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.