Wood creaks in wailing protest beneath his heavily pounding feet. A door slams behind us.
Then I’m flung carelessly to the floor, the loosely fixed boards thankfully absorbing most of the force. Even so, it’s still bone jarring. The sack is pulled clear of my body as part of the beast’s same, easy motion.
I’m in a house.
A small, wooden house.
Is that what beasts live in these days?
*
‘Quick, quick!’
The female beast, moving away from the door she’s just closed behind us, hurries her partner.
He moves swiftly, picking me up as if I’m weightless.
It offers me the first clear view I’ve had of these dreadful creatures.
Although in many ways werewolf-like, as I’d first thought, there are many differences. These creatures are gaunt, starved, their furred skin pulled tightly over their skeletons. The bones push out hard against the grey skin, like the bones of the rotting dead, as if readying themselves to cut themselves free of the awkwardly constraining skin.
If, then, it’s anything like a werewolf, it’s a werewolf risen from the grave.
Holding me clear of the floor with nothing but one hand, the beast uses his free hand to open a door behind me, thrusting me into what seems like a cupboard.
But it’s not a cupboard.
It’s a pantry. With bloodied meat hanging from rusting butcher’s hooks.
*
Chapter 17
There’s a rapid, urgent knock at the door to the beasts’ house.
Briefly, the beast’s darkly set eyes blaze with irritation, perhaps even his own equivalent of terror.
‘Damn! They’ve already spotted their brats are missing!’
Over the beast’s shoulder, I see the female shiver, like she’s cold. The fur ripples. The sharp bones lying beneath wrench and writhe.
In a moment, she’s a scrawny, nakedly-pale woman. Like the beast, she’s a skeleton held together by nothing bar skin: but at least this is a human skeleton.
She reaches for a simple black dress that had been flung over the back of a nearby chair. She slips on this dress in an easy, well-practised move.
The harsh knocking at the door continues. With a furious snarl of tattered lips, the beast sharply hoists me up, pushes me back – and brings my back down hard upon the point of a butcher’s hook.
*
Like his partner (or should that be wife?), Henry begins to transform into an emaciated human, closing the cupboard door as he turns away.
There’s the rustle of clothes being slipped on. Then I hear the woman answer the door, pleasantly apologising for her delay. Making out she was busy cleaning.
She’s interrupted by the caller, who’s obviously got no time for such niceties.
‘The children,’ the caller wails in the quavering tones of a petrified woman, ‘some of the children have gone missing again!’
Henry acts like he’s shocked, concerned.
‘Don’t you worry, Mary,’ Henry declares authoritatively, ‘we’ll help you search for them again, won’t we Mari?’
‘Of course, of course we will dear,’ a kindly sounding Mari agrees.
‘They went in the woods…we told them not to go in the woods!’
Mary’s voice fades as she backs away from the house, the clump of footsteps across the wooden floorboards indicating that Henry and Mari are hurriedly following her outside. Keeping to their word that they’ll help her find her missing children
The door closes to behind them.
And I’m left hanging here, strung up in readiness to be carved up into their next meal.
*
Chapter 18
Why aren’t I dead or dying, the butcher’s hook having already carved out my back and liver?
Thankfully, Henry had been in too much of a rush to make sure he’d gone about his job properly. Thankfully, too, my jacket’s made of sufficiently thick leather and enough abundant loops to have latched onto the hook regardless.
Which all means that when Henry and Mari come back from their fruitless search, they can have the extra pleasure of slicing and dicing me up while I’m still fresh and alive.
My luck just gets better and better, doesn’t it?
I wiggle around a bit on the hook, wondering just how snagged up my jacket is back there. Maybe I can get the leather to tear a bit more. Maybe the loops the hook’s caught up in can be worked a little looser.
Ripping my expensive leather jacket isn’t something I’d usually be hoping to do, but right now I’m praying for it to happen.
There’s a blissful sound of tearing, the clink of buckles snapping free. Suddenly, I’m tipping forward, the toppling getting worse as the leather continues to rip and the buckles jerk open.
Wait! What about the bottle I’d slipped into another of my jacket’s loops?
If that smashes when I fall, the shards could cut right into me!
As I finally fall forward, I bend my body to protect the bottle from the worst of the impact when I hit the ground.
Instead, I let my forehead take most of the painfully jarring force.
Arrggghhh!
Wonderful.
If I were a masochist, I’d be having the time of my life.
But…that bottle of magical liquid might be my way out of here.
If I take a drink: voila!
In one bound, she was free!
I’d be so small, all these ropes and the scarf would simply fall off me!
The ropes that, presently, are stopping me reaching for the bottle.
The tightly binding scarf that, presently, would stop me drinking from it anyway.
Now, what would Popeye do?
*
The wood forming the base of the wall just by my head has already rotted a little, creating a tiny hole. Beyond the hole, I can hear the scratching and scrabbling of some small creature making its way here.
A rat, probably. You know, one to come and nibble at my nose.
Just to really heighten the pleasure of being here, trussed up like a turkey.
But it’s not a rat that scrambles through the small hole.
It’s an old style china doll.
Oh, of course!
A doll!
Why hadn’t I expected that, right?
She stares at me with her wide, bright blue eyes. Lifts a finger to her mouth: ‘Shuussh!’
Oh, dash – and there was me, all ready to have a sparkling conversation about the weather!
*
Chapter 19
Dragging the last of her legs through the hole, the doll rises to her primly shoed little feet.
Quickly yet quietly, she slips around the back of my head, where she begins to attempt untying the scarf. It sounds like she’s having difficulty, the knot too tight for her to get a good grip on any part of it.
Giving up on her hopeless task with a sigh of frustration, she tiptoes back round to my front.
‘I’ll go get help – and a knife,’ she whispers as, with only slightly less of a struggle, she finally manages to pull the tightly tied scarf down from around my mouth.
‘No, wait: you don’t have to,’ I whisper back urgently, using a downward glance of my eyes to draw her attention to the bottle stored in my jacket’s loop. ‘The bottle; a drink from that will shrink me.’
There’s what could be the light of understanding in her eyes. She darts towards the bottle, loosening the buckle and loop holding it in place. She struggles once more with what to her is a massive, heavy bottle. Even so, she thankfully manages to drag the bottle along the floor until it lies close to my lips.
It’s another struggle for the doll to unscrew the cap. She’s drenched as the liquid cascades all over her when the top at last pops off.
I jerk my head forward, wrapping my lips around the opened bottle neck, briefly drinking in the magical waters. Trying to make sure I don’t drink too much, don’t drink too little.
&nbs
p; I begin to shrink, the scarf falling loosely about my neck. The ropes around my ankles and wrists similarly drop away as their loops become too ludicrously large to hold me any longer.
Completely unconcerned by the state of her drenched dress, the doll grins happily. She offers me her hand as she indicates with her other than we should leave via the hole she came in by.
Her dress has an odd pattern; one of repeated monkeys, tramcars, geese, and bottles.
I stare longingly at what is now an unmanageably large bottle, wishing there were some way I could take it with me once again. Unlike before, it hadn’t shrunk with me; I’d had to spit its top clear of my mouth once I’d believed I’d drunk enough
Ah well: maybe I can hope that those two hideous creatures drink up whatever’s left. And they end up as the ugly little rodents they deserve to be.
*
Following the doll as she worms her way back through the hole, I find myself in yet another gloomy cupboard. This one is dominated by a loomingly large and overfilled sack, the many, angular objects packed inside stretching the sacking, like the bones of the creatures pushed hard against wasted skin.
As if the sack were also somehow alive, it quivers, shrugs. Its ‘bones’ move beneath its surface.
One of the sack’s bottom corners has shredded badly. Through this hole, a tin soldier slips out of the sack. He rises to his feet, salutes me.
‘Welcome,’ he whispers quietly. ‘We’re usually too late to rescue anyone,’ he adds with a sad shake of his head, but brightening up as he congratulates the doll. ‘Well done, Diana!’
Diana catches me staring at the pattern on her dress. Is it yet another connection with that damn song?
‘I drew them myself,’ she says. ‘Do you like it? It’s not really much of a pattern at all, is it?’
‘I’d thought it was a strange pattern,’ I admit, smiling to let her know I didn’t mean it as an insult.
Other soldiers step free of the sack, alternating with the wooden characters of Noah’s Ark, a few clowns. There are also a number of other dolls, all of different sizes and quality.
All the toys are crudely made, badly painted and scuffed through regular play. Yet they all smile happily when they see me, with none commenting on my size.
‘We were taken off the other children when they were brought here,’ Diana explains.
‘But now we’re used to entice more children into the house of those horrid wendigoes!’ another doll adds, her face quivering with fear and disgust.
‘It’s starvation that made them this way,’ the solider says with another sad shrug of his head.
‘Is there a way out of here?’ I ask, realising I can’t spend the rest of my life living amongst a cupboard of toys, no matter how friendly and helpful they might be.
The toys exchange questioning, worried glances.
‘There’s one,’ the soldier admits. ‘But it’s probably the most dangerous route out of here of them all.’
*
It takes a while for my eyes to get used to the lack of light. Hardly any light, of course, can reach beneath the wooden house.
To help prevent its base rotting, the house has been constructed on a number of small pillars of stone. But there’s only a small gap between floor and ground.
It’s enough room for me, of course, in my new, reduced size. But as I peer through yet another small hole in the house’s wooden floor, I can see that the way across the ground isn’t completely clear; everywhere I look, there are obstacles of a subtly glistening white, each one oddly shaped.
‘Bones: the bones of the children they’ve eaten,’ the doll says from behind me, doubtless aware that I might be a little puzzled by what I’m seeing there.
And I am puzzled: because the bones shift, they move. There’s a muted sound of grinding bone, of scrabbling.
‘Rats,’ the soldier says, like the doll no doubt fully aware that I can’t quite make out what I’m seeing. ‘Rats who feed on what little flesh is left on the bones.’
*
Chapter 20
Peering more intensely through the gloom, I see the dim flash of yet another colour.
A washed out yet strangely radiant yellow.
It’s the yellow of a minute dolls house.
No; not a doll’s house.
It’s a yellow wendy house.
*
‘I’ve got to risk it; it’s my only way out of here.’
The toys have listened patiently to my explanation that the wendy house will take me out of this world and into some new one.
‘You won’t make it: not on your own,’ Diana warns me.
‘I’m sure I can speak for my men on this: we’ll help you.’
The soldier receives nods of agreement from his men.
‘No; it’s too dangerous for you–’
‘That’s our job.' The soldier cuts me short, his men already filing up by the hole, ready to help me.
‘None of us like our new role: entrapping children,’ Diana explains. ‘Helping you will make up for how we’ve been misused.’
The soldiers aren’t waiting for any more arguments to be made. They’re dropping down through the hole, as silently as they can.
On reaching the ground, they quietly move forward, taking up positons on either side of a protected track they’re creating for me through the jungle of bones.
The doll notices my fear.
‘We have to do it, you know that?’ she says sagely.
I nod in agreement, gulp, ‘Yeah, I know: I’m just not used to facing rats the size of cars.’
‘Cars?’ Diana gives me a puzzled yet understanding frown. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll go first: you can hide behind me. I’ll protect you for as long as I’m needed.’
‘Go,’ says the soldier to me, ‘we need to move quickly and silently.’
Diana slips down the hole, landing as silently as the soldiers on the packed earth. I drop down next, following her and the soldiers who have already gone on ahead. The soldier who’s taken charge of everything follows me down through the hole.
There aren’t enough soldiers to create two flanking lines running completely from the hole in the floor to the wendy house. As we nervously head towards the dimly glowing house, the soldiers we pass curl in behind us, some forming a defensive wall at our rear, the others expertly slipping forward to extend each line a little closer towards our goal.
So far, the rats seemingly remain oblivious of our presence. They gnaw at the bones. They scratch at the ground, at the woodwork.
With any luck, we might make it to the wendy house without disturbing them.
A slight creak of wood emanates from the wendy house. The top part of the stable door swings back. A young, smiling girl appears in the revealed space.
‘Quickly! I need your help!’ she cries out.
And suddenly, every rat beneath the house is aware of our presence.
*
Chapter 21
With shrieking squeals, the rats throw themselves at our defensive lines of soldiers.
I’m expecting the soldiers’ guns to pop and crack. To bring the rats down as they charge at us.
But no: the soldiers bravely stab with their tin bayonets, or use their guns as clubs. Trying to hold back viciously snarling creatures that are at least four times their size.
The toy soldiers might have come to life, but obviously that doesn’t extend to giving them realistically firing guns.
With a brutal swipe of its snarling maw, a relatively gigantic rat rips off the head of a poor soldier. Another rat, leaping on top of another soldier, easily brings him down.
‘Run, run for the house!’ the soldier standing by me yells. ‘We’ll hold them off as long as we can.’
Once again, I’m about to stupidly protest. But the doll takes me by my elbow, and begins to urgently propel me forward.
‘There’s nowhere else to go now! It’s their job! Run!’
A handful of the soldiers peel off from the
line, offering us protection on our final sprint towards the wendy house.
They lash out at the rats that follow after us, the rats that are still coming in to the attack from farther afield beneath the house. The rats’ claws rip at the soft tin flesh, their teeth effortlessly sinking deeply into arms, heads, bodies.
We’re almost at the wendy house’s beckoning door when a rat manages to break through the protective line of soldiers. Throwing itself heavily at the doll, it swiftly drags her down. I slew to a halt, intending to help her shrug off her attacker, to get her to rise to her feet once more.
‘No no!’ she insists vehemently, rolling in the dirt with the snapping, snarling rat looming over her as if it were a ravenous lion. ‘Go on! If you stay with me, they’ll get you too. I’ll have failed helping you!’
‘Quickly, come quickly!’ the girl wails pleadingly from the wendy house’s door.
‘Go, go!’ the doll screams as another rat leaps upon her. ‘I can’t keep them off you for much longer.’
I turn once more; and run weeping towards the partially opened door.
*
The girl waiting just inside the door quickly moves aside, letting the lower half of the door swing open.
I dash inside the little house with a grateful sigh.
The door swings shut behind me, the dreadful squealing and screams immediately silenced: as if that world of mayhem has suddenly ceased to exist.
Has it?
I can only hope so.
I’d hate to think that Diana and those poor soldiers are still suffering back there.
I hang my head in shame; I shouldn’t have left them. They gave up their lives, sacrificed themselves. To save me.
‘Could you help me please?’