D Gillespie - The Toy Thief

“I believe you,” I whispered back, and I meant it. “Let’s give it another hour or so. Make sure Dad is really asleep. We’ll carry it down to the quarry, and that will be the end of it. For good.”

He was nodding along with the words, but his eyes were staring off at something else, something I couldn’t see.

“Andy,” I said in a sharp tone, “be ready.”

He nodded, and without another word, I walked out of his room, leaving him to sit quietly on the bed. I went straight to my own room and locked the door behind me before slipping between the sheets and pulling them up to my chin. I watched the shadows on the wall, the leaves filtered through the blinds, fluttering in the wind, moving like something alive. They looked like they wanted inside, with me. I listened to the wind, to the house popping, for the sounds of footsteps that might be creeping down the hall. More than once, I held my breath, wondering if the awful thing that jumped from body to body would ever even have to lift a finger to kill me. Why put any effort forth when my brother could do it for him? At some point, I began to drift – not quite asleep, but close enough to wander, glide above my conscious mind, see things, hear things, feel things that were both real and in my mind.

Footsteps.

Whispers.

Voices from within.

Andy’s voice.

Dad crying.

None of it real. All of it real.

I must have finally drifted all the way off. I heard the tinkling sound of music. Familiar, but hard to place. It came from somewhere just far enough away to be a dream. Faint, growing, fading, and growing once more. It was ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.’ Everyone knows that song. After all, that song had eased me to sleep when I was a baby. It was a memory written in my DNA, the kind of thing I would recall on my deathbed. A sweet sound. A sweet memory.

I could still remember the time I found it. The first time since I was a baby that I had heard it, but even then, I’d known. It was my song, written for me as far as I knew. A song about the stars, something lovely and sweet. I had been in the garage then. It was the first time I found the bear, the ratty green one, and I found that metal clasp on its back and spun it around with my small fingers and listened. There it was: a clear sound, a real sound, not something in my mind at all, but in my room, rising from the floor, from the carpet, from underneath, lower, under the wooden joists and layers of plywood.

From the dirt.

I opened my eyes and listened.

It was faint, but there was no doubt. It was real, as real as the wind and the shadows on the wall, and it was moving. Heart racing, I slipped out of bed and followed it on hands and knees, creeping across my room, keeping pace with the odd trail it seemed to be making. I hit a wall and nearly screamed, because I knew something was down there, some new horror, and the only thing that could hope to give me peace in that moment was to stay on top of it, to know where it was. Not knowing – that was the true nightmare. So I fumbled my door open and spilled into the hall, ear to the floor.

I found it again, halfway down, curving toward the back door. It was wandering, fumbling in the darkness, carrying my bear. Was something toying with me? It felt likely, and that question itself was more important than even the bigger, more obvious questions, but none of that mattered when I was that damn scared.

I imagined the crawl space, open and dark, the musty, murky smell, the spiders, the centipedes, and God only knew what else. What sort of thing would dig around there? I knew where the bear had been, wrapped in the sleeping bag and still clutched in the Thief’s dead grasp – still clutched by the penitent, pathetic creature that died the night before.

I thought of Andy again and wondered if he would even be any help. I didn’t think so, and the realization that I was on my own made me sick with fear. The tinkling sound led me into the living room, over to the far wall, where it halted, hovering, waiting.

Then the music stopped, and I froze.

I held my ear to the ground, listening for footsteps, music, stumbling feet, just about anything that would give me some sense of where it was. Then I heard it: a shuffling that seemed to vibrate the floor itself, the sound of something being fiddled with, shaken loose. I could feel the tremors of it in my hands, and I feared it was trying to tear through the floor right then and there. I sat back, afraid that a knife or a hand might shoot up through the floor.

That was when I heard the rattle of metal, no longer in the basement but in the room with me somehow, and I nearly screamed. I scanned the dark edges of the room, and I saw it – the floor vent, rattling in its slot. Just a few taps here, then a pause, then a few more. It could have been a mouse walking over the vent’s surface, so gentle and subtle. Memphis had joined in the hunt by then, and he slunk along behind me, back arched, seeing, hearing, maybe even smelling more than I could. He looked curiously at the vent, hissed, and dashed away. I crawled over, close enough to get a good look. That was when I saw the pink eye staring up at me.

Kirstie, the cash girl at the chicken joint, had been pregnant when she ran off out west. Andy didn’t know that, not until about a year later, when he got a message saying that he needed to pick up his son. A boy named Andrew. Andy ended up going out there for a few weeks, spending time with the boy, getting to know him. Andrew was still just a baby, but from the way Andy talked, the boy seemed to know his daddy.

“He smiles whenever he sees me,” Andy told me over the phone. “I can’t really explain that. I spent most of my life in jail; now I work a fryer all day. And he still smiles at me.”

“You’re his daddy,” I told him. “He’s supposed to like you.”

The idea was so very foreign to him.

“I hope I can do it,” he added.

“Do what?” I asked.

His voice sort of faded in and out, and he seemed to lose his train of thought. “I… I dunno. There’s just… I hope I don’t mess it up.”

“All new dads feel like that.”

“No,” he said sharply. “It’s not just that. I can’t explain it, but… I just hope I can do it.”

He changed the subject after that, jumping to Kirstie. It turned out his former fling hadn’t just looked him up out of the kindness of her heart. Their little relationship had been short and rocky, especially at the end, and she wanted to be closer to her family. That’s what had sent her back out to Colorado, where she grew up. That, and the cancer.

“She’s… she ain’t going to last very long,” Andy told me. There was sadness in his voice, but a bit of fear as well, and I knew what was coming before he said it.

“She wants Andrew to be with me. Her mom’s losing her shit over it, telling her I ain’t worth a damn. I was holding him in the other room, and I don’t think she knew I could hear. Or maybe she did and just didn’t care. Either way, she says, ‘You’d be better off pitching that boy in the damn river.’ That’s how highly she thinks of me.”

“She doesn’t know you,” I said.

He thought about that for a long while and said, “What if she’s right? What if I only make things worse for that boy?” I could hear his voice getting watery. “I love him. That sounds weird. I don’t know him, and he don’t know me, but I love him.”

“That’s not weird at all.”

We talked circles around it, and by the end, Andy had made up his mind. He was a dad now, and he’d try his best to make it work. He came home for a bit, then took another trip out a month later. Kirstie was nearly gone by then, so he spent the better part of that week with her, letting her hold little Andrew and say goodbye. When it was all said and done, they were back here, and I finally got to hold my nephew for the first time. He looked a bit like Dad, a bit like Andy, and, surprisingly, a bit like me. I didn’t see it at first, but it was right there in his eyes, a sharp edge to them that told you this boy might be cute, but he might not take shit either. That made me smile.