My teddy bear, Austin, grinned at me out of the darkness. There were a lot of shadows in the room where I used to live as a child, you see. Cobwebs hung in many corners, from beams that hadn't been dusted in decades.
"Why did you bring me here?" I wanted to know. But Austin grinned more toothily, in that "you'll find out" kind of way he always had. Austin was the most arrogant of my teddy bears, or of any of my stuffed animals for that matter. It was a good thing I didn't creep out easily, never had. I was happy anyway that the asylum had released me for a bit, for my parents' funeral. Even though I'd hated them both.
I could remember every nook and cranny of that house from feel, even though I didn't need to walk around with my eyes shut. That was just a game I'd learned at the asylum from Jumper who thought he was King Charles of Pluto and insisted on wearing as few clothes as possible in the winter. He'd killed himself in the spring as soon as he saw the first crocus, said it was unnatural. So now I was back at the old house on Memory Avenue, where the whipporwills and the northern flickers trilled oddly by the lake, and a heron stalked its boundaries looking for fish. I could see that out the window, through the moldy panes.
And I felt Austin's pebble eyes staring at me from the shadowy corner.
The room was in a gabled section of the house, with crinkly wallpaper that had never stayed up proper. The paper was covered in tiny leaves and a few rosebuds, always too delicate for my taste, like the lacy curtains. Grandma had wanted me to learn to be a "lady" and so I had, with several different finishing schools to which I'd never been allowed to take Austin until my parents learned that apparently all young ladies had stuffed animals in their dorms. Apparently all young ladies also stick frogs' legs in other peoples' beds, and hang nooses in their lockers. I learned to sleep under the bed or out on the porches; so they called me mad.
I wished evil upon all of them, and would cling tightly to Austin those nights as I cried into the rosebushes or my pillow. No one ever believed me, not really I could tell, but I was always transferred to another school. It was as if they were placating me to keep up appearances. The appearance they created was that "Lenore's a big, fat baby," and I was none of those things. A hunchback, maybe, but not a baby. I hated them.
I hated the other girls through four schools, and then something miraculous happened. One night I was sitting in the dumpster out back of the school, living among snot rags and candy wrappers and not caring, when I heard the voice. "I will help, if you just let me," it said. "Just let me, Lenore. It will feel so good. . . ."
I stopped sniveling then, and I looked around but couldn't see a thing. I went to sleep and dreamed of Shrly Gosham catching pneumatic fever and having to pee herself everywhere, that gorgeous ass of a girl. She'd be so sick she wouldn't know how to beg for mercy, and she'd never put itching powder on another girl's dressing table again!
It came true the next day.
Other things happened. Doris McCall got food poisoning. Keira Sommers started gaining weight, no one knew why. And Seline Otter slipped on a banana peel and cracked her head wide open. I was Seline's roommate, so naturally they all looked at me queerly.
I got transferred, but first I was to be checked out by a psychiatrist. That was an annoying old man who asked me about my parents. They'd always been distant, he decided - well, of course they were! We weren't rich, but every proper girl had to have a governess. I'd liked mine well enough, though she could only come a few times a week. She always left the house and grounds well before dark, as well. Why? he asked me, but I didn't know. His final diagnosis was that I had a nervous disposition and could do well with a trip to the asylum "where things are better than you are led to believe, my dear. They'll just make you all better."
I was put into a straight-jacket the instant that my sniffling mother and bland-faced father closed the door of the stark building. And I was left there for several days, the only visits by nurses who came to inject me with something to stop the screaming, and to feed me. They were wary of me, because of my hump, I learned. Some said I must be a witch, others said things more dark about me. I had been placed at the lowest corner of the hall. And I didn't have Austin anymore.
They took the diaper and the straight-jacket off after nine days, and I was allowed to move around much more freely, though I fell the first few times. When you get used to not having arms, your balance changes and you must change it back. I learned to do that. I learned other things, as well, like smoking, from the other patients. "You think you been put here just for a bit?" asked a tall guy who had a mental disorder they called schizophrenia one day. Charles, he called himself. "They tell us all that. You been fleeced, sheepy." He walked off laughing. We had sex in the locker room two days later. We plotted our escape, we made out, even though he was a terrible kisser. Very slobbery. When I asked him about the burn marks on his arms he just laughed and told me to shut it.
That night I dreamed of his death, because I was afraid of him for some reason I didn't understand, and the next day he was dead. And I was blamed, because we'd slept together, but they released me because they had to.
My parents were dead. And it was a requirement for them to release me, as I was the sole heir to the family.
So now, here I was back in that nasty old house. By now I wasn't surprised why Grandma didn't often visit while she was alive. I'd gotten nightmares from the loons calling at night; my room looked right out on the water. My governess used to sing me songs of the loons, in their weird, winding language, and she hung a dream-catcher over my bed. "Always keep him close, he'll be a good help to you one day," she told me. By now I knew what she meant; back then I hadn't known.
I walked over to the shadows and felt a crackle like electricity when I touched Austin's fur. He'd been made of wool and pebbles, but I'd always loved him. It was the one thing my aunt Calendula had done for me that I'd liked. The electrical jolt went through me like the orgasm from hell. Maybe he was from hell, I thought vaguely as I found I couldn't let go. The whipporwills called outside; it'd be dark soon.
Floating?
No, I can't go to hell for what I did because I didn't really do anything. I had sex out of wedlock, that's about all of my sins. And I conspired with a possessed teddy bear to do damage to others. I am not sure where that ranks in the laws of heaven and hell, but apparently it's confusing enough for the Powers that Be to stick me here in limbo. So I suppose I'll haunt this cobwebby room for a few hundred years, and scare the pants off of other children who are doomed to live here.
And I'll wonder all that time who Austin was, originally.
END