“We’re not going anywhere!” he screamed as he shoved me behind him, sending me reeling, stumbling onto the ground. I fell on my ass as new tears pricked the edges of my eyes. Andy glared at me, but he never once dropped his hand to me.
“Get them,” he said to the Thief. “Hers and mine. Or I’ll make you regret it.”
The creature stared, seeming unsure of this new turn. Then he slowly slunk away into the darkness.
“Why are you doing this?”
“Because they’re ours. He had no right to—”
“No,” I said, cutting him off. “Why are you acting like this?”
He said nothing at first, just stared at me, confused. Then, like a switch had been suddenly flipped, his eyes grew dark and guilty.
“I don’t know,” he said, his breath quickening. He was shaking his head back and forth, his chest heaving like a man on the edge of a panic attack.
“Calm down,” I told him, reaching out to him.
“No,” he said, swatting my hand away. All at once, he was on his knees, scratching at his raw legs. “That thing,” he muttered. “That fucking thing. It thinks it can do whatever it wants.”
“Then let it,” I cried. “I just want to go home.”
There was a shuffling behind us, and we turned to find the Thief slithering down the wall above us, his head twitching, pink eyes glistening. With his head turned down like a scolded child, he approached us and opened his mouth. I knew it was coming. I had wondered if it were possible. But knowing did little to prepare me to hear that voice as he spoke.
“Y-yours,” he hissed. The word was choppy, broken, something that had been forgotten and remembered. The pitch was high, like a toddler who didn’t know he had long ago grown up. There was a sense that this creature had passed adolescence and manhood, straight into old age, all beneath the earth, surrounded by other people’s toys. I remembered the picture in my pocket, and I wondered.
He opened his sore-infested hand and the plastic Superman spilled out onto the ground. Then he raised another hand from behind him and showed me the bear. Part of me wanted it, begged for it, longed to be back in my bed curled up with it. Then I saw the red, scabbed hand that held it, and I felt a sudden desire to draw the lighter from my bag and send it up in flames. But either way, it was mine, and I was leaving here with it.
I kept waiting for him to drop it like he had Andy’s toy, but he didn’t. I noticed his hand was shaking, and a thread of saliva was dripping from the side of his mouth. I remembered how he had found me after I went walking in the woods with my bear, remembered Andy’s theory that the Thief had tracked me like a bloodhound. Then I remembered the way he had acted after he laid those horrid hands on Andy’s skin, and I knew, somehow, that the two things were the same. He was feeding on Andy, taking something from him, just as he fed on the toys. I thought of Andy’s other forgotten toys, the ones the Thief had left behind, focusing only on the most important, the most delectable treats.
Whatever this… feeding was, it was happening right there in front of me, to my bear, and it must have been a wonderful sensation. Even here, with Andy clutching what seemed to be the Thief’s most prized possession, he still couldn’t easily let go. I couldn’t stand it anymore, so I reached forward and snatched the bear away. It felt suddenly dirty in my hands, and I just didn’t want to touch it, so I scooped up Andy’s Superman and slid them both into my backpack. The Toy Thief closed his eyes and sighed, the moment of ecstasy broken.
“Now,” I said as I zipped the bag closed. “Please. Let’s go.”
Another rumble of thunder, this one even louder than before, seemed to wake Andy out of the haze he was in. Slowly, still holding the globe in front, he began to shuffle back down the hall.
“M-mine,” the Thief said, pointing. “Pleassse…”
“No,” I whispered. This thing was pitiful, an awful, bent creature that shouldn’t have existed. And there was pain in that horrible face, miserable pain that might be temporarily quenched by that snow globe. I glanced up at it, saw the tiny family within, saw the silver flakes dancing around them, thought of the boy in the picture. I wanted to give it back, to leave this awful creature to his own devices, but I knew we wouldn’t make it far without something to ensure our safe passage.
“Not until we’re out of here,” I said for Andy. “We’ll leave it outside. You can get it when we’re gone…”
“Puh-puh-lease… is mine. F-from her…”
Was that her in the picture? The thought made my heart break a little, but Andy had different plans. He was shaking, that strange look washing over his face once more.
“Your mother?”
“Yesss…”
“Did you love her?”
The creature nodded.
“Good. That means this will hurt.”
With a single, swift motion, he raised the globe and threw it down onto the rocks, shattering it into a million glittering pieces.
Chapter Ten
Dad died about six years ago. I was grown by then, on my own, self-sufficient more or less. It was a punch though. One I didn’t see coming. Those are always the ones that hurt the most.
It was his heart, because of course it was. Decades of fast food will do that. He had a massive heart attack on… a Tuesday, I think. Then, on Thursday, when he was waiting on surgery, he had another one. They thought everything was stable, but his ticker was just a bit weaker than they thought. He wasn’t that old, after all. Men his age run marathons and climb mountains nowadays.
I didn’t know what to do. I can be honest about that. I was working nonstop at the time, fresh out of college, carving out a shitty career for myself. All of it, rolling along without a care in the world, when boom, the call came in. What are you supposed to do? What can any of us really hope to do when that call comes in?
You go. You sit. You talk.
“They’ll get you fixed up,” I told him about twelve hours before he died. “They know what they’re doing.”
I spent the entire day sitting next to his hospital bed, occasionally holding his hand when he cried here and there. He didn’t think it was the end. Neither of us did, but he had passed beyond something in his mind. The days of living one moment to the next were over, because he knew that soon enough, there would be no more moments. The last day would be two days away, then tomorrow, then today. I could see him working it out in his mind. I won’t say his life flashed before him, but he was more wistful than I could ever remember him being. Growing up, it had always been about pushing forward, charging into the next moment, making sure that Andy and I were full of food, that the lights were still on, that the bills were all paid. Now bills didn’t mean anything. I was paying my own way and Andy was… well, he was behind bars, the family secret that everyone knew about.
We talked about Mom, and he told me about meeting her, the way she laughed at all his jokes. He told me about what a wonderful mother she had been, and he made sure to change the subject when he saw how uncomfortable it made me. And then, as I knew he would, he talked about Andy.
“I don’t know what I did wrong,” he said, tears on his cheek. “If I had it to do again, I… I just don’t know what I could have done different.”
I never told him about what happened that summer, beyond what he already knew, what everyone knew. There were parts of it that he surely guessed at, the secret that Andy and I shared, but he never knew the truth. How could he? But in that moment, for the first time, I came dangerously close to telling him everything, because I wanted him to know that it wasn’t his fault.
“Dad… what if I told you that there wasn’t anything you could have done?”