by Amy Cross
“Damn it,” he added, turning suddenly and starting to limp down the steps. “They can't stay there on the sidewalk! I'm going to take them to the end of the street!”
“I'll take them with me right now!” I told him, reattaching Lucas's leash and then grabbing the laundry bag, before making my way past him. “Maybe I should just get going. I've got a lot to do today, and Lucas is driving me crazy, and you don't seem to be in the mood for visitors.” Reaching the gate, I saw the soldiers waiting for me on the sidewalk, and then I turned to see Dad still huffing and puffing his way over.
“Get those things out of here!” he gasped. “I mean it! Get rid of them! I don't what them within a hundred blocks of this house! You should burn them!”
“Sure,” I replied, opening the gate and heading out. After tossing the laundry into the car, I turned and picked up the two soldiers. “I know they're kinda creepy,” I pointed out, staring at the soldiers' faces, “but don't you think you're overreacting just a little?”
“What are you gonna do with them?” he asked breathlessly.
“I told you, I'm going to mail them back to the guy.”
“Do it today! Do it right now!”
I sighed. “Dad -”
“Do it, Michael! Get them out of your hands as soon as you can!”
“Dad, I just -”
“Or burn them! That'd be better! They shouldn't even exist in the -” He gasped, clearly struggling for breath. “They shouldn't even exist,” he stammered finally, clutching his chest. “I want you to destroy them right now!”
“Okay, fine,” I replied, keen to calm him down before he had another heart attack. “Relax, Dad, I'll get rid of them right now. First job after I drive away.”
“Do you promise?”
“I promise.”
“You'll go straight to the post office?”
“I'll go straight to the post office.”
This, at least, seemed to mollify him a little, even if it was a lie. I had no intention of driving all the way back to the post office, not when I already had plenty of other chores to get done. Instead, I was going to stick to my original plan of mailing them back in a day or two.
“I'll try to come by with your laundry tomorrow evening,” I added, “and maybe I can stay longer when you've calmed down. Maybe Lucas will finally have settled too.” I glanced down at my father's bare, pained feet. “You should go inside,” I told him. “Seriously, Dad, it's not good for you to be outside like this, you could end up with pneumonia. Go inside and warm your feet back up.”
A couple of minutes later, sitting in the car with Lucas still whining on the back seat, I couldn't help looking at the soldiers as they lay on the passenger seat. The fact that they came from a serial killer's basement was pretty freaky, but personally I actually found them kind of fascinating. They were a part of history, albeit a slice of history that was kind of gross and disturbing. Glancing back at Dad's house, however, I saw him peering out the window, as if he wanted to make absolutely certain that I took them away with me.
I'd never, ever seen him act all crazy about something so trivial. As I started the engine, I couldn't help wondering what had made him get so worked up.
Three
“John Spencer Baxter?” Jimmy replied, his eyes widening with shock as he stared at the figures on the kitchen counter. “The dude who ripped all those women apart?”
“Creepy, huh?” I said with a faint smile. “I figured you'd be interested.”
“This is super mega freaky,” he continued, looking back down at his phone and scrolling through the web-page for a moment. “You can actually see them in some of the crime-scene photos. They must have been right there in the dude's basement while he was hacking his victims apart. They must have been there when all those women were screaming. Hell, maybe they even got, like, blood sprayed on them!”
“Maybe,” I muttered, looking at the figures. “I guess they saw a lot of bad stuff.”
Jimmy mumbled something under his breath, while still looking at images online.
“I can't stay too long,” I continued after a moment, checking my watch. “Lucas is in the car. I gapped the window, but still, the poor guy's going insane with lust. Must be all these invisible dog hormones floating through the air. I just figured I'd drop by and pick up those books you said Katie could have.”
I waited, but he seemed completely engrossed by whatever was on the phone's screen.
“Jimmy?” I said again after a moment. “The books? Do you still have them or not?”
“Look!” he said suddenly, holding his phone up so I could see yet another grainy black-and-white photo from the John Spencer Baxter house. “There they are! Those exact figures, on a shelf in his basement!”
“I know,” I replied. “I think we've established that the -”
“And again!” He'd already scrolled to another picture, and then he quickly brought up a third. “And there too! Man, these twisted little things are, like, direct from the crime scene!”
“It's kind of weird that there's a market for this stuff,” I pointed out, looking down at the figures again. “It's weird that they're even allowed to be sold, but I guess that's the way the world works these days. Everything has a price-tag. You should've seen my father, though. I dropped by his place earlier and showed him, and he really freaked out. I guess his generation sees things differently.”
“Are you gonna keep 'em?” Jimmy asked, setting his phone down and then kneeling in front of the counter to get a closer look at the figures.
I shook my head. “I'm going to post them back to the guy.”
“Why?”
“He sent them to me by accident.”
“So? That's his problem, dude. Legally they're yours now.”
“Is that how it works?”
“That's totally how it works.”
“Well, anyway, I don't want them.”
He looked up at me. “Can I have them?”
“No, Jimmy,” I said with a sigh, “they're not mine to give away. I already explained this, the guy in Wisconsin made a genuine mistake, and I'm gonna post them right back to him.”
“But dude -”
“Don't dude me,” I continued. “I'm sending the damn things back. And frankly, I'm...” I paused for a moment, before sighing again. “You know what? I was going to say that I'm surprised you want them, but then I realized I'm not surprised at all. After all, I'm talking to a guy who owns one of those dumb Klingon swords.”
“It's called a Bat'leth.”
“And a life-sized model of the woman from Plan 9.”
“These statues were in the presence of pure evil,” he replied, staring at them, “for a long, long time, dude. And pure pain, too. Can you imagine the atmosphere down in that basement while Baxter was torturing his victims? The screams, the blood, the fear... And then the periods in-between victims, or when there was just a corpse down there, waiting to be cut up. Do you think the air in that basement was different somehow? Like, these figures are made of wood, right?” He reached out to touch one of them, but at the last moment he held back, almost as if he didn't quite dare. “It's like it's hard to believe they didn't somehow absorb some of it.”
“Maybe the soul of John Spencer Baxter is inhabiting the soldiers,” I said with a smile. “Both of them at once.”
“Don't joke!” He winced as he touched the darker of the two figures, but he quickly pulled his hand away again.
“John Spencer Baxter died a few years ago,” I pointed out. “I checked. He was shot dead in a jail cell, but I really don't think he's come back to inhabit a pair of stupid wooden figures. I mean, this whole thing is getting pretty laughable, right? I genuinely don't understand why everyone's suddenly so superstitious. It's like there's something in the water. These are just two little chunks of wood.”
I waited for a reply, but Jimmy was busy tapping away at his phone, and after a moment I heard a muffled bumping sound coming from the tinny speakers.
; “What are you doing?” I asked.
“Wait.”
I waited.
“Jimmy -”
“Wait!”
I sighed.
“Jimmy, I really -”
“Just wait a moment, dude! Jeez, since when did you become so impatient?”
Sighing, I realized I could hear a faint, grainy voice coming from his phone. A moment later, a woman's scream erupted just as Jimmy turned the phone so I could see a dark video that showed a naked woman tied to a chair.
“Help!” the woman shouted. “Please don't do this! Please don't hurt me!”
From behind the camera, there was a faint sniffing sound, as if someone was laughing.
“Don't kill me!” the woman sobbed.
The camera moved around her, exposing a flank of flesh that had been sliced away from the left side of her torso, revealing the glistening, bloodied ribs beneath.
“Jimmy,” I said cautiously, “I really don't -”
“Help me!” the woman screamed suddenly, making me flinch. “Somebody -”
“There!” Jimmy said excitedly, pausing the video and pointing at the top right of the screen. “See them?”
I was about to ask what he meant, when I realized I could see the two wooden soldiers on a shelf in the background.
“The Baxter videos leaked online a while back,” he said with a grin. “There are your two little men, right there in the picture while that woman was being killed!”
“And you watched these videos?”
“There's nothing wrong with being curious,” he muttered, zooming in until the screen was filled with a pixelated view of the two soldiers. “They were in that room the whole time,” he continued, his voice filled with a sense of awe. “It's like they were witnesses to the man's crimes. Or accomplices. Or, even worse, they just, like... They stood there, watching with fixed, blank gazes, like a little wooden audience.”
I stared at the frozen image for a moment, before glancing at the soldiers on the counter. I'd never been a superstitious kind of person, but even I had to admit that it felt... unsettling to know that those two little statues had once been in the room where a serial killer had tortured and murdered countless victims.
“Look at those faces,” Jimmy continued, holding one of them up for me to get a closer look. “Do they seem innocent to you? Guilty? Uncaring?”
“They're toys,” I pointed out.
“But look at their expressions,” he added, holding the soldier even closer. “What did the experience of being in that basement do to them? Maybe the vibrations changed them on, like, a molecular level!”
Reaching out, I put a hand on his arm and forced him to set the figure back down. “The experience didn't do anything to them,” I explained calmly, “because they're wooden toys. That's all!”
“You don't believe that,” he replied. “Not for one second.”
“Well, I'm sending them back tomorrow,” I said finally, tiring of the whole thing. “I mean, they're weird, but I don't want to hang onto them.”
“Are you sure you don't want to pass them on to your good buddy here?” he asked. “I can slip you twenty bucks.”
“Do you have those books for me to pick up or not?”
“They're in the bathroom.”
I frowned. “Why are they in the bathroom?”
“I only read when I'm on the can,” he said with a sniff. “It's the only time I can concentrate.”
“When you said you wanted to donate books for the sale at Katie's church,” I said with a sigh, “you didn't mention that they'd been sitting in your rancid bathroom.”
“You don't want 'em?”
“I guess no-one has to know,” I muttered, heading through to his bathroom. Sure enough, a pile of thirty or forty paperbacks had been left in a cardboard box on the cistern. I moved the roll of toilet paper from on top, before taking the box and carrying it back out to the kitchen.
The bottom of the box was a little damp, but I told myself that was just moisture from the shower cabinet. I really didn't feel like giving the matter any more thought.
“I want you to get these things out of here,” Jimmy said suddenly, hurrying to me and placing the two wooden soldiers on top of the box. “Now!”
“Well, I'm -”
“Now, dude,” he continued, clearly agitated as he stepped back and kept his eyes fixed on the statues. I'd been out of the room for all of thirty seconds, but the change in his demeanour was incredible. “I don't want 'em in my house.”
“A minute ago you were -”
“Dude, seriously!” He started rubbing his arms, as if he was cold, and after a moment I realized I could see sweat running down his face. “What the hell were you thinking, bringing those things in here in the first place? Get 'em out!”
“Alright,” I replied, surprised by his sudden change of heart, “I was going anyway, I can't leave Lucas in the -”
“Get them out!” he shouted, grabbing the statues and hurrying to the front door. A moment later, I heard him heading outside.
“What's getting into people today?” I muttered under my breath, heading to the door just in time to see Jimmy throwing the statues into the street.
“Jesus Christ!” he hissed, hurrying back to meet me at the door. “Those things are evil, dude! You don't want to be messing about with that kinda stuff! Fuck! I can't believe they were even in my house!”
“Two minutes ago, you wanted to buy them from me,” I pointed out.
“That was before I realized just...” He turned back to look at the statues, and for the first time I realized he actually seemed lost for words. “After you left the room,” he continued finally, “I got a bad feeling. It was like something was suddenly creeping up onto my shoulders, like it was leeching out of their little wooden bodies and...” He visibly shuddered, as if he was genuinely freaked out. I'd never seen Jimmy act so strange, but he slowly stepped back into the house, keeping his eyes on the statues. “Don't send 'em back to anyone, dude,” he continued finally. “You know what you should do with those things? You should destroy them. For the good of, like, the world and shit! You have a moral responsibility to, like, incinerate them!”
“I'm not destroying someone else's property,” I replied, rolling my eyes as I carried the box of books to my car. “Thanks for these. I'm sure someone'll be very happy to inherit your collection of bathroom literature.”
“I'm not kidding!” he called after me. “Those statues aren't right! You need to burn them or crush them!”
I slid the box onto the backseat, before turning to Jimmy just as his front door slammed shut.
“Huh,” I muttered, having never seen him in such a state before.
Sighing, I headed around the car and picked the statues up from the street.
“What is it with you two little guys?” I asked, staring down for a moment at their intricately carved faces. “You sure as hell seem to get on the wrong side of some people.”
Four
“Easy, boy,” I stammered a short while later, holding tight on Lucas's leash as I led him from the car. “Can't you just tone it down a little, buddy?”
Even as we reached the garden gate, he was pulling to go the other way, as if the scent of some distant female dog was still driving him crazy. The scent might have been undetectable to the human nose, but to Lucas it seemed to be overwhelming.
“We'll just tie you up in the yard,” I told him, setting the box of books down, “and -”
“Daddy!”
Turning, I smiled as I saw Lucy racing out of the house, with Katie wandering after her a moment later.
“Hey,” I said, bracing myself just in time. Lucy clattered into me, wrapping her arms around me for a big hug. “I wasn't gone that long!”
“Mommy and I made cookies!” she replied, stepping back. “Mommy said we should do it while you and Lucas were out, because it'd be the only peace we get all day. Do you want to try one?”
“I'd love to try one,” I to
ld her. “Let me just -”
Before I could finish, the leash slipped from my hand. I turned, but I was too late and Lucas had already bolted.
“Lucas!” I shouted, hurrying after him. “Stay! Sit! Lucas, stop!”
Reaching the sidewalk, I saw him racing away along the street, dragging his leash. Sighing, I watched as he ran around the corner, disappearing from view.
“Where did Lucas go?” Lucy asked.
“Oh, he's just got some...” I turned to her, not really sure how to explain. “I guess there's just someone he really, really wants to visit.”
“Are you gonna go look for him?” Katie asked as she joined us.
“That's what the app's for,” I muttered, taking my phone from my pocket and bringing up the GPS locator.
“Is Lucas coming back?” Lucy asked, with tears in her eyes.
“Of course he is,” I told her, tousling the hair on the back of her head. “Remember last time he got out and went chasing after a lady dog? And this time, it'll be even easier to find him because of the tracker in his collar.” I turned the screen, showing her a map of the neighborhood with a little red dot movingly surprisingly fast along a nearby street. “Shouldn't take too long. I just need to follow this thing until our canine Romeo finds his Juliet.”
“But why did he run away?” she asked. “Doesn't he love us anymore?”
“He loves us very much,” I replied, opening the car door again, “but he's just picked up on the smell of a lady dog, that's all.”
“I don't smell a lady dog.”
“It's a different kind of sense,” I told her, climbing into the car. “You and I can't pick it up at all, but for Lucas it's like the biggest stink in the world. Don't worry, I'll be back with him real soon.”
“Please don't let Lucas go away forever,” she replied, sniffing back tears. “I love him.”
As I drove away, I glanced in the mirror and saw Katie leading Lucy back across the driveway. Looking at the dashboard, I frowned when I saw that there was no sign of the wooden soldiers. When I realized that I'd put them on top of the box of books, and that I'd left the box in the driveway, I very nearly turned the car around to go back. Then again, I told myself there was no need to worry, and that the soldiers would simply sit on the box until I returned. The last thing I needed was to let myself get caught up in the same supernatural paranoia that had gripped Dad and Jimmy.