Being captured and crammed into a burlap sack by a bunch of Little Ratty Toy Freaky Deaky Dementos had been the weirdest thing that Billy had ever even dreamed of. At least they’d finally pulled the sack off once they got him to the strange and disturbing place where they’d dragged him. This dark, damp kingdom of toys and weird little creatures was so bizarre that it actually delighted Billy as much as it frightened him.
It’s like a Monster Scary Movie, he thought. Like the Frankenstein guy, but with toys. He’d watched several of these Monster Scary Movies without his parents’ permission, which, of course, was a big deal and almost against the law. They hadn’t told him he absolutely couldn’t watch them, but Billy had a pretty good idea they would say “that’s not age appropperable” or some long words like that.
So, instead of asking, he watched these movies “in secret.” He’d watch the movies when his parents were napping or busy doing parent stuff. If he heard them coming, he would change the channel to Barney or something he knew they thought was good for him; then they’d leave him alone and he’d go back to the spooky thrills of werewolves and hunchbacks and their fog-enshrouded wonderlands that were more wonderful for not being in color. And though these Monster Scary Movies did, in fact, scare him, usually he sort of liked it. And he liked the monsters a lot more than the regular people in the story, which was puzzling to him. “Monsters in black-and-white land are so cool,” he’d told Ollie. Ollie agreed.
But right now was not in black and white nor was it on TV. This place was apparently real life, and Billy would have to deal with it. He was tied up with a dozen different kinds of rope and string, lying on the wet concrete floor in what he’d figured out was some creature named Zozo’s workroom.
And he thought he knew where this workroom was, and thus where he was. The burlap sack had been easy to see through. For most of the journey, the Creeps had dragged and pushed him across the bumpy ground and through a wooded vacant lot. Billy’d been clever enough to shove his action figures, one by one, out of the hole he’d made in the burlap sack during the journey. Once they came to the overgrown entrance of a place called “the Tunnel of Love,” Billy realized that he must be deeper within the Dark Carnival. He had walked on the outer edge of the carnival several times with his mom and dad, but they never explored it, which Billy had desperately wanted to do.
“It’s too dangerous,” his dad had told him. “Huge holes you can’t see. Old rides practically falling down. The place is a menace.”
“I loved it when I was a kid,” his mom had said, and the way she had said it stuck in Billy’s mind. He could tell that remembering the carnival made her happy and sad at the same time. And this made the Dark Carnival Place very interesting to Billy.
But he never dreamed he’d be at the carnival at night without his parents. The Creeps had lowered him into a rotting wooden boat in the shape of a giant swan and rowed it down the Tunnel of Love.
At the entrance he’d managed to shove his winged Pegasus out of the sack at the last second. The toy horse lay quiet and still in the grass and mud, his wings upstretched, the shadows covering him well. Perfect! None of the Creeps had noticed him as they trundled Billy along.
As Billy had lain in the bottom of the swan boat, he’d wondered if his trail of action figures and creatures was still there. And if perhaps he should have made his trail with the candy he’d packed. Hansel and Gretel had used crumbs. That had always bothered him. What if birds or squirrels or a dog had come along? So long, Hansel! See ya, Gretel! No, his small plastic pals seemed the best choice. And indeed they were. The Code of the Toys was unshakable, even for the tiniest of playthings. The code was simple: that a toy would always help whenever possible. Help make their child’s day full of adventures, full of joy, full of comfort.
But this underground otherworld of Creeps and clowns had a different code, and Billy could feel that it was not a good or friendly one. As he was listening to the one called Super Creep talking to the Monster Toy Clown, he figured out these creatures had stolen Ollie at the Wedding. That their mission was to steal any favorite toy they knew about. But Ollie had escaped! Ollie had been so messed up from escaping that Billy almost didn’t recognize him. Then a miserable thought came to Billy. What if Ollie didn’t understand why I threw him? What if he didn’t know I was trying to save him from those Creeps? And if they wanted a favorite, why did they take me?
These guys do a lot of illegal and commit A LOT of mean, thought Billy, and this made him feel big-time mad. Mad that they had taken Ollie and tried to do crummy bully stuff to him. Mad that they had done the same thing to bunches and bunches of other toys. Then he remembered a kid at the grocery store and how the kid had cried so hard and kept saying, “I lost Binky! I lost Binky!” And how that kid and the mom were looking everywhere for Binky. The kid was so sad that Billy felt sorry for her. Really sorry. Almost as sorry as he felt for the lost dog he saw one day when he was riding somewhere with his parents. They were in a whole different neighborhood, and the dog wanted to cross the street but was scared and shivering and skinny, and Billy yelled at his dad to stop the car so they could help the dog. But his dad said the dog would be fine. Billy wasn’t so sure about that. And he thought that maybe grown-ups pretended too. But that grown-up pretending seemed more like lying than pretending sometimes. Billy still worried about that dog. Even though he’d only glimpsed it for a few seconds, Billy knew he would never forget it. Not even when he was superold, like fifty. Or maybe even older. He would remember that poor, skinny dog forever.
And then he thought of Ollie.
How Ollie had been wet and muddy and sad looking. Like that dog. And it made Billy so sad he couldn’t think about it for even one more second.