Toyland- the Legacy of Wallace Noel

by Tony Bertauski

  “Ah!” Tin threw Monkeybrain across the kitchen.

  He thudded on the refrigerator, lanky arms and legs swinging wildly into a heap. Pip jump off her stool and swept her purple companion off the floor, squeezing him tightly.

  “Sorry, sorry. I didn’t mean to…” Tin turned to her mom. “There was a spider on my neck and I just… I’m sorry, Pip. Is he all right?”

  “It’s all right,” she whispered to him. “She said she’s sorry.”

  Tin kept her distance. Monkeybrain’s head fell over Pip’s shoulder, big eyes fixed on her. It was a spider on her neck, that was what she kept telling herself. A bug or something.

  His fingers didn’t move.

  Pip hooked his hands around her neck and went back to the counter, where she explained to her purple friend what gingerbread was and how he was going to like the icing. Mom whispered to Tin, “She’s all right. Go on.”

  Tin, with her hand still on her neck, stopped in the doorway.

  “Hey, Pip?” she said. “What did you mean when you said Monkeybrain was nervous?”

  Pip was singing a song and making a gingerbread wall dance. It was familiar, but she couldn’t remember the words.

  “Piggy is gone,” Pip said.

  “Piggy?” Tin looked at her mom then remembered the pig she’d found in the woods. “The one in the bedroom?”

  Pip shrugged. “That’s what he said.”

  “Said what?”

  She nibbled on a gingerbread wall and offered Monkeybrain a bite. Mom had to ask her to answer.

  “He’s nervous,” she said, crumbs falling, “because Piggy might get lost.”

  Tin wrapped a towel around her damp hair. Steam was wafting. The hot water heater worked just fine. Her pendant necklace stuck to her chest. It was oval and metal, a necklace Awnty Awnie always wore, and the one item Mom wanted Tin to have.

  She grabbed a pair of jeans. The button pinched against her belly. The jeans were old with ripped knees. They used to be comfortable. She hurried back to the bedroom and pulled on sweatpants instead. A few minutes later, Corey came up.

  She looked down at the lobby. A fire was roaring with empty couches. She quietly latched the door and climbed up the slide.

  “Have you seen Piggy?” Tin looked under the beds for the tenth time. “I left her right there, remember?”

  “Your sister probably has him, or her. How do you know it’s a girl?”

  “Do you know what she said? She said Monkeybrain was worried because she might get lost.”

  “Sounds legit.” He flopped on the bed. “I wouldn’t mind doing the same, as in getting lost from this place.”

  “Don’t you get it?”

  “Yeah. I heard you. Then I said, I wouldn’t mind—”

  “Do you remember where I found Piggy? In the woods.”

  “Is this a test?”

  “It’s weird, right? All the stuffed animals out in the woods and my sister saying Piggy might get lost again.” She grabbed handfuls of his sweatshirt. “Right?”

  “Yes.” He nodded mechanically. “It is weird.”

  She shoved him down and stood in front of the empty closet. She rubbed her neck. She’d scrubbed with shampoo until it was raw. That sensation she’d felt when Monkeybrain was holding on to her still lingered. It wasn’t delicate spider legs crawling up her back. She’d lied about that.

  It was felty fingers.

  “Did you see this?” She pointed in the closet.

  “Is it a pig?”

  “Just… look.”

  He slowly, reluctantly, peeked at the small door. He pushed it with a finger. The hinge squeaked.

  “Maybe Uncle Wally had a wiener dog.”

  “There’s one in the workshop, too.”

  “A wiener dog?”

  “A door, idiot.”

  “I’m afraid to ask.” He stood up. “What do you think they’re for?”

  She started to say it then stopped herself. Mouth open, her thoughts folded themselves into an unrecognizable origami that fluttered down to her stomach. He’d check out if she told him she thought Monkeybrain grabbed her. He already didn’t believe her about the hat.

  “Looook,” Corey said slowly, “I don’t want to say I’m the voice of reason here, but—”

  “I don’t know,” she blurted. “I don’t know what the doors are for. I just know I found stuffed animals in the woods and-and-and there’s a weird little door in the closet and Piggy is gone and I don’t know.”

  He looked a little panicked. She was breathing a little too fast and she was about to say maybe, you know, Piggy went through the door. Everyone was too calm about this place. But then everyone didn’t put on an elf hat and transport to the North Pole.

  What’s happening to me?

  When she looked up, he was wearing the floppy green hat with a kind grin. He put his hands out like it was nothing, just like before. There was no noise in the house, no visions.

  “You think I’m lying,” she said, “don’t you.”

  “I mean—”

  “Mom wants to go home, you know. Because of the noises.”

  “Yeah, they’re a little, you know, not right. But compared to bedroom chutes and ladders, they’re normal.”

  “Do you want to leave?”

  “Haunted Toyland? I’m going to say yeah.”

  She snatched the hat off his head and fell on the bed. It was nothing like that Santa hat her mom found in the kitchen. This was just so authentic, so warm. A tingling sensation tugged inside her belly. Her legs were still a little jelly from putting it on the night before.

  “Awnty Awnie was there,” she muttered.

  “Where?”

  “When I put the hat on. And it wasn’t a dream, Corey. I was there. I could feel the leaves and trees. I was scratched and bleeding. I wasn’t able to move anything, you know. Like it was a memory or something I couldn’t change. It happened and I went back to see it.”

  “But you touched the ground,” he said. “You were scratched by a branch. So something’s touching you. It doesn’t make sense, you know that, right?”

  She was shaking her head because he was right, it didn’t make sense. But what did? Nothing about this house—the fire tower, the fact that there was heat and a refrigerator and lights—made any sense. Least of all, an elf hat.

  “I think it’s trying to tell me something,” she said.

  “Like it, uh, it’s talking to you?”

  “The visions. I think something happened here, and somehow this knows.” The little bell rang. “It’s showing me.”

  “Like a movie. Cool, cool, cool.” He backed up. “I’m not going anywhere, no need to worry. Just maybe, you know, I’ll take a walk down the road, catch a bar of reception, Google psychotic breaks and elf hats.” He deadpanned, “You got a problem, stepsis.”

  She shoved past him and walked down the slide. The iron door clanged behind her and echoed in the lobby. She was almost to the rope ladder.

  “Where you going?” he said.

  He was right, she had a problem. And it started with the hat. There had to be answers. She was going to start where they found it.

  5

  “You destroyed this place,” Corey said.

  The workshop doors were askew, but not in the normal M. C. Escher meets Willie Wonka askew. One door wouldn’t budge. The other one took some effort.

  The center table was buried. Tin had knocked down a shelf when they found the hat. The entire wall had fallen since then. Every tool, every box was turned over. Plastic doll parts, brassy screws and rusty bolts were scattered.

  Their phones cut dusty beams. She stepped over shards of mason jars that once held miscellaneous fasteners. The schematic of Pando was still pinned above the workbench.

  “Uh, Tin?”

  Corey was pointing his light into the back corner. A rope ladder had unfurled against the wall. Tin added her beam and slowly made her way across the room.

  It was more than a rope ladder. It h
ad been engineered like steps supported by thick ropes, something that could be pulled into the wall. It reminded her of the steep stairwell at Awnty Awnie’s house.

  All these mystery doors have access. It’s just figuring it out.

  She tested the bottom step. The ropes creaked and swayed.

  “You’re going up?” he said.

  She put all her weight on the second step. “Get closer and light my way.”

  He was still standing at the entrance. She pulled herself up a step at a time and held the ropes in case a tread snapped. There were fifteen of them, each made of rough-hewn cypress and each one more untrustworthy than the one below it.

  She was near the top when the outline of a door as black as the wall was visible. It hadn’t been behind the shelves. They just didn’t see it the first time. But the ladder wasn’t here. Her hands ached. It would be a long and dangerous fall onto a heap of pointy things.

  “Closer.”

  She waited patiently. Each step Corey took required another chiding to take the next. Her grip was trembling by the time he was near the bottom step. Her heart thumped once as she reached for an inset T-shaped doorknob. The well-oiled latch clicked and the door swung inward.

  “What is it?” Corey called.

  It felt humid and smelled green. She pulled herself up. There was a floor just past the last wooden tread. Carefully, she put her weight forward and reached for her phone.

  “There’s another door.” She waved the light.

  It was a short tunnel maybe three steps long. The floor was as black as everything else. The dust had been disturbed. Something had come through there. No telling how long this had been closed up. Maybe those footsteps had been there for fifty years or more.

  She tested each step and reached out for another T-shaped doorknob. Yellowish light knifed out as she threw it open. Scents of a forest flooded the short tunnel.

  “Tell me it’s gold,” Corey shouted. “Is it gold?”

  Tin’s thoughts and words were stolen by the sight of it. She stepped through the second doorway and let the wonder wash over her, humid and alive. A massive tree was growing through the floor, its trunk gnarly and knotted, the branches stretching and brushing the algae-stained windowpanes of an arching greenhouse ceiling. Vines hung like ropey tendrils.

  The vines dangled over cluttered shelves, stacks of boxes, and leaning towers of rubbish. Narrow aisles wandered between towering walls of junk.

  She took a step and caught herself on what looked like a streetlight post. The aisle was slippery. Not wet or cold, but icy. She took two careful steps and looked like a tourist in a foreign land—the sepia sunlight, the fallen leaves, the endless array of stuff.

  This was going back in time.

  The tree and vines hadn’t grown through a break in the floor. They were anchored in oversize planters, the walls splitting along the sides, roots spreading like anacondas.

  There was tapping behind her. Corey was testing the black tunnel. But when he saw what she saw—the tree, the stuff—he forgot where he was going. And she forgot to tell him.

  His first step went flying.

  He grabbed her sweatshirt with one hand and a coat rack with the other. A clatter of metal pans and an old set of antlers rattled on the floor. A fur pelt smothered their faces. It tickled her cheeks, musty and old. Corey threw it off with a groan. They lay there staring at ribs of the yellow panes of greenhouse glass, a translucent roof that was shaped in a half hemisphere connected to the wall.

  “Is that,” he said, pointing, “what I think it is?”

  She hadn’t noticed the life-sized mobile hanging above them. There were nine of them, two by two, each pair in front of the other with legs outstretched. Their antlers arching out. But one of them was in front, a massive animal with a set of antlers that dwarfed the others. The only thing missing was the sleigh.

  Ronin, she thought. The one in front is Ronin.

  She didn’t know how she knew his name. He wasn’t a reindeer anyone sang about. But he was the one who led the sleigh, the one who protected the herd. Did Awnty Awnie tell that story?

  “Did he, uh, did he stuff them?” Corey said.

  “They’re not real.” She carefully rolled onto her side. “Careful.”

  They helped each other stand. She stood the coat rack up and hung the fur. She’d seen that fur before. The man who was wearing it was lost on the North Pole with frostbite on his nose.

  “Wallace,” she whispered.

  She took baby steps to her right, holding onto solid objects where she could find them—a book rack made of walnut with hand-carved faces, a sculpture carved from white marble of an elf with oversized feet, an ornate cabinet with a slate inlay and a mirror that made her look distant and warped.

  Her slippery route wound past a bookshelf against the wall. It reached all the way to the glass ceiling. A ladder was bolted to rails so it could be pushed side to side to access all the hand-sewn covers, hardback and faded. She pulled one off the shelf, signed by the author.

  Charles Dickens.

  Just past a bamboo bird cage (the door open) and a rack of feathered spears, the space opened up to a chemistry lab, complete with glass tubes and flasks and long-melted puddles of candle wax. This space was somewhat orderly, a hardbacked chair pushed in, all the test tubes in their racks.

  A journal was left open.

  It was squared to the edge of the counter, the pages thick and brittle. The handwriting was beautiful. She couldn’t understand a thing, all of it symbols and equations—chemistry far beyond what she’d studied in high school—along with sketches that seemed more like fantasy daydreams.

  The aisle continued through a maze of items—wooden skis, a wall of plaster masks, a collection of paper lamps—that led to the apex on the other side of the tree. The branches hung over an arching dais.

  Someone was watching her.

  She took wide steps up to the platform, thankfully not slippery, where a desk faced the glass wall. Once upon a time, she imagined, this was where Wallace sat with an unimpeded view.

  Now it was Pando.

  The famous life-sized panda bear was seated in a leather-padded chair. The arms and legs were thick and stiff. The fur was dense and in the familiar black and white patterns with two big green buttons for eyes. The chair was turned toward her like someone who was expecting her arrival, but it was only the button-eyed panda with a grin stitched beneath his shiny nose.

  The desk was wider than usual and, unlike the laboratory, cluttered with useless things beneath fallen leaves and brittle twigs. Shelves were positioned next to it and loaded with office items. A rack of scrolls next to it. Several books were set upright, leaning as if some were missing.

  A zebra was in the middle of the desk.

  It was a normal-sized toy, one a child could wrap her arms around. The black and white striped legs were splayed outward, the fur dusted with pollen and debris. The head was bowing as if it was looking at the center of the desk. It had been there for some time.

  Tin pushed the chair to the side. Pando fell forward. He was warm from the sun. She pushed him upright. He was heavy and firmly packed. She reached for one of the slender leather-bound books.

  It was a journal.

  The cover was soft and scratched where it had been continuously handled. The font was recessed and gilded with gold letters. She smelled its oldness. Her chest fluttered with anticipation.

  Just like Awnty Awnie’s journal.

  Awnty Awnie had filled her book with newspaper clippings. Tin turned a page in hopes of finding explanations. Perhaps there were such musings at one time. But no longer.

  The pages had been ripped out.

  Threads hung from the binding. The inside of the cover was dated. It was about the time the urban legends began. Only the corner of a page remained. It clung to the bottom of the binding, a triangle of hope in black ink.

  … a way out, it read.

  “Tin,” Corey called, “you’ve got to see th
is.”

  The route to the other side of the room was circuitous and slow. Twice she almost went down. He was staring at the brick wall. There were no shelves or books like she’d seen on the other side.

  It was photographs.

  They were black and white, framed and squared on the wall. They were scenic shots of jungles and mountains, rivers and volcanoes, oceans, snow, deserts and wetlands. All the things her mom had described in the slides she’d found in Awnty Awnie’s footlocker.

  Corey was staring at one.

  The woman was wearing a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up. The man wore suspenders, with a wide-brimmed hat shading his face and a cigar between his teeth.

  “It’s them…” She shook her finger at it. “I was there.”

  “They looked like that?”

  Chills clamped down like a cold iron vise. Her scalp was shrink-wrapped. She grabbed onto an armoire. That was how they were dressed in the dream, when the tree fell, when they looked at the plans.

  “Exactly.”

  There were progressive shots of the construction of Toyland—the skeletal scaffolding, the walls and roof, and windows. The fire tower stood in the background. Toyland was finished in the last photo, with someone in it.

  It was Wallace.

  He was wearing a white T-shirt with suspenders and a generous belly. Awnty Awnie was leaning on him. They were smiling.

  “Notice anything missing?” Corey said.

  She looked back down the line. “No toys.”

  He was right. There were toys in every photo in the lobby—at play, swinging, posing.

  “Is that what I think it is?” Corey said.

  Wallace and Awnty Awnie were shoulder to shoulder, checkered shade falling through his mesh hat. One beefy hand was over her shoulder. His other was behind his back. There was nothing unusual about it. The way they were leaning forward looked natural. Corey noticed the roll of paper peeking out from behind his sleeve.

  He’s holding the plans.

  Tin looked around the room. She’d seen a thousand items since entering, and she’d only been down one of the aisles.