Chapter 5

Evil Bunny – [Even toys get scary]

Evil bunny sat on the cushion of the bead surrounded by empty and used syringes, and all the other soft toys that had come to support him in this family of hardship. None of the other toys really liked him, or even trusted him all that much, even though he’d had recently undergone ear therapy to make him more lovable, cuddlier and cute, and therefore more real, but had it worked, was it a deception. Even he no longer knew at this point, everything had become so tangled with emotion that animated him and all the other toys. Ear therapy was where they bend you’re at a certain angle to make the toy look less threatening, or dangerous. It had been used by Teddy Roosevelt on the very first Teddy Bear. But none of this could help his family, and the terrible ordeal they had undergone.

They had all been savagely killed and mutilated beyond recognition, yet he hadn’t taken his revenge, not immediately. First he wanted the farmer to feel comfortable, safe on the old farm. He’d waited until his name and his story had seeped into the history of stuffed toys. The story was a gruesome one, he’d been out foraging for food one night in the pretend wheat field, a good evening’s foraging, until he returned. To his utter horror he’d returned to find his borough and his family slaughtered, their pelts removed, laying there like grotesque statues pried from the mind of Francis Bacon, and made flesh by an angry Nick Park on a bad day out.

Rage welled within him as he knelt down at the naked and raw corps of his wife and three children. All of them might have been toys like him. All of them might have softened the blow of reality for some innocent child. From that point onwards there was only one single course of action left to him. Kill the farmer responsible for their deaths. The only question remaining was how to do it, and when. If he acted too soon the finger of blame would snap in his direction faster than cartoon coyote. The blood rushed through his system like fire raging through a burning house as each new scenario graphically sped through his fevered brain, a calculation, a sequence of possible actions.

An image of his shitty little car sprang to mind. An old soft top with moss growing on the sill of the roof, a beardy, sneaky little man who never revealed his inner workings. He was cold like a fish, dead in his heart and soul. He wasn’t a man, or at least not the kind of man who bought his children presents that made them happy and stimulated their imaginations. That man who had done those unspeakable deeds was a coward who never faced the world with any real courage, with any real fortitude or character.

A chaotic life style my arse, those where his only grounds for terminating his family, erasing his reason for being, but now he’d found a new reason to live. To get revenge, and so he would wait. He could would wait until the world had forgotten, but he would never forget, he still knew in his heart, and the image was now indelible, undiminished by time. If he closed his eyes he could see them all now, blood sprayed on the wall, throats cut and fallen to the soggy carpet, lying like rag dolls with no fur and naked flesh in his borough. Thoughts of revenge flooded his mangled brain over and over again, like bombs triggered via a mobile phone, his hands around the man’s neck, blood pouring from open wounds, and arterial spray covering his skin. He could feel it’s warmth and the power of the spray as it covered his face, as he looked into the dying embers of the man’s eyes. None of this he knew would bring them back, but it was all he could think of anymore, it had become the reason to animate when they awoke, to train, to remain fit so that he could fight.

None of the other toys liked being around him anymore, There land was still made of true fantasy, real imagination, and animated in warm memories. His was animated through pain, he embodied their pain. They had been bought him for a purpose, but that purpose had now gone. Jenney, the girl, would sit in the nursery surrounding her fragile and thin form with all of them she could find, drawing on the walls and animating them all into her fantasies, as though they held some answer to a question she couldn’t never bring herself to ask. If she asked they could have told her, nothing could bring him back, most of them came from charity shops, so they’d seen all of this before and knew the signs.

She looked to evil bunny, and picked him up, then bent down his ear so that it would hold, so that it would not spring back into its natural position once more, and turn him evil again. She had been adamant about that when they had both talked. They rarely talked these days, but where they lived and slept was filled with the voices of so many, children, people, visitors to that house that had once been a home. It was ostensibly why they they had named him “Evil Bunny”.

“Do you think he’s cured, he doesn’t look evil anymore?”

She hadn’t slept in four days now, and then only to drift off into that nightmare world she so quickly erase from her memory on wakening to a far more bitter truth. The world she woke up to was far more disturbing, and haunting. She had rejected her own child, and child services has taken him off her, put him on morphine for no reason. The balance of these two conflicting emotions where unbearable, and no less frightening, it was just that slight bit more solid and concrete, though perhaps less vivid. In the distance there was the constant sound of crying and arguments. Day after day after day, and night after night, the toy saw her there sitting with other of there kind, cooking up snow balls, half crack, half heroin. It’s what they lived on now. It was what made the imaginary world come to life and move, talk, think and dream. Without them they were all just toys, stuffed with foam and wadding, made out of cloth and plastic.

To be totally honest he wasn’t really sure what happened during those days. At one point he remember them, the toys and Jenney, walking round the house asking guests to leave a party that they had never held. The toys helped them, showing the people where their coats and shoes where kept. That’s why they made no noise, no shoes, equalled no noise.

With his ear pinned down evil bunny stopped being so evil, at least to the greater world, The great hatred he felt towards that word for taking his family turned into a massive sadness that washed away all other things from his life. The other toys did their best to comfort him, hands keep him from harm, but they, sensing his vulnerability, couldn’t help poking fun at him behind his back.

The ones who gave them all life found him one day overdosed in the bathroom. They performed CPR on him, luckily just in time, but he screamed and yelling that they were attacking him, hurting him, trying to kill him. It wasn’t true obviously. They just wanted him to live again, a life free from pain and self-loathing, one that didn’t convert into self-destruction. At that point on he was a slither of the thing he had once been. The farmer had done his job well. He’d taken a completely sane toy, a productive member of an imagined society, and turned him into ghosts who roamed the halls and stairs in search of oblivion.

Evil bunny thought back to his youth, to the stories his mother told him, and one in particular that struck him as he viewed the comatose couple sprawled on a bead of unwashed cloths. It began with the emptiness, when the emptiness had only its own will and presence to lend it a voice, but that voice was dulled by the absence of everything. Being nothing it longed for harmony, for some sense of peace, for in that emptiness there was also loneliness, and with that loneliness a single point of focused energy that had no mass or density.

The energy was a discord like a note out of time and harmony with itself that longed to be a melody. The focal point had no substance, and so the void exploded spewing out notes that rang through the newly created space and time, the continuum. The first note was light, a light that shone brightly in the darkness as nothing became something and flung it’s self out into hot gasses of glistening high pitched song. The second note was time witch underpinned the harmony, and the third was space that formed the base of all that grew from that moment. As the aeons massed upon themselves the song changed, solid rhythms formed into burning points of gravity pulling in other melodies and coalescing them into solid fixed patterns. The melody of the something real began to spring into life, and the tune became aware of its self. Life was born, and reborn, over and over again.

At that moment the young woman slipped off to sleep, and evil bunny faded out of existence, as did all the other toys. Ten hours later she woke up, the reality of the world crushing in like a large stone on her chest. They were rapidly running out of cash, and friends. That’s the thing, friends don’t really mean anything when you bail out of life because it all gets too much. They all fade, gradually phoning less and less, and they stop answering you’re calls.

Before life became unbearable they had a friend who he had met at college, a pleasant enough man who wanted to be a writer but couldn’t quite get it together, so he worked on obsolete systems that no one else wanted to touch He made good money too, but it was a dying trade, or at least that’s what he told himself. Frank had been part of that little sect which he hovered on the edge of most of the time he’d been away. Evil Bunny knew this because he was made from their desires. They would all get drunk together, they would laugh about how the world wasn’t ready for them. Tony was the smart arse of the group, a large youth with very little ambition, and a capacity to start or encourage fights where ever he went.

He was the one who was always full of stories like the day some kid decided to take on a bouncer and hit him square in the jaw, the bouncer shook off the punch, looked him square in the eye and said.

“Is that all you’ve got.”

Then punched him across the bar with one blow. Him and Frank where forever trying to put together comedy scripts, but Tony being a lazy bastard just could never actually get down and do the work. He had first-hand experience of this when they all did a group based tasks that formed part of their final mark. It was always Tony who’d come up with the fucked up name like monkey plumbers, and mission statements like ‘we promise to try more than you did’, funny but irrelevant. It was into this world he had retreated, departed from the girl in so many ways, as she had departed from him. The toys where now there only real link to each other, and the shared ritual of grief that could not even name the event that it marked.

On the whole the names and ideas that Tony came up with where funny, but ultimately redundant when the aim of the game was to get the best marks. Somehow he doubted they were ever given grades for their sense of humour, but they did manage to get grades, mostly because of his work and that of Frank who both worked their arses off to get it all finished when everyone else was pissing about.

Not that he really care anymore, given that his degree was now about as useful as used toilet paper, but back then they were still under the impression that they’d be able to get work at some point and phoned Frank up to get a loan off him in order to pay the mortgage. At first he said yes, then he obviously found out through some means that life for them had slipped a notch or two, and the investment suddenly started to look more than a little bit shaky. Needless to say they were unable to pay those bills, and started to porn and sell most of what they owned, including the house, but never the toys. They had become the heart of their universe.

They made a fifty grand profit and immediately began spending it. It was at that point that they ran into Max, He was a drug dealer with a specific goal. He put them up in one of his rent girl’s flats, toys and all, and of course sold them drugs. At first it was a couple of grams every other day, but that soon turned into quarter ounces and finally ounces. Evil bunny wasn’t concerned with any of that. His main concern was once more with revenge, the sweet and catastrophic dismemberment of the farmer who’d taken his family from him had come back into his life with the loss of the livelihood of those who gave him life, and animated him. A crime against them was ultimately a crime against all those who relied on them for their existence. Of course all of it was merely a hallucination on all their parts, even the toys knew that. In a helpless world people make helpful things to guide them through the madness, Sometimes it makes no sense, but it is a shield that gives it some semblance of sense. At that time, having had a child taken from them, and in total despair, their minds became polluted and rampant with hatred for those who had perpetrated that act upon them.

They had been successful, they had dreams that they were fulfilling, and where intending to make real. Now that was all gone. The best of their lives consisted of driving for hours to get to some God forsaken little middle class housing estate in the middle of nowhere, bordered by a shopping centre, just to see the child they had named for a couple of hours. To walk into a room full of chintz, and see him strapped in to a chair staring at a wall with a vacant expression. He had even at this young age, been trained not to complain at the lack of stimulation. At least he wasn’t the mentally retarded seven year old who lay sedated upstairs and paid for the mortgage. The couple that social services had placed him with would give them disdainful looks while upstairs the severely handicapped child laid with no human interaction, lining that evil woman’s pockets with yet another check from the government. She too was on evil bunny’s list, along with her silent and obedient husband.

They’d get there after a long drive down a derelict piece of motorway flanked on both sides by small factories, and large shopping centres. Sometimes they’d stop off at a little van that server a passable bacon sandwich, and sit watching the cars go by with that horrid feeling of dread twisting at their stomachs, knowing that whatever happened, however good they might feel, they’d have to give him back to those merciless jackals to place in that chair, facing a bland and distasteful wall again. People like that shouldn’t exist, shouldn’t at the very least be allowed to care for children.

When they finally got there they’d take him out to the only place for miles, the vast multiplex, all under one roof shopping centre. For him it didn’t have a name, he never wanted to remember it, and even now it fills him with bile having to recall those moments snatched from the hands of uncaring so called paid carers. Those moments Evil Bunny lived for a short time, found his voice again. He feared that he would never leave him, no matter what happened in the future. They would walk around the polished marble flooring feeling for a brief moment what it might be like to be parents, and then they’d take him back, usually as late as possible.

The journey home was always silent, and laden with mixed emotions like a cocktail of all your worst and most bitter feelings drowned out by the noise of screaming. Then they’d score, unable to take the harrowing nature of the act it’s self, the relinquishing of their own child to people who only had him because it got them a better car, and a new stove.

Evil bunny plotted his revenge…