D Gillespie - The Toy Thief

Now a boy with a soft face, listening to his mother read him stories as he gazes into a snow globe, her gift to him, the only possession that he can remember. Neither of them sees the face leering from the window, another body now spent, used up, ready to be discarded. In a flash, the mother is gone, and the boy is lifted from the bed, never to be seen again…

“No,” I heard from some far-off place, the voice of a girl’s brother fighting for her life across some unimaginable gulf of space and time. But his voice pales in comparison to the voice within that blackness – a rumbling hum that is all around her, inside her, is her.

This feeling , the voice moaned with obscene longing. After all this time. I’ve never known this feeling…

It was me. I was that feeling, something ecstatic to taste, something unknown and new after countless years of boredom. I was nothing more than a new prize.

Pressure. A light hand on my face, pulling me back from that edge, and another voice.

“Let her go!”

Never , it moaned. Such possibilities…

“You son of a bitch, let her go!”

Your brother bores me. I think I’ll have you instead…

The grip on my bare leg was broken, and I shot back into reality so fast my head spun. My first concern was my leg, and I looked down, afraid to touch what must now be bare, empty bone. But I saw nothing more than my own skin, spotted with a light red handprint. Andy was holding a rock, and the skeletal white hand was bleeding from where he had been pounding on it. Andy slid under my arm, lifting me, and the two of us limped farther up the tunnel, away from the small hole, which was now filling with black smoke.

Just once, Andy and I looked back to see the Thief pushing his head through the hole. He was red, half-covered with horrific burns, the skin peeling around the pink eyes. All that was bad, but it paled in comparison to the mouth. The lips were gone, burned away, and all the madness in that thin frame seemed driven into that gaping wound of a mouth. We both gasped aloud as the arm receded and the face pushed forward, but there was no way he could make it through a hole that size, a hole smaller than a basketball.

Then an awful thing happened as the face crept closer and closer, edging through the impossibly tiny hole. The shoulders, wide and bony, seemed to hinge and split, slipping through – first one, then the other, as if the horrid creature were being born before our eyes.

I remembered a strange thing in that moment, one of those weird facts that kids pick up from their parents, the kind of thing you stow away and forget that you ever knew. My dad had told me about mice one year. We had found a bunch of little brown pellets in the pantry. Mouse shit. It looked just like rice. We were laying traps out, and he told me about mice and rats, how they could sneak in just about anywhere. Their bones were flexible, and they could shift them around if they needed to fit into a tiny space. Ribs could flatten out; shoulders could float freely. Basically, if they could fit their heads into a hole, they would figure out a way to get the rest in too.

I didn’t know if it was true or just another one of Dad’s stories, but when I saw the Thief squeezing through that hole, his face a ragged mess, his eyes filled with murder, I knew it was the truth. Bit by bit, he was making it through, driven by sheer, unparalleled malice, and the sight seemed to lock every one of my joints in place. Once again, it was Andy who peeled me off the floor, got me moving, got me out of the side tunnel and into the cooler, fresher air beyond. We tumbled out of the cave and landed on the carved stair steps of the mine, and for the first time, I actually heard the drone of the storm outside.

“Come on,” I said, my senses finally returning to me. I led us down the darkened stair steps of rock, taking them two at a time. Andy tumbled down behind me, catching one of the steps wrong, and we both fell down the last one, expecting to break a rib on the rock floor. Instead, we splashed into knee-high water that drenched us from head to toe. Sputtering, we helped each other to our feet, and I saw the absolute amazed confusion on his face.

“Where the fuck are we?” he screamed.

“The rain,” I answered. “Flooding the place. We gotta hurry.”

I clutched his hand and pulled him down the slope, into the dark, deepening water. The stone-cut room, half-lit to begin with, was now nearly black as the rising water blocked both the tunnel and the light outside. The water passed our waists, and I felt Andy pulling me back.

“No,” he said, a look of pure terror in his eyes. “I can’t.”

He’d never liked closed places, a fact that I used against him on multiple occasions, daring him to go into closets or to get into a car trunk. The thought of it alone was enough to make him violent, but this wasn’t the time or place to hesitate. I could hear the Thief somewhere in the dark behind us, spitting and shrieking. If we waited for another minute, we’d both be dead.

“You can do it,” I assured him. “All you have to do is hang on to my hand.”

“Please,” he begged, “there has to be another way.”

“It’s a straight shot. One path. And you’re a better swimmer than me. All we have to do is stick together.”

“No! No!”

I grabbed both sides of his face, forcing his darting, nervous eyes to lock onto mine. He wasn’t a person at that moment; he was some kind of animal that had just realized it was locked in a cage.

“You can do this,” I told him. “Just hold on to me.”

I felt him easing a bit under my touch as some of that wild animal energy drained away. He was nodding, but he never said a word when I grabbed his hand and plunged into the rising water. We half walked, half swam toward the exit, which appeared to us as a narrow line of daylight just ahead. With each step we passed deeper into the murk, the water hitting our chests, necks, and then faces. Soon, we lost the floor entirely, and so we swam toward that narrow line, which seemed to be dimming by the moment. I wasn’t sure how deep it was, probably seven or eight feet, but in my fight to stay above water, our hands drifted apart.

“Jack,” he said pitifully as the water carried us back and forth in gentle waves.

“I’m here. Just keep swimming.”

He did, and I did, and the rainwater filled our mouths, eyes, and noses. I became aware that the ceiling, once a good twelve feet above, was close enough to touch. The line of daylight was close now, less than ten feet away, but it had narrowed to a sliver that blinked in and out of existence as the water lapped against the ceiling.

“We’re almost there,” I was able to blurt out before I heard the hiss just behind me. The Thief was climbing on the ceiling, his eyes a sickly pink, his mouth an open pit lined with jagged rocks.

“Mine!” he shrieked as he grabbed at Andy’s back, twisting his long fingers around his t-shirt. “You took mine. I’ll take yours.”

Andy pushed off the roof with his hands and dove under the water. The grim hand followed him as the Thief continued hissing and spitting, but he soon pulled his hand back, clutching only a swatch of dark cloth he had ripped away. I stared, dazed, desperately treading water. There was a moment, just a few seconds, where I saw that insane anger melt into something else – a look of misery, of fear, of outright terror.

“Ohhh… he won’t be happy…” the Thief whispered, his pink eyes pleading with me.

Then I felt Andy’s hand on my leg, and I shot underwater as well. We swam, eyes open, but blind to all but the hazy blue light that beckoned us toward the exit. The pair of us beat our hands, kicked our legs, driving farther and farther away from the mouth of darkness, lungs burning, but refusing to surface until we were absolutely sure we were free. When we finally did come up for air, we arose into a torrential downpour under a dark blue sky, but none of that mattered. We were out. Andy looked at me, confused as to just where in the world we were, and I pointed toward the ramp. Moments later, we were on dry land, clambering up toward the flat field that had carried us both, so long ago, to that nightmarish place.