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.
Chapter Fourteen
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.
The eye receded into the darkness of the floor, and I fell to my knees with a moan. I couldn’t do anything more than shake my head and stare at it, wondering how much longer I could go before madness took me over for good. The metal vent cover shook again, and I saw it rising, slow and steady like a boat on high tide. It rose and rose, inch by inch. Then it fell to one side with a clatter.
That was when I saw the hand, that same burned, skinless hand, still moving, still alive somehow. I thought of how much of a husk it had seemed, how bloodless and desiccated. It wasn’t alive, not in the way that everything else on this entire planet was alive. I knew then that I hadn’t watched it die, not really. All I’d seen were the human slivers that still remained curling away like dead leaves. Now the only thing left was the seed in the middle, the dark, twisted part, planted half in Andy and half in that awful frame.
The hand receded, and I heard something clicking, whirring down in that black, mouth-like hole. Then the teddy bear rose up, tinkling the same familiar little song. It floated, hovering, held aloft by a red-black hand, which gripped it by a single ear. He swung it left and right, almost playfully, before dropping it onto the carpeted floor. A gift. Something just for me.
Then I heard the laugh. Giggling. He knew exactly what he was doing to me. He was breaking me, weakening me, putting small cracks throughout my psyche. It was brilliant in a way. Something was coming for me, something that had tasted me, tasted my essence. He wanted more. I knew that now. He had a choice between me and Andy, and he had chosen me. All he had to do was soften me up enough to finish the job for good.
I was on my feet, dashing back down the hall toward Andy’s room, falling through the door and tumbling onto his bed. I was so hysterical that I didn’t even notice he wasn’t in there. I checked behind the doors, under the sheets, under the bed, but I couldn’t find him. He had sneaked off somewhere in the night, and though the idea terrified me, it didn’t really surprise me.
“What are you doing?” I heard him say from behind me.
“Jesus, where were you?” I said with a little shriek.
He stared me up and down, untrusting, unsure how to handle the way I was acting.
“I was outside.”
My eyes swelled in their sockets.
“Why?” I said, trembling.
“I couldn’t sleep,” he replied. “What’s with you?”
I’d slipped off the bed, making my way toward the door now, unsure of everything. “What were you doing out there?” I imagined him opening the basement door, imagined him being called out there by his master, under some dark spell.
“Just walking,” he said quietly. He had that same shifty look about him, that same hollowed-out stare.
“You didn’t see anything?”
He froze, and his eyes locked onto mine.
“You’re my sister,” he said with a bit of surprise in his tone, as if he had just remembered the fact. “I’d never hurt you.”
No sooner had the words passed his lips than he grabbed my wrist, twisted it to a near-breaking point, and kicked my legs out from under me. I tried to scream, but he had stuffed a pillow over my face. I felt something sharp biting into one wrist – a cord from one of his games, binding me to the foot of his bed by one hand. Then a belt wrapped around my mouth, choking me, keeping me from screaming. It wasn’t until all of this was done that I saw his face, saw his bloodshot eyes rimmed with tears.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “But you don’t know how much it hurts.”
He dashed from the room, and I heard the back door slide open, and I knew it was back. The Toy Thief was inside my house once more – only this time, there was no need to sneak in. Andy rounded the corner first, and it followed on shaky legs, barely able to walk any longer, a newborn fawn with a nightmare face. The head lolled, the pink eyes were dry and unblinking, and the mouth was a black nothing lined with yellow teeth. Hands, gangly and burned, were opening and closing, driven by some awful hunger to feed once more. The boy who’d smiled in swimming trunks, who had cherished a tiny snow globe with every ounce of his heart, was gone, and all that remained was death incarnate.