The Toymakers(89)

Cathy stole forward and opened the door.

Here were Martha’s dresses and here were Martha’s coats; here were the costumes Kaspar himself had stitched, that might whisk Martha away to the court of some Imperial Tsar or the pleasure gardens of a Parisian palace. The candlelight, weak as it was, came from somewhere beyond.

She parted the coats and crept through – and there, in the back of the closet, sat Martha, gaping upwards with the candle at her side.

‘Martha Godman, what on earth …’

Martha lifted a finger to her lips. Then, ‘Look!’ she whispered.

So Cathy looked.

The wall above Martha was a woodcut panorama from head to toe. The candlelight picked out grooves that had been scored into the wood, shapes and swirls of some primeval design. There were spirals and boxes, amorphous shapes that gradually took on the details of faces. Cathy followed them as they grew: the first, just a blob; the second, an orb with barely defined eyes, a mouth open wide as if in a scream. There, at the end of the row, the face of a toy soldier was recognisable at last.

She knelt down, bringing her candle close to the wood. The artist, whoever it was, had grown confident in the telling. At her foot an etching showed ranks of toy soldiers lined up against one another. The next showed two soldiers, crude stick men with tall charred hats, reaching out to shake each other’s hands. In the next frame, what she could only take for a God (for he was vaster than any toy soldier) towered above the regiment. A second God was drawn leaner, more handsome, where the second was corpulent with eyes of deep engraved black.

In the final frame the soldiers lined up in procession. Cathy doubted herself at first but now she was certain: the soldiers were winding each other up while, from above, the good God looked benevolently down.

‘It’s Papa, isn’t it?’ Martha began. ‘And the other …’ She pointed to the corpulent god, the one whose mouth was a wide black vortex, ‘that’s uncle Emil.’

She dropped the candle.

‘Did you do this, Martha?’

Martha barely had time to shake her head when Cathy, with a rising panic she did not fully understand, snapped, ‘Martha, this isn’t a joke. If this was—’

‘It wasn’t!’ Martha protested. ‘Come and see.’

Outside the closet, Martha got to her knees and prised back a piece of skirting board from the wall. ‘They scuttle through here, Mama. I hear them every night. So one night I got a chisel from Papa’s workshop – I’m sorry, Mama, I’ll put it back, I swear – and opened it up. I thought I might catch them, whatever they’re up to in there. That’s when I found this …’

The etchings inside the skirting board were not nearly as nuanced as the ones across the closet walls. If the closet wall was a Bayeux tapestry of details and delights, the skirting board was the first foray of some Neanderthal cave dweller, scratching out bison and mammoth on his cavern wall.

Cathy took Martha’s candle and pushed it into the gap. The sounds within were unmistakable. The toy soldiers might have been no more than inches from her hand. She imagined them gathered together, watching her in the dark.

‘They’re everywhere, Mama. Up and down every Emporium wall. It’s an … infestation.’

Cathy revolved to look at Martha. The words she wanted to say seemed absurd, but the evidence was there in etchings across the skirting board, up and down the closet walls.

‘It’s more than infestation. Is it possible …’ She paused, hesitating even now. ‘Martha, have they learned how to think?’





THE FOREVER WAR



PAPA JACK’S EMPORIUM, 1919–1924


Emil opened the Emporium door, oblivious to the smells of the London spring. The snowdrops had flowered late along the Emporium terrace this winter, and a month later the circles that darkened around his eyes had still not disappeared. Sleep had been coming to him only in snatches; the memories of the season kept turning in his mind: the obliterated Long War, the barricaded aisle, the disappointed faces of the children who had flocked to their door, only to leave it empty-handed.

The man standing in the doorway had the look (like they all did) of somebody only just demobbed. Emil invited him inside and, taking care not to stare at the bright red birthmark that discoloured his right cheek, tramped with him into the aisles.

‘I can hear them already,’ said the man. He had a broom handle in one hand and a leather satchel into which had been stitched the words ANDERSENS’ EXTERMINATORS. ‘There must be a nest. It’s the time of year for a nest. O’ course, every time of year’s the year for a nest these days. It’s on account of the End Times. Plagues and wars and infestations. Well, we’ve already had two, so the third’s on its way. You’ll see.’

Emil did not intend to talk theology with a ratcatcher’s apprentice and had already marched on when he looked back to discover the exterminator on his hands and knees, listening to the floor. ‘Good Lord, there’s a fair few. Have you got a sewer running under this shop?’

‘I’m sure there’s nothing of the sort.’ Impatience came too easily these days. Emil pressed his face into the palm of his hand, hoping to cram whatever insult had been forming back into his throat.

‘Well, there’s something. I can hear hollows. There they are again!’ And the exterminator, still squatting, scuttled to one of the walls. ‘Do you mind?’ he asked – and, before Emil could answer, he was back on his knees, a crowbar in hand. Soon, he had popped a length of skirting out, revealing a long black cavity beyond. ‘It’s the most vexing thing. Ordinarily, you’d jimmy up something like this and see spoor. Spoor here and spoor there. You see?’