The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror(23)
Near the house there was a wood, and in the long summer evenings the boy liked to go there after tea to play, on the evenings that he could stand and keep both eyes open. He would march off brokenly, dragging a wagon with the Rabbit riding behind him. Some nights as the sun set, and his cracked lips bled, the boy would cry a long, noisy child’s cry, and the Rabbit would endure it with perfect patience as the boy built him a nest and told him all his stupid, childish sorrows.
One evening, while the Rabbit was lying alone on the grass watching the light play over his own splendid paws, he saw two funny little creatures creep out of the tall brush near him. They were rabbits like himself, but differently made, as they seemed quite brand-new. Their joints didn’t show in the least, and they changed shape queerly as they moved: one minute they were low to the ground and whispersome and the next thickly gathered together into a neat bundle of flesh. They slid and spilled about him, one quite the shadow of the other. The Rabbit stared as they crept close to him, looking for the key that wound them up and made them jump so. The rabbits stared back at him, twitching their noses all the while, until one of them finally asked, “Why don’t you get up and run with us?”
“I don’t feel like it,” said the Rabbit, which was true.
“Don’t you?” asked the other rabbit. “It’s easy as anything.” And he gave a great juddering lurch sideways and caught himself violently on his hind feet. “I don’t believe you can do it,” he said.
“I can,” said the Rabbit. “I can run like anything and jump, too,” and he meant it.
“Can you?” asked the laughing, lurching rabbit, and he shivered from side to side in a funny little hopping sort of dance. The grass behind him was pale, and the long, slim trees beyond paler still. The garden was a shuddering black thing, the winding path back to the house a ghastly river, white as termites. The Velveteen Rabbit could only sit madly in the middle of the pale path—he had no hind legs at all, only a single stiff-brushed cushion his head was sewn onto.
“I don’t want to,” he said again. But the slumping, slinking rabbits had very sharp eyes, and they peered at him and peered at him, and stretched out their necks wildly, and gaped at him as much as they pleased.
“He hasn’t got any legs to run with,” one of them said to his rabbit-shadow, and they each grinned at him with their mouths. “He hasn’t got any legs to run with.” The other creature bobbed his head up and down in gibbering agreement.
“I have got them,” cried the little Rabbit wildly. “I have got them! I’m only sitting on them, and I don’t care for you to see them!”
One rabbit danced closer and thrust his eyes up under the Velveteen Rabbit’s nose, then shook his head and flattened his ears and jumped backward. “You don’t smell right,” he said. “You don’t smell right at all, and you aren’t anything that I know of, and you aren’t real.” The other twitched his nose in agreement.
Just then came the slow, slumping sound of the boy approaching, and with a fierce whirling of feet, the rabbits disappeared. For a long time the Velveteen Rabbit lay very still, looking at the grass and everything that moved over it and everything that moved under it. The sun trembled lower and lower in the sky until it tipped and spilled itself out over the grass. Presently the boy came limping back up the white path, and picked up the Rabbit and carried him home.
Months went by, and the Rabbit grew soft and tender like new skin from touch, and the boy loved him all the more for it. And the Rabbit loved him back. He loved the boy until his freckles faded and his head ached and his breath came in hard, sharp gulps like a dog’s.
One day the boy caught a fever, and dark red patches bloomed high on his cheek, and he wept in his sleep, and his little body grew so hot it burned the Rabbit when the boy clutched him close. Strange people streamed in and out of the nursery, and a light began to burn all through the night, and through it all the little Velveteen Rabbit lay there, hidden under the bedclothes. The Rabbit found it a long and weary time, and worried that someone would spot him and take him away. But he knew how to be patient. He thought of the stupid Skin Horse, who had waited years to become Real. He thought very hard about what it would be like if the boy should get well again, and how they would go out in the garden and play splendid games in the raspberry thicket. All sorts of delightful things he planned, and while the boy lay half asleep he crept up close to the pillow and whispered them into his ear. The boy’s skin grew white and thin as moth’s wings. His joints seized up, thick and angry, and he cried out when his nanny moved his legs to change the sheets. The boy’s teeth trembled and his eyes darkened and his brain had a fire inside of it. The boy hurt. And the Rabbit got Realer and Realer by the minute.
The boy no longer whispered his stupid secrets to the Rabbit, because his tongue had swollen up into every corner of his mouth. The boy scarcely moved. The boy gazed at the Rabbit and loved him, and the Rabbit loved him back very hard, until at last the boy stopped moving at all.
It was a bright, bold morning and the windows had been thrown wide open to let the breeze in. They had carried the boy out of the room, wrapped like a new toy. The little Rabbit lay tangled up among the bedclothes, with just his head peeping out, listening as they talked about arrangements and doctor’s orders. The entire nursery was to be disinfected, and all the toys that the boy had ever played with were to be burned.