The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories

by James D. Jenkins

  The four of us formed a gang, developing a kind of friendship, even if the vast majority of our time together was spent discussing the practical aspects of our toys’ dying process. There were two boys and one girl in the group besides me. The fact that our mothers wanted their boys to set aside their plush toys at a certain age was more or less understandable, but I have the impression that parents are less strict with girls in this respect. A girl can play with plush toys for a longer period of time, my therapist agrees with me in this – it is socially acceptable for a girl to keep her plush toys even into adulthood. Still, the girl’s plush toy, Ferkó, got infected with the sickness all the same.

  Vili more or less stagnated the first two weeks; only the rupture in his armpit had apparently been growing bigger, and the thread had started to loosen in other areas as well – at his foot, at the edge of his hand where he had black claws made of cotton. By the end of the second weekend his fur started to fade. During this period Vili’s voice in my head was calming. He kept my spirits up, as if I were the sick one, not him. I often fell asleep listening to his voice.

  During this time I unfortunately sometimes peed in my bed again. My therapist says that’s normal, it’s called regression, an emotional reaction which entails going back to a former stage of development. After a while, I stopped sleeping with Vili because I didn’t want to stain his fur. My mother was not very happy with the bedwetting, and I was well aware that it was a sign of weakness. My mother would shake her head impatiently and sigh heavily to express her discontent, and I would stand in the middle of my room in shame, shaking in the coldness of dawn, but Vili’s voice gave me comfort even then.

  Then things took a turn for the worse.

  One day I came home from school and found Vili on the floor, the thread broken on his side and the white stuffing pouring out of him. My heart sank. I thought Vili had died while I was at school. But I could hear his voice, very quiet, weary with pain, but still clear. Vili was alive. I took him carefully in my shaking hands, which only caused him to lose even more stuffing, my throat went dry from panic, I could hardly breathe. I laid Vili on my bed and tried to hold his wound together. I couldn’t sew, and I despised myself for that. Eventually, I applied super glue to the edges of the wound and held the material together while I whispered to Vili that everything was going to be all right, although I knew that nothing was ever going to be all right.

  The next day it turned out that the others had had similar experiences as well. One of my friends, the boy who always wore black-framed glasses, told us about the deterioration of his plush toy named Nyinyi. My bespectacled friend’s thinking was a bit slow and dim – a year or two later he was sent to another school because his learning difficulties had become too severe.

  There is a chance – but not a certainty, because I didn’t stop to talk to him, I simply walked by as if he was a thrown-­away soda can or a cigarette butt on the cold concrete – that I passed by my friend a couple of years ago, now an adult. My friend apparently lived on the streets, he had a thick blanket wrapped around his waist. There was a tin can by his feet with some coins in it. My friend kept staring straight ahead like someone who had stopped counting the minutes and days long ago and let time flow effortlessly through him. He was still wearing the black-framed glasses, which he kept sparkling clean just like in his childhood. I didn’t turn towards him, and I didn’t give him money. I wanted to get this miserable man out of my sight as quickly as possible. Maybe it wasn’t even my friend, just someone who looked like him.

  When my friend was still a kid, he told me how Nyinyi’s condition took a turn for the worse. Under Nyinyi’s tiny, fluffy tail a hole opened up – it was not even the thread but the fabric itself that loosened, allowing Nyinyi’s freshly torn anus to eject thick red fiber onto the floor. My friend tried to push the yarn back, but he only made the hole bigger. My other two friends, the boy and the girl, listened in shock first to the account of my bespectacled friend, and then to mine. Later that week their own plush toys started to deteriorate as well. One morning the girl found her toy Ferkó with a severed arm – his right arm had detached from his body during the night. The other boy’s plush toy, Egyes, went into paralysis. We didn’t quite understand what this meant, since we all knew that plush toys don’t move by themselves, only when we move them or imagine them to be moving. Well, my friend’s toy didn’t move anymore. He didn’t die, my friend told me; he was one hundred percent alive, only disabled. Soon after, the stuffing started to pour out of Egyes’ mouth – the sickness made him vomit up his own guts.

  We were all faced with the situation that our plush toys were losing their vital filling, and our knowledge taken from movies made it clear to us that such an excessive loss leads to certain death. We needed a transfusion to keep our toys alive, and for this we had to find other, still living plush toys.

  I fished out some of my old toys from the toybox, those I hadn’t played with for a long time – Szilvio, a plush bunny who was given to me by distant relatives for a Christmas years past (I didn’t give him this name, it was written on the funny bow he was wearing); a Disney-­franchise plush based on one of their current movie’s side characters, which I named Gyuri for reasons unknown, and finally a female fox, Anni, who used to be my favorite toy for a long time, until I didn’t find her fur soft enough anymore, so upon mutual agreement I had retired her into the toybox. Now I spread them out one by one on the floor. I could hear their voices as well, those old voices they used to talk to me in when I still played with them. But Vili’s voice drowned theirs out. He was begging me not to do this, that these toys didn’t deserve it – but by then Vili had another hole in his body and the stuffing needed urgent replacement. I also knew that no matter how brave Vili wanted me to see him, he was terrified; I felt it. At this time Vili often talked to me in his sleep. I don’t think he was conscious, his words were too confused, too out of character – he was whining in his sleep, often mumbling obscenities; every word reeked of fear.

  I smuggled a knife and a pair of scissors from the kitchen and I started with Gyuri, the Disney toy. I never considered him to be too clever, nor very sensitive; on the other hand he was made of an excellent material manufactured somewhere in China. He didn’t get sick though, and I was angry at him for this. He didn’t deserve to be so lucky. I made an incision with the knife on Gyuri’s abdomen – I could hear him screaming in pain, then begging for his life. But at that point there was no turning back. I slipped the scissors into his wound and cut through his skin. Gyuri was screaming, and I was screaming with him, or instead of him because he didn’t have a mouth or throat to scream out loud. I wanted to give him an actual voice in his final minutes.

  My mother asked me during dinner why I was shouting in my room. I told her I was doing surgeries, dissections in order to prolong Vili’s life expectancy. My mother was drinking red wine, I recall this because her teeth were black when she smiled. Good, she said, I’m glad that you’re taking responsibility.

  That made me happy. My therapist says this is normal, children always want to live up to their parents’ expectations, and my mother’s expectations were always quite high. She took out a box of ice cream from the freezer and carved out a slice of the delicacy for me. This happened very rarely, only on festive occasions. She placed the bowl full of ice cream in front of me and took another sip of the red wine. She kissed the top of my head, another evident sign of motherly love, which nonetheless scared me at that moment. My hair got sticky from drool and wine. It’s important, she said, that we take care of our loved ones, that we’re by their side even in times of hardship.

  I didn’t notice it as a child, but my father says my mother was drinking too much in that period, usually right before bedtime. This made my father unwilling to share the bed with her, bothered by the smell of alcohol. Now he drinks too, of course. Apart from that night I still remember my mother as a sober person though.

  My father la
ter also told me, and this gives a special context to my mother’s behavior that night, that my mother had abandoned her own mother in the final hours of the latter’s life. Or final days. Or final weeks. All in all, my mother kept her distance in the physical, geographical, and emotional sense as well. My grandmother died alone. That night my mother obviously projected her desire to have done it differently onto me. I was, of course, not aware of this at that time. I ate my ice cream and in the following days I butchered my remaining plush toys, screaming and whimpering to vocalize their death throes under the edge of my scissors.

  There were times when I would scream for hours, because I didn’t finish Anni off right away. We figured that only freshly transfused stuffing was optimal for our plush toys. There could not be more than half an hour between the moment of transfusion and the donor’s death, otherwise the stuffing would coagulate – it would turn useless and poisonous. But if we only took a handful of stuffing from our donor at a time the donor wouldn’t necessarily die; on the contrary, we could keep them alive at our will in order to extract a second and third portion from them, this way prolonging the lives of our favorite plush toys. I extracted three portions from Anni, and I gave voice to her suffering all the way to the end. I didn’t enjoy killing the toys. I hid their remains shamefully in the corners of my room, and early one morning I sneaked out to the street and threw the carcasses into a distant trash can. Then I spent days in terror fearing that someone would knock on my door and confront me with the murder of the three plush toys.

  Naturally this never occurred, but my therapist agrees with me that such a fear is an indication of my lack of sociopathic tendencies. I didn’t find joy in this kind of torture, and my mind feared retaliation – for I regarded my actions as sinful.

  Sometimes I wish I had enjoyed it. Then everything would have been so much easier.

  I carefully stuffed the fresh filling into Vili. I knew this was a painful, demanding procedure for him as well, so I sedated him in my imagination. He breathed in anesthetic gas from an old carnival mask made of papier mâché – obviously this mask was turned into an anesthetic mask only in my mind, but the trick worked. Vili fell asleep; I could hear his rhythmic breathing in my thoughts, but not his voice. Why I didn’t do this with the toys I killed I cannot say for certain, but on some primordial level I felt that pain was a necessary element of the process.

  I carefully stuffed the fresh, hot filling under his skin with my fingers. I used an office stapler for the stitches. One of my friends, the one without glasses, managed to get a stapler for each of us. His parents were rich and successful. They had some sort of company, and maybe a restaurant too, but I’m not entirely sure about that. Everyone was a little scared of him because his family was so wealthy, and the power of money can be sensed even as a child. I met him once as an adult. He didn’t recognize me, although he was staring right at me – or maybe he did but chose not to talk to me. He quickly looked away and rushed off, perhaps holding the handle of his briefcase a tiny bit tighter. He had an expensive suit, an expensive briefcase, and an expensive pair of shoes. It hurt me a bit that he didn’t recognize me, just like I didn’t recognize my friend with the glasses.

  Anyway, as a child he stole the equipment for us from one of their offices. This speeded up the stitching procedure, which was crucial for me because Vili’s sewing loosened more and more every day. No matter how quickly I stuffed in the new filling, when I came home from school or woke up at dawn, he had lost just as much or even more in the meantime.

  When we ran out of plush toys at home we had to look elsewhere for resupply. Since we were kids, we didn’t have much to spend, except for our rich friend. He was able to purchase new toys and gave us some spare coins now and then, but never enough. With my other two friends I would go through the charity shops in the hope of finding some discounted plush toys. Sometimes we would steal toys from these shops and run through the streets like hyenas with our prey, hoping that no one was following us. These stolen toys smelled like poverty, but they fulfilled the purpose we needed them for. We eviscerated them and stuffed their filling into our own toys. The girl’s older sister advised us to mix fresh blood into the cotton wool so our plush toys would get stronger. We followed her advice and collected lizards from our school’s sunny playground. They were easier to kill than the plush toys because we didn’t need to imitate their suffering, they were inherently alive. We slushed their blood onto the cotton wool, but this method didn’t bring any visible results.

  Not then at least.

  The situation soon turned more dire. Vili’s skin burst in several places, but not along the stitching like before: the plush itself had worn so much that the wear eventually became a hole, through which the life-­giving filling flowed out. These parts were harder to staple because the fabric would often burst or grow precariously thin. Vili’s friendly eyes also became blurred. They were covered in some kind of fog, as if his plastic eyes had faded from the inside. One afternoon, as I was trying to close up his recent wounds, Vili’s left eye fell out of its place and hit the floor with a thud. I felt like I was going to vomit. Vili was blindly looking at me with his one eye, while where his other eye should have been there was only plush and filling. I wanted to scream, but I bit my arm instead. I didn’t dare hug Vili because I was scared his other eye would fall out as well. I tried to glue the fallen eye back, but my efforts were clearly in vain. The eye had nothing to stick to anymore, it would only fall out together with the filling again. I knew that Vili’s time remaining would soon be up.

  At that point Vili was no longer able to sleep from the pain. I would listen to his groaning all night long, his begging, swearing, and cursing. This was not the Vili I knew – my Vili always knew what was right, even if the harder path was the right one. But at night the dying Vili loathed the world that doomed him to suffer – he would either insult everyone and everything with spite, or moan out of terror like a lunatic. He did his best to hold it together by day, but he spoke less and less. He became remote, and sometimes I could hear him cursing in the daytime as well.

  After a while, his other eye went blurry and eventually fell out. I put red tape in the place of his eyes, so Vili spent his last days with two red X’s on his face. The scattered limbs, eyes, and fluffy insides were starting to cause us more trouble. The boys complained that the scattered filling was infecting their other toys with sickness – the wheels detached from their Matchbox cars, their plastic soldiers fell apart, and their LEGO pieces didn’t fit together anymore. The girl attempted to work out the meticulous protocol of our plush toys’ dying process because her parents were doctors. Hence, following the girl’s advice, we started to collect the potentially infectious plush body parts in resealable plastic bags – we painted the universal biohazard symbol onto the bags with black markers. I placed Vili’s eyes, stuffing, and one of his legs that had detached in the meantime into one of these bags.

  I was scared to stay alone in my room, especially after I woke up one night to the gaze of Vili’s red X eyes. Vili was lying on my pillow and stared right at me, even though at night I would always put him into a warm, cozy nest on the floor, firstly in order to protect him from potential bedwetting and secondly because I could barely stand his smell anymore. He smelled of death, and I would choke from it at night. My eyes, Vili shouted at me. Where are my eyes? I screamed and tossed Vili away, causing him to fall on the floor with a painful groan. For the first time I peed my bed while I was awake. Vili was whimpering quietly on the floor, so I got out of bed, carefully slipped my hands under his head, and placed him back in his nest. Although I was scared, I wasn’t angry at him. He was only a sick, demented plush toy. He didn’t mean to hurt me, not consciously at least.

  Not yet.

  The others reported similar experiences about their plush toys’ disturbed minds. Our rich friend claimed that Egyes had been whispering terrible things in his ear all night about the endless, bleak darkn
ess that swallows everyone like an insane father, and about the Black Emperor who ruled in its guts. The girl stated that Ferkó had attempted to sneak out the window – whether he wanted to escape or kill himself was not entirely clear, but after she thwarted his plan she could feel him pinching her feet and thighs so as to prevent her from falling asleep. Since then she would sometimes wake up to find her plush toy lying on her chest with his mouth attached to her skin, as if he was trying to suck the life and flesh out of her. Our friend with the glasses recounted that his plush toy walked in circles around the room, cursing and swearing and listing the names of those who had offended him, those who ought to be ended, whose heads should be pinned onto the wall of the LEGO castle, whose blood should be used to sully the television screens.

  My therapist maintains that these episodes are no more than violent fantasies, the products of a child’s imagination, which we brought to life in order to confront the unbearable stress and confusion we were faced with. Still, after a while I had to tie Vili up at night because he would often crawl into my bed, nauseating me with his filthy breath, his burning gaze pointed at me and clutching a tiny plastic sword in his hand. If I tied him up, nothing of that sort would happen; then I would only hear his painful groaning, his whining that overflowed with his terrible fear of death, and his cursing of life. He cursed the one who brought him to life, who forced him to live and die, for otherwise he had existed in lifeless unconsciousness until then.

  He was cursing me.

  Our friend with the glasses was first. One day he found Nyinyi lifeless on the floor. Nyinyi had passed away in his sleep. Our friend’s parents threw Nyinyi’s corpse in the trash, and when the body disappeared from the trash can leaving dirty traces behind on the floor, they resorted to corporal punishment against their son. Despite our friend’s firm insistence that he hadn’t touched Nyinyi’s corpse. The second night after Nyinyi’s disappearance our friend saw him from his window. The deceased toy was dragging a dead cat through the street, disappearing under a garbage bin with his victim. The next day our friend examined the bin and its surroundings but found nothing but used stuffing.