
Freedom. Paula walks into the cell and looks around, remembering her time here, how miserable and afraid she was. Paula had suffered from nightmares in which she was made a human sacrifice, burned on fires, executed, or conversely, made the high priestess of some new religion, worshipped wholeheartedly, offered gold and gifts and marriage proposals. Both had been frightening thoughts for her; Paula had wanted nothing more than a return to the familiar, to go home. And then Ness came, and brought her that precious gift.
Freedom, how very wonderful to be free, to live without boundaries, without a cage. I never realized until I was kidnapped how very lucky we are to be free, to wake up every morning and feel the light of freedom shining on my face... Paula wipes a tear from her eye, steps out of the cell and leaves the mountain cabin, suddenly feeling a happiness that few ever realize. She is free.