by DW Gillespie
I keep talking about my fingers. About how they itch all the time. They do. Wherever they are. You see, the last two fingers on my right hand. They’re gone.
It hurts just to write that.
It hurts because this isn’t who I am. This isn’t who I was supposed to be. Can you remember what it was like for you in high school, or even worse, junior high? Maybe you were pretty or skinny or fat or tall or whatever. Chances are, you weren’t perfect, and even if you were, you weren’t really perfect. Sallie was pretty damn close. Blonde, tall, gorgeous. A cheerleader even. There was this group of boys who thought they were clever. They liked to come up with nicknames for all the girls, cutesy little labels with an edge of pure fucking meanness to them. Sallie had this tiny birthmark on her forearm, just a small patch the size of a dime that had just a hair more melanin than the rest of her body. They called her Shit Arm.
Clever, huh?
Now, imagine what it was like for an admittedly pretty young girl with a good sense of humor who just happened to be missing two fingers on one hand. I might as well have been in prison the way people treated me, boys especially. Prison would have been better, now that I think about it, because at least in prison, you knew where you stood. Every person I met, every conversation I had, every smile I got from a stranger, they all came with a ticking clock so loud I could hear it in my ear. How long would it take before I got careless, before I turned my hand the wrong way, before they saw who I really was? Who I had been turned into? My very fucking body was the prison, and I took it with me everywhere I went.
My fingers, still to this day, itch whenever I get nervous. The doctors call it phantom pain, sensations that exist in limbs that have long since rotted away. My brain, bless its heart, doesn’t quite know that my fingers aren’t still there, and in some strange way, they hang on to that last moment, a physical memory of the last time they were still attached. They were burning then, itching as if the skin were being peeled off of them, and maybe it was.
No, I haven’t been completely honest. But I hope you can forgive me for that small transgression. If not, well…I suppose you can just go to hell.
* * *
The first steps into the dark mouth of the cave were a bit like stepping into a haunted house. It was dark, but not nearly as dark as I thought it would be – the sensation unnerved me more than I can really explain. It should have been darker, especially as I stepped deeper in, and my eyes and body were at odds with one another. It wasn’t until my foot sloshed in the first puddle that I realized how much water there was in there, how much of the light it was reflecting back at me from the floor.
The walls and ceiling were symmetrical, carefully cut square blocks that had been carved out decades earlier. The floor was a bit bumpier, with small pools here and there from where the rain had been the night before. Somewhere behind me, miles in the distance, I heard a crack of thunder, and I shuddered to think how far the water could rise if a storm blew in suddenly.
There was only one path in, straight back up a gentle slope that rose toward the grassy ground I had been standing on ten minutes earlier. I followed the trail, clutching the wall one careful footstep at a time. It was an easier route than I had imagined, and before I knew it, I had traveled far enough up the slope to lose the mouth of the cave altogether. The previous sense that this was a well-lit place faded in an instant as I fumbled for my flashlight and the cheap little pocket knife. The beam pushed back the darkness, but not nearly as strongly as I hoped it would. It was a cheap plastic flashlight, the kind of thing you gave to a kid to play with – something you didn’t mind too much when they broke it. Dad had a good flashlight out in the garage, a heavy metal one with half a dozen D batteries, and I cursed myself for not taking it.
A few feet later, the path leveled off and the room opened up on both sides, the walls expanding around me. They had been just venturing into this part of the mine when they abandoned it, and massive, angular slabs had been sliced out of the gray walls as if it were a giant cake. To one side, the room was even and square, ending in a bare hallway. On the opposite side, I found a stair step of sliced rock, uneven pieces that had been left when the work ended. I kept following the wall, checking this way and that, unsure as to where Andy and his captor could have gone, or if I was even pointing in the right direction at all. Moments later, I finished the circuit around the room and found myself staring back into the dimly lit hallway I had arrived in.
Go, that dark voice whispered. Go now and forget this place.
It was the same voice, my voice, but for the first time, it felt as if it were coming from outside of my body instead of within. Then, in a whisper into the cup of my ear, I heard it once more.
I’ll kill you when I’m done with him.
I spun around, crying out weakly as I did. My pocketknife was at the ready, and I swung it, slicing out at whatever it was that could have sneaked so close so very quickly. There was nothing but open, black air, but I felt like somehow, some way, something was trying to stop me. If I hesitated for a single moment, I might have dashed back the way I’d come, but I refused to back down. I walked into the center of the room and shined the light on the nearest wall. Then I began to make a slow rotation, checking every inch of the room, scanning the corners for anything, any clue at all. There was nothing: no hidden alcoves, no separate halls, no branching paths. Nothing but dark gray rock.
No. There was…something. I noticed it next to the crisscrossed staircase, a patch on the back wall that was darker than the others. I had glanced by it once, thinking it was just a darker shade of rock, but suddenly, I wasn’t so sure. Slowly, I walked over and realized what it was.
A hole.
It wasn’t very big. Not much more than a child could fit through, and the odd shape told me that it hadn’t been made by the miners. At least not intentionally. I never found out for sure why they closed the quarry, but in that moment, I had some ideas. The workers had come across a natural cave, and for some reason, they had to abandon their work. Maybe it had been a gas leak, or maybe they feared the entire thing might collapse. Maybe it was just something as mundane as the money running out. Whatever the cause, this tiny hole was all that was left, a tiny doorway from the world that man had built to the strange, wild world beyond.
I felt like a child slipping through her mother’s womb as I slid into the darkness. The air was thick and cool, the musty smell of mold hanging all around me. My flashlight, seeming more pathetic than ever, sliced into the solid blackness, showing me a scene from one of our school field trips to Mammoth Cave. The walls were uneven, the floors bumpy and jagged, both a product of nothing more than the patient flow of water over thousands of years. Narrow rocks rose from the floor and dropped from the ceiling, and every inch of the gray rock seemed to hide secrets. A bony hand here. A deformed face there. A flap of loose skin draped over the rocks.
“Please,” I begged my overworked imagination, “don’t do this.”
My mind refused to listen as it changed the drip of water into blood, the glistening rocks into eyes, and the slight breeze from behind me into faint, softly played music.
Music?
I closed my eyes, focusing all my energy on my ears, and as impossible as it seemed, I realized there was little doubt. A sweet, childish melody was drifting up through the black corridor like a lullaby. No. It wasn’t like a lullaby; it was one. A delicate tune whose name I didn’t know but whose words were instantly recognizable to just about anyone.
Go to sleep, and good night…da, da, da-da-da-da-da…
The sound of it transformed the barren crags into some obscure, faraway dream, a trip the likes of which I wouldn’t experience for many years – not until I finally tried acid for the first time. It was all hopelessly unreal, and yet it made perfect sense. What else would I hear when I entered the lair of a monster that stole toys?
A foot at a time, I crept forward, and the
music grew and began to blend with other sounds. I heard a twinkling music box, the kind that might have a ballerina twirling in the center. I heard a baby crying, a sound that sent shivers up my spine until I realized that it wasn’t real. The repetitions were too similar, too exact to be anything other than another toy. I walked in silence as a quiet, gentle chorus rose from somewhere below me, echoing down the gnarled chamber, drifting like smoke. The farther I ventured, the more I expected to see it: a leering, glassy-eyed face staring back from the blackness with a baby doll in his hands. The more I imagined this scenario, the more I became convinced that I had to turn off my flashlight. At that point, I assumed Andy’s captor already knew I was there, and all the music and crying were just part of some cruel game.
I shut it off and walked a few steps, then used it in short bursts only, just enough to get me the next ten feet. The chamber was still straightforward, with a few small holes here and there, each of them too small for even me to fit through, so I felt reasonably confident that the Thief wouldn’t fit through either. Before me, the tunnel spread out into empty blackness that was cut only by the occasional stalactite. The path was also widening the farther I went, stretching out like the end of a cone. I could see the jagged floor ahead of me, and it looked as straight as it ever had for at least thirty feet. The music seemed to suddenly grow, and I flipped off the light once more and waited, blinking at the darkness around me.
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 ou
t. 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.
Across the room, there was some kind of hand-built box, cobbled together with two-by-fours, about six feet wide and four feet deep. It was filled with stuffed toys, which glowed from within, and for the first time, I thought I had found the source of the music. One of the dolls was loudly playing lullabies in a loop, but I couldn’t quite grasp what the purpose of the box was.
When my gaze first landed on the thing between the box and the table, I didn’t recognize it for what it was. I’d simply never seen anything like it. It was a cage. There were bars, a grid of rebar, no doubt stolen from construction sites late at night. But the true horror was the decoration added to the frame. There were plastic baby doll parts that the Toy Thief had dismantled and attached to the metal, overlaying them in specific, insane designs. There were arms and legs running horizontally and vertically, and a single, wide-eyed head had been attached to each joint, forming gruesome columns.