The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror(22)

After that the Skin Horse was seen no longer in the nursery, and the Rabbit’s eyes gleamed a brighter black and his ears glowed a livelier pink.

*

In the nursery, there was a tiresome sort of person called the nanny. The nanny was difficult to anticipate; sometimes she took no notice of the things lying about, and sometimes, for no reason whatsoever, she swooped about the place like a windstorm and bundled all the toys away in cupboards. She called this tidying up, and everyone but the nanny hated it. The Rabbit especially hated it, and he did not forget the times he had been tidied. The Rabbit was not in the business of forgetting, especially once he decided that he had been cheated of something. After one such tidying, the Rabbit had been cheated of his place on the floor, and he would not forget it. The nanny was most assuredly not Real.

Sometimes the Rabbit thought it was entirely possible that nothing at all was Real, that Real had been a lie of the Skin Horse from the beginning. But if there was Real, the Rabbit would find it. If there was not Real, then the Rabbit would decide what would happen next.

One evening, when the boy was going to bed, he couldn’t find the little white horsehair dog that always slept with him. The nanny was in a rush, so she simply looked about her, and seeing that the toy cupboard door stood open, she fetched the Rabbit out with an efficient hand.

“Here,” she said, “take the old bunny—he’ll do to sleep with.” And she dragged the Rabbit out by one ear, and put him into the boy’s arms, and the Rabbit felt the Realness of the boy’s warm heartbeat and the boy’s soft and fluttering throat, and he knew that the Skin Horse had not been lying.

That night, and for many nights after, the Velveteen Rabbit slept in the boy’s bed. At first the Rabbit found it rather uncomfortable, for the boy hugged him very tight, and sometimes he rolled over on him, and sometimes he pushed him so far under the pillow that the Rabbit could scarcely breathe. The Rabbit found he missed the long, dark quiet of the nursery, when everything else in the house slept and was still. The boy did not sleep like everything else in the house. The boy slept in motion, and he snored, and rolled over, and grunted, and chapped his lips, and muttered in his sleep. The boy had jam on his bedclothes and shoved crackers in his flat and flabby mouth. But the Rabbit bore his discomfort graciously and waited for the boy to start loving him.

The boy insisted on talking to the Rabbit, spilling the secrets of his stupid and inane boy’s heart, and he made ridiculous tunnels for the Rabbit under the bedclothes that he said were like the burrows that real rabbits lived in. Then the Rabbit knew that there were others like him and that the boy had kept him from them. And he did not forget that, and when the boy made him play his insipid games after the nanny had gone to bed, the Rabbit burned in shame and anger. But when the boy dropped off to sleep, the Rabbit would wriggle down under the boy’s small hot chin and above his small hot heart and listen to his dreams. And then it was the Rabbit’s turn to play.

On some mornings the boy would wake up dizzy and red-faced and cross and tangled in his bedclothes, and on some mornings the boy could not get out of bed at all. One morning, the boy woke up and was sick in the hallway. The Rabbit was his only comfort then, on mornings when his limbs were so sleep-heavy that he stumbled on the way to the kitchen and spilled his breakfast with a trembling hand, and he grew afraid of the body he lived in.

So time went on, and the little Rabbit was very happy.

Spring came, and there were long days out in the garden, for now the boy never went anywhere without his Rabbit. There were rides on the wheelbarrow, and picnics on the grass near the nursery door (the boy could not go past the flower border without becoming quite short of breath and complaining of dark stars behind his eyes). Once, when the boy slipped and fell down and had to be carried inside, the Rabbit was left out on the lawn until long after dusk, and the nanny had to come and look for him with the candle because the boy couldn’t go to sleep unless he was there. The Rabbit was wet through and quite earthy from creeping along the burrows the boy had made for him in the flowerbed, and the nanny grumbled as she cleaned him off with a corner of her apron. She had not seen him when he was an inching, bunching thing streaming darkly through the tunnels under her feet, and the Rabbit rejoiced that he had not been seen until he wished to be.

“You must have your old bunny!” she said to the boy. “Fancy all that fuss for a toy!”

The boy sat up in bed and thrust out his shuddering hands. “You mustn’t say that. He isn’t a toy. He’s real.”

When the little Rabbit heard that, he was too happy to sleep. That night he grew fatter and sleeker and stronger, and into his boot-button eyes, that had long ago lost their polish, there came a look of happiness so bright that even the nanny noticed it the next morning when she picked him up, and she smiled to see it.

That day the boy was especially ill, and complained of a thick feeling in his lungs and dust in his eyes. The nanny was cross, for she was never ill, and there is nothing the healthy find more tiresome than the sick. “Is there anything else you need, love?” she said, bustling about the sickbed, but the Rabbit knew she meant “Why don’t you get up and get better?”

“Why don’t you get up and get better?” the Rabbit whispered to the boy that night. The next morning the boy woke with four teeth cracked open to the root.

*

Now it was summer, and the sun shone so hot that all the next month the servants found fox after fox lying along the edges of the grounds like gifts, mouths strewn open and flecked with white, quite dead from the heat.