Patricia Geary - Strange Toys

You could sacrifice yourself… you could make yourself do something that you were afraid to do.

I didn’t have to think long before I knew what I had to do: go out to Deane’s room. Even in broad daylight, even when she was in there, her room was totally scary.

My stomach lurched. I sat back down on the bed. Maybe God would admire my bravery and make things okay again with our family. Though what okay might consist of seemed pretty hazy.

Actually, this room of Deane’s that I was about to go out to was one of Linwood’s explanations for why she had “gone bad.” At first, having part of the garage turned into a teenage apartment had seemed like a good idea. For instance, Deane could play her rock and roll music as loud as she liked without bothering anyone. She could have her friends over and they could all shriek and enjoy the din while the normal people in the big house slept on. After a fair amount of pleading and whining, Stan and Linwood had the room refinished for her, and it was nice—a big bedroom with a window seat, her own bathroom, and even a tiny hotplate and a miniature fridge. They decorated it in a pink flower print set off with candy-stripe accents, and the effect was a fantasy set out of Seventeen , the ideal bobby-soxer smacking her gum as she lolls across her bed, Princess telephone propped at her ear, flipping through movie magazines and doing her nails as she gossips with girlfriends about the school hop.

The idea was that this would be Deane’s room and then when she moved away June’s room and then finally mine. Except that what seemed to happen was that Deane didn’t stay there so much as she did disappear. Since you couldn’t hear the rock and roll music, you sure couldn’t hear her creep out at night past the stable, nor could you hear any of her unsavory friends sneaking in. And besides, Deane had done a bit of redecorating. I’d only made two visits there this year, the last one being the time Deane had put the hex on Stan to make him break his arm.

Going out there at night… why, this was the kind of thing Nancy Drew did!

I could do it too.

I rose from the bed in search of my go-aheads, and then I sat back down. Should I include June?

The negatives: I was sick of her for the day. She was always pinching me and telling me I was fat and trying to bully or trick me into playing Monopoly or Risk, both of which I loathed. If I told her the plan, then suddenly it would become her idea, and she’d decide how we’d do it, and there I’d be, once again playing dull old Watson to her brilliant Holmes.

The positives: as the older sister, she would be responsible. If anything went wrong, they would blame her. And, I never got hurt when June was around—I mean, unless she was the cause of pain. No matter how much she despised me, she always watched out for the sharp branch or the odd gopher hole.

This was a stumper. Already I was going for second best by not murdering Rose and Pansy. What good was a sacrifice without some feeble show of courage?

I would go alone.

Rising from the bed with conviction, I flicked off the reading light and on the carousel night-light, with its bobbing, glowing horses, and waited for my eyes to adjust to the dark, already spooky. I slipped on my go-aheads and checked out my flannel PJs: fortunately, they were a size too small, so the legs wouldn’t catch on anything. I crept to the window and raised it; the sheers blew ghostly in the breeze. Unlatching the screen, I eased my bottom onto the sill, legs dangling down into the dark.

Frozen for the moment, not quite summoning the nerve to jump, I thought about how alone I was.

The moon twirling out over the silent green prairie of the lawn.

Then Ace nickered from his stable, and one of our twenty cats screeched as if at that instant being gutted with a machete, and I slid down the windowsill to plop damply on the grass below. Exactly how was I going to get back up?

Too late now. Don’t farewell: fare forward .

The entrance to Deane’s room was around the corner from the pepper tree, and first I tripped over the big metal cat dish, which was glowing like a beacon in the moonlight, no one else could possibly have missed seeing it, and then the sprinkler, pop right on the shin, and then a missing croquet wicket, the one we’d been trying to find for several weeks.

Toes smarting, I approached her door, fearful, watching the snails glide across the concrete and leave their slimy coded messages. But you have to push inside.

The strangeness of the interior odor apprehended me like a large, splayed hand. Sandalwood incense, I knew that smell, and gardenia cologne, and cigarettes (Deane had started smoking when she was ten), but there was also a weird, herby smell, burnt and sweet, and another bad one—tar? sulfur?—and another one, the worst, like the bird the cats killed that day and didn’t eat, the one with the maggots.

Anyway, I wanted to turn right around. Instead, I flicked on the light switch.

Well, what can I tell you? Even my Chinese fairy tale books never prepared me for this.

Things! Clusters and clusters of bright things: ceramic statues, to begin with, three feet tall of Jesus and the Virgin Mary, and dozens of candle holders, skinny ones like snakes and short fat ones, with stubs of wicks and long, shimmering rivulets of wax, and tiny carved dolls, Japanese and African and some that looked familiar, and strings of black and yellow and red glass beads, and crucifixes, there must have been more than a hundred crucifixes, and countless bowls of what looked like rotting fruit and dead flowers, teeming with ants. Decay: that was one of the bad smells.

Deane’s room had always been strange, but not this strange.

There were lots of bright scarves, too, Mexican scarves tacked up on the walls, sequins and cacti and señors reposing sombreros-downward next to their beasts of burden. I tried to see some kind of pattern in all the chaos, and then I saw that all the jumble was stacked on a series of orange crates, which wound around the room like a crazy, sloppy worm carrying its baggage of decoration to the masterpiece: a stepladdered series of crates in the far, dim corner.

Gingerly, I picked my way through the unpleasant rubble until I was directly facing the grand tower. In homage, piles and patterns of colored sand were carefully arranged around.

Well, I knew what that sand was all about. It had been here before, the last time I’d visited; Deane had made hex signs with the sand last spring, when she got Stan to break his arm. She’d made interlocking circles with that Nazi sign in the center. But these patterns looked more complicated than those. These looked like Egyptian hieroglyphs, which June and I had studied last year when we were making up our codes. We started out to create a common language, but June wanted to make all the rules, so, for once, I said no, and we went our own ways, her with Junese and me with Pettish, which was a big waste of time because nobody had anyone to write to. Still.

These symbols were even more elaborate than hieroglyphs, and stranger. Who was Deane casting a hex on now? I looked more closely, even though my stomach went cold. In the center of the floor-mural was a large red configuration, a woman wearing a wild headdress with green, yellow, and blue spiraling points, a cross between an Indian chief and an angel. Except her face had only one eye, cyclops, and she had four hands, each one holding a tiny doll with a miniature headdress of green, yellow, and blue spiraling points, only one eye, and four hands holding etc. Whatever it meant, I didn’t like it.

Little shivers raced up and down my forearms.

Get the hell out.

I straightened up from my kneeling posture, examining the sand drawings. And then I was eye to eye with my whole reason for being out in Deane’s room: a stuffed cat.