James Jenkins - The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories. Volume 1

There were times when I would scream for hours, because I didn’t finish Anni off right away. We figured that only freshly transfused stuffing was optimal for our plush toys. There could not be more than half an hour between the moment of transfusion and the donor’s death, otherwise the stuffing would coagulate – it would turn useless and poisonous. But if we only took a handful of stuffing from our donor at a time the donor wouldn’t necessarily die; on the contrary, we could keep them alive at our will in order to extract a second and third portion from them, this way prolonging the lives of our favorite plush toys. I extracted three portions from Anni, and I gave voice to her suffering all the way to the end. I didn’t enjoy killing the toys. I hid their remains shamefully in the corners of my room, and early one morning I sneaked out to the street and threw the carcasses into a distant trash can. Then I spent days in terror fearing that someone would knock on my door and confront me with the murder of the three plush toys.

Naturally this never occurred, but my therapist agrees with me that such a fear is an indication of my lack of sociopathic tendencies. I didn’t find joy in this kind of torture, and my mind feared retaliation – for I regarded my actions as sinful.

Sometimes I wish I had enjoyed it. Then everything would have been so much easier.

I carefully stuffed the fresh filling into Vili. I knew this was a painful, demanding procedure for him as well, so I sedated him in my imagination. He breathed in anesthetic gas from an old carnival mask made of papier mâché – obviously this mask was turned into an anesthetic mask only in my mind, but the trick worked. Vili fell asleep; I could hear his rhythmic breathing in my thoughts, but not his voice. Why I didn’t do this with the toys I killed I cannot say for certain, but on some primordial level I felt that pain was a necessary element of the process.

I carefully stuffed the fresh, hot filling under his skin with my fingers. I used an office stapler for the stitches. One of my friends, the one without glasses, managed to get a stapler for each of us. His parents were rich and successful. They had some sort of company, and maybe a restaurant too, but I’m not entirely sure about that. Everyone was a little scared of him because his family was so wealthy, and the power of money can be sensed even as a child. I met him once as an adult. He didn’t recognize me, although he was staring right at me – or maybe he did but chose not to talk to me. He quickly looked away and rushed off, perhaps holding the handle of his briefcase a tiny bit tighter. He had an expensive suit, an expensive briefcase, and an expensive pair of shoes. It hurt me a bit that he didn’t recognize me, just like I didn’t recognize my friend with the glasses.

Anyway, as a child he stole the equipment for us from one of their offices. This speeded up the stitching procedure, which was crucial for me because Vili’s sewing loosened more and more every day. No matter how quickly I stuffed in the new filling, when I came home from school or woke up at dawn, he had lost just as much or even more in the meantime.

When we ran out of plush toys at home we had to look elsewhere for resupply. Since we were kids, we didn’t have much to spend, except for our rich friend. He was able to purchase new toys and gave us some spare coins now and then, but never enough. With my other two friends I would go through the charity shops in the hope of finding some discounted plush toys. Sometimes we would steal toys from these shops and run through the streets like hyenas with our prey, hoping that no one was following us. These stolen toys smelled like poverty, but they fulfilled the purpose we needed them for. We eviscerated them and stuffed their filling into our own toys. The girl’s older sister advised us to mix fresh blood into the cotton wool so our plush toys would get stronger. We followed her advice and collected lizards from our school’s sunny playground. They were easier to kill than the plush toys because we didn’t need to imitate their suffering, they were inherently alive. We slushed their blood onto the cotton wool, but this method didn’t bring any visible results.

Not then at least.

The situation soon turned more dire. Vili’s skin burst in several places, but not along the stitching like before: the plush itself had worn so much that the wear eventually became a hole, through which the life-­giving filling flowed out. These parts were harder to staple because the fabric would often burst or grow precariously thin. Vili’s friendly eyes also became blurred. They were covered in some kind of fog, as if his plastic eyes had faded from the inside. One afternoon, as I was trying to close up his recent wounds, Vili’s left eye fell out of its place and hit the floor with a thud. I felt like I was going to vomit. Vili was blindly looking at me with his one eye, while where his other eye should have been there was only plush and filling. I wanted to scream, but I bit my arm instead. I didn’t dare hug Vili because I was scared his other eye would fall out as well. I tried to glue the fallen eye back, but my efforts were clearly in vain. The eye had nothing to stick to anymore, it would only fall out together with the filling again. I knew that Vili’s time remaining would soon be up.

At that point Vili was no longer able to sleep from the pain. I would listen to his groaning all night long, his begging, swearing, and cursing. This was not the Vili I knew – my Vili always knew what was right, even if the harder path was the right one. But at night the dying Vili loathed the world that doomed him to suffer – he would either insult everyone and everything with spite, or moan out of terror like a lunatic. He did his best to hold it together by day, but he spoke less and less. He became remote, and sometimes I could hear him cursing in the daytime as well.

After a while, his other eye went blurry and eventually fell out. I put red tape in the place of his eyes, so Vili spent his last days with two red X’s on his face. The scattered limbs, eyes, and fluffy insides were starting to cause us more trouble. The boys complained that the scattered filling was infecting their other toys with sickness – the wheels detached from their Matchbox cars, their plastic soldiers fell apart, and their LEGO pieces didn’t fit together anymore. The girl attempted to work out the meticulous protocol of our plush toys’ dying process because her parents were doctors. Hence, following the girl’s advice, we started to collect the potentially infectious plush body parts in resealable plastic bags – we painted the universal biohazard symbol onto the bags with black markers. I placed Vili’s eyes, stuffing, and one of his legs that had detached in the meantime into one of these bags.

I was scared to stay alone in my room, especially after I woke up one night to the gaze of Vili’s red X eyes. Vili was lying on my pillow and stared right at me, even though at night I would always put him into a warm, cozy nest on the floor, firstly in order to protect him from potential bedwetting and secondly because I could barely stand his smell anymore. He smelled of death, and I would choke from it at night. My eyes , Vili shouted at me. Where are my eyes? I screamed and tossed Vili away, causing him to fall on the floor with a painful groan. For the first time I peed my bed while I was awake. Vili was whimpering quietly on the floor, so I got out of bed, carefully slipped my hands under his head, and placed him back in his nest. Although I was scared, I wasn’t angry at him. He was only a sick, demented plush toy. He didn’t mean to hurt me, not consciously at least.

Not yet.

The others reported similar experiences about their plush toys’ disturbed minds. Our rich friend claimed that Egyes had been whispering terrible things in his ear all night about the endless, bleak darkness that swallows everyone like an insane father, and about the Black Emperor who ruled in its guts. The girl stated that Ferkó had attempted to sneak out the window – whether he wanted to escape or kill himself was not entirely clear, but after she thwarted his plan she could feel him pinching her feet and thighs so as to prevent her from falling asleep. Since then she would sometimes wake up to find her plush toy lying on her chest with his mouth attached to her skin, as if he was trying to suck the life and flesh out of her. Our friend with the glasses recounted that his plush toy walked in circles around the room, cursing and swearing and listing the names of those who had offended him, those who ought to be ended, whose heads should be pinned onto the wall of the LEGO castle, whose blood should be used to sully the television screens.