Toyland- the Legacy of Wallace Noel Read online

  Toyland

  The Legacy of Wallace Noel

  Tony Bertauski

  Contents

  THE CLAUS UNIVERSE

  Pando’s Song

  Prologue

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Part II

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Part III

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Part IV

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Epilogue

  LAST PART

  What To Read Next?

  YOU DONATED TO A WORTHY CAUSE!

  REVIEW TOYLAND!

  THE CLAUS UNIVERSE

  The Claus Universe is a collection of standalone novels.

  Jump in anywhere you like.

  BERTAUSKI.COM/CLAUS

  Pando’s Song

  If you want to play, and stay out all day, I know the place we can do it.

  Prologue

  A funeral isn’t a fun way to start. But this isn’t your usual Christmas story.

  Great-aunt Annie was a hundred and thirty-six years old. You read that right. That’s not how long people live, but you heard what I said about this story.

  We didn’t call her Great-aunt Annie. We just called her Awnty Awnie because she wasn’t great. I mean, she was great. Just didn’t seem old. Eternally young. But, like I said, this story starts with a funeral.

  By the way, no one ever called her Aunt Annie. It was Awnty Awnie, one word. Awntyawnie.

  What I remember most about her, besides the infectious high-pitched laugh and her doughy hugs, was that she was a wonderful storyteller. Probably the best ever. That’s where Piper gets it.

  When Awnty Awnie started a yarn, everyone listened. Neighbors, pastors, little kids, dogs. You knew a story was coming when she patted her knees.

  “There was this time…”

  They were all Christmas stories about reindeer and snowmen, elven and Santa Claus. Stories you never heard before. She believed them. And so did we.

  Then one day forgot them.

  Before she passed, she forgot our names. Even Pip. There was one story left, though. One she never told.

  It began after the funeral.

  Everyone was in their dress-ups. Pip wore what four-year-olds wear: frilly dress and sparkly red shoes that tapped the floor. Tin had just started driving a car, whatever age that is. She wore a dress, too. Not sparkly shoes, though.

  Awnty Awnie’s house was as old as she was. The paint was peeling and the foundation cracked by a giant oak tree. Awnty Awnie didn’t care. Once upon a time her house looked like a greenhouse.

  She loved nature.

  Pip’s mom was planning to auction off the house with all the stuff in it. Her collections were in piles, boxes and cabinets, under beds and behind couches. There were newspapers, magazines, yarn, hats, and stuffed animals everywhere.

  She loved her stuffed animals, too.

  Pip and I climbed the steep stairs to an old, stuffy attic, where she played with Awnty Awnie’s stuffed toys. Pip would’ve told stories till it was time to go home if her mom didn’t start crying.

  We went back downstairs when Oscar called. He took care of paperwork for Pip’s mom. Stepdad stuff. I don’t know why stepparents are always the bad guys. Tin and Pip had different dads. Tin’s dad wasn’t a bad guy, just sort of not around. Pip’s dad was bad-bad. Their mom left him before they got married. Then she met Oscar.

  He was a keeper.

  He came over to help, but still he couldn’t understand why Pip’s mom was crying. A walnut was just a walnut, not the thing she’d carried home from school when a bunch of girls teased her and Awnty Awnie chased them off with a broom.

  “Just let the auctioneer have it all,” she said.

  She had a box full of memories to keep her crying for a month. Tin didn’t want to let the memories go like that. She didn’t have as many memories as her mom did. If she didn’t keep going, Awnty Awnie’s last story would’ve have been lost forever.

  Tin found the footlocker.

  It was metal and dented, with leather straps and rivets along the seams. It contained a heap of random stuff—wooden shoes from Holland, leather bolo ties, pan flute CDs—along with plastic binders of black-and-white photos. The pictures weren’t that interesting, really, just trees and flowers, hills and buildings and things.

  “I didn’t know she travelled,” Tin said.

  “Neither did I,” her mom added.

  There was a lot they didn’t know. Mom found an old leather-bound journal with newspaper clippings glued to the pages.

  “Who’s Wallace?” Pip said.

  She read the journal’s cover. Pip was only four, but she was precocious. She even knew what precocious meant.

  “Look.” Tin held up a photo.

  It was grainy, but they could make out what looked like a very tall treehouse. Oscar was the one who called it a fire lookout used by foresters. The man in the photo didn’t look like a forester.

  He had a very round belly and a thick gray beard. He was wearing a white T-shirt with suspenders. But, oddly, he was wearing a floppy hat. The photo was black and white, but it didn’t look like a Santa hat. It had a little bell and looked more like something an elf would wear.

  He was hugging a giant stuffed panda bear. It stood nearly as tall as he did. Mom flipped the photo over. Awnty Awnie’s handwriting was in blue ink. Wallace and Pando, 1908.

  “That’s a Noel Bear,” Oscar said.

  I knew what a Noel Bear was. Of course I did. I didn’t know who Wallace Noel was.

  All those stories that Awnty Awnie told had, in one way or another, come from a beat-up metal footlocker, a journal and a collection of black-and-white photos. But her last story is this one.

  If you ask me, it’s her best.

  Part I

  MISSOULA, Montana – Parker Stevenson, 51, a long-haul trucker, left Christmas Eve.

  “It was about two minutes after midnight,” Stevenson said. “The roads were empty. And all of a sudden, I see what looks like a man on the side of the road. Only he ain’t hitchhiking. He’s just walking on the snow.”

  Stevenson claims to have pulled over out of concern. The man didn’t appear to be wearing a coat on a night when the temperature was well below zero. According to Stevenson, the man was about five feet tall with a full beard and vivid green eyes. He was wearing a T-shirt with suspenders. But that wasn’t the strangest part.

  “He was barefoot.”

  The man got in the truck but didn’t appear to be cold, according to Stevenson. They rode for a couple of hours. At a truck stop outside Missoula, Montana, the man disappeared. There isn’t much known about the stranger who, Stevenson reports, never told him his name.

  “He was looking for someone who lost a hat.”

  Any information regarding someone who knows of someone matching this description, contact the local authorities.

  1

  Tin’s head was cold.

  The rest of her was toasty. Pip had crawled into her sleeping bag sometime in the night. Tin didn’t mind the kicking so much. The body heat was welcome.

  Monkeybrain’s lanky arms were around Pip�
��s neck. The purple monkey was bald where Pip rubbed the fur between her fingers. Tin had done the same thing when she was Pip’s age and Monkeybrain slept with her. She’d traded in her toys for boys a long time ago, but Monkeybrain was staring at her like he remembered her.

  It was chilly. Cobwebs waved near an odd-shaped heating vent. It was a triangle. The tepid air smelled like hot coils. It masked the smell of mouse droppings.

  Tin pulled her phone out. Her lockscreen was her favorite pic, one she would use as a profile pic if she did social media. It was her in full gear with a lacrosse stick yoked across her shoulders. It wasn’t so much the pic she adored as it was the memory it carried.

  Her last game.

  That depended on her knee. Tin knee, her teammates said. Hard to be a thug with tin knees. Tinsley wasn’t a thug off the field. Only when she needed to be.

  She slid out of the sleeping bag and put her feet in open boots. She found her stocking cap on the floor. It had slid down a metal slide that led to a round door. It looked like a bank vault from a bad movie.

  This place is so weird.

  The floor and ceiling slanted toward a rectangular window sliced into a short wall. Tin had to crawl on her hands and knees to peer through it. The glass was algae-crusted; the morning light was dull. Vines and branches grew against it like twisted fingers. She rubbed off a spot of grime.

  The fire tower.

  According to the photos in Awnty Awnie’s locker, there used to be a field of wildflowers out there. Now it was trees. But the fire tower looked exactly the same. It stood alone, untouched, overlooking thousands of acres belonging to Awnty Awnie.

  And now Mom.

  It was nearly impossible to find. The will identified the place with coordinates. There was no address, no street signs. When they looked it up on Google Earth, there was nothing but trees.

  Mom doubted the place was there anymore.

  Monkeybrain peered out of the sleeping bag. Tin grabbed her backpack and slid down the slide, her boots thudding on the iron door, and turned the wheel. The hinges squealed.

  There was a railing outside the bedroom. Below, a fire was roaring in a wide fireplace. The front room resembled a lobby in an M. C. Escher painting—all the strange angles and random walls, the jigsaw-puzzle windows and sloping floors.

  The bedroom was somewhere between the first and second floor. So, floor one and a half. Nothing in this place seemed to line up. The stairs leading to the first floor went up then down then back up again before she climbed down an aluminum ladder.

  A Victorian couch was in front of the fireplace. A fresh log was throwing red tracers against the black grate. Tin put her hands out.

  “What is this place?” Corey was buried under a pile of blankets.

  An upside-down staircase was attached to the far wall. It led to a door in the top corner of the room. If gravity ever reversed, someone could take the stairs. Otherwise, they were decoration.

  “You sleep out here?” she asked.

  “The rats kicked me out of my room.”

  There were framed photos on the wall. They were crooked and misplaced. Maybe that was on purpose, it was hard to tell. The sepia photos were from back in the day, similar to the ones Awnty Awnie had in her footlocker.

  It was mostly shots of stuffed animals. They were on an elaborate wooden playground, lined up and posed to jump, some watching from swings. There was another one of an amphitheater between the trees, with dolls on stage and brown teddy bears in the crowd.

  The one with Pando raised the hairs on her neck. It was the giant panda bear on a porch swing, all alone. Strands of Christmas lights, the old-fashioned kind with big bulbs, were hanging from the eave. A wooden sign was post above the door.

  Toyland.

  “Was your uncle Willie Wonka?” Corey said.

  “He’s not my uncle.”

  “Then why we here?”

  The property had been bequeathed to Awnty Awnie almost fifty years ago. She’d never said anything about it. Mom found the papers in a lockbox at the bank. Maybe Awnty Awnie forgot.

  But she had pictures.

  It was her mom’s idea to come here for Christmas. She and Oscar had checked the place out in August. They had a hard time finding it. It was country dark, the kind of dark where you couldn’t see your hand without a light. They were going to camp in the trees when the house just popped out of the dark.

  They camped in the backyard, and then she thought they could spend the holidays there. Pip thought it sounded fun. Corey was there because Oscar was married to their mom.

  One big happy family.

  “You could’ve stayed with your mom,” Tin said.

  “That’s what I said, but this is Dad’s Christmas. And your mom really wanted me to come because she hates me.”

  “You’re not funny. Are you texting under there?”

  “No, why? Are you getting service?”

  He popped his head out. His glasses were crooked, but his hair was a perfect mullet. Mullets never go out of style. He was only fifteen. Tin didn’t argue. A mullet fit him.

  “I got service on the entry road.”

  “Oh, so, like, just walk through the snow a quarter mile and there’s service?”

  “Just read a book.”

  “You read a book.”

  There were hundreds of old hardbacks in the lobby. They were stacked at angles or leaning on sloping shelves. They looked published right about the time the printing press was invented.

  She reached in her backpack and dug out the leather journal from Awnty Awnie’s locker. She’d read all the stories. Twice. Pip read them, too, sort of. She mostly pretend-read.

  “You’ll like it,” she said. “It’s urban-legend stuff.”

  “About your uncle? I’ll wait for the movie.”

  “He’s not my uncle.”

  But he had a point. No one knew why Awnty Awnie had inherited this place. If they were just friends, she wouldn’t own this place.

  He went back to his phone and Tin crossed the crooked room, passing a ghostly couch hiding beneath a white sheet against a wall (another Victorian couch, she’d peeked) and through a doorway, down two steps then back up one giant step.

  Her mom was on the far side of another giant room, this one with a walnut table long enough to host two football teams. Oscar was at a stove that wasn’t much bigger than the one at their house; he had to stoop to avoid banging his head on dusty pots and pans. He was wearing a blue bandana and an apron that said Man of the Kitchen.

  “It all still works.” Mom was unloading boxes into a walk-in pantry. “The stove, the fridge. Amazing, right?”

  Her pants were frozen around the cuffs. Snow was melting on her legs. Her nose and cheeks were rosy. It was the first time Tin had heard her humming in months.

  She’d cut her hair after Awnty Awnie died, and stopped dying it. Now it was mostly gray and framed her face. She rarely seemed to blink, either. It was sort of a Zen laser beam whenever she was awake. But now there was softness on her cheeks.

  “Want some light?” Tin reached for a string.

  “Bulb’s burned out. I got something for you and Corey though.” She tossed an empty box into the dark end of the pantry. “Go find a tree; bring it into the lobby. Pip’s nervous Santa won’t know we’re here. We can decorate it with popcorn and pine cones.”

  “Just go cut one down?”

  “We own a million of them now.” She smiled brightly. “There’s a workshop somewhere on the west end. I’ll draw you a map. I’m sure there’s a saw in there. Find a scrawny tree, too. You know how Pip likes them.”

  Her little sister (technically half-sister, but Tin never thought of it that way) felt sorry for the ugly trees. They were the last ones on the lot that no one wanted. She liked to make them feel special, dress them up with ornaments.

  “This is strange, coming out here for Christmas,” Tin said.

  Mom wiped her hands and Zen-stared. This was the thing she always did when she took
life’s inventory. It goes so fast, she would say.

  “I never had a family tradition. My parents divorced when I was younger than Pip, and then your father and I didn’t work out… and then Pip’s father didn’t work out… I think you see a pattern. I just, I don’t know, just always wanted you to have something that made Christmas special, something you would remember. You know, like a big table filled with uncles and aunts and cousins passing turkey and opening presents.”

  She looked around and shrugged. At least there was a big table.

  “When your aunt died, I just thought maybe it was a sign that we could start something new. You know, this place was supposed to be some sort of resort, I think. It was built, and then at the last second Wallace just closed the road, and no one saw him again.”

  She heard herself describing a very sad ending to a place where she wanted to start a family tradition. Tin wondered if she’d read the entire journal. The newspaper clippings sounded like urban legends, but there was one thread of truth holding them together.

  Wallace wasn’t normal.

  And this place was proof. It was a twenty-thousand-square-foot architectural sculpture. And if it was supposed to be a resort, why is the kitchen so small? And the table so big?

  “And there’s heat.” Mom smiled. “A Christmas miracle.”

  She hugged her. It wasn’t the stiff I-hug-because-I’m-your-mother hug. It was warm and soft. She was good at that. She was short and stocky but soft at the same time. Sort of like Tin, only grayer. Pip was skinny like her dad, but if they ever found photos of Tin, Mom and Awnty Awnie at the same age, it would be proof of genetics.