The Toymaker

by Sergio Gomez

  KO. Just like Rocky!

  He was more tired than he’d ever been, and that whole scuffle had only lasted a few seconds. He couldn’t imagine how Rocky must have felt after going twelve rounds with Apollo Creed.

  Then again, he’d never been in a fight in his life. He’d jumped into the deep end by getting into one that involved a knife.

  Speaking of…

  He looked down at his body to see if it was him that had gotten stabbed.

  There was a knife sticking out of his forearm.

  But I won the war… Like Rocky eventually does… Because Apollo Creed loses in Rocky II…

  It was only thoughts of the Sylvester Stallone movies that kept him from fainting.

  “You guys go ahead,” Gina yelled to the boys, who were just standing there with uncertain looks in their eyes. “I’ll check on him.”

  Tommy and Jack looked at each other, then started off to catch up with Twist, who’d run off the moment he heard the gunshot near the trailer.

  “Yell if you need backup,” Jack said.

  “I will,” Gina yelled to him, then turned her focus to Victor. He was covered in blood, with his eyes half open. She hoped to God that he wasn’t dying.

  With Momma’s man dead, he could turn his focus back to Jamie Harper.

  Except, he wasn’t there. Only Momma was on the grass out front of the trailer, pinned down by her palms by a knife in one and a screwdriver in the other. She wasn’t screaming anymore because she’d passed out from the pain. Lucas was sure she wasn’t dead yet because if he focused, he could still feel the connection between them.

  That didn’t matter. This wasn’t good. Jamie Harper was nowhere to be found.

  “Over here, you sonofabitch,” Jamie said, aiming the gun at him.

  When he hadn’t been looking, Jamie Harper had gone around the trailer and climbed up the ladder leaning against the trailer. The same one that Lucas had used to get up on the roof and that Momma’s man was supposed to have used to get into position to pick the teens off with his crossbow.

  His whole plan had failed, and everything seemed to be against Lucas.

  Behind him, the open gateway screamed as it sucked in more unwanted objects.

  Before the dummy could react, Jamie unloaded the clip on it. He pulled the trigger five times, each shot hitting the dummy in a different spot.

  Two in the head, one in the chest, and the last one near his hip.

  As he suspected, the bullets didn’t kill him—only sending him through the portal would do that, but they must have hurt him like hell because he screamed with each new bullet wound. Wood splintered. Pieces of the doll broke off and went flying away. The iguana watch on its wrist shattered into pieces. The left side of the dummy’s head exploded when the bullet went through it, and the arrow went spinning through the air, getting sucked up by the portal.

  Lucas stumbled backward, like a drunken man on the verge of passing out, until his foot slipped off the edge of the trailer. He threw his arms through the air to try to keep his balance, but it was futile. He went spilling over the edge.

  His fingers clawed at the edge of the roof in one last ditch effort to stop himself from falling, but there wasn’t enough strength in his blasted body to keep him up and the dummy plummeted down to the ground.

  They he saw Lucas fall off the roof, but it was Tommy who sped up and got there first.

  He took a batter’s stance, turned his hip to load up, and then swung the bat as hard as he could just as Lucas stood up onto his feet. The bat smashed against the dummy’s back with a sound almost as loud as the gunshots had been.

  Homerun.

  Lucas flew through the air, clearing over the roof of the trailer and landing on the other side.

  Jamie was cackling with laughter the entire time he watched the whole thing happen, but they all knew they weren’t done yet.

  “The other side,” Twist said to Jack. “Come on.”

  He and Jack both raced ahead, with Tommy following close behind.

  Gina reached for the knife in Victor’s arm.

  “Don’t pull it out…” Victor said. He was only half conscious, but he sure was glad to see a friendly face. “It’ll hurt like hell. Rather wait for the professionals. No offense.”

  “He get you anywhere else?” Gina lifted his head up and removed the football helmet.

  “I-I don’t think so,” he said.

  “I’m going to lift your shirt to get a look.”

  Victor gave her a thumbs up with his uninjured arm.

  There was too much blood on his shirt to be able to tell if the stains were from a wound underneath the clothing or smeared on. Gina lifted his shirt up to his collarbone and was glad to see that there weren’t any other wounds. It was good in some way, but it would’ve been better if he didn’t have a damn knife going through his arm and he wasn’t losing so much blood.

  “Only the arm,” Gina said. She smiled at him.

  Victor grinned. “Yeah—hey, are you crying?”

  Gina wiped at her eyes. She was, but she wasn’t going to admit that to him, not even if he was on his deathbed. “No, you freakin’ doofus. The wind is in my eyes.”

  “There’s no wind,” Victor said, “the portal is throwing everything off in our world.”

  “Whatever,” Gina said. Then grabbed him by the armpits. “I’m going to drag you over to that tree and sit you up. Can you help me by moving your legs?”

  Victor nodded. “Yeah…and hey, Gina… Thanks for staying back and checking on me. I know how you like to fight and all.”

  “Victor, for once in your life, you need to shut up,” Gina said.

  Lucas was just getting up, just trying to reorient himself and figure out what had happened to put him here on the ground so close to the portal, when he saw Jack and Twist make the bend around the back of the mobile home.

  Neither one of them stopped running, because they both had the same idea.

  Tommy, seeing what they were going to do, hung back. If their attack happened to miss, he would do what he could to back them up, but for now it was better if he let them do their thing.

  Twist and Jack charged at the dummy, shoulders lowered, like linebackers charging a defensive line.

  Lucas turned, but it was too late for him to react.

  The boys smashed into him, and though it felt like they’d just rammed into a solid wall, their momentum sent Lucas off his feet again and through the air.

  Jack and Twist slowed down and came to a halt within a few feet of the portal. They watched as the dummy was sucked into it, then disappeared through the gate.

  “It’s over,” Twist panted. “We did it.”

  “Yeah,” Jack said, trying to catch his breath.

  Twist fell onto his ass, and Jack dropped right next to him.

  Jamie and Tommy walked over to them and sat down between them. Jamie put his hand over Twist’s shoulder, and Tommy did the same to Jack. And then they just sat in silence, watching to see what would happen next.

  Waiting to see if it was really over.

  Chapter 27

  When the dummy entered the portal, the soul of the demon inside of it was ripped out through the jagged edges of the hole in its head. The demon screamed as his body was literally torn from him.

  “No! No! Nooooo!”

  He was weightless in this world, nothing but a floating soul. It wasn’t freeing, though, it was terrifying. The most vulnerable state that a being could be in was a soul with no body to protect it. A form of matter that could be destroyed by anyone or anything.

  Lucas (it was how he thought of himself even now that he was separated from the doll part of himself) looked around. He wasn’t trapped in the dark between worlds like he had been the last time he was in this state—no, this world was worse.

  Much worse.

  Everything around him was set ablaze. Beyond the flames, he could see the silhouettes of others. Beings that had sharp claws, beings that had wings, beings that had ho
rns, and beings that had all those at once. Some were large, some were small. But they all had one thing in common: they were shackled to the ground. He could see the links between the chains around their limbs and necks that kept them in place.

  They were the True Father’s other demons. The ones waiting to cross over into the other world to do his bidding, waiting for their own second chance at life.

  The ones who hadn’t failed him yet.

  From Lucas’ left, the True Father emerged from the flames. He reached with one clawed hand that looked immense. The hand wrapped around him, and began to squeeze.

  Lucas stared up into the True Father’s eyes as he was crushed.

  And that was the last thing that soul would ever see.

  With the wood separated from the demon it once housed, the portal spat the dummy back out to the other side the way it had done to the other objects. Then, the gate began to close.

  Gina had helped Victor up and holding onto each other they walked over to join the others.

  Now, they all sat on the grass, watching the portal spit the last of what it had sucked up and didn’t need. Then it started to shrink, and in a matter of seconds, the thing would wink out of existence. No one in Dutch County would ever know what they’d gone through.

  There would be no way to prove it, not even the dummy. Because even as they watched the dummy being ejected out from the portal and fly over their heads, they knew it was being sent back into their world as nothing more than Mr. Gibson’s final creation—a soulless, inanimate dummy made of wood. Nothing more, nothing less.

  Later, when they would talk about it until they couldn’t talk about it anymore, they would agree that it felt like when someone hangs up the phone while you’re still on the line. The connection they’d had with the demon inside the dummy was gone.

  They knew that if they told anyone else about this, they would write it off as just another tale kids tell to spook one another over campfires. Like tales of teenage girls playing at being witches and calling forth demons from other dimensions of reality.

  And that was okay, because what mattered was that it was over.

  “Let’s go home, guys,” Victor said. He was lying on the grass because he still felt woozy, still with a knife in his arm.

  “Yeah,” Twist said, “let’s get the hell out of here.”

  Twist and Jack helped Victor up, and then together the six of them started their way back to town.

  As they walked by Cassandra, who was fainted but not dead, Tommy brought their attention to her. “What do we do about her?”

  “I’ll carry her down,” Jamie said, “then I’ll take Big Bob’s truck and drive her to the hospital. Sucks she had to get involved in this.”

  They all agreed, because they weren’t entirely sure in that moment who she was. When they would find out a few hours later, it would make more sense to them how she, and the rest of her family, had gotten involved with this.

  Jamie crouched down next to her and was about to pull the screwdriver out of her palm, when they heard a voice coming from the trees surrounding the trailer.

  “Momma?” It was Buckethead, and his face was flushed red with anger. “What did you do to my momma?”

  He ran at Jamie full speed.

  The others’ hearts leapt into their chests, the adrenaline that’d been coursing through them firing up once again.

  But they saw Jamie rise out of his crouch with a grin on his face—his trademark grin, Twist thought—and wait for Buckethead’s charge. When the boy was close enough, Jamie reached out, sidestepped, and wrapped his arm around the boy’s throat. With his other hand, he grabbed his own wrist and pulled up, putting his hips and all into it.

  Buckethead fought it for a few seconds. He stomped his legs hard against the ground and tried to use that leverage to pull his head out, but Jamie was too strong for that to work. When that failed, he tried to claw and punch with his arms, but there wasn’t enough space between them to get any real power to his strikes.

  A few moments later, the kid went limp in Jamie’s chokehold. Jamie let him go but caught him from crashing to the ground.

  Tommy Marino had come to his side at one point to help, but stopped short when he’d seen Jamie had a control of the situation, so now he just stood there with a dumbfounded look on his face.

  “What the hell was that?” Tommy asked him.

  Behind them, the others were excitedly chattering about what they’d just seen.

  “It’s called a guillotine,” Jamie said, setting the boy to the ground slowly. “The Army taught me. You take him, I take the woman.”

  “You gotta show me how to do that later,” Tommy said, still reeling back from what he’d seen. “But yeah, I’ll take the kid.”

  “Alright,” Jamie said. “Now turn away. This is going to get ugly.”

  Jamie reached for the screwdriver in Cassandra’s palm and pulled as hard as he could. The woman woke up from the pain, screamed, but then passed out again.

  The same thing would happen when he pulled the knife out of her other hand, and if it didn’t, he’d probably have to do another one of those guillotine chokes Tommy Marino was so impressed with.

  But, as it would turn out, he wouldn’t need to resort to that. Cassandra had lost too much blood to stay conscious for very long.

  There was still one more thing they needed to take care of being leaving. Gina broke away from the group and went over to the dummy that was lying a few feet away.

  She stared down at it. It was unbelievable that this was the same thing Mr. Gibson had handed to her and Jack the other night.

  At the time, she’d thought it was nothing more than an innocent gesture from the local toymaker. There was no way for her to have known that when they’d accepted it, their lives were about to change.

  Oh, well. Can’t put shit back into a horse, Gina thought, and picked the dummy up.

  “What’re we doing about this?” she asked the others.

  “Take it,” Jack said. “I have an idea.”

  “Alright, but you’re carrying it.”

  Because he and Twist were acting like his crutches, Jack said to Victor, “You gonna be okay?”

  “Yeah, don’t worry,” Victor said, putting his weight on Twist to make it easier for Jack to slip away. “I’ve got my best bud to hold me up in case I faint.”

  Jack grinned at him, then looked at Twist. Twist shrugged and smiled back at Jack.

  It was true. They were best buds, now.

  They all were.

  Epilogue

  Two days later…

  Maria pulled the Toyota into the driveway of 1418. Jack noticed the FOR-SALE sign sticking out front in the yard.

  When they got out the car, Jack said to her, “I have something to do at Oliver’s house real quick.”

  Maria glanced down at the thin watch on her wrist and nodded. “Your mom should be here soon, but I’ll let her know. Just make sure you come back in twenty so we can get to the funeral home in time.”

  Jack nodded. “I will.”

  “Okay, great.”

  Jack started across the street, toward the Harper home.

  Jamie was out on the porch, drinking a beer. As it turned out, the soon-to-be-Sheriff Dwayne Smith had used his authority to have the county police forgive Jamie for breaking out of jail. The Army was told that the charges had been dropped, and next week Jamie would be returning to his station.

  “They’re out back waiting for you, Latey McGee,” Jamie grinned.

  “Thanks,” Jack said. “You’re not coming?”

  Jamie finished the rest of his beer in one big gulp, then crushed the can. “I’m not thirteen.”

  “Neither are Gina and Tommy,” Jack said.

  Jamie got out of the chair he was in and smiled. “Go on back and get the hell out of here.”

  “Alright,” Jack said, laughing.

  “And yo, Jack,” Jamie said before he started off.

  “Yeah?”

 
“Good job the other day.” He said, nodding approvingly.

  “We couldn’t have done it without you, Jamie.” Jack said.

  “Yeah, well, you better write to me when I’m on tour next year.” Jamie grinned at him.

  “I will.” Jack promised. “I better go meet the others.”

  “Yeah, go do that, kiddo.”

  Jack headed to the backwoods behind the house.

  They were all dressed in their best clothes— “lookin’ spiffy” as Tommy had described it—because after this gathering in the bunker they were going to the funeral for Jack’s dad. Victor’s bandage wrapped around his forearm was hardly noticeable under the sleeve of his dress shirt.

  In the middle of them was a pit with tall, orange flames coming out of it. This was the pit that Jamie and his friends had used for bonfires back when he was in high school, so the fire they had going was fierce.

  Jack could feel the blast of heat it emitted before he was even that close to it.

  “Well, well, well, look who decided to finally show up.” Gina teased.

  She and Tommy had their arms around each other, and it was strange to see them publicly showing affection like this, but it was something they would all get used to.

  Even Jack, who’d been developing some sort of feelings for her, didn’t really care anymore. There was more to life than a crush on a girl, he knew that very well now.

  Pushing a wheelbarrow, Twist came to meet Jack when he was halfway to the pit.

  “You do the honors,” Twist said to him.

  The dummy crumpled in the wheelbarrow was covered in bullet holes, stained with blood that would never wash off. Its clothes were torn. Its pompadour wig was shaggy and stuck up everywhere. Half of its face was missing. Only one glassy eye stared up at them.

  But it was Lucas, alright. Jack—and the others for that matter—would never forget what he looked like.

  “Yeah,” Jack said. “I’ll do it.”