A dark figure stood in the doorway of the doll hospital, backlit by the street lamp outside. Lil and Nedly swapped anxious glances and then they heard the click of a switch and the room was awash with the unforgiving glare of the strip light.
It was Abe.
‘So you came?’ Lil bent down to scratch Margaret’s ears and hide the smile that betrayed her relief. Abe stepped awkwardly to one side to reveal Naomi standing behind him and Lil’s smile vanished.
‘You! You followed me?’
‘No,’ Naomi replied honestly.
‘She followed me,’ Abe confessed.
‘Great, some detective you are.’
Abe took that one on the chin. He gave her a sombre look. ‘I just took a call from Monbatsu at the Morgue – the toymaker is dead.’
‘We’re too late,’ Nedly whispered.
Lil laid her hand on Margaret’s tufty head. The little dog met her gaze with sorrowful eyes.
Naomi bobbed down beside them. Her glasses had fogged up in the warm workshop. She peeled off a glove and wiped her finger over the lenses. ‘You’re supposed to be at home.’
Lil dipped her eyes and muttered. ‘So are you.’
They crouched in silence while Naomi tugged off the other glove finger by finger and then she tilted her head down low, until she was in Lil’s sightline. ‘I figured I’d come by and find out what was so important that you had to give me the slip.’
Lil got to her feet. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’ She walked over to where Nedly stood and opened a random drawer that turned out to be full of patched-up dolls’ clothes and pretended to sort through them.
‘Try me.’
Nedly raised his eyebrows hopefully, but Lil murmured, ‘She doesn’t know anything about this. She’ll just get in the way.’
‘Give her a chance,’ said Nedly.
Lil blew out her cheeks and turned to face her mother. ‘We’re looking for some toys.’
‘Looks like you came to the right place.’ A smile crinkled Naomi’s eyes.
‘This is serious. They’re very dangerous toys –’
The crinkle straightened. ‘How are they “dangerous”?’
‘They’ve been tampered with and now we have to destroy them.’ She steeled herself. ‘It has something to do with the ghosts that are terrorising the city.’
Naomi started to speak but Lil interrupted her. ‘I know. I know you don’t believe in it. But if you’re going to stay here and help you’re going to have to trust me. We’re not here for the scoop; we’ve got work to do.’
Abe moved away from the doorway. He trod heavily as he crossed the room as if he were weighing every step, until he was standing beside Lil. He took a deep breath and squared his shoulders. ‘It is true, Naomi. Lil knows her onions. I’ll vouch for that. Quake’s story, the haunting of Peligan City. We knew all about it, before it broke, I mean. We’ve known for a while and –’ He cleared his throat. ‘I don’t have time to explain right now – but we do have a pretty tight theory that the person controlling the ghosts is doing it by means of some objects that we think he’s keeping here.’
Lil gulped in the silence that followed. Her eyes slid sideways to Abe, who was trying to hold his chin up at a dignified angle while maintaining Naomi’s troubled gaze.
‘So,’ he continued, ‘we aim to destroy them before he catches on, wakes them up and sends them after us.’ He nodded gravely at her. ‘I know how it sounds, but that’s the tall and short of it.’
‘O-K,’ Naomi said uncertainly, with a look of someone who’s wondering whether she’s dreaming or everyone else is. ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, either of you, but how is it that you know so much about it?’
Lil couldn’t stop herself executing an almost-perfect Cryptic Eyebrow raise at her mum. ‘We’ve seen this sort of thing before.’
‘Have you?’ Naomi turned to Abe and narrowed her eyes. ‘Really?’
Abe tried to laugh it off in a strange combination of snorts, shrugs and the occasional ‘ha!’, then he leant on the end of one of the shelves, which pitched under his weight and jettisoned a row of soft-bodied clowns into the air.
He grabbed a couple of fistfuls and stuffed them hurriedly back onto the shelf where they slumped forward like they had bellyache.
‘Yes,’ said Lil matter-of-factly. ‘You see, I have secrets too.’
She and Naomi stood in silence for a few seconds, neither one looking away.
‘If we’re all going to work together,’ said Nedly. ‘We’re going to need some kind of a plan.’
Lil nodded imperceptibly. ‘OK, Mum, Abe. Listen up.’
She pushed all the pots, bobbins and tools off the top of the workbench with the sleeve of her mac and threw down a couple of handfuls of sawdust, scattering it thinly. Then she picked up an old cane someone had used for stirring paint.
Abe, Naomi and Nedly gathered round. Along the shelves, rows and rows of glassy-eyed dolls watched in silence.
‘All right. Once we have found the right toys we’re going to need to destroy them as soon as possible. We can’t afford to waste time if one gets set off accidentally while we’re searching.’ She glanced over at Nedly and he gave her a reassuring thumbs-up. ‘Here’s the workshop,’ Lil said, drawing a large rectangle in the dust with the cane pointer. Then she drew a circle. ‘And that’s me.’
She put in a dividing line of shelving across the rectangle to create the back room. ‘It’ll be faster if we do it in a kind of throwing relay. Mum, you wait here at the top of the stairs.’ She added a couple of lines for the stairwell and sketched another circle. ‘I’ll throw each toy we find to you, then as fast as you can you throw it downstairs for Margaret, here.’ Lil tapped the bench. Margaret was too small to see the plan in the dust, but she cocked her ears at the mention of her name.
‘What about me?’ said Abe.
‘Tell them about the furnace,’ Nedly cut in eagerly.
‘Give me a minute, will you?’ Lil muttered at him.
‘Sorry, I –’ Abe buried his chin in his crumpled collar.
Lil sighed. She had run out of bench. ‘It’s not to scale,’ she explained as she squished in a thin sausage-shaped room right at the edge. ‘Abe, you’ll be down here.’ She tapped the sausage with the pointer and made a tiny circle. ‘Right by the furnace. That’s how we’re going to destroy them.’
‘Where do I fit in?’ Nedly asked.
Lil let the cane rest on the sawdust in the corner of the workshop. It left a small dot behind, a fifth circle in the dust. Abe saw it too and nodded.
‘Keep an eye out,’ Lil murmured to Nedly and then she raised her voice again. ‘But first we have to find these haunted toys.’
Abe pulled off his rubber hand and flexed his pliers. Naomi pushed up the sleeves of her camel-hair coat and scanned the shelves. ‘This place has nothing but creepy toys. What are we looking for?’ She scrutinised the faces of a row of baby dolls in front of her, pausing at one with a lazy eye whose hair looked like it had been cut by a buzz saw. ‘How about this one?’ She reached up to grab it.
‘Stop!’ cried Nedly, Abe and Lil all at the same time.
‘You didn’t warn her about the bells,’ Nedly added.
‘There’s one thing we forgot to mention.’ Lil gingerly picked up the doll to examine it. Very lightly she gave it a shake. Breathing out she replaced it. ‘The ones we’re looking for will have bells on them or inside them to make a noise. We’re going to have to shake them to see if they’re the right ones but very carefully, because as soon as we do the spooks will start coming. That’s why we have to act fast.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Ready? OK, let’s do it!’
Dust floated in the air as they set to work.
‘Hey, Lil!’ Nedly piped up. He was standing on a cardboard box and searching along the high shelves. Lil stood on a crate to join him and came face to face with a balding clockwork monkey in a threadbare silk waistcoat. It was brandishing cymbals and the sort of smile you would have if you were being electrocuted.
She winced at it and murmured, ‘This one is horrible.’
Very carefully she shook it. Nothing happened. Lil started to return it to the shelf and then paused. With trembling fingers she turned the cold metal key in the monkey’s back. The ticking of a mechanism unwinding filled the silence but the arms stayed still. It was broken.
Abe was working his way down a line of teddy bears, his hand finally coming to rest on a saggy-chested bear with a shiny bald pate and misty eyes.
He smiled at its kindly face, and then the smile vanished and he murmured: ‘Please, not you.’ He gave the bear a gentle shake. The straw in its body rustled. Abe breathed a sigh of relief, stretched up to replace it and then thought twice and stuffed it into the pocket of his mac. He looked up furtively to find Naomi staring at him, eyebrows raised.
‘Ha! Caught me red-handed!’ He held up his pliers in surrender. ‘There’s a kid that Lil knows down at the orphanage, his toy got destroyed a while ago and I figured this might be a good replacement.’ He squashed the bear further into his pocket.
Naomi smiled then took a step sideways and bumped against a wooden crate. She peered inside; it was full of pale sack-cloth poppets, mannekin-shaped with a topknot of cloth on their heads where the material had been gathered and tied. Some were featureless but others had black-thread crosses for eyes, a single stitch for a mouth.
‘These ones are horrible!’ she said. ‘And there must be more than fifty here. Tell me these aren’t the ones we’re looking for?’
Abe looked over at the crate and poked a couple of the poppets with the end of his pliers.
‘I can’t see any bells attached, but maybe there’s something inside that could make a noise?’
Naomi swiped the nearest poppet and shook it, while the others held their breath. There was no sound, so they all exhaled and Naomi chucked it back into the pile.
As Abe straightened up he came face to face with his dusty reflection in the cabinet. He wiped his hand across the glass and saw a shelf full of the same sack-cloth poppets.
Each one had a tiny silver bell tied round its topknot.
Naomi peered over his shoulder. ‘Like those ones?’
Abe croaked, ‘Yeah, that would do it.’
They all stood looking at the poppets who stared disconcertingly back with their crosses for eyes. Their cloth bodies had mouldered and sagged, pulling their mouths downwards.
‘OK,’ said Lil, breaking the silence. ‘Let’s get to work.’
Abe, Naomi and Margaret left to take up their positions while Nedly stood by the window in the opposite corner to Lil, where he had the best vantage point to watch for the other ghosts.
Very slowly, Lil extracted the first poppet, holding it by its little bell to stifle the ringing. She ordered her hand to stop shaking but it just got worse. The grey body jiggered beneath her fingers, its damp cloth face brushed her palm and she nearly let go.
She blinked. Why was she hesitating? It was just a doll. But somewhere sleeping behind those cross-eyes was a murderer, and in a second it would wake. Doubts crept in and stretched their spiky limbs; this was her idea, and if she’d got it wrong then one of them could die. Maybe Abe. Maybe her mother.
‘I’m ready, Lil! Give it your best shot!’ Naomi yelled from the back room.
Lil looked at Nedly, and he nodded encouragingly back at her: Do it!
She swallowed hard and took a deep breath, pulled her arm back and swung it low. ‘Incoming!’ she shouted, as soon as the poppet had left her hand. Lil watched it turn somersaults in the air, arms and legs wheeling. She heard the little bell on its head tinkling softly as it soared above the other toys, and then over the dividing shelves and out of her sight.
‘Whoops!’ Naomi exclaimed. ‘Dropped it.’
The temperature began to plummet
‘Here they come,’ said Nedly.
‘Throw it to Margaret now!’ Lil shouted. Her breath curled out, a white wisp on the freezing air and the plastic toys on the shelf all turned to look at her. There was a beat of silence and then she heard the tiny bell ring out once more as Naomi hurled the poppet.
The strip light flickered. Nedly’s wide eyes tracked sideways as something crossed the room, towards the basement, following the sound.
At the bottom of the stairwell Margaret leapt, curling her body to propel herself upwards, and snatched the poppet out of the air with a toothy grimace. She hit the floor at a run, high-tailing away from the thing on the stairs, down the short corridor to the furnace room where she skidded to a halt, her claws skating over the concrete floor. She released the poppet at the same time as Abe’s multi-use pliers reached for it and in one fluid movement he hurled it into the flames.
The light stabilised and the temperature rose again.
Lil peered round the shelves into the back room. ‘Are you OK, Mum?’
Naomi shrugged brightly back at her and said, ‘I don’t think that was too bad.’
Lil’s skin was dewy with cold sweat. She shook her head. ‘We have to be faster than that.’
In the minutes that followed the frenzied relay played out, the room dropping to freezing as ghost after ghost woke up bewildered, only to be extinguished again when their poppet was incinerated, until they only had one to go.
The last remaining poppet on the shelf glared coolly at Lil, who shivered and gave it the Squint. Outside in the street a car door slammed; at the sound the poppet flopped suddenly forward and slid from the shelf. ‘No!’ Lil cried, swiping it off the floor and pulling back her arm to hurl it.
‘Lil! Hide!’ Nedly shouted.
She ducked, fumbling the shot. The sound of the small bells ringing was drowned out by the ding of the shop bell as the front door opened. Lil threw herself behind the workbench and squatted there, heart pounding. She let her head drop back against the side of the bench and counted to three, trying to slow her breathing down, trying not to gasp back too much of the sawdusty air and then, as quietly as she could, she peered round the corner.
The new owner was back.