It was dull in the Wendy House. The toy soldiers provided some modicum of company, and across the weeks and months Kaspar had grown used to the silence, but no amount of tutoring them, or watching them discover new things, could keep boredom at bay. Sometimes, he let it smother him and lay in bed for days and nights (though he could not tell where one ended and another began, and never would again), and were it not for the memory of the summer Cathy, his Cathy, had spent here, perhaps he would never have got out of bed again. Cathy had thought this place a prison too … at first. But she was carrying Martha inside her, a whole new world, and when Kaspar remembered that, that was when he knew what he had to do. If the world outside was to be denied him, he would have to make the world within.
The toy soldiers stopped their drilling as they watched their demi-god shed his bedclothes and get to his feet. With his canes he shuffled to the toybox and began to empty it of the tins of seasoned ham, the bags of flour and jars of honey that Emil had crammed inside. Beneath were bags of earth and seedling potatoes, onions with shoots and packets of seed. Emil had provisioned him well, and that was both proof of the love his brother still bore him and evidence of how eagerly he had prepared Kaspar’s cell.
With the toybox emptied, Kaspar lowered himself inside. The place was more cavernous than he remembered, though scarcely the size of a four-poster bed. He basked in the darkness and remembered: that summer, that first summer with Cathy, I barely made six of these. We painted them in bright colours and put the price tag high, but I never went back to them. It was too slow an endeavour – and back then there were other distractions, the ordinary magic more important than the rest.
But now, he thought, what is time? What else is there? And: I did it once. I could do it again. All it takes is to hold the vision in mind. A little push here, a careful tweak there, and things start changing. You have to remember the textures. You have to cast yourself back, back to when you were eight years old and rooms were bigger, your home was bigger, the world itself bigger than it would ever be again. Perspectives, he had told Cathy. It was all about perspectives.
He sat up, at one and the same time at the bottom of the box and peering over its lip. The Wendy House walls were stacked high with other boxes, materials Emil and the shop hands had carted in here that winter they turned it into their secure shopfloor. In there were rolls of felt and bales of wire, reams of crêpe paper and card, pipe cleaners and springs and bags of iron balls: everything a toymaker might need for the greatest creation of his life.
In a crescent around him, the toy soldiers bobbed up and down, as if to ask what he meant to do.
‘My wife once told me that, when nobody else can help you, you have to help yourself. And the world, it can be anything we want it to, if only we can hold it in our heads. So, my little friends, what do we want it to be?’
Papa Jack once taught him that a toymaker needed only two commodities: his imagination and his time. Well, now he had both. I’m going to have to get a lot better, he thought, but there was no time like the present – so, with the wind-up soldiers still watching, he got to work.
Cathy took the book of matches, lighting each candle as she came.
There were seventeen steps before she stopped counting. There might have been seventeen more before she felt the crinkling of cardboard creepers underfoot and, looking down, saw crêpe paper flowers in blue and green, a carpet of blossom and berries as in the depths of some summer forest. Behind her, Sirius stopped to sniff at the crinkling foliage.
At the bottom of the steps the paper was thick and entangled, gone to seed for so many years that the way ahead was a wilderness of briars and thorn. Through it, the narrow stairs became a passage and, beyond that, opened out into a room, a cavern, she could not see. That cavern was forested in cardboard larch, evergreens of tinsel, mighty oaks whose paper trunks had hardened and knotted with the passing generations.
‘Martha?’
She was at her side now, the axe in her hand. ‘I’ll give it everything I have,’ she said, and together they blazed a path forward.
Under the trees the briars grew less wild. Here there were trails and places where the trees had been coppiced, and in the roots the spoor of some animal. Something startled above them: the goldfinches of pipe cleaners and golden brocade that were roosting above.
A patchwork rabbit darted across Cathy’s path. She followed it with her eyes – and there, in the shadows between two cardboard elm, it looked back. Perhaps it was only her imagination, but its eyes seemed to pinch in imitation of a human’s surprise, before it turned tail and zigzagged back into the forest.
After that, more rabbits came. One, chewing at the petals of some felt flower, birthed a tiny kit, which took one look at the interlopers and hurtled for cover.
‘Mama,’ Martha whispered, ‘look …’
Together, their eyes turned upward. Through the lattice of branches, the sky seemed closer than ever. Unable to resist, Martha lifted herself into the nearest elm. There, she reached through a canopy of crinkling green – and felt the touch of the sky, a blue wall against her hand.
By the time she returned to the forest floor, Cathy had already gone on ahead. Somewhere, Sirius yelped in fright – and Cathy barrelled forward, until she chanced upon a clearing. Here was the place the forest met the sky, and surely the outer limit of the toybox. Nestled against the wall stood a cottage of imitation stone, cotton wool smoke billowing out of its chimney.
Cathy was standing outside its picket fence. Patchwork hens clucked around a coop, and in the trees a great wolfhound opened one lazy eye to consider them, then closed it to snooze once again.
‘Mama,’ Martha ventured, ‘mightn’t he …’
Cathy said nothing. She squeezed her daughter’s hand, and walked into the cottage.
Inside, there were only boxes – two dozen and more, lined up around the cottage walls, with paper grasses growing up in between. Martha and Cathy opened each one, gazing within. Inside lay new worlds, and nestled in them more worlds still. A great galleon lay beached upon the sand, with patchwork parrots nesting in its sails and troops of patchwork monkeys screeching from the jungles inland. Across icebound taiga, herds of embroidered reindeer outpaced the mountain tigers that stalked them, and beavers made dams out of paper spruce and fir. A miniature railway crossed a lunar landscape, populated by little green men.
‘Oh Papa,’ said Martha, ‘he lived a life …’
So many lives, thought Cathy, but where to begin?
It had taken them some time to catch up, but finally the Imperial Kapitan led the toy soldiers into the cottage. Cathy helped them on to the lips of the toyboxes, so that they might peer into the new worlds within. She was watching them sally in and out, seemingly inspecting each frontier, when she realised that Sirius was whimpering. He had been following a scent in the dirt and now he had risen on his hind paws, scrabbling at the lip of a toybox crammed in behind the others. Cathy moved toward it. The box was of a simple design – and there, on its lid, a single scarlet arrow, in florid design.
‘This way,’ she smiled.
The way in was a mountain ravine, with the bones of prehistoric patchwork bears littering the way – but soon they emerged into the box’s interior, where a rainbow arced across what Cathy took for the sky. On a cliff face above them, words were carved into imitation stone. Cathy read them to herself, each word a prayer. ROBERT KESEY, read the first. ANDREW DUNMORE. DOUGLAS FLOOD. JEKABS GODMAN, PAPA JACK. The names of every other Emporium shop hand lost along the way.
Onwards they went, beneath the memorial stone as high as the sky. Fields of incandescent flowers, like the sparklers of a bonfire night, dropped down toward the shores of a vast lake: streamers of crêpe paper in blue and green, with cross-stitch fish leaping from the waves and gulls, borne up by tiny balloons, hovering above. Cathy stood on the sand and looked across. In the heart of the lake rose an island, and on that island a tower of stone. There was only one window in that tower. Halfway up, firelight crackled, ringing the window in orange and red.
‘There’s a boat,’ Cathy said, and pointed to a coracle moored against a narrow jetty. ‘Come on …’