by Jeff Strand
He could not get a handle on his feelings. “But—”
She frowned prettily. “Unless you have a thing against older women?”
“No! I don’t care how old you are. I love you! It’s just so much, so sudden. You were just a doll in the attic. Now you’re—”
“A woman almost in love.”
“Mother would be wary of my taking up with a—a strange woman.”
Her pupils came to resemble the fiery mouths of two volcanoes. “Not half as wary as she would be of an angry Sorceress.”
He was alarmed, knowing her power. “Please don’t hurt my mother!”
She was instantly contrite. The pupils became two placid love pools. “I wouldn’t think of it, dear. I’m just saying that I’m sure she will be reasonable.”
“I—I can’t tell you no. But I don’t know what to do. I have no experience. I’d be clumsy. I don’t want to—to turn you off.”
“Fortunately I have experience also, in quantity. I will guide you.” She took a breath. “Tumble, I have proposed marriage to you. Do you accept?”
What could he do? He was overflowing with desire for her, and sex was only part of it. “Yes. If it’s the right thing.”
She smiled. “It’s the right thing, Tumble, and it’s only the beginning.” Then she kissed him, and won him, completely.
The White Knight
Aric Sundquist
Solomon found the knife in the attic. At first he thought it was a carved wooden stick, but when he gripped the handles and gave a little tug, it separated in half like a katana sword. The writing on the handle looked Japanese, with an intricate dragon etched into the blade. Instantly he knew this wasn’t a normal knife. This knife was used to hunt dragons. This knife was feared.
He closed the chest and jumped onto a rickety chair just as a wave of molten lava jettisoned past him and slammed against the cavern wall. He had to be careful opening up treasure chests out in the open. He might not make it out alive next time. That last blast was too close for comfort.
He hopped to the couch, being careful not to touch the attic floor, and then climbed down the ladder and stood in the kitchen again.
The blade shone like polished glass in the sunlight.
“What do you have there?” his grandma asked. “Looks like a bread knife.”
“It has a dragon on it,” he said.
“A dragon you say? I think your grandfather must have gotten that in the war. It’s very old.”
She knelt down and tested the sharpness of the blade with her fingertip. “I don’t think you could cut through warm butter with that edge. You can keep it, Sol, but only if your dad says it’s okay.”
“It’s okay!” Solomon pleaded.
“But we have to ask your dad first, remember?”
“Okay.”
His grandma kissed his forehead.
Solomon thundered back up the attic steps with his new weapon tucked in his belt, and this time he met Talking Cat, who was nailed to a tree. The cat had patchy brown fur and a top hat and liked to practice voodoo and other strange magic. They were treasure hunting rivals.
“What did you find in that volcano?” the cat asked.
“I found a magic blade,” Solomon declared.
“Really? Does it dance in the air and attack on its own?
“No.”
“Oh. What does it do then?”
“It’s the sharpest blade ever created.”
“So you found the legendary Vorpal blade that beheaded the Jabberwocky?”
“Yes.” Solomon didn’t know what a Jabberwocky was, but it sounded weird, and fierce.
“That’s amazing! So what name are you going by these days?”
“I am called the White Knight,” Solomon said. “I fight for the good guys.”
“Well, my friend, looks like you’re going to need the help of a powerful wizard. A war is coming.”
“I will think about it. Why are you nailed to that tree, Talking Cat?”
“Oh, that. Well, the natives caught me, you see. They don’t like renegade toys looting treasure from their island. And they don’t like little boys, either, so I would be careful if I were you.”
Solomon glanced around the vast jungle. The foliage began growing deeper and everywhere the sounds of exotic birds mingled with tribal drum beats.
“Please help me,” the cat said. “My stuffing is leaking out. Do you have a needle and thread?”
“Are you going to behave if I help you?”
“Yes, I promise.”
Solomon crept up to the cat and tried to push the stuffing back inside the holes, but to no avail. “I don’t have needle and thread, but I know someone who can help. We just have to watch out for the cannibals and make it to the raft.”
“Then we better get moving. Free me and I will fight by your side with my fire magic.”
Solomon unsheathed his blade and pried out the nails. Talking Cat fell to the ground and then stood on wobbly feet and scooped up his cotton entrails.
Then the cannibal toys attacked.
Solomon jumped into action. He struck down the foes with deadly accuracy. Hobby horse didn’t have a hobby anymore. Jack-in-the-box didn’t have jack anymore. Fabric and plastic limbs littered the ground.
Talking Cat kept his word and fought by the White Knight’s side. The cat chanted and held out his paws and magic flames erupted, scorching the jungle landscape, laying waste to all the attackers hiding in the trees.
They fought as a fearsome duo, past the valley of cannibals toys, and finally made it to the raft.
Talking Cat fell to the ground, near death.
“I am on my last breath,” the cat confided. “I have lost too much of my stuffing.”
“But it’s just a little farther to safety,” Solomon said. “You can make it.”
“You were always my favorite adversary. Now we are friends and I will die a true hero’s death. For that I am thankful. You should use your new blade. One strike will end my suffering.”
Solomon looked down at the blade. “It’s only for fighting bad toys” he said, “not good toys who pretend to be bad sometimes.”
“A weapon like that isn’t always for fighting evil. Sometimes you need to ease the suffering of good toys, too. It’s because they are hurting inside and it’s better if they don’t hurt anymore.”
“But I’ll miss you.”
“And I will miss you, too, my friend. But it must be done. Sorry I stole all your jewels and pushed you off that flying carpet last summer. There are no hard feelings, right?”
“No hard feelings.”
“Take care.”
Solomon took a deep breath and slipped the blade into the heart of Talking Cat. He held his friend as the toy went limp and became just an old toy again.
Solomon mourned the loss of his friend. And then he heard real crying downstairs.
He crept halfway down the attic steps and saw his grandmother washing dishes and wiping away tears. She cried a lot lately. He wished there was something he could do to help her. He didn’t like to see her sad.
Solomon crept back up the steps. Talking Cat was now shambling around a box of Christmas lights, pretending to be a zombie. “She wants to be with him again,” the cat moaned in zombie talk. “She is hurt and lonely and only you can ease her suffering.” The cat motioned to the blade.
Solomon took the zombie cat up in his hands and grabbed the string on his back and stretched it out all the way. The motor sputtered to life and MEOWED in a long metallic cat voice, and then Solomon spun him in the air and threw him hard across the room.
“Don’t ever say that again!” Solomon shouted. “I’m going to imprison you like a mummy and you won’t be able to talk for a thousand years! And I’ll put a curse on you, too, so you can’t ever leave!”
“But I am already cursed,” Talking Cat said from the corner. “You know that.”
“Then you’ll have two curses.”
“Want to know where that knife
really came from? I traded it with a merchant in Kyoto, Japan, for two Hershey bars. It was a Christmas present for your grandmother because she loved baking so much.”
“I don’t care,” Solomon said. “You’re becoming bad again and I need to put you away. Nailing you down didn’t work, so I think I need to bury you deep in the ground somewhere.”
“I just had a thought!” Talking Cat said. “There’s a sharpening stone in here somewhere. Don’t you want your blade to be sharp?”
Talking Cat did have a point, Solomon realized. If his blade was the legendary Vorpal blade used to slay this vile Jabber-thingy, and if he was indeed the White Knight of legend, then his weapon needed to have the sharpest edge in the world.
“Okay,” Solomon said. “But no tricks. Help me find the stone and then it’s off to the mummy crypts for you.”
Talking Cat began shuffling toward the boxes.
“Not like that,” Solomon said. “You’re a mummy now, remember?”
“Sorry.” Talking Cat held out his hands and walked stiff like a mummy. “Like this?”
“Yes.”
“You know what?” Talking Cat said as they began rummaging though the boxes, “I know a lot about curses. I was in Haiti for three years, you know.”
“I know. But tell me again.”
Talking Cat smiled wickedly, and then he began telling Solomon about real curses.
The Doll Tree
Amelia Mangan
All the signs are there. Just where everyone told you they’d be. Lining the cracked and broken road, lopsided in the black and crumbling earth: “THIS WAY TO THE DOLL TREE”. The letters are childlike blocks, the arrow beneath them a shaky, trembling squiggle. Maybe the sign’s writer was starting to have doubts.
Nothing grows here. On either side of the road, crops lie wilted, exhausted, lank as a dead girl’s hair. Shiny-eyed crows feast on shreds of purple gore, scraped from hot black tarmac. Thin, pale grass twitches in the hot and unrefreshing breeze, throwing skinny shadow at the feet of peeled-paint fenceposts. Rusting chainlink sways in the wind.
It sees you before you see it. The Tree. Looming over the barren soil from the top of its high hill, lord of this dead land. The size of the thing, the size. Immeasurable strength, unfathomable age. Its thick tangle of roots, sunk deep into the hill’s flesh, endless whorls and loops and spirals. Its skinny, scabby limbs burst through the sides and roof and windows of the House, the House that contains it, the House it wears like a corpse wears the suit it was buried in. The House was grand once. Big, impressive. Nowhere near as impressive as the Tree.
Nobody knows which came first: the Tree, or the House. Did the Tree grow up through the House, displacing, assimilating, infecting its brick and mortar, crawling up through its drain pipes, out through its fine brass fixtures, snaking through bedrooms and bathrooms and, finally, the attic, before smashing through its roof, stretching up and up and up, arms high and wide enough to span the empty sky? Or was the Tree here, first and last and always, and the House an organism that grew up around it, a parasite of glass and wallpaper, chandeliers and wooden beams?
It doesn’t matter. The House is here, and the Tree is inside it, eating its heart forever.
Climb the hill, spiky grass lashing your legs, dry dirt slumping beneath your feet; push gently on the once-red door. It will open, and the House will admit you.
All the floors have fallen away. Up above and all around you, the skeletons of rooms lie bare and stripped. Here, the remains of a bedroom, now no more than rough wood floorboards and a naked brass bedstead, tarnished swamp-green from rain. There, a bathroom: fixtures ripped from the walls, shattered tiles like broken teeth, thick wet mildew seeping down from the edge of its open facade and poised to spread.
And in the middle of it all, the very soul and spine of the House and its decay: the Tree’s trunk. Thick and black and forever. Wooden night.
The spiral staircase wraps around the tree, poison ivy around a forgotten temple’s column. No one knows who put it there. You’d prefer not to climb it, but it’s the only way. The only way to get to the attic.
You place one timid foot upon the step. The metal is heavy with rust, buckshot with holes, but it holds steady, surprisingly steady. You hold the banister; its cold burns your palm but you hang on, and climb the stairs, one at a time, slow and cautious at first, then faster, more determined, knowing it would now be pointless to go back down.
Your head brushes flat wood. Your flesh rises in tiny bumps, reaching up. The Tree’s trunk vanishes into darkness above you, a darkness even greater and heavier than its own. You take a breath, take another. You press close to the Tree. You breathe it in, its sap: molasses-thick, sweet and metal, melted candyfloss and swallowed blood.
You move up, stretch out an arm, feel around with splayed fingers. Hit floorboards. You’ve found it. You’ve found the attic.
And you haul yourself up, wrenching your shoulder, twisting around the trunk, until you sit on the edge of the ragged hole surrounding it. Your breath is a cloud. Films of dust cling to your eyeballs; you tear up, blink, stare with eyes as wide as you can make them.
The branches stretch from wall to wall, up and out through the broken roof, the splintered windows.
And every one of them yields the same bounty, the same fruit: dolls.
Dangling from every single branch, hanging from every clawed black finger, every spindled limb: dolls. China dolls and plastic dolls, girl dolls and boy dolls, porcelain and wax, big and small, dressed and naked. All of them dirty, all of them old. A thousand half-lidded glass eyes watch you in the kaleidoscope light; thousands upon thousands of stiff little bodies sway in the stifling wind. Some hang by the neck.
The floor is littered with dolls, the ones that have fallen from the Tree. The ones that were ripe. You pick one up, a chubby, unsmiling pixie; it has a cord dangling down from its back. You hold it taut between thumb and forefinger; it is damp, mildly viscous. You let it go. “Ma-Ma,” says the doll, its voice deep and grinding, an old-man death-rattle. You put it down. Quickly.
You walk across the floor, trying not to let your feet touch anything, any doll, navigating winding paths around them until you make it to the nearest wall. One arm of the Tree has punched through here; you move closer, curl a hand around its curiously smooth bark, and lean closer, peering outside.
Down below, a long way down below, behind the House, long and neatly-hoed rows of soil stretch on and out into the far blue distance. Tiny white shoots poke up through the dirt. And though it is impossible to tell, impossible to ever know, what strange seed feeds this dark and quiet earth, one thing is obvious even to you, even from your vantage point high above and close to Heaven: those shoots are not shoots at all, but the fingers of dolls. Hundreds and thousands—uncountable millions—of dolls. Growing in the earth. Growing their tiny doll fingers.
Some of those fingers have prints.
A breeze, cooler than before, waltzes through the attic, strokes your shoulder blades. You shiver. It’s still summer now, still hot, dry, infertile summer, but soon the summer will end, and fall will take its place. Soon, the harvest will be in.
A Little Terror
Phil Hickes
Small hands flash like blades in the half-light of the attic. To and fro, this way and that, they prise legs, pop arms, gouge eyes and yank heads. Movement is economical and precise. The right hand teases glistening, sticky tears from a tube of glue. The left brandishes scissors like cutlasses. Together, they’re an industrious blur, knotting string and sticking tape, destroying and creating with equal vigor.
Tools are selected with the same care a surgeon chooses scalpels. There’s a tiny hammer, the type a cobbler might use. A pair of rubber-gripped pliers. A screwdriver. A sharp craft knife. Each of them has their part to play. And when the hands are done, the tools are gently replaced in the exact same spot from whence they were plucked.
It is a great work.
A herculean labor.
A
symphony long in composition.
Outside, the day has long since snuffed out its candle. In the attic, a solitary bulb flickers feebly, its life slowly ebbing away as it dangles from its black wire noose.
A small figure stands.
Those clever, agile hands take a moment’s rest on skinny hips.
Then the figure turns and is gone, thoughts of creation replaced by thoughts of cookies.
* * * * *
Left behind, in the corner of the attic, slumps an abomination. An antichrist of symmetry. Already forgotten by its fickle creator, it lays where it has taken crooked shape, a gargoyle without a steeple. One huge, muscled arm props it up. Another, slim and feminine, points up at the ceiling, frozen in a plea for mercy to an indifferent deity. A third, some kind of woolly tentacle, flops flaccidly to one side.
Stretched out in front are its legs. Or they could be more arms. Even the creator wasn’t entirely sure. One limb is metallic and mechanical, the other soft, squishy and covered in lime green fur. They’re joined to a jigsaw puzzle torso, an ugly contradiction of plastic, rubber and metal.
Atop its catastrophic geometry, the bitter cherry on a moldy cake, sits a ghoulish head made from robot, doll and teddy bear. A couple of mismatched glass eyes, sourced from other toy-box unfortunates, have been added for effect. The final flourish is the strawberry grin of Mr. Potato Head—an irony of expression that makes mockery of the creature’s twisted physiognomy.
It’s a thing best suited to the shadows.