Chapter Twelve

Arthur didn’t sleep after that. He spent the early hours of the morning pacing the house, going over everything in his mind. He eventually sat down and made himself eat breakfast around nine. He quickly swallowed a bowl of Rice Krispies, then threw on some clothes and raced over to Ash’s house.

Ash was still in her dressing gown when she answered the door.

‘Morning, Arthur. What has you up so early?’

‘I have some stuff to tell you. Some Viking stuff. Can I come in?’

Ash led him into the living room where, over the next ten minutes, he recounted in as much detail as he could his dream of the Norns. When he was done, she stared into the distance for a few seconds before speaking.

‘Wow,’ she said. ‘Well, we learned a lot there.’

‘Did we?’ he said doubtfully. ‘Like what?’

‘Now we know that the gods managed to stop Loki before, but that he must have got out of his prison somehow, just like Urd foretold.’

‘I guess. Then there was that last thing she said …’ He didn’t really like thinking about the Norn pointing at him, saying that only a young boy and his friends could stop Loki.

‘Exactly. Do you think she meant you?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t like to think about it. I wish I could remember exactly what they said would happen when Loki returns this time. I just know it was bad.’

‘Yeah. Real bad. Worse than forgetting your homework or some –’ As Ash spoke, she suddenly remembered that they still hadn’t done any work on the presentation for school. ‘Arthur! The presentation!’

For a moment his eyes were glazed in confusion. Then the realisation hit him like a ton of bricks. ‘Oh no!’

For now, this homework was definitely more important than ancient monsters and evil gods. Ash leaped off her seat, saying she’d have to wash and dress before they started, and asked Arthur to wait in the kitchen. Arthur did as she said and found Ash’s mother – a warm, bubbly woman in her late forties – in the kitchen fixing breakfast. After the introductions were done, she made Arthur some toast (with real butter and marmalade). Ash soon came back down wearing a pair of jeans, a T-shirt and a hoodie. Just as Arthur was about to take another bite of toast, Ash grabbed his hand and dragged him out the back door. She led him across the small, neatly kept garden.

‘Where are we –?’

‘I have the perfect idea!’ she explained when they reached the small wooden shed at the end of her back garden. ‘I thought of it when I was getting dressed.’

The shed door squeaked when she pulled it open. Inside, shelves were piled high with old paint cans and tins of oil. A large spider ambled across its web towards the carcass of a fly. Dust hung in the air, caught in the rays of light coming through the little square window. Some paintbrushes sat in a jar of murky white spirits, the paint long caked into the bristles. A few gardening tools – a rake, a hoe and a shovel – had fallen onto the electric lawnmower in the corner. And a wooden stepladder leaned on its side against the opposite wall.

‘Give me a hand with this, will you?’ she said, taking one end of the ladder.

It wasn’t as heavy as it looked; it was just an awkward shape to lift single-handed. As they carried it into the house, Ash explained further.

‘Miss Keegan loves it when you do something a bit unusual for class presentations. Like, if you’re studying Ancient Rome, you’d dress up as Romans. In last year’s class they were reading The Wind in the Willows and somebody brought in their pet toad. She loves stuff like that.’

They made their way through the kitchen, past a quizzical Mrs Barry and up the stairs with the ladder. Getting it through the stairwell was tricky and they had to reposition themselves a few times to manage it.

‘So you’re saying we dress up … as what?’ Arthur said as they opened the ladder under an attic door in the ceiling. ‘Metro drivers?’

‘No,’ she said, mounting the ladder, ‘I’ve an even better idea.’ She pushed open the hatch and clambered into the attic. Then she looked back down at Arthur waiting on the landing. ‘Are you coming or not?’

‘The last time I followed someone on a ladder it didn’t end very well, remember?’ he joked, climbing up. There was a little round window in the gable wall of the attic. Dust danced in the light shafts that poured in through it. The roof was low enough for Arthur to reach up and touch the rafters, but not low enough that he had to stoop to walk around. There was an old moth-eaten mattress, turned on its side, and a lot of cardboard boxes cluttered together against one wall. Ash was searching through one such box with ‘Toys’ written on it in black marker.

‘What are you looking for?’ he asked.

She ignored him and lifted the box she’d been looking through to one side with a sigh. She dragged out another box, also marked ‘Toys’, and searched through it, throwing old dolls and action figures behind her as she did.

‘Ash? What are you looking for?’

‘Yes!’ she exclaimed, finding what she needed, then turned back to Arthur. ‘Sorry. Anyway, I was saying that Miss Keegan likes it when we do something more interesting for her presentations. Thinking outside the box. So I thought to myself, what’s the best way to present the Metro to the class?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said, as if she was telling a joke. ‘What is the best way to present the Metro to the class?’

She took a toy train out of the box and held it up to him. ‘We build one.’

Ash’s idea was ingenious. Instead of just talking about the Metro trains and how they would run, they’d make a working scale model. Max’s old train set was perfect. The electronics didn’t work any more but Ash was confident that she’d be able to fix them given a couple of hours.

‘It’s a very simple circuit board,’ she’d said. ‘If I had more time I could probably make it run faster than the actual Metro.’

‘Well, if you get it running at all, that’s all we need,’ Arthur had said with a laugh.

While she worked on the electronics, Arthur worked on making the toy look more like the new Metro trains. The toy train was shaped like an old steam engine whereas the Metro trains were going to be slick, silver and streamlined, with the Citi-Trak logo printed on the side. Ash had given him some light card, construction paper, scissors and markers and he set to work. Using images from the Citi-Trak website, he made a sort of hood that could be fitted straight over the toy engine, giving it the shape and look of the Metro trains. When he was finished with that, he set about making signs to indicate the different stops along the line.

As he worked, Ash kept stealing glances at him. She liked Arthur. A lot. In fact, she found herself liking this boy more than any other boy she knew. Something about him just made her smile. In fact, she was grinning like an idiot when he looked up and caught her.

‘What are you smiling at?’ he asked.

‘Oh … eh …’ she blustered and looked away shyly, then held up the train. ‘I’m finished. Have a look at this.’ She put the toy train on a one-metre length of track she’d assembled on the kitchen table. It sat idly there for a second before she pressed a button on the remote attached to the track. The train shot off at high speed, so fast, in fact, that it flew off the track and over the edge of the table.

‘Well done!’ Arthur patted her on the back.

‘It was no big deal,’ she said modestly, ‘but we do need some more track.’ She pointed to the length on the table. ‘That’s all I could find in the attic.’

‘Where can we get some?’

‘Shopping trip to town, I guess.’

‘Can I come?’ a voice said from behind the kitchen door. It was Max.

‘What are you doing there?’ said Ash. She hoped he hadn’t seen the looks she’d been giving Arthur. ‘And, more to the point, how long have you been hiding?’

‘A while. Can I come? I’m bored. Stace and Mom are gone out. And Dad’s watching one of his silly Carry On movies. Can I come, please?’

‘No, you can’t come.’

‘Why not? You’re using my train.’

‘It’s for a school project,’ Ash said, putting on her coat. ‘Now go and watch the movie with Dad. You don’t really want to come. It’ll be boring.’

‘But …’ he whined as Arthur and Ash walked out the door, laughing to themselves.

‘What’s more boring than a toyshop!’ Arthur chuckled when they were out of earshot.

When they got into the city centre, they went straight to the nearest and largest toyshop. Toyz Toyz Toyz consisted of three storeys where they could find any type of plaything they could possibly want. The pink teddy bear on the sign outside promised ‘Magic and Fun under One Roof!’ The ground floor consisted of baby and infant toys, a nursery section, video games, arts and crafts and board games. The first floor housed all the girls’ toys and was wall to wall pink, cerise and magenta with baby dolls, dress-up sets and fashion-model heads. The top floor was mainly boys’ toys: action figures, racing cars and construction sets, along with large outdoor toys like bikes, go-karts and playhouses.

They quickly found the extra pieces of train track they needed somewhere between the third aisle of infant toys and the first aisle of arts and crafts. Arthur gave Ash his half of the money for it and she went to pay.

‘I’m just going for a wander,’ he said and made his way up the escalators to the top floor. He wanted to take a look at the bicycles. Getting around Dublin was a lot harder than he’d thought it would be. Certainly much harder than at home, where he could just walk anywhere he wanted to go. He’d left his own bike in his grandparents’ house in Kerry for safe-keeping but now he regretted it. He figured a bike in Dublin would probably come in handy.

When he got to the top floor, he was surprised to find it so quiet. The other departments had been busy, with children, parents and staff bustling about. But up here it wasn’t just quiet, it was completely deserted. Even the pop music that had been playing downstairs was switched off. It was like a ghost town.

Weird, he thought, before spotting the bike section past a long aisle of action figures. He ran towards it, his footsteps echoing on the blue linoleum floor. If Arthur had been more careful, he might have noticed that all the security cameras were pointing away from him and in towards the walls.

The bikes were displayed on a wall of racks. Most were black, though some were silver, but Arthur’s eyes were instantly drawn to the glossy red ten-speed at one end of the display. He checked out the price. It was at least double his savings. In his head he did some basic maths, working out whether he could somehow find the necessary money. As he added and multiplied silently, he became gradually aware of a noise coming from behind the bike racks.

It sounded like a voice, like somebody speaking, maybe. No, not speaking, singing. He couldn’t make out what, but it definitely was singing. Slowly but steadily he walked back along the aisle, his soles squeaking slightly on the lino as he went. The singing grew louder and eventually clearer as he turned the corner at the end of the racks, where playhouses, swings and slides were displayed. Because of the hollow, echoing sound of the singing, he assumed that it was coming from inside a large pink plastic playhouse in the centre of the display.

‘Rock-a-bye baby on the tree top …’

The playhouse was designed like a princess’s castle, with two turrets and a couple of bluebirds stuck to the roof. Plastic flowers sat permanently in the windows while fake grass sprouted at the base. The castle shouldn’t have been anything to be scared of and yet for some reason he was filled with a sense of dread. Despite this, unable to stop himself, he took a step towards the playhouse. Then he noticed the legs. Stretching out of the front door of the castle was a pair of legs. They were long – long enough to belong to an adult man. The legs wore dirty black trousers and a pair of heavy-looking black boots on the feet.

‘When the wind blows the cradle will rock …’

As he stepped even closer, Arthur realised it was a man’s voice he was hearing. Only the man was singing in a false high-pitched tone. There was a window in the side of the castle closest to Arthur, but he couldn’t see through it yet. He took another tentative step forward.

‘When the bough breaks the cradle will fall …’

Arthur’s breaths came raggedly as he stooped to look through the window at the man inside the playhouse.

‘And down will come baby, cradle and all.’

He was dressed head to toe in black, a dirty long coat to match his trousers. His hair was long – falling well below his shoulders – greasy and blond with dark streaks of dirt matted into it. His beard was thick and bristly but patchy in places. What Arthur could see of his skin looked red and blotchy. He was singing to a baby doll cradled in his arms, but when Arthur peeked in, the man slowly turned his head and looked up at him. His thick eyebrows created a dark hood over his eyes, eyes that were terrifyingly familiar. He grinned from ear to ear, a grin Arthur recognised from his dreams.

The grin opened, revealing blackened and crooked teeth, and the man spoke in a dry, rasping voice. ‘Hello, Arthur.’