Von Gobstopper's Arcade (13 page)

The toys in Hack Ward had been snipped and stitched and twisted and chopped and put together again in the wrong order. It was a monstrous mutation of objects originally created to generate feelings of warmth and belonging. Surrounding the beds were monitors as well as a tangle of cords, wires and transparent bags containing bright fluids connected to a part of the patients’ bodies. The toys all wore identification tags fastened around their wrists. The fact that the patients were toys and obviously not breathing did not lessen the gruesomeness of what had been done to them.

One of the dolls’ eyelids fluttered briefly and it sent a monitor into a frenzy. In response purple fluid spurted through one of the tubes. The doll jerked and was immediately motionless again. It was also impossible not to notice that every toy had some kind of weaponry grafted onto its anatomy.

Milli, Ernest and Loyal avoided eye contact with each other, for fear of seeing their own reaction mirrored in the other’s gaze. Milli’s limbs felt leaden and she had to focus hard to will them to move. The terrible sight of these
poor toys meant only one thing to her. Even though she dared not say it out loud, it looked like the work of Lord Aldor the Illustrious. But he had been dismembered back in Mirth. Milli herself had seen him carried off in a cart by the slavish Federico Lampo. It wasn’t possible that he could have returned so soon. Even a magician of his calibre needed time to regroup. But when she looked at Ernest’s face she knew he was thinking very similar thoughts. The toys in Hack Ward weren’t the result of random vandalism by curious children who had pulled the arms off their dolls or the stuffing out of their teddies to see how they were made. The mutations they saw in Hack Ward clearly had some kind of
purpose.

Milli looked up and realised that Fritz was watching her with concern. She had been biting hard on her lower lip to stay calm but when he patted her shoulder awkwardly, she buried her face in his shirt to hide her tears. The group stood in silence, searching for something appropriate to say. Finally, Loyal spoke.

‘Something is very wrong here, but remember, toys have been the allies of children for centuries.
It would take something more extraordinary than an operation to change that…Let’s get out of here,’ he said quietly.

‘We can’t just leave them,’ Milli said, reaching a hand out towards the nearest toy.

‘Touch nothing,’ said Fritz firmly. ‘They mustn’t know we’ve been here.’

Loyal nodded firmly in agreement. ‘Fritz is right. Giving ourselves away now will help no one.’

Seeing Milli’s distressed face, Fritz added, ‘We’ll come back—I promise.’

Ernest was just reaching for the door when they heard the tapping sound of sharp heels on a polished floor. Tempest Anomali was coming in their direction and she wasn’t alone. They could hear her speaking to someone in a berating tone. They had barely enough time to huddle together on one of the empty beds and draw the curtains around them before the door was flung open so violently its metal handle smashed into the wall.

‘Dr Savage, so far you have made me only empty promises!’ Tempest screeched. ‘The board wants to see results!’

The group could see her feet beneath the curtain as she marched through the ward like a commandant inspecting troops. What she saw clearly did not impress her.

‘Not good enough!’ she yelled and stamped her feet.

Her companion tried to mollify her. ‘We are moving as quickly as we can,’ he said. ‘These things take time to fine-tune. It’s a relatively new field of endeavour—’

‘I am not after the Nobel Prize, Savage.
Finetuning,
as you put it, is not high on my list of priorities. Sometimes I wonder whether you are deserving of being called a Botcher.’

‘Perhaps if we had access to the secret manual,’ the man suggested.

‘Yes, that would be
useful
,’ Tempest said between gritted teeth. They could imagine the look of fury crossing her face. ‘Unfortunately, and as you well know, we have not yet been able to procure it.’

‘But surely the toymaker could be persuaded to—’

‘He is proving more stubborn than we expected for an old git, but there is another
tactic I’m about to try and I don’t expect to fail.’

‘I’m sure you will succeed,’ fawned the man.

Tempest’s rage abated a little with the flattery.

‘I’ll be generous and give you another week to produce something impressive,’ she said.

‘Don’t be fooled by appearances. The specimens you see before you may look comical but are more vicious than you would believe,’ said the Botcher, but it was a poor strategy as it served only to infuriate Tempest again.

‘Don’t insult my intelligence, Savage,’ she snapped. ‘This looks like the rubbish you’d find in a flea market! Try at least to understand the essence of my drawings and stop taking so many short cuts. After all, short cuts are what landed you here in the first place.’

‘We’ll do our best,’ the doctor replied, sounding as if he was struggling to maintain his composure.

‘You’d better. Otherwise, it’s back to unemployment and you know what that means?’ Tempest snarled. ‘No more Club Med holidays or the best grammar school for the kiddies.’

With that final barb, she pushed past the stunned doctor and flounced out through the door. Dr Savage performed a hasty round of the ward and tweaked a few tubes, before slinking out himself, like a dog with its tail between its legs.

The main concern preoccupying the group now was the welfare of the toymaker. Fritz’s theory had been correct: Von Gobstopper was being held somewhere in the arcade. Finding him became a matter of urgency.

‘What’s this secret manual they mentioned?’ Ernest asked. Fritz frowned.

‘I think I might have an idea, although I can’t be sure as it happened so long ago. I was very young at the time but I distinctly remember Uncle Gustav telling me about having inherited a friend’s private notebook. He was worried about it falling into the wrong hands.’

‘Why, what was in it?’ Milli asked.

‘He didn’t say exactly, just that it contained valuable information, information that could prove dangerous.’ Milli and Ernest exchanged glances. The mention of wrong hands had triggered disturbing memories.

‘There’s someone we suspect could be involved; someone we’ve had dealings with before,’ Milli said hesitantly.

‘He’s known as Lord Aldor,’ continued Ernest.

‘Who is this person?’ Fritz demanded.

‘Just the sort of person who would be interested in information that could be used to further his own ends, the sort of individual you wouldn’t want to know if you could help it.’

‘We’ll tell you more about him later,’ said Milli.

‘Do you think your uncle still has the notebook?’ Ernest asked.

‘I’m certain of it. We must find him. He has to be in the building somewhere.’

‘We’ll search every floor!’ exclaimed the rocking horse.

‘It would help if we knew where to start,’ said Fritz.

As if in answer, several loud beeps sounded, making them all jump in alarm. It was the doctor’s pager, which he’d inadvertently left behind on one of the beds. There was no time to lose. Dr Savage would soon realise his oversight and return to collect it. Milli pocketed the pager before anyone
could even offer an opinion and headed out the door to find Theo and the others.

‘Quick thinking,’ said Fritz admiringly, once they had regained the safety of the stairwell.

‘As long as it doesn’t raise any suspicion,’ qualified the ever-cautious Ernest.

‘Better read the message,’ urged Loyal, ‘before we decide whether it will be of any use or not.’

‘All right,’ said Milli, withdrawing the shiny gadget from her blazer pocket. They all crowded around her to read the message flashing on the black screen. The message on Dr Savage’s pager provided them with a vital piece of information. ‘Collect old man from monument and bring him to me at 8 sharp.’

Milli and Ernest smiled. Luck, it seemed, was finally on their side. There was only one minor problem: they didn’t remember seeing any monuments, large or small, in the parts of the arcade they had been through.

Fritz was only too aware that his uncle’s safety now depended largely on him. ‘The monument…where could that be?’ he said anxiously. He frowned, willing himself to remember. When nothing came to him he grew
agitated and began pacing and pressing his palms to his forehead. ‘I know I’ve heard of it before…but I can’t think!’

The others could only wait and try to help prod his memory.

‘Could it be a special room in the arcade?’ asked Milli.

‘Monuments can sometimes be tombs,’ Ernest suggested.

‘No one is buried here that I know of.’

‘Is it even in the arcade?’ puzzled Loyal.

Fritz stopped pacing and gave Loyal a look of grateful acknowledgment.

‘I think I know where it is!’ he said. ‘And no, it isn’t in the building—it’s right outside. The monument is the giant statue of my uncle at the entrance.’ Congratulatory smiles were exchanged all round.

‘Now we know where,’ said Ernest, thinking aloud, ‘but how does it help us?’

‘Doctor Savage is heading there tonight,’ Milli reminded them.

‘We have to make sure we get there first,’ said Fritz.

A
fter hours, the arcade had a totally different atmosphere. The group—now joined by the other members of the Resistance—walked through it as though in a tomb. A few of the gaslights had been left on casting dancing shadows on the stone. Security grilles were pulled down over the shops’ windows. The only sound was the sharp tapping of their footsteps on the tiled floor, until they were interrupted by rhythmic marching and the beating of toy drums. They retreated behind some decorative carts and watched as a small procession of baton-wielding golliwogs appeared. The golliwogs
threw their shoulders back, swelled their chests and lifted their knees ridiculously high as they marched. They wore khaki uniforms and military caps with badges. The leader of the procession was tank-like and had a thuggish expression. Milli knew at once that these weren’t original Von Gob toys—their glinting eyes and scowling mouths cut from brilliant red felt told her so. These golliwogs had been altered somehow to become a menacing regiment.

Up until now, the children had only heard about a ‘round-up’; now they saw the Golly Police executing one. Moving methodically, the gollies unlocked doors and cabinets and randomly withdrew toys, which they then threw unceremoniously into a laundry cart as if they were nothing more than soiled towels. The toys’ limbs jutted out at uncomfortable angles as they were piled on top of one another. Then the drum beat started up again and the patrol moved off around a corner.

‘Who were they?’ the children asked, horrified by the gollies’ callous treatment of their fellow toys.

‘The Golly Police,’ Fritz said. ‘Bred to patrol, a service which, I’m told, gains them certain privileges.’

‘Traitors!’ whispered Loyal angrily, but Fritz gave a dismissive shrug.

‘I suspect corruption has been beyond their control,’ he said.

Outside, the children and their toy friends studied the giant stone replica of Gustav Von Gobstopper. They circled, kicked and prodded the immovable stone. It divulged no answers.

‘Could there be a password?’ agonised Fritz.

No one replied; they all felt as if they had reached an impasse. Their plan to find the toymaker before the doctor did and take him to the safety of the toys’ secret headquarters was about to be foiled. What could they do now? In half an hour or so, Dr Savage would come for Von Gobstopper and deliver him to Tempest Anomali. There was no way they could prevent this without access to wherever it was Von Gobstopper was being held.

They decided to position themselves strategically behind some shrubbery and wait.
They figured that once the doctor arrived, a plan might present itself.

They didn’t have to wait long. Dr Savage appeared wearing a crumpled suit. He walked purposefully to the colossal statue of the toymaker, stopped in front of it and pulled himself, with some exertion, up onto its base. He rummaged for something in his pockets, and cursed under his breath when he did not immediately find it. Then, from his breast pocket, he withdrew something very small that Ernest thought might be an allen key. They watched him fit it smoothly between a gap in the statue’s stone fingers. After some seconds there was a sound like a roll of thunder and the seated statue began to vibrate and then rotated on its base until it was facing the opposite direction. Dr Savage stepped into the exposed opening and disappeared.

Who would have thought that the toymaker was being held prisoner beneath the very statue that celebrated his genius? Wild possibilities raced through the children’s minds. Perhaps, once Von Gobstopper emerged, they could distract the doctor and make a run for it. Perhaps
together they would be strong enough to tackle him to the ground whilst Pascal guided Von Gobstopper to safety? Whatever they did, they would be giving themselves away and an extensive search for them would surely follow.

Whilst they ruminated on these possibilities, something totally unexpected happened. Without so much as a warning, Captain Pluck charged towards the monument with his rifle cocked. Upon reaching the opening, he let off a round of shots, which still managed to create a loud cracking sound even though it was only a toy weapon.

‘Up here, good doctor!’Pluck shouted, despite gesticulations from his companions urging him to turn back.

Dr Savage’s face emerged from the hole looking stunned. He looked around for the speaker, then spotted the wooden soldier.

‘Come and get me, you bumbling coward,’ jeered Captain Pluck.

It took the doctor several moments to get his bearings and realise who was speaking to him. Captain Pluck had been constructed from forty separate pieces of shellacked and painted timber, but was remarkably nimble as he darted between
the rose bushes. The doctor stumbled clumsily after the retreating figure of the toy soldier wearing an inspired expression as though he had just made the discovery of the century.