‘Ah,’ explained Punch, ‘that’s because there are insiders and outsiders. The villagers are insiders, they’re of the attic, so to speak. They belong here. They are indigenous – I can tell by your expression you know what that means – while we are not. Of course, many of the creatures in the attic are immigrants, like us. Some of us came here by accident or design – like yourselves – others were banished here, exiled. Like us. You are people and as such will come up against a lot of hostility from things that used to be inanimate and now have life of a sort. Objects which were mistreated in the real world – or simply felt they were mistreated.’
‘The villagers acted very peculiarly,’ said Chloe, involuntarily copying Punch’s manner of speech. ‘Very peculiarly.’
‘That’s because they see you as phantoms. In their eyes you have a certain translucency. They can’t see right through you – as through something transparent, like a window – but you have – now what’s a good simile? – yes – you’re like a jellyfish to them. They think you want pictures of your ancestors. Did they give you any photo albums? Yes? There you are then. They think that’s what you’re after.’
‘Oh. That’s why they sort of jumped back in fright when they came across us? That explains it. But I’ve got another question. A very important one. You can’t tell us where we can find any watches, can you? We’re looking for a special pocket-watch that belongs to a neighbour of ours.’
‘No, I can’t, I’m afraid. You need a map for that. There’s a map not far from here. Watches? That sounds like something a board-comber would look for. It’s my guess most of the watches in the attic have been collected at some time. You need to find the whole collection.’
‘Where?’
Punch shrugged. ‘I’ve no idea, have you?’ he asked his wife and the policeman. They shook their wooden heads. ‘Maybe beyond the Great Water Tank, which is close to the centre of the attic. None of us have been over the Great Water Tank. None of us ever wanted to go there.’
Alex said, ‘What about trapdoors? We don’t seem to see any of those any more.’
Punch said, ‘There are trapdoors, though where they lead is anyone’s guess. You’ll find them if you look, mostly in the dark corners. But be careful if you go down them. You might find yourself in an even stranger place than the one you’re in now. Chinese boxes within boxes, so to speak. If you have to come back up again, it might not even be here, but somewhere else. And the further away you get from your original entry point, the more difficult it’s going to be to find your way back. Do you understand?’
‘I think so,’ replied Alex. ‘Yes. Don’t go down.’
‘It’s probably best not to,’ Judy confirmed. ‘You could find yourselves in all sorts of trouble.’
‘By the way,’ asked Punch, ‘did you go round or come over the mountain of weapons?’
Alex said, ‘Over.’
‘So you met our monster?’
‘You mean Katerfelto,’ said Alex. ‘I sorted him out all right, with – well, I sorted him.’
‘How very brave,’ murmured Judy. ‘He’s terrifying, isn’t he? It’s all those weapons collected in one place. They’ve seen death, you know.’
‘Dispensed death, my dear,’ said Punch, patting his wife’s wooden hand with a clunking sound. ‘Dispensed death in anger. One weapon on its own has very little power, but so many gathered in one place … The dark spirits of gun, sword and shell seep out, mingle like gases, and become Katerfelto. An evil cocktail of terrible spirits. You can’t experience such horrors as they have seen and made – yes, they have made horror – and come away without absorbing something very dark.’
Chloe said, ‘You mentioned board-combers a little while ago. What are they?’
‘Oh,’ Punch laughed, wooden head dipping in mirth, ‘yes, of course, you probably haven’t seen anything of them, though they’re bound to have been around. They’re masters at camouflage, the board-combers. They melt into the environment. It’s more than a disguise – they’re chameleons, those board-combers. And they often follow newcomers around, hoping they’ll lead them to whatever it is they’re collecting. Board-combers are collectors, you see. They collect the thing that interests them most.’
‘Why board-combers?’
Judy explained. ‘Rather like beach-combers, only they search the attic strand. It’s like a fever, an obsession. Collecting sometimes can be. With some of them it’s mirrors, with others it’s masks, or toy cars, or watches. Once they’ve got too many to carry, they gather them in one place and go out on forays, searching for more. The melancholic board-comber who collected the weapons, God rest his morbid soul’ – the puppets crossed themselves, producing that drumming noise again – ‘succumbed in the end to his very own collection. I believe he was frightened to death by Katerfelto. Very tragic, but I wonder what he expected?’
‘How dreadful,’ agreed Chloe. ‘And are these board-combers native to the attic?’
‘No,’ replied Punch gravely, ‘they’re from down below. They often carry a friend with them. An attic creature of some kind. A mouse. A bird. A very large hairy spider with long front legs.’ He shuddered a little, before continuing with, ‘You know the way pirates always have a parrot on their shoulder? Board-combers carry live creatures much in the same way, for company.’
Chloe suddenly felt overwhelmed by it all.
‘If you don’t mind,’ she said, ‘I’d like to get a little rest now. I’m exhausted. What about you, Alex?’
Alex shrugged inside his greatcoat. ‘Yeah – if you like.’ He got to his feet.
‘Where are you staying?’ asked Punch.
Chloe was still unsure about the situation and remained a little suspicious of the puppets’ intentions, so she waved vaguely at the gloaming beyond.
‘Oh – out there.’ She got to her feet. ‘Thank you for your kindness, and your explanations. We hope to see you again.’
‘We hope so too, don’t we my dear?’ said Punch, nodding at Judy.
‘Yes we do, and you’d be most welcome any time,’ said Judy, making Chloe feel guilty for harbouring doubt about them. ‘Don’t stand on ceremony.’
Alex and Chloe gathered up their backpacks and went on their way.
Once the children had disappeared into the twilight zone, Punch turned to his two companions and said, ‘That boy is turning.’
‘You noticed then?’ replied the policeman. ‘I did too.’
‘I hope he doesn’t,’ sighed Judy, ‘for his sister’s sake. She’ll miss him, she surely will. You can see she’s fond of him.’
‘Well,’ finished Punch, ‘maybe something will happen to stop him. You never know. Miracles do occur, occasionally. Now, my dear, what shall we do with the rest of the afternoon? There’s still a lot of light left in those high windows. Let’s have a game of cards. I miss my cards. Who’s got that pack of Happy Families we found the other day?’
CHAPTER 11
Dancing Rats in the Moonlight
Having fought his way across the region of the scissor-birds Jordy had settled for a while in a forest of tall clocks. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to leave it. He did. For one thing, the grandfather clocks were all set to different times, which meant there wasn’t an hour in the day when all of them were silent. At least one of them was chiming. And the ticking drove him crazy. He wondered who it was who wound them up.
And of course, the hands were all going backwards, which meant that an hour after a clock had chimed six times, it chimed five.
‘Have to clear myself an area,’ he said. ‘Otherwise I’ll never get any sleep.’
And this he did, by opening the fronts to the grandfather and other clocks and stopping the pendulums. Those with weights and chains, he unhooked and let fall to the bottom of their cases. With others he simply jammed pieces of paper in the works to stop the wheels from moving. Thus he managed, after a day, to make himself a silent vale in the forest of tall clocks, where he could wait for his step-sib-lings. He had see
n them coming over the plain behind him: vague misty shapes warped by the moted sunbeam shafts that criss-crossed the space between.
Chloe he had recognised by her posture: Jordy had always admired the straightness of her back when she walked. Alex had been more difficult to identify, for he seemed quite lumpy now. Then Jordy realised his step-brother was bundled up for some reason, with coats and other clothes, a hat, and was wearing some kind of mask. But it had definitely been Alex: you could tell by the way he dragged his feet and walked in that dreamy kind of way which told you he was lost in his head somewhere.
‘I expect they’re missing me,’ he told Nelson, who paid him a visit once the clocks had stopped. ‘I can’t see them getting on very well without me. They’re not practical like me. I’m a survivor.’
Nelson agreed with Jordy, of course: he always did.
But after that initial sighting, Alex and Chloe vanished. They must have taken another turning, or direction. Jordy was disappointed. He longed to have someone real to talk to now. Loneliness was not a pleasant thing, especially in a strange place. It dragged you down. He found himself waking in the middle of the night with a start, wondering if he’d heard voices or had simply been caught in a dream. He would stare out into the darkness, hoping that Alex and Chloe were nearby, and that morning would reveal them. Once or twice he even called out their names, but received so many mocking replies from attic creatures, he never did it again.
At night the attic was like a jungle. Even with the clocks stopped Jordy was plagued with sounds. There were twitterings, squealing, screeches, scratchings and scrapings and the like. These were noises he could more or less identify and put down to live creatures. But there were other more sinister sounds: whirrings, rattlings, mechanical buzzings, high whining noises, raspings. Some of them were quite loud and near to him, others were softer and further away.
In the night it seemed as if the whole of Attica was swarming with mechanical beasts, roaming the boards, looking for prey. When morning came around, however, it became relatively quiet again. He would stand on the edge of the plain and stare out, thinking to see herds of clockwork elephants, or robot monkeys, or automated leopards out there. But once the darkness had lifted, the boards were bare of such creatures. There was just him, alone, without a single companion of any kind.
The nights gave him the feeling of being besieged, threatened and menaced by hordes of unseen creatures. The days left him convinced that he had been abandoned, acutely aware of his solitude, like a castaway sailor on a desert island. Neither sensation was very pleasant. Yet he was swiftly falling in love with the attic. He guessed it was the same sort of feeling his grandfather had spoken of, when talking of Africa. In his grandfather’s youth Africa had been a dangerous place, with wild animals which roamed everywhere. Snakes, crocodiles, lions and other beasts. There had also been the extremes in climate, deadly diseases and mosquitoes. Yet Jordy’s grandfather had loved Africa with a great passion. This is how Jordy felt about Attica: it was a dangerous place, but it captured your heart.
When Nelson was around Jordy felt better, but Nelson was not one to stay long and once he’d gone again the bitter taste of loneliness returned to haunt him. He found he needed to talk to himself to avoid going crazy. One’s own company is better than nothing. Otherwise he was afraid he might come to believe he was not there at all: a figment of an imagination. How terrible that would be, to discover he did not exist except in the mind of a spider or a fly. To go swiftly from a point where he believed he was the only real living thing in the world, to the sure knowledge that he was nothing but a stirring of the dust, a draught of air, a splash of light.
‘I must try to stop these weird thoughts coming into my head,’ he told himself. ‘Otherwise I will go crazy.’
He tried making noises to prove to himself he was there: clashing old saucepan lids together and kicking hollow drums. But somehow the noises made things worse. He found himself listening very hard in the silence that followed, for sounds that he might have missed during the racket. What if there had been a search party out there, calling his name, and he had blotted those calls out with his stupid noises? Every solution turned out to be a problem and every problem grew to enormity.
But he stayed in the forest of tall clocks, and waited. There came a time when he ran out of food and had to go looking for more. Sick as he was of the vegetables grown by Atticans, he knew he had to find some or starve. And true to his determined nature he did find some. Two hours’ walk from the forest there lay a triangle of three Attican villages. He visited this place twice in two days, gathering crops and filling his larder.
On his third trip he found the villages in the middle of a festival.
‘Oh, hey!’ cried Jordy, delighted with what he saw. ‘A game of hockey – I think.’
It appeared that they celebrated this festival by playing sport with old-fashioned T-squares – such as those used by draughtsmen and architects – wielding them as their sticks. With these sticks they batted an object around in teams of thirteen, attacking three goals placed one outside each village. Jordy watched as the lumpy little Atticans charged back and forth, whacking a ball made of rags. There seemed to be few rules in this game apart from the obvious one: you were not allowed to pick up the ball.
There were no goalkeepers and the goals themselves were sea chests on their sides with the lids thrown back, like open mouths waiting to be fed.
‘Oh, wow,’ Jordy murmured to himself from behind a cardboard box. ‘I’d love a game …’
He sat watching for quite a time from his hiding place. Gradually, one by two or three, players began dropping out. Jordy wasn’t sure why this was happening, but he guessed that when they got too exhausted to play any more they simply gave up. Once they came off the pitch, it seemed they couldn’t or wouldn’t return. Before long the teams were down to about three on each side and Jordy realised that the drop-out rate had been the same from each team at any one time. So if a player from village A had had enough, and left the field, village B and C players would follow shortly. Thus the teams were reduced equally and with no advantage to any of them.
One trick with the T-square seemed to be a favourite. A player would slip the T-square between an opponent’s legs, so that the top bar of the instrument was behind the ankles, then yank him off his feet. A great cheer would go up from the crowd when one of them did this to another. Jordy could see no referee or umpire on the field and assumed this kind of play was not a foul, even though the aggrieved player would leap back onto his feet and remonstrate loudly with the attacking player.
Finally, when there were only three players, one from each village, left on the pitch, Jordy could stand it no longer. He jumped out and grabbed a T-square which had been left leaning against a box. Shouting wildly, he threw himself into the fray, swinging his T-square with expert hands.
‘Go for the ball!’ he yelled at himself. ‘Keep your eyes on the ball!’
Indeed, one would have expected the villagers to have been shocked into immobility by the sudden appearance of a ghost. Not so. The players still on the pitch fought furiously with him for possession of the ball. Did he think he could be a star T-square-wielder overnight? Not so. These villagers had been playing the game since they could walk. Within two seconds Jordy was on his backside and nursing a bump on the back of his head.
He didn’t stop to complain: he was up on his feet in a flash and had downed the Attican who had flattened him. The other two came at him in a rush, but he sold them a dummy and sidestepped them, managing to take the ball with him. Two whirled and chased, the one on the ground followed swiftly. Jordy drew back his T-square to shoot at the nearest goal: what did he care which village it belonged to? But an Attican flung his T-square from five metres, striking the ball and sending it shooting across the field of play, out of his reach.
‘Is that allowed?’ cried Jordy. ‘Is that in the rules?’
He didn’t wait for an answer. Jordy chased the bat and ball. R
eaching them he kicked the other player’s T-square out of reach, sending it skidding over the boards. Then with the other two bearing down on him he did a marvellous turn and struck the ball well. It lifted about six centimetres off the floor and passed between the two oncoming players. Onward it flew, surely and truly, and ended in the corner of a goal on the far side.
The crowd went into an uproar. They surged on to the pitch.
‘Yay!’ Jordy yelled, elated. ‘Goal!’
But the mood was ugly.
They were not coming to congratulate him, to raise him up on their shoulders and carry him triumphantly through the attic. They were coming to get him. Many had picked up T-squares and were holding them in a threatening manner. Jordy was left in no doubt they were angry with him and meant to do him harm. He decided it was time to leave. He dashed off into the dim regions of the attic. Happily they did not follow, probably feeling that having chased him away was a victory in itself, ghosts in the attic often being quite stubborn creatures.
Jordy went disconsolately back to his camp site among the grandfather clocks and brooded for a while. That game with the T-squares had reminded him of how much he was missing his old life. He moped around for the rest of the day, thinking that he wasn’t going to move again until Alex and Chloe caught up with him. At least they never minded indulging him when it came to a game of cricket or hockey or something, even if they didn’t feel the same way about it themselves. They could be a pain in the neck at times, but they had their good points.
Jordy went for a walk in the evening, avoiding the three villages. He was on his way back when he saw the villagers gathered in a large group around something hanging from the rafters. He hid behind a pile of junk and observed them from a distance.
At first he thought it was another game, but then the scene seemed too solemn for it to be sport of any kind. Something more serious was going on. He studied the object hanging like a huge plumb bob from the rafters by a long rope. Covered in butcher’s muslin it looked like a giant cocoon, a chrysalis. About the size of a large side of mutton, it spun slowly on the end of a rope.
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