D Gillespie - The Toy Thief

I expected to hear footsteps slinking quietly toward me, but I heard nothing beyond the now-familiar sound of soft music. Frozen in place, I felt my eyes slowly adjusting, and I realized it wasn’t quite as dark as I’d previously thought. Somewhere up ahead, glowing like a swarm of fireflies, I saw a dim light. It seemed to be bubbling up from the ground beneath me, a strange sensation that I couldn’t quite place until I took a few more steps forward. In that moment, I realized that turning off my flashlight might have very well saved my life. The light was radiating up from a hole in the floor, a hole that was no bigger than a manhole. The light from my flashlight had all but drowned the glow out completely, and I gazed down, imagining how badly I would have been injured if I hadn’t seen it.

Once I leaned down, I could see a sloping wall beneath me, a bit steeper than I would have liked, but angled enough for me to slide down. Had I tumbled in without readying, I would have at least hurt my legs, probably enough for me to break an ankle. I could picture the whole scene: me at the bottom of the slope, bone sticking out of my foot as I screamed and screamed, practically ringing the dinner bell for the Thief.

I stared down for a long time, measuring the distance in my mind before I dared take the plunge. I wasn’t entirely sure I would be able to get out of there once I went in, but I was now more or less convinced my arrival had gone unnoticed. I had come too far, ventured too close to his lair for him to willingly let me any closer. In the distance, thunder boomed, and I shuddered, thinking how close it must be.

From my vantage point, the room below looked giant – a wide expanse of empty walls that dwarfed everything I had seen before that moment. An ember of light shined from a deep groove that glowed in the center of the room some hundred feet away. I couldn’t make out any of the details, but from a distance, it looked like a maze of rocks – good hiding places for me and him.

With nothing left to lose, I eased down into the hole, adjusting my seat on the rocky slide and edging down as far as my hands would let me. It was cooler in the hole, the air drier than I expected, but I didn’t have time to wonder much about this. The eerie music ringing in my ears, I loosened my grip, dug in my heels, and began to skid downward.

The slope wasn’t as steep as it looked from above, and I slid down the incline, bumping and rattling my teeth here and there whenever I caught a rough patch. I slowed to a stop, and the vast expanse of the room became fully apparent. It was gigantic, a vista thousands of years in the making, the walls and ceiling overhead lit by the dim, glowing patch in the center. I wanted nothing more than to turn on my light, to really explore the amazing world hidden under the rock and dirt and grass, but I didn’t dare. Instead, I ignored the stunning view and began to walk toward the strange, narrow path cut in the rock near the center. From this point, both the light and the music seemed to radiate out from a single point, somewhere still beyond my sight.

Each step was as quiet as I could make it, each breath held tightly, unsure of what the next moment would bring. The room spread out, an uneven and rocky floor arched with high, hanging rock formations, and there in the center was a neat, almost symmetrical aisle cut into the rock.

No.

Not rock.

I couldn’t have dreamed to see it clearly, not from above, or even from the ground level so far away. The light was too weak, my eyes not yet adjusted. It wasn’t a row of rock that I was seeing; it was two neat even rows of… something. They were, I could now tell, taller than they seemed from a distance. Indeed, as I stepped forward, I seemed to be shrinking as they rose before me. It wasn’t until I was nearly in touching distance that I realized what comprised the giant, glowing aisles.

Toys.

Two careful lines of them, arranged in meticulous stacks from the floor to a height of some fifteen feet. I approached the first one and gasped when I saw the contents. A pair of eyes glimmered, black and glassy, and I saw the face of a tiger, stuffed, all but rotten after the long years in the dark. There were stacks of board games, action figures, vintage GI Joes, and Barbie houses. I saw a Mickey Mouse carved from what looked to be wood, the style of it older than anything I had ever seen in person.

Finally, I was able to wrap my brain around the strange geography of the place. The floor between the rows was flat and smooth, and it ran back into a deeper corner of the cave, a place where the dim light shined brightest. It was a fine spot for a nest, quiet and secluded, and the giant aisle of toys had been carefully formed around it, but for what purpose?

Safety?

Seclusion?

Or did all of those toys just remind him of something else? Something he never had? A home perhaps? I couldn’t begin to guess. The hallway between the stacks of toys was probably six or seven feet wide, and it ran straight back into the groove of the cave, and from deep within, the light shined. I checked the sides of the aisles, searching for a better way in, a sneakier path, but there was just this, a single road in and out. I slipped the flashlight into my bag, and with a careful step, I went forward, knife in hand.

Every step brought some new wonder, and I felt as if I were walking through a museum of toys. Artifacts from every decade made up literal walls of toys, some of them terrifying, if for no other reason than the fact that they shouldn’t exist. This was a cave, a forgotten, hidden hole in the ground, and there was a child’s skeleton mask, eyeless and watching, perched next to a wooden duck whose face was peeling. I saw rattles and mobiles, BB guns and slingshots, dolls’ heads with eyes that rolled back like marbles. There was a puppet, sitting quietly, almost begging to be picked up and made alive once more.

About halfway in, the walls of toys began to come alive. A robot, head spinning, greeted me as I approached. I saw the baby that I heard earlier, making a whining cry accompanied by a heaving chest that puffed up and down. There was a glowworm, its head illuminated from within. Toys of all ages greeted me, shining, speaking, crying out in a cacophony of mechanical voices, some of which were older than my father.

As I swept my gaze across the spectacle, I realized that the Thief was responsible for stealing more than just toys. The batteries to keep this place running alone told me that my father’s gripe about vanishing AAs wasn’t just talk. The other thing I realized was that the majority of these toys would have stopped working long ago if not for clever hands that kept them running.

The closer I came to that core of light, the more jumbled things became. The smooth lines of the aisle became angular and broken, and I crouched behind a stack of board games and peered out. I was nearly to the end of the chamber, and I could, generally, see it all from here. I still hadn’t laid eyes on either Andy or the Thief, but I knew I had to be getting close.

The glow, as I now realized, came from the myriad of light-up toys that surrounded the room: glowing eyes, beeping robots, animals that emitted beams of light that danced on the ceiling. There were dozens of them, all of them turned on at once, giving the room the appearance of a darkroom, full of light and yet half-visible at the same time.

As I surveyed the scene, I grew to think of the earlier, ordered aisle as long-term storage, whereas this section was more of the work-in-progress area. There were loose stacks of items here and there, labels and instruction packets stuck to the rocky walls. Along one entire wall, rocks had been arranged into smooth worktables where older toys sat in various states of dismantling. Tools lined the impromptu tables, everything from tiny screwdrivers to wrenches and a sampling of electronic pieces. Below the tables, plastic bins were filled with spare parts, including dozens of pilfered batteries.