Nedly’s face appeared as a pale smudge, looking out through the dirty glass window of the doll hospital. He glanced up at Lil for just long enough to mouth Almost there! and then went back to glaring and pointing his glowing finger at the window latch.
Lil tried to look patient and encouraging but she was standing atop the curved metal lid of an aluminium bin in the alley outside and the frost had made it slippery so she didn’t dare move her feet.
‘There!’ The latch flew up.
Lil had her penknife ready. She traced the window opening a couple of times, cutting through the paint.
‘Don’t be too long.’ Nedly poked his head through the glass. ‘I don’t like it in here on my own.’
‘I’m being as quick as I can.’ Lil stuck the blade through and levered it a few times until, finally, the long-closed window popped open. She pocketed the knife and pulled herself up quickly in case the frame gave way.
Crouched on the window recess she took her torch out of her mac pocket and shined it below.
‘How did you get up here?’ she whispered.
‘I climbed on those boxes.’
Lil gave the tower of cardboard a cautious poke; it swayed slightly. She didn’t fancy her chances, so with a sigh she repocketed the torch and lowered herself as far as she could until she was hanging by her fingers, and then dropped, further than she would have liked, to the floor. ‘If we have to make a quick getaway, I might have to exit through the door.’
‘Or stack up some more sturdy boxes? There are tonnes here,’ Nedly said, and there were.
Lil let her torch beam follow the toy-covered shelves that lined every inch of the room, right down to the ground where they were partially covered by crates and boxes. She had a creepy feeling they were being watched but that could have been the hundreds of toys lined up on the shelves who all seemed to be looking in their direction. The underlying smell of sawdust, turpentine and paint was comforting; the lingering scent of Hench’s potent aftershave lotion was not.
‘What do you think?’ she asked Nedly. ‘Are you picking anything up? I’m nervous, but I think that’s just because we’ve broken into the lair of a known associate of an evil genius.’
‘Hmmm,’ he agreed. ‘There’s definitely a weird atmosphere in here but I haven’t seen any spooks.’
‘So maybe they’re sleeping.’
Nedly turned to her with an ominous look in his eyes. ‘Or hiding.’
Lil tried to hold the torch beam steady as she surveyed the rest of the workshop. The torch had been the first thing she’d bought with her wages from the Nite Jar, and so far she hadn’t had much chance to use it. She had always imagined that when they finally uncovered Gallows’ trail Abe would be there too and they would seek him out together. It hadn’t crossed her mind that she and Nedly would have to go it alone.
She let the beam trace the shelves opposite. Every type of doll was lined up there in battalions. They looked abandoned, maybe forgotten.
Pale-faced china dolls with soft bodies and sticky hair, teddies, tin soldiers and plastic action figures, waxy-looking toys with bendy rubber limbs and clockwork mechanicals … a particular shiver crept over her skin when she saw the moth-eaten knitted animals.
‘It’s going to take hours to check all of these.’
To their right was a huge and heavy workbench with an Anglepoise lamp crooked over it. The surface was covered in a chaos of fur, tiny scattered nails that looked like iron filings and metal implements of the kind you might find in an unlicensed operating theatre. A row of vices were clamped onto one side and there was a little wooden stool that was fastened to the bench by a sturdy hinge and polished to a high shine by the seat of someone’s trousers.
Behind it were free-standing shelves filled with everything you would need to fix things. Coils of wire, bobbins, dried-up pots of glue with gummy, balding brushes stuck in them, unlabelled bottles of solvents in various colours, oil cans and tiny rusted tins of paint with battered lids.
Past the workbench and shelves was a doorway without a door that led to a small back room. Lil began walking towards it when she saw something move out of the corner of her eye, a pale flash; she back-tracked quietly, stifling a gasp as a distorted version of her own face appeared in the dirty glass door of a wall cabinet right in front of her. Lil pulled her jumper over her sleeve to wipe it and then lifted her torch to look through the darkened glass.
‘Lil!’ Nedly called to her.
‘What?’ she hissed, following him. In the back room was the toymaker’s bed: an old armchair with a knitted blanket draped across it, a pot-bellied stove and a little white sink with a grimy curtain that hung down from the bowl. A portable TV sat on top of a big wooden bookcase that was stuffed with paperback novels. Lil accidently kicked over a mug that had been left on the floor with a thin layer of fossilised tea at the bottom of it. It rolled over to where Nedly was standing, passed through him and bounced off the skirting board on the other side.
‘There’s another floor,’ he said. ‘A basement.’ He nodded towards an open door that led to a stairwell.
As Lil made her way down the concrete steps, following the spot of her torch as it was swallowed up in the gloom, the hair on the back of her neck was prickling. From deep inside the basement there was a low roaring sound. At the end of a short corridor a door was ajar and Lil could see a light flickering softly behind it, like a candle.
She nodded to Nedly to go first. He shook his head. Go on – she nodded more vigorously. No way! he mouthed back. Lil rolled her eyes. Mouthing ‘fine’ and then ‘whatever’, she pushed up her sleeves, took a deep breath and then continued on alone. The dancing orange light on the basement wall made her draw back for a second, as she cautiously pushed the door open, but it was just the firelight from the window of a large cylinder-shaped furnace, with wide copper pipes that sprung from it like legs and plunged into the floor and ceiling. That was where all the noise was coming from.
Nedly peered over Lil’s shoulder. ‘You know what this means?’
She pointed upwards. ‘That must be where Delilah’s old pitch is.’
‘I didn’t think of that,’ Nedly admitted. ‘Yes, but also it means we have a way to destroy the toys – when we find them we can burn them up right here.’
‘Good plan.’ Lil grinned at him, her face lit by the orange flames. ‘Come on, we better get to work.’
They backed out of the furnace room. Lil was about to put her foot on the first step of the stairwell when they heard the sound of the shop bell ringing