Ghosts of the past are released with the death of innocence.
Terror Bear
E.D. Detetcheverrie
Lucas heard the unmistakable giggle of his personal assistant, June Peale, as she depressed the intercom button on
her desk to announce that he had a visitor. He paused over the New York Times crossword puzzle, wondering if
she was serious or if it was all a little joke. If he had a genuine, unscheduled visitor, then he should maybe tidy up his desk and adopt a keenly bored facade, attempting to gain the upper hand right off the get go in order to impress upon his guest his extreme displeasure at the unannounced intrusion. If, however, the dewy-eyed girl was playing another cute prank on him, a singing telegram or the delivery of enough flowers for a respectable funeral for his upcoming birthday, then why bother trying to hide the remains of his leisurely late lunch or the fishing gear he had assembled in a pile beside the fireplace?
The giggle became a snort before she’d released the button, so he smirked and pushed aside the clutter on his huge,
marble-topped desk, accidentally knocking off a framed photo as he replied to Miss Peale, “Ah...send him in.”
The left door of the gigantic, inlaid exotic wood pair swung open and his latest hire, the brown and
blonde-streaked wide-eyed Junie grinned hugely as she stood upon the threshold in the twig-heeled Armani pumps
he had given her, announcing in a rather overly dramatic tone, “May I present for you a Mr. Theodore Edward
Bear.”
Ted. E. Bear? She bowed with a flourish, her striped ponytail almost brushing the floor as a very small figure waddled awkwardly past her. Confused, Lucas stood up, accidentally resting his left palm on the remains of his roast quail and cress with chipotle kissed aioli tomato-basil whole grain wrap. At first, he thought his visitor was a midget or perhaps even a tired child. Hadn’t he paid his last assistant enough to ensure she would never again try to claim her son was his? As the figure neared, he noted the absurdly short limbs and unnatural wobble of the oversized head sans any visible neck. No, it was a toy—not a tiny person in disguise. It was dwarfed by the life-sized bronze crouching lions which marked the halfway point between the door and his desk. It was truly doll-sized, maybe a foot and a half tall, and as it drew nearer he could make out the center stitching up the overstuffed belly, the glass button eyes, the worn leather patch nose.
If it was a joke, Miss Peale was not waiting for his reaction. She closed the door, practicing a ridiculous bow until she was safely out of sight. The creature stopped beside the ostrich leather chair and sagged slightly, as though reluctantly realizing it was in his best interest to climb it. Lucas recognized the animal. It was a rather threadbare and moth-eaten version of the teddy he had treasured as a small boy. Someone had apparently animated it with a remote control or computer-programmed skeleton. He picked up his hand and peeled some of his lunch from it, wiping it thoroughly with the linen napkin before presenting it to his guest. The automaton was having difficulty scaling the polished teak chair legs. Before he could round the desk to assist, it gave up and stopped, moving right toward him.
Lucas sat and bent, thinking the toy would approach him from under the desk, but he saw it had picked up the fallen photograph and was peering intently at the cracked glass.
“Who is this?” It said surprisingly clearly in a voice that sounded too perfect to have been pre-recorded.
Delighted, the man laughed and clapped his hands. “That’s amazing! You have cameras in the eyes and a speaker
stuffed inside the head?”
The animal turned toward him and shook its head. “In this picture. The little boy. Who is he?”
Lucas’ brown eyes narrowed, but he kept grinning as he calmly replied, “That’s my boy.”
“Your...boy,” said the voice the man noted was a soft baritone, slightly muted, probably from stuffing packed
around the hidden speaker. The thing studied the picture while the man studied it keenly. “He looks like...but it’s not right. Not him.”
“Who were you hoping it was?”
“My Tommy,” said Ted E.
“Thomas Miller, eh?”
The creature tilted its head toward the top of the desk, still clutching the photo. “Tommy Miller?”
“Right,” said the man, seating himself with his manicured hands steepled over his waist. “What about him?”
“This isn’t him.”
“No. What do you want with Tom Miller?”
“He’s my boy,” insisted the animal gently, bending out of sight to set the framed picture upright on the floor.
“Well he’s not any longer. What do you want? Who sent you?”
The creature said softly, “I just wanted to find my boy.” It sighed, shook its head, and began to trudge past the ostrich leather chair back toward the lions.
“Is this a game?” called Lucas, intrigued, but playing it casual.
The doll sighed.
“I’m Tommy Miller.”
It stopped, straightened, eventually slowly hobbled its way around to better face the speaker. “What?”
He stretched to grab hold of the etched glass plaque striated with gold colored needles to resemble gold quartz.
“See? T. Lucas Miller. You knew that when you got here,” he accused.
The oversized head was cocked so far, the bear appeared to be in danger of tipping to one side. “Tommy? My
T-tommy? But how?”
“How what?” asked the man, nearing forty, thinning hair age-faded a tawny gold. “Why don’t we just get this over
with and you tell me why you’re here and what you want.”
“But Tommy’s just a boy.”
“He’s the father of a boy now, and an infant daughter. What’s it to you?” Lucas reached for the remains of his
wrap, then considered. “Is this an elaborate hoax? Are you just some remote control freak using a toy bear to case the joint?”
“Case...the joint?” repeated Ted E., beginning to totter slowly back toward the huge desk.
T. Lucas Miller sighed and lifted his plate over his wastebasket to slide his wasted lunch within it. “What do you
want? Make it snappy, or I get security to gut you and find out where your signal is coming from.”
The toy reached the chair and drooped for just a moment, again intimidated by the very thought of the effort
involved with scaling it. Lucas almost smirked for a moment, but his patience was waning, so he simply waited
with his elbows on his leather blotter, fingers steepled, forehead leaning against his thumbs.
“If you’re Tommy Miller...then you must have finally drank all your milk and eaten your Brussels sprouts like
Momma told you.”
“Yeah, and then I picked up smoking from Dad. What do you want from me? Is this just a new product you’re showing me? Some surreal version of This Is Your Life?”
“I’ve been looking for Tommy,” said Ted softly, grunting as his mitten-shaped paws strained to get a grip on the
highly polished wood. “I’ve been waiting for him for so long.”
“So now you’ve found me. Can we get this over with? I’ve got a masseuse coming in at three, just before I go meet Artie for drinks at the Iron Forge Club.”
With surprising agility, the little robot or whatever it was finally managed to haul himself up toward a chair arm, then swing a stubby leg out to catch the edge of the chair seat and pull himself onto it. He sat as though plunked there, sagging, not moving at all for a moment, and Lucas had a flashback of coming home from school one rainy afternoon and catching sight of his old bear sitting just like that, looking so melancholy in the half-light that he’d dropped his books and run to comfort the toy. Then it sighed as though it really needed air to breathe, and the man smirked, impressed by the detail that had gone into making the stuffed animal so believably animate. “He came home in tears with me because those other boys beat him up.” Lucas stiffened and the smirk faded, became a near scowl, his eyes blazing. “They called him stupid because he was still playing with little boy toys.”
Ted sat up straighter as the large man came swiftly around his desk and thrust a finger toward his short muzzle.
“You don’t know that. You don’t know anything! Where did you hear that? That’s not true !”
“So he threw me down on the living room floor and refused to pick me up for two days before his father finally got mad about it and snatched me up and tossed me in a box in the downstairs coat closet.”
Lucas recalled the event clearly. He’d been seven. He’d dearly wanted to retrieve his old, worn teddy and sit and
rock with it and deny everything the other boys had said about him....but he couldn’t forget their words, their
accusations, their frenzied fists meeting his tender young flesh. Too old to play with stupid stuffed bears. That’s what girls play with—animals. Why don’t you grow up and try a BB gun like I’ve got? And racing away shrieking
as the armed eight year old took aim at the seat of his patched dungarees. He inhaled deeply and focused back on
his visitor again. “You should work on the eyes. Make them blinkable instead of glass. Remember that candy-ass
weird thing in the smock they tried to peddle a few years back? Teddy Ruxpin or something? More like that, but
loose the stupid smock. Made the damn toy look gay.”
The bear waited for him to perch on the corner of his desk before continuing. “I sat in that closet for weeks. Saw Tommy now and then when it rained and he reached over the box to grab his coat. He never played with me again. His father said to throw me in the trash, but Momma rescued me and took me upstairs with her. Put me in a box with a few other toys he wouldn’t play with. The rocking horse that wound up and played music. The monkey that
smiled and played the cymbals. Broken stick horse. I’m sorry to tell you they’re gone, now. I had to tear them apart and eat their stuffing just to stay alive.”
Lucas uttered a harsh bark of surprise. “That’s...that’s...toy cannibalism?” He shook a finger at the bear. “You, sir, have a bit of a dark sense of humor, don’t you?”
“Oh, it was very dark,” admitted Ted, trying to clasp overly short forelimbs around himself. “She put us up in the
attic, and all you could hear were muffled sounds. Animals running across the rooftop at night. Cars driving by on
the street during the day. The TV. The yelling. Oh, you yelled and screamed and made all kinds of noises as you
turned to toy cars and robots and toy guns. Then later it was Momma and Dad yelling at you when you tried to
skateboard in the house, you wouldn’t take that awful yapping dog out for walks when you were supposed to, you
wanted to watch TV instead of doing your homework.”
The corner of the desk beneath one ass cheek seemed rather unstable, and Lucas slowly stood, straightened his double breasted blazer and the crease of his slacks, then backed toward his chair opposite the bear once again, putting his desk between them. His voice was a bit raspy as he mentioned, “And the lips don’t move. You just have
stitching where the mouth should be. Make them give you a hinged mouth so at least it looks like you’re actually
talking...just tilting your head this way and that and making noise is kind of...creepy.”
“Then, as more time passed, I heard your voice grow deeper, heard the strange loud music that you began to play in your bedroom right below me, heard the language you weren’t supposed to speak come pouring from your lips as
you hung out with your new friends. I could smell the cigarettes you tried to sneak, the late night pizzas that you
ordered, the strong cologne you started wearing when you decided not to beat up girls any longer.”
Should he summon security? What would he say to them? He was being given the creeps by a little teddy bear that
talked? What if it refused to speak anymore when they got there? They’d think he was crazy...it wasn’t hurting
anything. Junie would vouch that the thing could walk and talk.
“You spent less and less time at home, and there was more and more yelling between Momma and Dad. It, too, faded over time, and then there was more TV, less guests over for dinner and bridge and football Sundays. They talk more now, but you know he doesn’t hear so good, which is okay because she mainly just repeats herself a lot.”
The man laughed. “Okay. Whatever. You could be describing almost any kid’s life. What is it that you want here?
What am I supposed to do for you? Endorse this thing somehow? Help you buy into it and mass market it? What’s
the deal here?”
The stuffed animal sat up straight and asked politely, “Well, how are you, my boy?”
Lucas rolled his eyes and leaned back in his imported swivel chair. “Me? Oh, I’m grand. Just grand. I clear three
hundred K a year, got a handicap of 61, drive a Mercedes convertible coup when I’m not taking the Jag for a ride
in the countryside, work out with a personal trainer three days a week, vacation on a private yacht off the Grand Banks two weeks every year, play bartender at a club outside Cabo San Lucas every summer while my wife thinks
I’m on a business trip in Vegas, she’s wife number two by the way, and I take Viagra to make her think I still
care.” Smiling smugly, he decided, “You won’t be leaving here in one piece, you know.”
“You’re handicapped?”
“I’m...what...no. No. Golf term. I golf. It’s a good thing.”
“You tell your wife you’re somewhere else every summer?”
Lucas snorted. “That’s just something I’m making up for the tapes. This is being recorded, isn’t it?”
The bear stiffly attempted to look around. “I don’t see a tripod. Is someone hiding and recording us?”
“This stupid game isn’t funny.” Lucas glanced at his Rolex. “I’m gonna hafta cut this short if-”
“What happened to your first wife?”
“Did Tonya send you?” Ire up, he stood and leaned toward the toy threateningly, “Is this a joke, Tonya? Some crazy way to get me to admit something you can use against me in court? I am not sending you a cent more in child support, you crazy whore! I know you’re still sleeping with Bud Tyner. He’s an electrician—he probably makes more an hour than I do!” Lucas laughed at his own joke.
“What’s happened to you?” the bear asked, his voice hitching as though the emotions his face could not show
required another outlet. “You got big and got loud, and then this....” He gestured toward the conservative opulence around him. “All of this seems so much, so nice...but you don’t have a penny to give your own child?”
“Oh, fuck off! I knew this was some kind of a set-up. Is that you, Rod Kenklemeier? Are you getting all this down for later?” he snarled at the bear.
Ted hunched a little deeper into the crease between seat back and seat. “How could Tommy gain so much...yet give
back so little? I see all this must have cost all of your allowance, but once you got everything you wanted, did you start giving any to those not as well off as you are?”
Lucas’ eyebrows furrowed as he sank back down into his chair. “Make up your mind, Bear. What the hell are you
getting at?”
“I grew up with a little boy with big eyes and an even bigger imagination. He was sweet-tempered and mild...except to most of the girls he knew, but we know they can make you sick if you hang out with them too long, so that’s okay. Tommy could play the piano and he loved to color in his coloring books and eat fried bologna sandwiches and find snails he’d try to make race one another.”
“I never took piano!”
The toy ignored his outburst. “It was a little plastic piano they bought you the same Christmas that they bought me.
Maybe it didn’t sound like music to anybody else when you banged on it or chose keys carefully and plunked them,
but to you it was like being in a concert hall, so it sounded a lot like Beethoven to me, too.”
Scowling, the man folded his arms over his chest and tried, “What does that mean? You hear what I hear? What I
want to hear? What I’m pretending to be doing?”
“Pretending!” said Ted, leaning forward, ears pricked toward the much older version of his beloved boy. “Yes, yes! You and I pretended, and when you pretended I could understand you and you could hear me and you told me all
the things you were afraid of and all the things you would do when you grew older...and did you do those things,
Tommy? Did you ever get to try all of those things?”
“I don’t remember what I wanted as a boy. What did I say? I wanted to fly around like Superman? I wanted to
jump eighteen-wheelers on a motorcycle? I wanted to dress like Fonzie?”
The toy scooted closer toward the chair’s edge. “You said you wanted to make the bad boys go away. Make them
stop hurting the littler kids like you. You wanted the flowers to bloom in the wintertime, to make every day at
school nothing but snack time and recess, you wanted to ride on trains like bums and see the world...you wanted to be King of the World one day and it would never rain again, and nobody’s grandma would ever have to go to sleep forever, and ride on a fire truck, and TV could only have cartoons on it and never the boring ol’ stupid news that just made everybody upset and angry.”
“Oh, please,” groaned Mr. Miller. “That’s just stupid kid stuff. You know my boy right now, he’s eight and a half years old, wants to be a video game designer. Has his own website he made up all on his own. Rides a mini ATV all over our twelve acres in the hills.”
“And he has a bear? Like me?”
“Y’know, I don’t think he ever had a bear. Just a few stupid stuffed animals people gave us when he was born.
Nothing special, just cheap shit. But he always liked TV. You could put on Ghostbusters or Batman or some
Japanese shit or what have you and he’d just shut up and sit still for hours. It was heaven.”
“When you get bigger, your language changes.”
“Whatever.”
The toy’s head sagged. “I thought...you’d be the same.”
“That’s ridiculous. Nobody stays the same.”
“But, I am-”
“You are a joke of some sort, a hallucination. A prank or something. This isn’t real. You’re not real. You’ve got a-a microchip or something. A speaker so I can hear you and you’re in another room or-or a van in the parking garage or something.”
“Why is it so hard to believe now? You used to talk to me all the time when you were little.”
“I was a stupid little kid. Little kids do that. They’re like insane or something. I read that somewhere. We’re all insane when we’re born and then we have to grow out of it. That’s why little kids see ghosts and have invisible friends and stuff.”
Ted cocked his head and asked him, “Invisible friends?”
“Well, I didn’t. I had you. I-I-I had a bear I used to talk to. But it was all imaginary. It never talked to me. I never heard it talk back. Not really. It was all pretend. You can’t be here. This isn’t real. You’re not the same toy I used to play with when I was little.”
Again, the toy sagged, and a loose stitch gave way high up on the chest and a little tuft of slightly stained fluffy filling poked out. “Tommy, I-”
Thomas L. Miller rose and came around his desk swiftly, hesitating before the chair where the stuffed animal sat.
It was motionless for so long he almost felt relieved, like it had all been some wild trick of his mind. Then it slowly tilted its head back for a look at him. Before it could speak, he snatched it up and squeezed it, expecting weight and resistance beneath the worn fabric, but finding it strangely lightweight and squishy instead. the toy was silent as he shook it, then brought it close to his face so he could look right in its eyes. They were sewn on, lightly scarred
glass with slightly irregular paint blobs for pupils. The nose was spongy, the short muzzle full only of stuffing. The man laughed wildly in a pitch a little too high as he twisted and gripped the thing, searching for an aluminum skeleton, telltale wires, the hardness of a tiny transmitter buried deep within the body. He found a decorative letter opener on his desk with his left hand and stabbed it into
the soft body over and over, letting stuffing rain down, recognizing a
few scraps of the remains of some older, plush toys he’d once played with. How had they gotten in there? Had the bear’s stitching popped when he was little and his mother had used bits of other toys to stuff him back up plump
again? Or...no. Of course not. Eating the other toys in the box he’d been stored in...that was some kind of sick
humor. That hadn’t happened. This was a prank. A joke. It just had to be. He knew it.
Before long he was gripping a limb and what looked like a flaccid bear costume dangling from it, its polyester scraps littering the floor at his feet. He dropped the remains in revulsion, wondering if he’d gone crazy, if this was part of some nightmare and not even real at all.
“What happened to you?” Came the plaintive moan from the mostly intact head, and T. Lucas screamed and
kicked the head toward the huge marble fireplace, wishing it wasn’t just decorative. Wishing there was a gigantic
fire flaring within it. He thought he heard muffled syllables and he screamed some more, drowning out the sounds of the nightmare, needing it to end.
“What the fuck?!” he asked aloud, his voice wet and raspy. He coughed a little spittle and wiped at his
lower face with one palm, focused on the dark lump near the far wall, listening intently, waiting to see it move, to hear it speak again.... “Jesus fucking,” he began, then choked on his own words. He’d gone to church when he was little. Knew better than to behave like this. To use such bad language. Dad only went on holidays to keep Momma
from crying, but he’d gone with her every Sunday until he was nine...and then he’d made sure to be out of bed
before dawn on the weekends and off with his new friends fishing or throwing rocks at old people’s windows or duct taping fireworks to stray cats and letting them run off in terror into the streets.
Was this some sort of weird karmic payback? No...stuff like that didn’t work this way. It couldn’t be supernatural. That was all Hollywood stuff. Toys didn’t resurrect from early childhood to come prancing into your office and ask you what the hell had happened to you. He backed up, one hand loosely covering his lips, wondering why
Junie hadn’t entered or called security when she’d heard him scream. Well, he sure hadn’t hired her for her brains,
but come on! Grown CEOs don’t just scream in their offices for no reason whatsoever....
His heel caught on something and he wobbled for a moment, catching sight of a thin black cord just before he fell.
The pain in his left elbow and knees made him forget everything else for just a moment, and then a piece of cloth
fell on him. Some kind of white netting...a modified delicates bag, he realized, like the one his wife washed her nylons in. It wasn’t much of anything and he easily shrugged it off, but then the 80 lb. test from his Brogdon 2000 deep sea rig went sailing over his head in a broad arc, lead by a number five sinker, followed by another length of line and another. Thinking of the tattered toy he’d kicked across the room, he uttered a shuddery whimper of confusion and looked around wildly, catching sight of slight movement from behind one of the big lion statues, a flutter of shadow just under his own desk. He reached up and caught some of the line with one hand, but more went sailing overhead, creating a flimsy, but efficient means of slowing him down, and then to his amazement, about six or seven little figures ran out and began yanking on the pale blue lines, proving that their ends were tipped with barbed and painful hooks.
Lucas howled and thrashed unthinkingly, catching himself more securely in the lines. Smears of blood began to appear on the mosaic tile as he flailed, trying to rip free and get to his feet. A pale plastic figure dressed only in
boots strode up and hailed him. “Tommy! Good to see you again! Remember me? From the Christmas after you
stopped playing with your bear?”
Taking a swing at the character, Lucas snarled, “Not the damn G.I. Joes!”
Joe ducked and chuckled. “I’m the one you tried to flush down the toilet, but that Corporal over there is the one
you tried to melt in the microwave when you were fourteen, and that Major with the one arm is the one you used
for target practice with your BB gun. Remember us?”
“This is not real!” the man half growled, half-screamed, pulling at the tangle of fishing line and hooks, ripping his own flesh to get free, striking out at any of his former playmates that got a little too close to him. “Junie! God-damn it, Junie! Junie get your ass in here now! Call security, you stupid bitch! Junie?! Junie? Are you out there? Jesus Christ, what the hell is happening to me!?!”
As he partially crawled and partially slithered through a barrage of office supply weaponry, kicking blindly at some
monster from his past ducking in repeatedly to try and staple his heels and shins, Lucas saw a growing stain
moving slowly across his highly polished floor from beneath the doors. He didn’t know if Junie had her own past
coming back to haunt her or if she’d been taken down by the animated ghosts of his own, but the freshly sharpened
pencils piercing him like darts as they were launched from some rubber-band powered slingshot made him realize
he’d probably never know.
A tall plastic robot badly scarred and missing parts pushed the heavy doors aside and walked awkwardly through the puddle in his stiff, C-cell powered fashion past the struggling man to reconnoiter with the damaged Joes. There was an object on the floor between the gigantic desk and ostrich leather chair, propped up amidst a cloud of pale, stained stuffing.
The robot slogged his way through the shreds of teddy, leaving wedge-shaped blood colored footprints, and bent to
lift the framed picture awkwardly with its sole working claw-like hand. The naked Joe started toward it, saying,
“Hey, whatcha got there?” as the toy stared thoughtfully at a photo of a somewhat familiar little boy posed with his parents, the red LED lights which acted as his eyes glowing dully with the internal replay of a faulty bit of
memory.
After Satan negotiates a pact with God and unleashes his army of demons, a secret sect battles a diabolical prophecy that threatens humanity.
Release Date: November 21, 2018
WEIRD RHODY is a short story collection featuring five strange tales all set in Rhode Island and written by five Rhode Island authors. The anthology is a tribute to H.P. Lovecraft, the Ocean State's famed author of pulp horror.
