Toying With My Mind

Bad things seem to happen every time Mr. Lonie goes interstate for work – giant spiders, deadly snakes, fountaining shower heads, geysering garden taps, hospital stays for rare medical conditions, hospital stays for frightening pains during pregnancy – so it’s hardly surprising that when he went away last Monday night, we had yet another…incident.

Miss Lonie yelped in fear and surprise, and came running from the bathroom to tell me that one of her toys had spoken to her. Not a whizz-bang robotic toy that cost more than I have in my bank account, not a pull-string talking toy, not even a hand puppet: a normal, inanimate soft toy. Normal…inanimate…yeah…

Laugh if you must, but I’ve always been susceptible to fears of ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggety beasties and things that go bump in the night. And a onetime favourite toy now possessed by a possibly malign entity ranks right up there on the scream-o-meter.

Trying to feign nonchalance, I cautiously peered through the doorway into her room to locate the offending character, which she said was in the toy box. Gulp. He’s up there on the chair next to it, as if frozen in the act of clambering out.

“He was banging my books,” she added from the doorway where she stood, eyeing him warily and afraid to come in. “With Prunella.”

More decidedly un-toylike behaviour. Gulp. Another former favourite implicated. Double gulp. There she lay right beside him. Time to go visit my mum.

Later that evening I was relieved to see that neither of the accused had moved, and though I didn’t feel an aura of menace emanating from either of them, I felt it couldn’t hurt to let the dogs have a good sniff. Dogs are supposed to be attuned to that sort of thing, right? Right? They seemed uninterested enough, but they and Miss Lonie slept in my room that night all the same.

For a while I lay awake in dread lest I suddenly hear the pitter-patter of little footsteps that didn’t belong to either of my children. I got up in the night for a drink, and I swear after I got back in bed, in the silence of the witching hour I heard the bathroom tap turn on and off again. Eep. Miss Lonie later complained that her toy had been playing with the soap and the toothbrushes. Eep eep.

The next day when my mother came to visit, I sent the toys home with her to stay for an indefinite period. Miss Lonie was relieved and her reluctance to enter her room is gone. She even said my mum could throw the toys in the bin.

Of course I’m not saying there was anything to her story – children have vivid imaginations, and for all I know Mr. Lonie may have made an imprudent remark (as he is wont to do) which planted the seed of this fantasy in her impressionable mind.

I was going to post a picture of the reprobate so you could see how innocuous he looks and have a good laugh, but I just couldn’t bring myself to take the photo. I am, after all, a ridiculous scaredy-cat, and simply could not take the risk that the resultant image would come out looking like this: