The Thief of Broken Toys by Tim Lebbon

Author:Tim Lebbon [Lebbon, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Horror
ISBN: 9781926851846
Publisher: ChiZine
Published: 2010-04-10T04:00:00+00:00

4

After an unsettled evening trying to read, trying to watch TV, trying to concentrate on anything, but finding his attention drawn again and again out into the falling darkness, Ray went at last to bed.

When he woke up the next day he stretched, unwilling to relinquish the comforting warmth beneath the duvet for the chill bedroom air. He’d woken with an erection and a dissolving dream involving Rachel from the bakery, and he smiled at the brightening room, sighing contentedly. He supposed he’d always had a crush on her, like an excitable teen instead of the forty-something he was. He had no memory of the dream, just a feeling, and it shrank away in the promise of a new day.

At last he stood up from his bed, shrugging on a dressing gown and padding to the toilet. After urinating he walked back to his room, enjoying the feel of the landing floorboards on his bare feet. Wood was never cold, just cool, whatever the temperature outside. He had always liked being this close to things. Carpets were fine, but walking on them barefoot he always felt as though he were separated from the body of the house. The wood was its skeleton, carpet merely clothing.

Dressing, Ray frowned at a memory hovering just beyond his perception. He paused with one leg in, one leg out of his jeans. What was that? Something forced itself toward him, a memory he should clasp, and he blinked in surprise at the suddenness of the vision that struck him: Rachel from the bakery slipping off her blouse with flour-covered hands, her smile promising more. That’s not it, he thought, frowning the dream-memory away. There’s something else, it wasn’t that, it was never that.

It was halfway down the stairs, as he saw the yellow toy safari jeep sitting on the fourth step up from the bottom, that he remembered he’d once had a son.

And Toby was like a dream fading in instead of out. There was a boy without a face or voice, and he had gone somewhere. Then his face emerged in Ray’s memory, freckled in the summer, blond hair made lighter by the sun, and he shouted in glee as he tipped bucket after bucket of water onto the flower bed, mud pies much more interesting to him than daffodil bulbs.

“Toby,” Ray breathed as he sat down on the stairs. He bent forward slowly and picked up the jeep, wondering how the hell he could have woken up and not remembered his dead son. Every morning since Toby had died, Ray had surfaced with the boy’s laughter or tears on his mind, and the knowledge of his death pressing him down like the greatest weight. Some mornings he had risen from sleep that had itself been infected with that dreadful knowledge, and sometimes — the meanest of times — he had dreamed that Toby was alive and well and laughing, and the waking had been unbearable.

But this morning he had come awake like a contented man.

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