Teddy (The Pit)

by John Gault

  SUCH A SWEET LITTLE BOY.

  SUCH A DEAR TEDDY.

  WHY IS EVERYONE SO AFRAID?

  Sandy isn’t afraid. She’s the babysitter. And she and Jamie are going to be great pals. But Sandy should never tell Jamie she loves him, not even teasing. Maybe most boys Jamie’s age don’t know much about sex . . . but Teddy does. And Jamie does whatever his Teddy tells him.

  TEDDY

  A bright smiling boy and his Teddy. The lure of carnal evil. And a wave of sickening violence that sweeps through a terrified town. What fiend in their midst could do such hideous things? Teddy knows . . .

  “THEY’LL HAVE TO BE PUNISHED,”

  TEDDY SAID.

  “I thought she loved me. She said she did.” Jamie turned slowly, and a strange, far-off little smile crossed his lips, though his blue eyes were icy and hard.

  “Yes,” he said, “they’ll have to be punished.” The voice was not his. It was Teddy’s. “I’ll kill them now.”

  “We know a very good way, don’t we?”

  Jamie had to think for a few seconds, but Teddy didn’t prompt him. “Yes,” he said, the strange smile growing, “we really do, don’t we.”

  AMULET PICTURES PRESENTS

  TEDDY

  starring

  SAMMY SNYDERS

  and

  JEANNIE ELIAS

  Screenplay

  by Ian Stuart

  Executive Producer

  John F. Bassett

  Producer

  Bennet Fode

  Director

  Lew Lehman

  TEDDY

  A Seal Book / August 1980

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1980 by McClelland & Stewart-Bantam Ltd, Cover art copyright © 1980 by Bantam Books Inc. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. For information address: McClelland & Stewart Ltd., 59 Front Street East, Toronto, Ontario M5E 1B3.

  ISBN 0-7704-1598-9

  Seal Books are published by McClelland and Stewart-Bantam Limited. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Seal Books” and the portrayal of a seal, is the property of McClelland and Stewart-Bantam Limited, 25 Hollinger Road, Toronto, Ontario M4B 3G2. This trademark has been duly registered in the Trademarks Office of Canada. The trademark, consisting of the word “Bantam” and the portrayal of a bantam, is the property of and is used with the consent of Bantam Books, Inc. 666 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10019. This trademark has been duly registered in the Trademarks Office of Canada and elsewhere.

  PRINTED IN CANADA

  C H A P T E R

  1

  Maybe, the boy thought, I should warn the old guy, I should tell him about the hole. But instead he just watched, mildly fascinated, as the skinny old man picked his way between the grassy hummocks of the clearing, then stopped and raised a pair of binoculars to his eyes, making a clacking sound against his thick glasses. The old man turned slowly, sort of revolving on his feet, and swept the wall of trees that made the whole clearing into a natural room, open only to the sky. Then the old man stopped turning, bent his buzzard’s neck forward, as if to get a better look, and fumbled a pad and pencil out of the flap pocket of his tweed jacket. He touched the pencil to the tip of his tongue—an odd gesture, the boy thought, one he’d never seen before—and laboriously wrote on the open page. The boy, Jamie, had been in a reverie when he first sensed the intruder—for that, indeed, was what the old man was to him, the first person who’d ever come to this place, his place—but now he was fully returned to the present. Jamie leaned out, as far as was safely possible from his tree-branch perch twenty-five feet above the ground, and saw what had so interested the old man: a bird, a cedar waxwing, if Jamie wasn’t mistaken. He returned his attention to the man. Seeing a waxwing was no big thing to Jamie, but this was his first birdwatcher.

  If he stays where he is, Jamie thought, he’ll be okay. And he wasn’t moving, at least his feet weren’t. In the weary, deliberate way that old people have, the man, whom Jamie now recognized as Reverend Marley or Morley or something like that, placed pencil and pad back in his pocket, lifted the binoculars to his eyes again—the clack sound repeated—and resumed his examination of the wall of trees. Instinctively, Jamie tried to hide, pressing himself close to the trunk of the great oak that had been his private domain ever since the spring. He did not want to be seen; he didn’t need any more trouble, and he didn’t want to answer any questions. Old Marley—or Morley—would demand to know what he was doing up there. Don’t you know children aren’t supposed to be playing in these woods, he would ask. What’s your name? Where do you live? And then, Jamie guessed, Old Marley’d go back to town and tell Tom and Barbara about Jamie playing where he shouldn’t be playing, and they’d have to pretend they cared and punish him. He might not be able to come back here any more, to his “place.”

  It’d be just like what had happened when that frigging Miss Oliphant had told on him, had called up Barbara and yelled on the phone so loud that Jamie had heard her in the next room. He had tried to explain that it was an accident, that he hadn’t meant to run into her wheelchair with his bicycle, but Barbara and Tom had said they didn’t care, they were taking away the bike. Maybe it was an accident, Barbara had said, but that didn’t excuse the terrible things he said to that poor blind old woman. What things? Jamie had asked, honestly not remembering. Now don’t start that, Jamie, Barbara had said. You know perfectly well!

  He peeked around the trunk to see if Old Marley—no, it was Morley, for sure—was still there. He was. Binoculars hanging against his chest, he was picking at something on his jacket; Jamie guessed it was burrs. Then Morley took up his stroll again, moving closer and closer to the hole but still not seeing it, his eyes searching everywhere but the ground. Jamie had to be impressed by how confidently the old man weaved between the mounds without looking down. He had a funny-looking cane. He probed in front of himself with it the way a blind man does, and it seemed to be giving messages directly to his feet.

  Abruptly, the old man sat down on one of the lower hummocks, less than a dozen steps from the largest one, the one with the half-hidden hole, and began picking impatiently again at the burrs on his gray flannel pants. He was now no more than one hundred and fifty feet from Jamie’s elevated vantage point, and the boy could even hear him humming something that he didn’t recognize but guessed was some kind of hymn. I wish Teddy was here, Jamie thought, suddenly. Teddy would know what to do. Whenever he felt confused about something, Teddy always seemed to have an answer.

  He was still thinking about Teddy when the Reverend Morley rose and began walking again, pausing every couple of steps and cocking his head comically, so much like the birds he was so obviously fond of watching. Then his eyes went to the trunk of Jamie’s oak and followed it skyward. Jamie, caught off-guard, tried to move too quickly—not quickly enough to get safely behind the trunk, but too quickly for Morley to miss him. He had given himself away.

  “Say there, young man!”

  Jamie crouched and pressed harder against the trunk, but he knew it was useless.

  “I see you, young man!” The voice was rich and strong, which didn’t seem right coming out of that turkey-neck. “Now come down here this instant! You have no business being in these woods! Can’t you read signs?”

  I wonder if he knows who I am, Jamie thought. There was still a chance if he could slide down the rope and run off into the trees. He weighed that possibility for a second or two and decided that even if that did happen to work it wasn’t worth the injuries—burned hands especially—that he might suffer. While part of his brain calculated his escape chances, another part gauged the old man’s stride. He was not avoiding the mounds now, he was walking over the tops of t
hem, his eyes never leaving Jamie, the funny-looking cane waving menacingly. Now he was standing on the biggest one, on the edge of the hole but obviously not aware of it, his mouth twitching and the sun flashing angrily off his glasses.

  “Stop!” Jamie shouted. “Don’t move.”

  “Don’t you ‘don’t move’ me, you pup,” Old Morley sputtered. He may have been retired but he was still a man of God, and he was accustomed to respect. He wasn’t going to take any lip from this brat or any other.

  “No,” Jamie pleaded, “Stop!”

  The Reverend Morley stepped forward defiantly, and Jamie couldn’t do any more for him. His mouth was open to shout again, and although no words came, it stayed that way in shocked disbelief. Everything seemed to happen so slowly after that. Even the old man’s scream became an extended growl, like what happens on a tape recorder when the batteries are nearly dead. The earth under Morley’s feet was falling away, but it was almost floating downward, as if gravity had lost its command of things. Jamie watched, transfixed, as each clump broke apart, hung in the empty air for long, long moments, then drifted down into the blackness of the hole.

  Morley’s feet must have hit something solid, because suddenly—or as suddenly as things can stop in slow motion—his slide was ended. Jamie watched the anger that had been on the old man’s face turn to shock, the mouth opening wide, the now-visible eyes—the glasses were hanging on some kind of chain or string on his chest, above the binoculars—searching and unsure. The man pitched forward, still in slow motion, into the hole, shock became fear, terrible distorting fear, and the old face down. There were no further screams.

  Jamie stayed where he was, trying to focus on the black pit that had just sucked a human being into itself, and tried to listen for sounds of life from down there, sounds of activity. But his eyes burned and his ears rang and wild waves seemed to pound at his brain. Then, as suddenly as if nothing had ever happened, the world returned to normal.

  He climbed carefully down the knotted rope, dropped the last few feet to the soft earth below, and walked out into the clearing, past the scrub brush toward the edge of the hole. He listened, but all he could hear were the normal forest sounds, the summer-buzz of high-tension lines just to the east, and the impatient growling of a semi changing gears out there on the highway. There were no sounds from the hole at all, no cry, no whimper, no breath.

  Because he knew the hole very well, Jamie did not hesitate to walk almost all the way up to the lip. On one edge, the safe one, a dead tree was buried on its side, just below ground level, its roots holding back the soft-earth wall. But standing, Jamie could see nothing. The pit was at least twenty feet deep, maybe deeper, and the black soil seemed to drain and extinguish any light that touched it. Jamie dropped to his knees and then lay flat, his head and shoulders over the edge, his hands one over the other, flat, under his upper chest.

  He waited as his eyes adjusted themselves to the near-darkness, and then his heart jumped and his breath left him. He had never seen death before, never experienced the ugliness of it. Sightless eyes fixed on him with hate and fear locked in them for all eternity. Jamie scrambled back, pushing away from the hole with his hands, propelling himself. For a moment he thought he was going to throw up, but the feeling passed.

  Jamie knew he had to look again, that he had to be sure. After all, Barbara and Tom said he imagined things. He studied his hands, and they were real enough; the natural hum of the forest was the same as it always had been, as were the cars on the highway and the singing of the wires. And that, over there, the old man’s cane, that’s real. Jamie walked around the hole and picked it up where it had flown after Morley had fallen. He saw that it wasn’t just a cane, but that it had a folding kind of top made of leather. Folded out, the top looked like a seat, a small seat. I’ve never seen anything like this before, Jamie thought, so I can’t be making it up: it must be real. Carrying the “cane” the way Morley had, by the refolded handles, Jamie returned to his safe position and peered down once again, prepared this time for the twisted face of sudden death below.

  But it wasn’t there. Jamie blinked, and his mind raced. Then he smiled, because he understood. His friends had come out to see what was going on. Sure, he could hear them now, grunting away at one another, and sounding more excited than usual. “Hey,” he shouted, “it’s me, Jamie. What’s going on down there?” The chattering stopped instantly, and another sound wafted up, the rustling, scraping sound of something heavy being dragged over soft earth, and Jamie’s mind flashed to images of ants, out in his backyard, hauling ladybug corpses. Then, abruptly, there was silence from below. A few seconds later, the dragging noises resumed, but fading farther and farther away.

  Jamie continued to lie there, concentrating on the dim patch of light that had, only a minute or so before, illuminated the dead face of the Reverend Morley. Maybe, he thought, they wouldn’t let him see them today. Maybe they were upset about the man falling into their home. Which was how Jamie had come to regard that particular hole—as a home for his admittedly strange friends, a home that he visited regularly, every day, when he could. He hoped they didn’t blame him for what had happened; it certainly hadn’t been his fault, not this time.

  “Is everything okay?” he asked, pretty sure that some of them were still around down there. He didn’t really expect an answer, but sometimes they’d jabber and grunt back at him, so he gave it a try anyway.

  “Okay,” he said finally, pushing himself to his feet, “it’s okay. I’ll come back tomorrow.” He considered the “cane” for a moment, then tossed it down into the darkness. He saw a small gray hand reach into the circle of half-light and push at the stick with long, broken nails. Then the cane was snatched back into the gloom, and a pair of familiar yellow eyes was looking up at him. Jamie waved and smiled, and the eyes blinked twice.

  “I’m sorry for what happened,” he said, his face serious again. “I tried to stop him, I really did!” The eyes blinked twice more, then disappeared. Jamie broke into an easy jog until he reached the trees; then he stopped and looked back toward the hole, satisfied himself that it was still invisible to any casual observer, and slipped into the woods.

  C H A P T E R

  2

  If Tom and Barbara had asked him how he felt about leaving Jericho, Wisconsin, he probably would have said, sure, that was okay with him. That would have been true too a few months before. But now that he had his friends in the woods to visit and talk to every day, Jamie Benjamin thought that maybe he’d like to stay in this town. It didn’t matter, though, because he didn’t have a vote. After supper, when he’d tried to leave the table, Barbara had asked him to stay; she had some news for him. They were moving to Seattle. “Oh,” Jamie had replied, “that’s okay. May I be excused now?”

  As he wandered upstairs to his room, he counted on his fingers the number of moves they’d made that he could remember. Five. And there had been one other one, when he was just a baby, and two before that, that he knew of. They had lived in Maine and they had lived in Georgia, in northern New York and in western Idaho, and two places in Canada that he could hardly remember, except that in one of them, called Kenora, there were lots of Indians walking around. When he was younger, Jamie would proudly announce at school that his father was a troubleshooter; it sounded exciting and important, and besides, that’s what Tom called himself. Actually, it was quite accurate too: Tom was a quality control expert on pulp and paper production, the best (Barbara said) that Troy-Battersea Ltd. had on its payroll. When there was a problem anywhere in T-B’s extensive North American operation, Tom Benjamin usually got the call. Sometimes, especially if it was during a school year, Tom would just fly off by himself and stay for as many weeks or months as it took to set things straight, getting home on weekends when he could. But when a real overhaul was in order, the family went with him. Until Jericho, one place had seemed pretty much like another to Jamie. Oh, Atlanta was bigger and warmer and Kenora smaller and colder—that sort of thing�
�but they were just places to live in.

  Instead of going directly into his room, Jamie detoured to the bathroom and sat there, far longer than he needed to, wondering if in Seattle he might finally make friends with some other children. If that happened—and who knows, it might, because he’d be in junior high out there, and more grown-up—then leaving Jericho and his strange comrades in the forest might not be so bad.

  Jamie slipped into his room and closed the door quickly behind him. Then his heart jumped. Teddy was not where he’d left him that morning, sitting on the desk in front of the window. “Teddy?” There was a growing hint of panic in his voice. Where was he? What had they done with him? Jamie suddenly felt like he had to go to the bathroom all over again.

  “Over here, kid,” the deep, familiar voice said. “Behind the bed.” Jamie flung himself across the bed and came eye-to-button-eye with Teddy, who was stuffed down, looking very uncomfortable and very irritated. “Oh, Teddy, what are you doing there?” Jamie asked, lifting the bear up gently and picking dustballs from the worn, black flannel fur. “Are you okay?”

  “To answer your first question first,” Teddy replied, his voice a mixture of anger and relief, not to mention wounded dignity, “I was shoved down here by one Barbara Benjamin, your mother, when she cleaned your room this morning.” Then the black eyes laughed mischievously. “Actually, it was worth it. She did her housework with all her clothes off today. Good-looking woman, your mother.”

  Jamie refused to acknowledge that, although he could feel his ears start to burn. Teddy was just being nasty again, taking it out on him because Barbara had tossed him on the floor. And besides, he didn’t believe that Barbara would walk around the house naked. Oh, she used to, when he was just a really little kid, but she had stopped that in the last couple of years.