"I can do anything if it means getting out of here," Gwen declared. Her eyes flashed. Clyde gave her a grin. The girl had spirit and courage.
"All right. Better not waste time, then. The brat is likely to show up at any minute. Suppose we swing down this light-cord?"
Clyde pointed at one of the green strands linking a string of tree lights.
"Just swing across it and move down," he said. "But watch out for the lights. They're hot."
The tiny figures began their journey. Time and time again they clambered across branches to avoid the burning incandescence of a Christmas tree bulb.
"Swing across that tinsel," Clyde grunted. "We're making progress."
Gwen, despite cruelly-smarting hands-- giggled.
"What is it?" Clyde turned his head.
"I can't help it! You look so cute in your blue ribbon, swinging along the branches. Just like Tarzan of the Apes."
"He does, does he?"
The voice came from behind them.
Both Gwen and Clyde turned their heads quickly back towards the room.
Standing before the tree, still on tiptoe from his stealthy entrance, was Roger. The boy wore a frown of displeasure.
"At it again?" he said. "Trying to get away!"
There was no hiding-place, no escape.
Advancing quickly, Roger reached forward and plucked Gwen from the tree.
"Let her alone!" Clyde yelled.
"Huh!" grunted the child. "I ought to throw her away." He made a gesture as if to hurl Gwen's body to the ground, and Clyde groaned.
But the gesture was not completed. A smile appeared on the vast bulk of Roger's face.
"I've got a better idea," he said. "I'll really punish you both."
He turned his back and swiftly carried Gwen across the room. Clyde clambered up a branch and strained his eyes, trying to follow the boy's movements.
Roger stooped down on the far side of the room. His hands groped and fumbled before him, but his back hid Gwen from view.
What was he doing to her?
Abruptly, Roger rose. His body still blocking the view on the far side, he approached Clyde with empty hands. Clyde couldn't dodge the starching fingers.
His ribs were crushed between thumb and forefinger as Roger carried him down to the floor.
"In you go," said Roger.
Clyde felt himself being lifted to an iron stand. He glanced down.
Roger had placed him on the cab of his toy train's locomotive!
The locomotive rested on the wide track that ran the full square bordering the room against the walls.
Clyde stood in the iron cab of the engine. It was a Lionel special model--”the "New York Central" to be exact, with a Hudson-type locomotive. Clyde knew. He had sold them in the toyshop.
He gazed at the shining track stretching ahead, and at the curve near the wall.
Why had Roger put him here? "I'm going to punish you," said the boy. "The way they did it in the old movies."
"What do you mean?" Clyde shouted.
"Look and see."
Far above, the child's arm extended across the room. Clyde stared.
Half-way around the circle, on the track directly opposite, lay Gwen's writhing body.
Roger had tied her to the track. "Notice how I did it?" asked the precocious little monster. "I've tied her to only one of the rails. Only her head extends between. If I laid her directly across she'd be electrocuted when I switch on the transformer.
"As it is, we'll do it like the movies. I'll start the train and you'll run over her."
Roger laughed. It was a cruel laugh, not at all boyish. Clyde shook his head. How could he appeal to this heartless, inhuman creature?
"But you don't want to kill her," he stammered. "A helpless girl-- "
"You're my toys," Roger snapped.
"I can play with you any way I want."
Abruptly the boy turned. He squatted in the corner, next to the black bulk of the transformer.
There was a whirring hum. And suddenly, Clyde felt the train-wheels turn. The engine was moving beneath his feet!
Slowly, the locomotive gathered speed. Clyde stared out of the cab. He was rushing down the rails, heading for the bend. In miniature time-scale, he was plunging forward at about sixty miles an hour. The engine would take this curve, take the next, go down the straightaway, and in the middle --decapitate Gwen!
The locomotive lurched as it whizzed around the first curve. Clyde braced himself. He couldn't jump. The second curve loomed ahead. The Hudson type was speedy. A few seconds more, now --
Roger was at the transformer, generating power. Power!
Clyde saw Gwen's body far down the tracks. The locomotive rushed with deadly swiftness.
Clyde gulped. He had the clue, if there was still time. He turned to the cab. Yes, this was the Hudson type. A miniature poker stood in the tender, and next to it was the fire-box door. If that door was opened --
He tore a strand from the blue ribbon about his waist and yanked the tiny poker free. He wrapped the handle of the poker with the ribbon and jerked at the fire-box door.
Peering out the window of the cab he saw Gwen only a little way ahead. The train rumbled on.
Gasping, Clyde jammed the poker through the open door. The end caught. It had to catch, make contact.
It did.
Clyde knew his locomotives. The poker would short on one of the motor terminals against the frame.
The result was spectacular.
The locomotive halted with a lurch, just a few inches from Gwen's tiny form.
At the same moment came a puff of smoke from the transformer, and Roger fell backwards in a cloud of acrid fumes.
CHAPTER VI
Out of the Mouths of Babes
It was the work of an instant to jump down and release Gwen. Clyde yanked the twine free and helped her to her feet.
"Come on,” he whispered. Over in the corner, Roger's coughing spasm had subsided, and now tears came in a surprising cascade. The boy was crying. The sheer, unexpected shock of the short-circuit had frightened him. Gwen turned and stared at him across the room.
"Gwen--let's go!" Clyde tugged at her shoulder.
Gwen tossed her black curls. "No," she said. "I'm going to talk to Roger."
"Are you crazy?" stormed the redheaded young man.
For answer, Gwen began to stride towards the looming bulk of the boy in the corner.
"Gwen--come back!"
She neither turned nor paused. In sheer amazement, Clyde watched her as she reached the crying child and deliberately tugged at his sleeve. In a moment she was crawling up his arm.
Clyde shuddered.
She sat there, perched on the boy's shoulder!
Roger looked up. Abruptly, his tears ceased falling. Gwen sat on her strange perch and gently patted his neck with one tiny hand.
Roger stared at her. He smiled.
"Blow your nose," said Gwen. "You're a sight!"
Roger blushed, fumbled in his pocket.
"Use your other hand,” the girl commanded. "You're likely to shake me off."
Roger obeyed without hesitation.
"There, that's better," she commented. "Now, young man, I'd like to have a talk with you. First of all, you'd better apologize for what you just did."
Roger stared down at her. His blush, deepened. Then he looked away at the wall.
"All right," he mumbled. "I'm sorry I tried to kill you. I guess I didn't understand that you are human, too."
Gwen shook her head.
"Don't you know any better?" she chided. "You're a pretty bright-looking boy, it seems to me. Hasn't your mother ever told you not to do such things?"
Roger stared at the wall more intently than ever.
"I --I have no mother."
"Well, what about your father, then?"
"My father's dead, too. I'm an orphan."
Gwen frowned. "But that man who brought you to the toyshop --Simon Mallot. Isn't he your father?"
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"No. He adopted me when I was a baby."
"When you were a baby?"
"Yes. After he killed my mother and father."
Roger's voice did not tremble or alter as he spoke the words. His tone was unemotional.
"Simon Mallot killed your parents?” There was horror enough in Gwen's voice.
"Yes. He was in love with my mother many years ago. She wouldn't marry him, because of his size. So after I was born, he killed her."
Gwen was silent, but only for a moment. To Clyde, she seemed to be driving at something. She had taken psychological advantage of the boy, and now she was cleverly pressing that advantage. She sat there maternally, possessively --the eternal woman engaged in her eternal problem of mastering man.
"How did Mallot kill her?" asked Gwen.
Roger did not hesitate over an answer. The words came quickly.
"He did it with the dolls. He made dolls and baptized them and then drove pins into their hearts. He's promised to show me how, soon. He's a wizard, you know."
"I didn't know." Gwen was striving to keep calm.
"That’s why he adopted me. He's going to make me his apprentice. He'll teach me all he has learned about sorcery. He says that since my appearance is normal, I can be a greater wizard than he is, if I'm properly trained."
The boy spoke as though becoming a sorcerer's apprentice was the most natural course in the world. Gwen tried to match his nonchalance.
"Do you like that idea?" he asked.
Roger frowned. "No --not exactly," he confessed. "There are some things he wants me to do that give me nightmares, and I won't do them.
"I like to play with my toys here, but he is always making me take lessons in his laboratory. And when he finally lets me play, he gives me toys I don't like. I won't keep them here."
"No?"
"There's a book he has . . . and the pictures in it move. They move like people, and they do strange things. It makes your head ache to watch them, but he wants me to study it.”
"Then we play games, sometimes. Not with marbles or anything like that, but with little houses and boats and things made out of wax. And he makes me recite pieces in Latin. I get all crawly inside sometimes at the way they sound. When I say them right, the shadows change on the wall, and once I saw the walls move.
"Next year he's going to take me to a meeting. They call it a coven, and I must meet someone there and sign a book in Wood. Does it hurt when they prick your finger and take blood?
"I hope it doesn't. Because I don't want to go anyway. I wish he wouldn't make me do those things."
Gwen was white-faced, shaken. The picture she had formed from these childish revelations was ghastly in its implications.
"He won't let me play with other kids," said the boy. "He keeps me locked up here all the time. Once in a while, for a special treat, he lets me play with my regular really-and-truly toys in this room.
"I studied hard last month, so he promised to give me a present. Anything I wanted. And last night, in the toyshop, I asked for you. That's how I got you."
Clyde had approached Roger's feet. Now he spoke.
"How did you know that Simon Mallot could --give --us to you?" he asked.
"He can do anything," said the boy, gravely. "Much more than this. He's a sorcerer. And I'll be one too." The boy sighed. "But I don't want to be, really. Besides, I'm afraid when I grow up I might get too big like he is, too."
"How did he get to be so big?" asked Gwenn.
"Just glandular abnormality, he says," the boys answered.
It was fantastic to hear such words from the lips of a seven-year-old child. But then, the whole affair was unearthly.
"He's working on hormone extracts now," Roger confided. "That's how I knew he would be able to shrink you. When I asked to have Gwen for a doll, he knew what I meant. And he did it. Because that hormone formula is wonderful."
"Yes," said Clyde, eagerly. "Can you explain it a little more than that, Roger?"
"Well, I don't know. He started years ago, trying to experiment on something to use on himself --somethings that might bring him down to a normal size. Then he must have hit on something off the trail with his reduction formula. Because the drug he perfected overdoes the job. Things get very tiny if you aren't careful."
The boy spoke gravely, but Clyde hung on to every word.
"There are lots of specimens upstairs in his laboratory," Roger volunteered. "But I guess he's never used it on human beings until last night. I just begged him to give me Gwen for a toy, and he'd promised me, so he had to do it. But I'm sorry I tried to kill you," he concluded.
Clyde took over. "You should be," he scolded. "And what do you think it feels like to be two inches tall? How would you like it?" Roger hung his head. "We don't want to be this way all our lives," Gwen sighed. "How can we get out of this?"
"You two are in love with each other?" Roger's eyes sparkled. "Gee, it's like a story, isn't it? And you're trapped here and everything?"
"You needn't be so enthusiastic about it," observed Clyde, bitterly.
"But it's exciting. And maybe I can help you."
That was the opening Gwen was waiting for. "Yes," she said, quickly. "By all means. You could phone for the police "
"No good!" Clyde interrupted. "If Simon Mallot found the boy phoning, he'd know. He'd hide us away and punish Roger. Besides, we've got to do something about our size."
"Yes," said the child, eagerly. "That's what I mean. I can find the antidote for you, perhaps."
"Antidote?" Clyde seized upon the word. "There is an antidote?"
"Yes. A sort of by-product or anti-toxin you get when you distill the formula. He keeps a bottle of it in the laboratory."
"Could --could you get it for us, do you think?"
Roger's face clouded. "Maybe. I don't know."
"What do you mean? It's a matter of life or death."
"I know. But--honest, I'm afraid to go up there, though. It's a horrible place."
Gwen patted his shoulder.
"There, now. Don't be afraid. I'll come along with you."
Surprisingly enough, the suggestion did the trick. Roger beamed.
"Well, if you two will come along—“
"Sure we will. It's safe, isn't it?" Clyde answered.
"Yes. He's asleep now, in the left wing. I can get the bottle. Just a few drops on the end of a pin will work, I think. But you'll come with me?"
"Right." Clyde took command. "Just slip us into your jacket now. Then head for those stairs. We're going to the laboratory."
CHAPTER VII
The Devil's Toyshop
Up the dark stairs, down the long hall, and through the outer chambers Roger tiptoed cautiously into the weird world beyond the laboratory doors. Gwen and Clyde clung to the edge of his jacket pocket and peered out into the realms of nightmare.
Here in the vast, sky-lighted room, science and sorcery had met and mated--to produce a hellish amalgam.
Gleaming white laboratory tables, modern as tomorrow, bore a host of ghastly objects straight from medieval myths.
Bell-jars filled with the root of fabled mandrake; trays of herbs and powdered distillates ground from the bones of animals and corpses; all the paraphernalia of mantic mummery was here.
On the shelves the black books mouldered, iron-hasped tomes with crumbling yellow pages illumined with Gothic lettering of another day. Clyde read exotic titles in Latin--De Vermis Mysteriis, and the unspeakable Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred.
Glass cabinets guarded instruments and laboratory machines; a switchboard towered ncongruously beside a mummy case; a zodiacal chart lettered in Greek stood next to the latest model of an X-ray unit.
Bunsen burners and powdered bat's blood, test tables and the hearts of toads, hypodermic needles and corpse- fat candles --all in a gargantuan jumble before the eyes of Gwen and Clyde.
The room was filled with evidences of thaumaturgy. A blue chalk tracing of a pentagon still covered a part of the floor. A
pile of smoldering incense fumed sullenly in a covered brazier near the further wall.
But all this was as nothing to the sights Roger pointed out.
The child, with his terrifying mixture of normal boyishness and hideous familiarity with forbidden things, wasted no time in directing the attention of his tiny guests to a strange spectacle.
A tier of glass cubicles stood along one of the big tables. At first glance they appeared to be a row of rectangular aquariums --but there was no water inside, and no fish.
Still, the glass prisons contained living forms.
"Look!" prompted Roger, moving closer. The two little humans gazed down at an incredible spectacle.
In one glass compartment, a rat padded ceaselessly to and fro, red eyes glaring through the transparent walls of its prison.
"Why, it's the right size!" Gwen exclaimed. Suddenly a hand went to her mouth in a gesture of horrified realization.
For the rat was the right size in proportion to her present state. But in reality, the rat was a shrunken creature --a living rat the size of an ant!
In the next compartment a guinea pig squatted; a common laboratory guinea pig, no bigger than a human finger!
Beside it, on the left, was a tiny black object that mewed piteously and clawed at the glass as they approached.
"A black cat," whimpered Clyde. “A black cat the size of a baby mouse."
"He injected them with the reduction formula," Roger told the two. "These were his first successes. That cat is the mother of the black cat downstairs. At first, when it was just a kitten, it seemed to know what he had done and clawed and spit at him. Now the cat is grown and doesn't remember. He calls it his 'familiar'. He says all wizards have familiars."
Gwen shuddered. "I don't like it here," she murmured. "Let's get out."
Clyde nudged the boy's chest with a diminutive fist. "Yes," he urged. "Where's the antidote? Let's get it and leave before he wakes up."
"All right." Roger moved quickly. The shrunken humans tumbled back into his pocket.
"Here," he said, reaching into a cabinet set next to a microscope. "Here's where he keeps the bottle."