Toybox Page 4

  “But—”

  “If we stay, he says he'll be Father most of the time. I want him to be Father.”

  “But Nellie—”

  “I need that, Willie. Just like he needs to be the people whose legs he puts on.”

  “I want to go home! I don't want him!”

  Trembling, Willie grabbed his sister round the waist and hugged her.

  On her back, beneath her hiked-up ski parka and blouse, Willie felt clasps and buckles and straps.

  “You!” he cried, pushing her away.

  “Yes,” Nellie said icily. Willie saw now how stiffly she moved.

  “Nellie!” Willie sobbed.

  “I can be anything in this room,” Nellie said, turning stiffly and stabbing her finger at the walls and boxes. “I can be the man who delivers flowers, the woman who gives piano lessons. I can be the mailman one morning, the insurance man who comes to your house the same night. Your teacher. Priest. Dentist.” She loped toward the neon-lit workbench and lifted with a click from its rack a crystal-fine saw.

  “I can be,” Nellie said, rocking rigidly on her legs and tossing her diamond sawblade into the air, catching it nimbly, “a little girl. Or little boy.”

  Willie leaped for the stairs, landing painfully on his knees on the second step from the bottom. Scrambling up them on all fours, he hit the closed door at the top.

  It wouldn't open.

  Nellie came slowly up after him. There was a smile on her face that the real Nellie had never worn—an ancient smile, nothing even like the meanest smile she had put on when doing the meanest big-sister thing to him.

  When she was two steps from him, Willie kicked out at her legs.

  “Nooo!” she cried out, falling backward.

  Dreamlike, Nellie's body split in two. The bottom half, two leaden appendages trailing snapped strings and wires at the top, clacked dully down the steps to land dead at the bottom.

  The top half changed into something else. No longer Nellie, no longer anything human—mailman, priest, or dentist—it turned into a screaming white thing, a shriveled form that scooted down the stairs like an albino insect on two deformed hands.

  “Noooooo!” it cooed, moving past the two legs at the bottom of the stair toward the back of the room.

  Willie pushed desperately against the cellar door, and with a sudden jerk it opened. Once again he found himself in a maze. Green and white tiled floors assaulted his feet, trying to make him trip. He made turn after turn and found himself back in front of the cellar door. From below he heard a high keening scream that made his bones rattle. He stumbled on, pushing at the walls, trying to find a way out.

  Abruptly, Willie found himself in the living room. The same hot fire roared in the fireplace, the same overstuffed olive furniture squatted in front of it.

  He ran past, out to the front door.

  There it was, and next to it the wide window to the outside world. Where snow forts waited, and television, and dinner, and Mother.

  Miraculously, as he looked, the bus chugged to a halt at the stop outside the house, waiting.

  His hand was on the doorknob.

  Pulling it open.

  A foot stepped around him to press the door closed.

  And a voice, the puffing voice of someone who had run very fast very quietly, the voice of someone he might have known, said, “Walk with me, won't you?”

  THE SPOOK MAN

  The Spook Man came to town.

  Mothers and fathers locked their doors. Dogs hid in doghouses. Mailmen, ignoring their credo, left mail undelivered and went to bars or home to scolding wives. Schools dosed up, locked and bolted their playground gates and sealed their windows. The grasses turned brown; even the weather changed, trading warmth for sudden chill and seeping sunshine for blustery blocks of gray-black clouds. The town tried to hide.

  The Spook Man set up on the edge of a baseball field. His rolling home was a brooding many-wheeled thing in All-Souls' colors; those that chanced to look at it said it was as big as a house or as small as a horse-trailer. No two gave the same description. Some said it had a hundred windows, hung with black lace and with flowerpots filled with dead daisies; others described it as sad and shallow, a hobo's retreat. There were gables and then there weren't. A turret and then not. A porch with a jet-black rocking chair that vanished into thin air. A steeple that became nothing. Soon no one looked at it.

  The waiting began. Children were locked in cellars, kept in tight bedrooms, told to glue themselves, literally, to television sets. Children were overfed, told to eat and keep their eyes off the windows. Most boarded up their windows, sealed them tight against the dim brown light that suffused everything and tried to leak in. Telephone games became the rule of the day: Susie called Billie called Carl called Maisie. Parents kept a watchful ear to see that games and TV were all that were talked about. Parents were everywhere children were; there was more parent-love exhibited than ever before, and this made Susie and Billie and Pete and Jerry and all the rest nervous.

  The Spook Man waited.

  Four houses kept four children locked up especially tight. Those were Harry and Brenda and Chubby and Larry—the four who lived, breathed, and ate monsters. When the new werewolf movie came out they were first on line; when the binding wire was snipped from the new eerie comics, they were hovering there with greedy eyes. No plastic creature model escaped them; no fright mask wasn't in their possession. Wax fangs covered their cavities; they walked in shuffling limps; spoke in Igor voices or baying howls.

  Harry and Brenda and Chubby and Larry plotted. Each in their own house, with parents floating like balloons nearby, they used their Code.

  “I loved the TV I saw last night,” Harry told Brenda.

  “We'll meet tonight to see the Spook Man,” is what he meant.

  “I ate a dozen cookies at one sitting yesterday,” Chubby told Larry. “Tonight the Spook Man,” is what he said.

  “Good books to read,” is what Harry told them all.

  “Ten-thirty by the playground gate,” is what they knew.

  As obedient as ever, the four watched television, read books and played games. They smiled like they always did. Then bedtime came, and the light went off, and each in turn climbed carefully out of pried-open windows.

  They arrived in concert as a quarter-moon broke through the low sky. The clouds scudded, making the moon blink, and as it shone again, their eyes turned like pin-magnets on the Spook Man's place.

  It was a house. This was no hobo's retreat. It was a house as sure as any of them lived in one. There were windows and a steeple and gables and a porch, and there was that jet-black rocking chair. It was magnificent and frightening. Victorian, Georgian, Tudor. Massive.

  Bleak.

  “Where are the wheels, how did it get there?” asked Chubby. “I don't want to be here,” said Larry.

  “Come on,” said Harry and Brenda at the same time.

  There was only one door, a dark one of metal, and they crept up to it. The sky overhead played tricks, turned bright and dark and all the colors of a thunderstorm. A thunderstorm threatened, went away, came back. Went away.

  They reached the door.

  The door opened.

  The Spook Man was there.

  “Ah,” he said, from somewhere beneath his cape. The cape fluttered, twirled, snapped. A face was revealed, quickly hidden. Powder-white, red-tinted, empty, sharp. Behind him a thousand fireflies seemed to hover, blinking Christmas tree colors. There were mirrors back there, and curtains, and strings of hanging beads that tinkled in the swirling bellows breeze. And other things lurking.

  “Come into my ghost cellar,” the Spook Man breathed at them. “Come see my ghosts and ghoulies. I have things that bump in the night and all day long. I have men with rubber faces. I have orange and black bats, and a hag with fingernails ten inches long. I have cats galore, with eyes so bright green and teeth so sharp you'll shudder. I have skeletons of white bone marble, bones that clack one against the ot
her like graveside cymbals. There are red crisp Halloween apples with fang marks in them, dunked for by vampires. The vampires are there too, red and black and hidden in upper corners with the spiders. There is something that looks like Jell-O that oozes when you speak to it; something else so horrible that I've left it unnamed. You can name it,” he said, pointing one long and insubstantial finger into Chubby's jacket-covered belly. “Or you or you or you,” he continued, pointing to them all. He pulled his finger back, making a steeple with all of his fingers and leaning down over it to hover, helicopter-like, above them. “Won't you please come in?”

  “Sure we will,” Harry blustered, pushing in front of the rest. He was brown, crisp haired, and bold, leader of the Four. “That's why we're here, isn't it?”

  No one challenged him, but no one moved to follow either.

  He mounted the short steps, passing under the Spook Man's cape. “Come on,” he said.

  They did.

  “Excellent!” the Spook Man hissed, rolling his cape over each in turn like a bullfighter, counting each upon the head as he passed. He tapped Brenda twice, causing her to look at him from beneath her red hair.

  “Twice knocks for red locks,” the Spook Man said, smiling a grin that put wonderful goosepimply hands round her heart.

  They found themselves in a black hallway, and when they looked back for guidance the Spook Man was gone. A black wall cutting off the outside world was in his place.

  “He's just trying to scare us,” Harry said, some of the bluster gone from his voice.

  “D-doing a good job,” said Larry, youngest and least true of the quartet.

  “Ahh,” was Harry's reply, and they proceeded.

  They felt along the walls, and the walls were damp and slippery. They were crypt walls. They gave off the smell of underground, as underground they went in a gentle slope.

  Suddenly, piling one on the other in the darkness, there was a door with a white face on it.

  Larry screamed, and Brenda and Chubby and Harry merely shivered.

  The face looked through them with the bottomless holes of its eyes.

  And said, “Quiet.”

  It was a Marley face, a face cut from the cloth of ghosts. It shimmered in and out of vision, now sharp, now wavering, now sharp again. It asked them their business. When they didn't answer, it asked who had sent them.

  “The Spook Man,” Brenda said in a rush.

  “The Spook Man,” the face intoned.

  The door melted away, showing a stairway of glowing green steps leading down into absolute black. There could have been a great and deep hole in the earth on either side of those steps, for all they could see. There were steps, and nothing else.

  “Let's,” Harry said tentatively, meekly, maybe-we-shouldn'tly, “go.”

  “No,” breathed the other three, but again they followed.

  The steps sang like chimes. Soon, as the four of them stepped down, a harplike mix of bells rang out. The tones became deeper as they sank into the darkness, turning by sneaky degrees to the middling screech of a stepped-on cat and then to the deep bellow of a funeral mass organ. The tones grew so low and thundering their stomachs rumbled. They looked back to see that the lights disappeared as they left them behind, and, to their horror, they found that along with the lights the steps disappeared too.

  They found themselves at the bottom, huddled together, four bodies in the dark trying to fit into the space of one.

  “I'm scared,” Larry said.

  “Don't be,” Harry countered.

  “Why not?” asked Chubby.

  “Don't know,” Harry admitted.

  “Come on,” said Brenda this time.

  The darkness drifted before them. They sensed something just out of reach, taunting them, debating whether to move back or strike. Things ticked along the floor, brushed at their legs. Chubby felt a clawed thing grab his ankle and release it in the same movement. Dusty things brushed their faces. When they covered their faces, dusty things brushed their hands.

  “I'm scared” Larry repeated.

  “You're supposed to be,” Harry tried, as all around them it grew lighter.

  They could see themselves now, their trembling arms and deliciously knocking knees. They could see each other's wild faces. With quick eyes they looked down for the crawling, drifting things, but saw nothing.

  A door creaked open in front of them.

  “I’m scared! I’m scared!“ Larry screamed, turning to flee.

  Something held him back. There was a wall a foot behind them moving up on them all the time, compelling them to move on. Larry scratched at it, beginning to cry. Harry and Chubby grabbed him, pulled him through the doorway after them.

  A voice sounded, the Spook Man's voice, and Larry quieted immediately.

  “Welcome to my cellar, “it said.

  Blackness descended then. And then a cacophony of lights. Fangs, radium-bright, flew at them from every corner. Deep and ponderous chains were dragged before them, around them. A cauldron made its appearance, bubbling and rolling green-hot liquid. It stirred itself, and then was stirred in turn by the vilest of witches—warts, cackle, and all. The cauldron evaporated, and then the witch was on her broom, coming straight at them and veering up and over at the last second in a steep angle. Skulls appeared at the four corners of the room, at headheight, and then skeletons winked into view below them. A skeletal rattle-dance commenced.

  Harry and Chubby and Brenda danced with it. All hints of fear were gone, replaced by wild abandon. They danced like wood creatures, aping the gestures of their bony mates. They laughed.

  Larry tried to laugh. Instead he made a compromise, painting his mouth with a horrible rictuslike smile that did little to hide his paralysis. He was paralyzed by fear; horrified by the revel of his wild friends. He wanted to be home, under the sheets and under layer on layer of patchwork quilt, listening to nothing but his own even breathing and the silence of his self-made night. He wanted Mother and Father to be out in the living room, further boarding the windows. He wanted Sis to be in the bedroom next door, sleeping safe with her lemon-yellow duck clasped under her sucking thumb. He wanted the TV to be on; the radio to be on; he wanted to play games, Scrabble and Parcheesi and hearts and rummy. He wanted, along with everyone else, the Spook Man to be gone.

  Larry's grin grew wider.

  The monsters came now.

  Brenda and Harry and Chubby cheered. Here they all were, the models they had built and the comics they had collected come to life. They came in a dancing procession, out of the dark and back into it again. First Frankenstein, green, square, and parading false life, his arms frozen in front; then Dracula—no, two Draculas, snarling and circling each other like caged tigers, each seeking to snap redly at the other's neck. Mummies followed; then wolfmen howling at artificial moons that blinked on above; then sea creatures of all sorts, dripping seaweed and smelling of salt and rotting fish. Then the invaders from Space, each more tentacled and more colorful than the one preceding, with breathing apparatus and bulging eyes. There were bat-men and bat-women, giant insects galore, a gaggle of hairless beasts slowly diminishing in number as the gluttonous blob-creature behind them ate them off one at a time. There were men with pumpkin heads and men with fly heads, men with dogs' heads, men with no heads. Growling rabbits. Mammoth frogs. Titanic rats, some so crazed they were eating themselves. Armless, legless, eyeless things; things that crawled and snapped and clicked; slimy things; things that went flit and were gone before they could be identified. Creatures of the night. Creatures of every underground imagination.

  Horrid things.

  Chubby and Brenda and Harry celebrated each monster's passing. With each new fright their huzzahs grew. Here was every nightmare they had ever dreamed about served up like breakfast, the nastiest breakfast there ever was. The monsters came and went, invoking death and rot and damp earth.

  Chubby suddenly stopped cheering.

  As if a spell had broken, he looked at the faces of h
is three friends and found only on Larry's what he wanted to see.

  “I don't think this is so much fun anymore,” he said in a bare whisper. Larry looked to him with hope; Harry and Brenda were lost in the procession of evil.

  “I think I want to leave,” Chubby said a little louder.

  “I want to go home,” Larry joined in without hesitation.

  Harry and Brenda showed no interest in them.

  “I don't want to be here,” Larry shouted above the flapping of batwings, the bellowing of the not-alive.

  Brenda grabbed him and howled, demonlike, into his face.

  Chubby momentarily lost himself again, becoming a wild thing. The three of them danced a witches' ring around Larry, screeching and tearing at their hair. The other monsters were gone. They formed a wider circle, and fairy lights, wisps of pale bright shooting stars, twirled round with them.

  The terror burst out of Larry.

  “I don't want to be here!” he screamed, “I never meant any of it, never believed any of it! I don't like spiders and toads and snakes—I'm scared of mice! I built monster models, but I built model cars and ships and planes too. I read Creepy and Strange and Ghoul and Monster comics but I also read Archie and Superman. I snuck out to the movies to see Westerns and funny movies, instead of always watching the Wolfman. I threw out the model guillotine you made me build; I like to collect coins and baseball cards and stamps.” He was crying now “I don't even like the night-time—I'm afraid of the dark!”

  The wild dance stopped. Chubby stepped over with Larry, hung his head.

  “Me,” he muttered, “too.”

  Brenda and Harry stood, unmoved. There was a wild ruby gleam in their eyes; their faces seemed more elongated, their ears sharper edged.

  “We want to go home!” Chubby and Larry begged.

  A door opened in the darkness.

  It was a rectangle cut out of nothing, leading to the outside night. There was the baseball field, there the chainlink fence they had climbed, few bare trees all bathed in velvet moonlight.

  Larry and Chubby ran through the door.