Dolls schmolls.
To Jennifer LeMarchant, her balsawood glider was the toy of choice. In their apartment in Boston, the four-year-old often got scolded for flying it. “Knock it off, Jenny! There’s no room.” But not here. In this big, old, lonely house, she had airspace.
Jennifer didn’t like the place at first; she felt lost in its long halls and high ceilings and the perpetual gloom wrought by the burgundy wallpaper and mahogany trim. The floors creaked and the radiators ticked and the dust swirled. Mommy said it was a “fixer upper,” and she told Jenny not to crawl in any small spaces because she could get stuck and they’d never find her. And she was not to go into the cellar because the electricity wasn’t working down there yet and she might get hurt. Jenny went anyway, without telling, but it was too dark to see. Mommy found out when she came back up.
That same day, a week after Jennifer LeMarchant began her new life in this rundown Victorian, the moving company returned to drop off a box they’d misplaced. Jenny’s glider was inside.
Sometimes she tossed the glider from the upstairs balustrade, laughing as it bounced off the chandelier below or swooped away in an unexpected direction. Today, she was throwing it with her eyes closed and then hunting it down, twice recovering it from entanglement in the heavy drapes. But on the third try, it vanished. She searched the hallways and the living room and unlit parlor, without luck. Then she noticed the open window and peeked out. A man she didn’t know stood on the sidewalk, holding the glider. Her glider! When he caught her eye, she gasped and retreated into the gloom.
From the darkened parlor, hiding behind the oak desk, Jennifer heard the front door creak.
“Hello?” the voice called.
Footsteps sounded, and then a shadow swept the wall in the hallway outside, stretched and distorted. In a moment, the man’s silhouette filled the doorway. “Hey, little girl,” he said. “I found your airplane.”
She spied the toy in his hand. She wanted it back.
The man stepped into the room. “You can come out. I won’t hurt you.”
Then he said, “Is your mommy home?”
Jennifer stood. His features were in shadow, but she saw his outstretched hand sure enough.
“Here,” he said. He crouched so they shared eye level. Jennifer thought he looked friendlier now. She took a step closer, then another. His face materialized in the faint light. He was smiling. The glider made him happy too.
But when she was just a few feet away, she started to feel bad. The man seemed nice, but that smell… she knew that smell. Sort of like cinnamon mixed with vinegar.
His blood.
The bad feeling disappeared, like always, when she tore into his throat and the red taste flooded her mouth. The man was strong, though, and she lost her grip when he shoved her away. But she could tell as he crawled backward on his elbows, his face a mask of terror and his neck spraying blood, that she had weakened him. Jenny ambled to his side, lifted his arm and bit into his wrist, and drank. Not just blood, either. Everything. And as she did, she watched his pleading eyes slowly become dull and roll back… His skin turn dry and crisp like an overcooked turkey… His flesh shrivel until only a desiccated husk remained.
Then came the hard part. The skeleton.
Jennifer crouched by the top of his head. Once her lower mandible became detached and dilated, her mouth was able to stretch around his cranium, and the hundreds of fang-like hooks inside her started pulling. In he went! Sometimes, getting past the shoulders pinched a bit, at least when it was a man, since men have wider shoulders than ladies. Sometimes, she had to break the arms off. This one wasn’t too difficult, though. Mommy and Daddy were hardest, because they were first.
Afterward, she opened the trap door in the floor and barfed up the clothes, the torn and slimy rags falling from her mouth and into the hole. She wasn’t sure what happened down there. Maybe They took the clothes away. They were the ones who had changed her that day in the cellar. Made her different. Hungry.
Mommy and Daddy had been so excited to buy this place but didn’t know about Them, the dark ones beneath who turned Jenny this way and gave magic to her glider. Since then, the glider always made food come, like a worm on a fishhook.
Now where was that silly thing? She wanted to play some more.
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©2011 Eric John Baker
In addition to writing horror, dark sci-fi, and general dramatic fiction about people who do bad things, Eric John Baker also does news satire at http://newsanvil.wordpress.com/ and muses about movies, music, and art at http://jameskillough.wordpress.com/category/baker-street/. Choose your poison.
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