D Gillespie - The Toy Thief

“Why?” I said through my teeth as I slid off my backpack. “Why? Why? Why?”

“What are you doing?” he asked as I dug frantically through my supplies.

I ignored the question and continued asking my own. “Why, Andy? Why? Why? Why, Andy?”

I kept asking it, over and over, my voice like a record stuck on a scratch. I didn’t want an answer, not yet at least. I just had to ask the question. It was as if my body were filling with pressure, a frustrated steam that could only be released through my mouth.

“I don’t know,” he said, peering back down the aisle. “I don’t know. I really wish I knew.” His voice was on the edge of breaking. “Just hurry. We have to get out of here.”

The Thief was screaming now, a wild yowling like something out of a horror movie, and I knew our time was almost up.

“What are you doing?” Andy asked, but I already had the answer in my hands, the bundle of roman candles in my left, the lighter in my right.

“No!” Andy hissed. “He’s already mad enough to kill us.” His voice was as frightened as that of a child who had broken his first rule. “If you do that—”

“You smashed it!” I barked. “If I don’t do this, we’re already dead.”

He opened his mouth to say something else, but the first wick was already lit. I turned toward the stack of toys and mashed the roman candle into a hollow of board games and began to light another. This one I tossed on top of the pile. Andy had stepped to the edge of the aisle, and he grabbed me just as I lit the third.

“He’s coming!”

I turned into the aisle and aimed as the sparks began to fly. The sight of the ball of white flame flying toward it made the Thief dive instantly into the row of toys for cover. I didn’t see where he went, but I let the candle finish as I showered the path in front of me with sparks. Beside me, the first two had already burned out, but I could feel the heat as the wall of ancient toys began to catch fire.

“That’s enough,” Andy said, pulling at me. “Please, let’s go.”

I couldn’t see the Thief anywhere, but I doubted my attack would be enough. There were three more candles left, and I evaded Andy’s grasp, rushed to the right-hand stack of toys, lit them, and mashed all three candles into a pile of dried-out Beanie Babies. By the time I stepped away, the cave was glowing as the right-hand stack caught with a whoosh .

I knew how old this stuff was, knew how amazingly dry this section of the cave had been, but nothing could have prepared me for how quickly it all went up. Suddenly, we weren’t trying to stoke a fire; we were trying to escape one. I slung my backpack across my shoulders, and as one, we turned and dashed up the slope toward the exit. Pieces of old cloth, bits of paper and burlap, and flaming wisps of cotton began to rain down on our heads and shoulders. Andy was in front, and once, a withered slip of baby-doll pants landed smoldering on his shoulder. I had to slap it out.

We hit the steep slope that would lead us out, and both of us began to clamber up. That was when I heard the screams. They were no longer screams of fear or anger, but of pure anguish. They were the screams of an old man watching his childhood home burn. I turned back just long enough to see the Thief silhouetted against the blazing fire. I can’t imagine how he could stand so close to it, how it wasn’t charring the flesh from his bones, but he refused to leave. He was crying, wailing, begging for the flames to recede as his clothes caught fire. It was a purely pitiful sight, and the only thing that took my eyes away from it was the smoke. It was building up overhead, billowing across the roof above us and pressing down like a wall of black death. I swooned and coughed, threatening to pass out on the spot, but I refocused on the climb, reaching for a solid handhold as Andy caught the lip of the tunnel overhead. He was able to pull himself up, and then, after balancing on one foot, I caught his outstretched hand. As he dragged me to the relative safety above, I heard a deep breath of air from behind me, and I dipped my head to see both of the giant stacks tumbling into a flaming heap where the Thief had been standing. I didn’t see the body get swallowed up in the wreckage, but I felt certain that it had been.

We fell on top of each other in the tunnel, faces slick and black with soot as the thunder rolled outside and within. Neither of us had the energy to move for a moment or two, but the growing stench of burning toys finally got us on our feet.

“You okay to walk?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I gasped. “You?”

He nodded. I wanted to ask him what had happened down there, why he had acted the way he did, what the last twelve hours had been like. But that was a conversation for another time.

“Let’s go home,” he said.

“Yeah. Dad’s waiting for you,” I felt compelled to add.

The tunnel was lighter now, thanks to the flames, and though the smoke was beginning to rise, it would be some time before it filled the tunnel completely. We moved carefully, watching our steps, so as not to twist an ankle in one of the knotted holes.

“You shouldn’t have come for me,” he said after a moment of silence.

“You don’t mean that,” I replied.

“I do,” he said without hesitation. “We shouldn’t have made it out of there. I think you know that.” His face in the semidarkness was wracked with a mixture of relief, fear, and something I couldn’t quite place. “I can’t believe you found me,” he added, his voice breaking.

“The jelly beans,” I said. “They were in your pockets, weren’t they?”

He didn’t speak, but he nodded his head, sniffling. He reached for me, and I did the same, and all at once, I realized that look on his face had been pure, unabashed love for his sister.

A charred hand shot up from a hole in the rock just next to my feet and grasped my ankle. I screamed, shook free, and fell to the cave floor as it swiped the air blindly for me. I didn’t need to see the white, scabby hands or the fresh burns to know who it was. I tried to shake him off, but he had me, his grip like cold iron. Andy was yelling something, but all at once I couldn’t hear him. My ears were filling with the sound of that voice, the one from my dream of the man made of darkness.

You…

There was a pressure on my leg, a warmth that spread up to my knee, that grew and bloomed, changing from a gentle heat to a fire, a blaze within my skin.

It’s you…

It was baking me, singeing the flesh off my muscle, the muscle off my bones, and boiling the marrow within. Somewhere high above me, I could hear Andy screaming – far off, inside of a tunnel miles away, as I swirled into a murky pit of darkness. I sank into it, and shapes seemed to rise in the blackness: silhouettes of people, moments frozen in time.

Children, reading an ancient book, something they know they shouldn’t, making a game out of it as they speak the old words aloud. What are they doing? Why are the shadows upon the firelit wall moving, almost dancing? One of the boys, a blond, shaggy- headed preteen, begins to writhe as one of the shapes solidifies and slips from the wall, a shape like a half spider, half rat spilling into him, covering his face with black tendrils before disappearing behind his grim smile…

Another scene rises from the dark, this time an old man, hunched over a table, his son watching him paint the faces onto wooden toys, his hands careful, dexterous, and clever. The boy wants to be like him, and he will be, but not in the way he imagines. Something is watching them, a weak, gangly creature that hides in the planks above like a giant spider. It wants the boy, needs the boy, because the body it hijacked, the body that’s been its home, is giving up, even after the changes, even after the long dark of the cave it calls home…