Otto Tattercoat and the Forest of Lost Things

by Matilda Woods

  “We really must move, Hans,” Frau Vidler said as she closed the curtains and tied them shut.

  Across the road, Nim took her place at the table. The window was open, and a warm breeze trickled into the room. The fire was unlit. Little trinkets covered the mantel above: some Otto had brought with him from Dortzig and others they had found on the streets of the city. Right in the centre, next to a clock which had been bought instead of stolen, stood a little orb with a black factory inside. If you held it up to the morning light and looked very closely, you could just make out a little old woman and two nasty young men scurrying about in thick coats. With no sundragon to keep the factory warm, it was as cold as a coldstorm in there. The Ferbers were trapped in their own little world, and for Nim, Blink and Otto, things were at last right within their own.

  Alberto is a coffin maker, spending his quiet days creating the final resting places for people in the town of Allora. Then one day a mysterious boy named Tito and his magical bird arrive – flying from danger and searching for a safe haven. Can Alberto shelter them from the town’s prying eyes and the shadows of their past?

  This is a story of life and death and of how hope can burn bright in a place faded by sadness.

  Turn over for an extract...

  THE COFFIN MAKER’S FIRST COFFIN

  The town of Allora was famous for two things. The first was its flying fish and the second was the beauty of its winding streets. Tourists came from all over the country to watch the fish fly out of the sea while artists came to paint, in pigment, the bright houses that rose like steps up Allora Hill. There were so many colours that the artists did not have enough pigments to paint them, and it was rumoured (at least by the Finestra sisters) that the great artist, Giuseppe Vernice, invented a whole new colour just to paint the roof of their house.

  “Splendid Yolk, it was called,” Rosa Finestra said to anyone who would listen.

  “Derived from the crushed eye of a peacock feather,” Clara Finestra added with a wise nod.

  Yet though the sisters gushed about their bright home, the one next door was even brighter.

  Alberto Cavello’s house was the highest house on the hill. If you went any higher you would reach the graveyard at the top. It stood like a bright azure jewel glistening across the sea. And it wasn’t just bright. It was loud. It was loud when Alberto and his wife, Violetta, moved in. It grew louder when their first child, a girl named Anna Marie, was born; louder still when their son, Antonio, came into the world; and even louder when a little miracle named Aida wailed for the first time within its bright walls.

  Alberto was a carpenter: the best in all of Allora. During the day he would build beds, tables and chairs for his paying clients, and at night he would build toys for his children.

  With each new toy Alberto made, a new sound filled the house: squeals of delight as Anna Marie jumped off her spinning chair; screams of anger as Aida cried for Antonio to give back her favourite doll; and cries of “Gallop on! Gallop on!” as this same Antonio raced his wooden horse up and down the stairs.

  Their house remained bright, loud and bustling for seven happy years until the sickness came.

  The sickness appeared in the coldest month of winter, but it did not reach Allora until spring.

  The first to fall ill were the men working on a new railway that linked Allora to the north, then the doctors who tended them and the artists who had come to paint the town. Only one family was wealthy enough to flee. The mayor took himself and his family on a long holiday to a place the sickness had not spread.

  “Good luck!” he cried over his fat shoulder as a plush coach drawn by six white stallions carried them far away.

  In the beginning, the dead were buried in the graveyard – one, then two, then three to a single plot – but as the sickness spread other measures had to be taken.

  A gate was built at the back of the graveyard and a thin staircase carved into the stone with steps leading down to the water. No longer buried, the dead were wrapped in blankets and cast out into the violent, surging sea.

  As the number of dead mounted and the number of living fell, the cobbled streets of Allora grew quiet. Houses went unpainted and shutters, once thrown open to greet spring, were pulled tightly closed. Even the Finestra sisters didn’t poke their big noses out.

  Just like the unfinished paintings that lay abandoned in the streets, the town of Allora itself began to fade.

  The sickness rose up the hill – house by house – until it finally reached Alberto’s home.

  It took the eldest child first. Alberto spotted the purple mark behind Anna Marie’s left ear as she read a book in her favourite chair. Then, Antonio fell ill. While he was ailing in his bed, the mark came upon little Aida.

  Violetta and Alberto tended to each child as they fell sick. They kissed them when they cried, hugged them when they whimpered and when the time came for each of them to go they answered, “Yes, of course: one day, we will meet again.”

  Keeping her promise, Violetta joined them two days later. The plague bearers came to collect their bodies that evening, but Alberto wouldn’t let them.

  “I can’t,” he had said to the two men waiting at the front door. “I can’t let you throw them away. Not into that cruel sea.” Even from where he stood outside the highest house on Allora Hill, Alberto could see foam shooting up from where the waves crashed against the grey stones below. He could not bear to think of his family thrown in there.

  “You must get rid of them somehow,” the men had replied. “You can’t let them stay inside. It will spread the sickness quicker.”

  “I’ll bury them.”

  “All the coffin makers are dead. We collected the last one this morning.”

  “Then I’ll make their coffins myself.”

  And that is what Alberto did. He went into his workshop and for the first time built something for the dead instead of the living. He carved a coffin for his wife, a coffin for his eldest daughter, a coffin for his only son, and a coffin for little Aida. Each was smaller than the one before and, like Babushka dolls, could fit inside the other.

  When the coffins were finished and his family buried, Alberto returned to his workshop and began to make his own. But by the time he finished, the plague had left the town. The mayor returned from his holiday, the Finestra sisters reopened their shutters and people passed gaily up and down the streets of Allora once more.

  But instead of joining them, Alberto sat beside his coffin every day, waiting for the purple mark to come back and claim him too.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Matilda Woods lives in the Southern Tablelands of Australia. Her first novel, The Boy, the Bird and the Coffin Maker, was described as a “luminous tale of loss, love and finding family… threaded through with the power of storytelling, and a touch of magic… it reads like a classic” by Kiran Millwood Hargrave, bestselling author of The Girl of Ink and Stars.

  Published in the UK by Scholastic Children’s Books, 2020 Euston House, 24 Eversholt Street, London, NW1 1DB, UK A division of Scholastic Limited.

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  SCHOLASTIC and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.

  Text © Matilda Woods, 2020

  Illustration © Kathrin Honesta, 2020

  The right of Matilda Woods and Kathrin Honesta to be identified as the author and illustrator of this work has been asserted by them under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  ISBN 978 1407 18491 3

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, incidents and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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