The Toy Collector

There’s a man in our town who never grew up. I don’t mean the charming kind of arrested development where someone still watches cartoons or eats cereal out of a mixing bowl. I mean something else. Something rotten wearing the mask of a man. He walks like us. Shops like us. Sometimes he even nods at you in passing like he's lived here all his life, and maybe he has, but no one remembers when he moved in.

He calls himself The Collector.

Not Mr. Something. Not Tom, Dick, or Harry. Just that. Like a title. Like he was hired to be that thing and never left the job.

His house sits on the corner of Dunlap and Reed, where the streetlights flicker no matter how many times the city sends a guy to fix them. A two-story clapboard nightmare with flaking paint and curtains that never move. No one sees deliveries go in, no trash go out. The mailbox is fused shut by rust and time. There’s a smell that wafts out from under the eaves when it rains, like wet felt and long-dead flowers. It sticks to your clothes if you pass too close.

Kids tell stories about him. They dare each other to touch his porch, to peer through the windows. But they never do. Not twice. And not after dark.

Here’s the part people don’t like to admit: toys go missing in this town.

Not new ones. He’s not after plastic crap from Walmart or battery-operated nonsense that makes noise when you’re trying to sleep. No, he wants the ones with memory. The toys with mileage. The things passed down through bloodlines, covered in the fingerprints of the dead. Your grandfather’s lead soldiers. Your aunt’s cracked porcelain dolls. The felt rabbit your mother sewed the year your sister died. One day they’re there, hidden in boxes or displayed on mantels. The next, they’re gone. No break-ins. No disturbances. Just absence.

And if you remember them at all, it feels like remembering a dream you’re not sure you had.

Most people just shrug. Old houses lose things. Memory fades. Time eats everything.

But I remember.

Because I saw him.

It was October. One of those early cold snaps where the leaves turn black on the trees and fall in clumps, like the town’s shedding skin. I’d had a fight with my wife, the kind that starts over a burnt dinner and ends with unspoken truths you can’t unsay. I went for a walk to clear my head, which really meant I stomped around the neighborhood like a sulking teenager in a middle-aged body.

That’s when I saw him.

Across the street, in front of the Thorson house. Their daughter died three years ago. Cancer. Eight years old. They kept her room just the way she left it. Toys untouched. Curtains drawn. It was their way of keeping her alive, I guess.

He was crouched in their yard. Not walking. Not pacing. Crouched. Low to the ground like a spider, like something in mid-prayer. A burlap sack hung from one shoulder. It pulsed. Not like it was full, but like it was alive. Something inside moved and didn’t like being moved.

He didn’t use the door. He reached through the flowerbed. His arm went in elbow-deep, like the dirt was water. When he pulled it back, he held a ragged teddy bear. One eye. Torn ear. Familiar.

I knew that bear. I’d seen it in the Thorsons’ window, propped against the sill, year after year. A tribute. A monument to a girl no longer there.

He cradled the thing like it was made of gold. Whispered to it. And when he smiled, I saw teeth that didn’t match the rest of him. They were small. Crooked. Child-sized. Like he'd stolen them too.

I blinked, and he was gone.

I went home. Locked the doors. Turned every light on in the house and sat on the floor like a man who’d just come back from a war no one believes happened.

And that should’ve been the end of it.

But the next morning, I checked my grandmother’s cedar chest. The one we kept in the attic. The one filled with her old keepsakes, including the toys she’d saved from when my dad was a boy. And the one I’d added to when he passed.

It was empty.

Every last thing. The tin spinning top. The wooden yo-yo. The ragged monkey she made from a sock when money was tight. Even the little ceramic horse I used to chew on as a toddler.

Gone.

But in the corner of the chest, something new.

A doll.

Small. About the size of a candle. Carved from bone, but not smooth bone. It had imperfections. Pores. Jagged lines that looked like they'd been carved by teeth, not tools.

The face was mine.

Not just looked like me. Was me. My hairline. My slightly crooked nose. Even the mole on my left cheek. Its mouth was sewn shut with fine, black thread. Its eyes, tiny glass beads, were shut tight, but behind the lids you could see something pressing outward, like the eyes beneath were real and trying to open.

Around its neck hung a tag.

#437 — Sentimental Attachment.

That wasn’t the kind of thing you ignore.

I threw it in the fire.

I watched it burn. Listened as it cracked and screamed. Not in sound, but in pressure. Like the room warped around it. Like the air stopped breathing.

But the next morning, it was back. In the chest. Same tag. Only this time, the eyes were open.

And they followed me.

I don’t sleep now. I can’t. When I do, I hear things. Laughter. Music boxes winding down. Tiny footsteps pattering across hardwood floors. I see toys in my dreams. Piles of them. Mountains. All broken. All staring. Some are familiar. Some I’ve never seen but somehow know.

And in the middle of it all, him.

The Collector.

He looks at me the way a chef looks at a meal not quite ready. He waits. He curates. I’m not just being watched. I’m being prepared.

Here’s the truth. The worst of it.

That doll? The one with my face?

It’s a receipt.

And one day, he’s coming to collect.