D Gillespie - The Toy Thief

My fingers, still to this day, itch whenever I get nervous. The doctors call it phantom pain, sensations that exist in limbs that have long since rotted away. My brain, bless its heart, doesn’t quite know that my fingers aren’t still there, and in some strange way, they hang on to that last moment, a physical memory of the last time they were still attached. They were burning then, itching as if the skin were being peeled off of them, and maybe it was.

No, I haven’t been completely honest. But I hope you can forgive me for that small transgression. If not, well… I suppose you can just go to hell.

The first steps into the dark mouth of the cave were a bit like stepping into a haunted house. It was dark, but not nearly as dark as I thought it would be – the sensation unnerved me more than I can really explain. It should have been darker, especially as I stepped deeper in, and my eyes and body were at odds with one another. It wasn’t until my foot sloshed in the first puddle that I realized how much water there was in there, how much of the light it was reflecting back at me from the floor.

The walls and ceiling were symmetrical, carefully cut square blocks that had been carved out decades earlier. The floor was a bit bumpier, with small pools here and there from where the rain had been the night before. Somewhere behind me, miles in the distance, I heard a crack of thunder, and I shuddered to think how far the water could rise if a storm blew in suddenly.

There was only one path in, straight back up a gentle slope that rose toward the grassy ground I had been standing on ten minutes earlier. I followed the trail, clutching the wall one careful footstep at a time. It was an easier route than I had imagined, and before I knew it, I had traveled far enough up the slope to lose the mouth of the cave altogether. The previous sense that this was a well-lit place faded in an instant as I fumbled for my flashlight and the cheap little pocket knife. The beam pushed back the darkness, but not nearly as strongly as I hoped it would. It was a cheap plastic flashlight, the kind of thing you gave to a kid to play with – something you didn’t mind too much when they broke it. Dad had a good flashlight out in the garage, a heavy metal one with half a dozen D batteries, and I cursed myself for not taking it.

A few feet later, the path leveled off and the room opened up on both sides, the walls expanding around me. They had been just venturing into this part of the mine when they abandoned it, and massive, angular slabs had been sliced out of the gray walls as if it were a giant cake. To one side, the room was even and square, ending in a bare hallway. On the opposite side, I found a stair step of sliced rock, uneven pieces that had been left when the work ended. I kept following the wall, checking this way and that, unsure as to where Andy and his captor could have gone, or if I was even pointing in the right direction at all. Moments later, I finished the circuit around the room and found myself staring back into the dimly lit hallway I had arrived in.

Go , that dark voice whispered. Go now and forget this place.

It was the same voice, my voice, but for the first time, it felt as if it were coming from outside of my body instead of within. Then, in a whisper into the cup of my ear, I heard it once more.

I’ll kill you when I’m done with him.

I spun around, crying out weakly as I did. My pocketknife was at the ready, and I swung it, slicing out at whatever it was that could have sneaked so close so very quickly. There was nothing but open, black air, but I felt like somehow, some way, something was trying to stop me. If I hesitated for a single moment, I might have dashed back the way I’d come, but I refused to back down. I walked into the center of the room and shined the light on the nearest wall. Then I began to make a slow rotation, checking every inch of the room, scanning the corners for anything, any clue at all. There was nothing: no hidden alcoves, no separate halls, no branching paths. Nothing but dark gray rock.

No. There was… something. I noticed it next to the crisscrossed staircase, a patch on the back wall that was darker than the others. I had glanced by it once, thinking it was just a darker shade of rock, but suddenly, I wasn’t so sure. Slowly, I walked over and realized what it was.

A hole.

It wasn’t very big. Not much more than a child could fit through, and the odd shape told me that it hadn’t been made by the miners. At least not intentionally. I never found out for sure why they closed the quarry, but in that moment, I had some ideas. The workers had come across a natural cave, and for some reason, they had to abandon their work. Maybe it had been a gas leak, or maybe they feared the entire thing might collapse. Maybe it was just something as mundane as the money running out. Whatever the cause, this tiny hole was all that was left, a tiny doorway from the world that man had built to the strange, wild world beyond.

I felt like a child slipping through her mother’s womb as I slid into the darkness. The air was thick and cool, the musty smell of mold hanging all around me. My flashlight, seeming more pathetic than ever, sliced into the solid blackness, showing me a scene from one of our school field trips to Mammoth Cave. The walls were uneven, the floors bumpy and jagged, both a product of nothing more than the patient flow of water over thousands of years. Narrow rocks rose from the floor and dropped from the ceiling, and every inch of the gray rock seemed to hide secrets. A bony hand here. A deformed face there. A flap of loose skin draped over the rocks.

“Please,” I begged my overworked imagination, “don’t do this.”

My mind refused to listen as it changed the drip of water into blood, the glistening rocks into eyes, and the slight breeze from behind me into faint, softly played music.

Music?

I closed my eyes, focusing all my energy on my ears, and as impossible as it seemed, I realized there was little doubt. A sweet, childish melody was drifting up through the black corridor like a lullaby. No. It wasn’t like a lullaby; it was one. A delicate tune whose name I didn’t know but whose words were instantly recognizable to just about anyone.

Go to sleep, and good night… da, da, da-da-da-da-da…

The sound of it transformed the barren crags into some obscure, faraway dream, a trip the likes of which I wouldn’t experience for many years – not until I finally tried acid for the first time. It was all hopelessly unreal, and yet it made perfect sense. What else would I hear when I entered the lair of a monster that stole toys?

A foot at a time, I crept forward, and the music grew and began to blend with other sounds. I heard a twinkling music box, the kind that might have a ballerina twirling in the center. I heard a baby crying, a sound that sent shivers up my spine until I realized that it wasn’t real. The repetitions were too similar, too exact to be anything other than another toy. I walked in silence as a quiet, gentle chorus rose from somewhere below me, echoing down the gnarled chamber, drifting like smoke. The farther I ventured, the more I expected to see it: a leering, glassy-eyed face staring back from the blackness with a baby doll in his hands. The more I imagined this scenario, the more I became convinced that I had to turn off my flashlight. At that point, I assumed Andy’s captor already knew I was there, and all the music and crying were just part of some cruel game.

I shut it off and walked a few steps, then used it in short bursts only, just enough to get me the next ten feet. The chamber was still straightforward, with a few small holes here and there, each of them too small for even me to fit through, so I felt reasonably confident that the Thief wouldn’t fit through either. Before me, the tunnel spread out into empty blackness that was cut only by the occasional stalactite. The path was also widening the farther I went, stretching out like the end of a cone. I could see the jagged floor ahead of me, and it looked as straight as it ever had for at least thirty feet. The music seemed to suddenly grow, and I flipped off the light once more and waited, blinking at the darkness around me.