Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(137)
The book fell over, flopped open on the floor. The gingerbread man rose from the pages, which beat around him like furious wings. He crawled out of the book, dark and strange and not much like the happy-go-lucky Cookie. He…No, it. It was not well formed, a lumpy and distorted figure, which staggered to its stumpy feet with effort. Not thin like a cookie but inches thick, six or eight inches tall. Twitching, jerking, graceless. It seemed to be tormented, white lips opening wide in what might have been a silent scream, rolling its misshapen head side to side, pulling at its flesh with mittenlike hands.
Flesh. Even from a distance of eight or ten feet, Bibi could see that this thing was not made of gingerbread. In the book, Cookie was made of gingerbread dough, rolled and shaped and baked. Of course that was silly. Even though she loved the story, Bibi had known that part was totally silly. That’s why magic was needed, a little Frosty the Snowman magic, to make Cookie supple, strong, and quick. Bibi didn’t know any magic. When she wished Cookie alive, she thought of him—if she thought at all about this part of his manifestation—as some kind of gingerbread animal, but what she got was all animal. Or it was less than an animal, elemental and primitive, as if a rotting mass of plant and animal tissue in a swamp had been lightning-struck and thereby animated with something less than life itself.
Still silently screaming, the thing picked up the book, which was bigger than itself, and flung it at Bibi. The whirling volume missed her but clattered against the bedside lamp, switching it off and knocking the shade askew.
Bibi would have fled if the minikin that she had wished into existence hadn’t been standing between her and the door. The only illumination came from the Mickey Mouse night-light her parents had recently installed, which until now she had found embarrassing, which she had plotted to dispose of one way or another. She was a child, yes, but not a baby in need of a night-light. She was years past being a baby. As the thing on the floor hitched out of the Mickey glow, disappearing in the shadows, Bibi didn’t want to scream for help, like a baby. Maybe she couldn’t have cried out even if she’d wanted to, because her hard-knocking heart seemed to have risen into her throat, so that she couldn’t easily swallow, and when she tried to say Go away to the minikin, no sound escaped her except a thin and tremulous wheeze.
Besides, if her mom and dad came running, maybe they wouldn’t be able to see the thing. In stories, kids were often able to see elves and fairies and all kinds of creatures that grown-ups couldn’t see because grown-ups didn’t believe in them. Then she would seem like a big baby, and they would never stop treating her like one. Worse, the thing from the book, the terrible not-Cookie, might hurt them. It was small, evidently toothless, but it was strong for its size, considering how it flung the book. If they were hurt, the fault would lie with Bibi. They would say it wasn’t her fault, “It’ll be what it’ll be,” but she knew the truth was that it would be because she had made it be.
Kneeling on the bed, she listened to the thing creeping around the room. Judging by the way it thumped and scraped and squished, she decided it was even slower and clumsier than it had first appeared to be. There was no magic in it. Maybe it was blind. It seemed unable to scream or speak, so possibly it couldn’t hear, either. Or smell. If the only thing it could do was fumble along the baseboard, it could only find her by chance. If it wanted to find her at all. Maybe it didn’t have a brain. Maybe it wasn’t able to want anything, just a stupid lump of twitching stuff.
Although her heart raced as fast as ever and seemed to pinball off her ribs even as it jumped into her throat, Bibi told herself that if she had wished the creature to come out of the book, she could wish it away just as easily. In fact that was what she had to do. Dispatching it was her duty. Her responsibility.
She slid under the covers once more, half sitting up against the pile of pillows, and she thought hard about the not-Cookie, picturing it crawling back to the book on the floor, slithering in among the pages, melting away into the illustration from which it had arisen. For almost an hour, there were silences periodically broken by new spasms from the creature. She was dry-mouthed and dizzy with wishing, with imagining. When eventually the horrid thing fell into a longer silence, she assumed that she had at last succeeded. She lay stone-still, listening. Second by second, minute by minute, she became more encouraged, though if her heart thumped not quite so fast as before, it beat harder.
Yet again the quiet ended. The thing scrabbled along a nearby wall. The lamp cord rattled against the back of the nightstand. If not by any of the usual five senses, the grisly little beast seemed to be finding its way to her by a sixth. She expected it to ascend to the top of the nightstand, two feet from her face. Then it moved under the bed and became quiet once more.
She had been wrong about it being brainless. It could think, all right. Think and know and want and seek. In the silence of the room, the only sound was within Bibi, the frantic pump in her breast, which beat her into a strange submission, into a kind of paralysis. But she could almost hear, too, the creature scheming in the darkness under the box spring.
She would never know how it progressed from beneath the bed and under the covers without her hearing it or sensing its movement. When it touched her bare foot, she threw aside the blanket and the top sheet, her scream no more than a dry whistle in her throat.
So it came to this. The confrontation of creator and created. In the dim light of the five-watt Mickey lamp, Bibi bending forward, seizing the thing with both hands, peeling it off her ankle. Cold but not slimy. Throbbing irregularly. Torsional. Difficult to hold. Her heart booming, quaking her entire body, breath fast and shallow and ragged, she wished it away, wished so hard that a headache split her skull, her ears popped as though from a change in air pressure, and a capillary burst in her nose, unraveling a thread of blood out of her left nostril. Yet the would-be best friend escaped her grip, twisting and flopping up her chest, toward her head. They were face-to-face when she seized it again, and the chocolate-drop eyes were not gentle or kind or chocolate, but wet holes in which pooled some thick, oily substance that she thought must be all the hatred in the world boiled down to just two spoonfuls. Openmouthed, the thing bent its flat face closer, closer, as if to suck out her breath of life. Migraine sawing through her skull, a blood haze tinting her vision, Bibi dug her fingers into the creature’s yielding flesh and did not wish it away anymore, but commanded it to be gone, this abomination that she had imagined into existence. To emphasize her authority, she punctuated her command by spitting upon the thing. It relented, and as it stopped struggling and diminished in her hands, she heard the pages of the book thrashing somewhere in the gloom, as the thing that was not Cookie nevertheless returned to Cookie’s world. When Bibi’s hands were empty, the book gave out one last rustle, and a hush fell upon the room.