The Grandest Bookshop in the World

by Mellor, Amelia

  She was about to share it with her brothers, in the hope of their reassurance, when Vally sat upright in his chair. ‘Oh, here we go. They’re buttercups!’

  Eddie didn’t look up from his book. ‘Every yellow flower is not a buttercup, Val.’

  ‘These are!’ Vally swigged the last of his tea and opened the flower dictionary. ‘Buttercup: childish.’

  ‘So with the crocus, that’s childish happiness,’ said Pearl. It could have applied to the whole Arcade – but perhaps it was a department designed especially for children. ‘Wonder Land!’

  The boys gave her the same look of horror at the same time.

  ‘We’ve done Wonder Land already,’ Vally said. ‘The ocean? The riddle on the mirrors?’

  ‘What happened to the ocean?’

  ‘Never mind. I have another idea.’ Vally tucked his watch back into his pocket. ‘You remember where Toy Land is, right, Pearl?’

  Pearl stood. It felt good to be doing something again; to be going somewhere, with purpose. She checked the rainbows outside and winced. Barely a third of the blue remained. ‘I think I do.’

  ‘Good,’ said Vally, swinging the satchel over his shoulder. ‘That makes one of us.’

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  UNCANNY VALLY

  Up on the first floor, on the Little Collins side, Toy Land waited. The shop was dark, but the door opened when Vally tried the handle. He wanted to call out to the department manager, but he couldn’t remember who it was. In any case, they didn’t seem to be in. He took a careful step across the threshold, allowing his eyes to adjust.

  Pearl barged through, with elbows that meant business. The shop began to light up in her wake – not by any electrical or flammable means, but a general brightness, as if the sun had hit the windows at just the right angle. A stand of whirligigs began to spin on a nearby shelf. A music box popped open and began to play, the dancer twisting stiffly from side to side.

  ‘Look at that!’ Pearl twirled in a circle, skirts billowing, and rushed down one of the aisles. A wave of light and motion followed her – flags fluttering, kites waving their tails, the big rocking horse by the cash register tilting to and fro.

  Vally picked up a clockwork frog and turned it upside down. Its legs twitched in the air. ‘Do you think Maximillian does hundreds of little tricks, or one big spell all at once?’

  ‘I think it’s a bit of both. A couple of big ones, and a few little ones that he makes up on the spot.’ The magical wind of her wake rustled the strings of the marionettes, making them swing gently. They reminded Vally of hanged corpses. As he watched the puppets, one in a large dress curtsied to him. The clown beside her started up a high, crazy cackle. It shook so violently with laughter that it fell from its peg and thrashed about on the floor.

  As if puppets weren’t creepy enough without magic. He hurried past them. Their faces turned to watch him.

  ‘Val, I’ve been meaning to tell you something.’

  He set the frog on the floor and watched it leap around his feet. ‘Can it wait until the end of the round?’

  Pearl took a deep breath. ‘I’m forgetting how to read.’

  ‘You won’t forget how to read,’ he said, trying to sound comforting – rather than frustrated and worried, which he was. ‘You’ve read outside the Arcade loads of times.’

  ‘I know, but it’s getting more difficult. It’s nearly four years of practice, and it’s all going away.’ She gestured to a row of four alphabet blocks in bright alternating colours. ‘What’s a louz?’

  The blocks read: L-O-U-2.

  ‘That’s not a word,’ said Vally slowly. ‘That’s three words. Hello, you two.’

  ‘A clue!’ Pearl perked up at once. ‘Are there any more?’

  A calico kangaroo made a slow shuffling hop across the bench using its forepaws, as if grazing. As it moved, Vally spotted another row of blocks behind it. ‘B-Y-Y.’ One B and two Ys, a B and two Ys … ‘Be wise.’

  Pearl wandered a little further down the aisle. Everything in the shop was set out at her height. The benches, which had once come up to Vally’s waist, were now at thigh level. His sister blended into the palette of vivid nursery colours, and the toys were drawn to her, looking at her or leaning in her direction, as if they knew she brought their best chance of being played with. His own drab trousers made him feel like a common pigeon in a tropical garden. He realised, with some disappointment, that the things on which his eye lingered were also the most bland. A cricket bat, with a pair of clean white shin guards. A penny-farthing bicycle, hanging from the ceiling. It was still strange, thinking of himself as thirteen. When Pa was thirteen, he’d had to spend all his daylight hours working on his stepfather’s farm. He’d hoed the ground and chopped wood to keep his mother and stepfather and all ten of his siblings alive through the hideous English winter. And then when he was Linda’s age, he’d said goodbye and had never spoken a word to them again. What must have happened to Pa in that cold, hungry place, to drive him to the opposite side of the Earth?

  ‘There’s another one,’ said Pearl. ‘I-C-U.’

  With a flutter of black wings, the paper wagtail hopped over the message and cocked its head at them. Around it, a collection of painted wooden birds flapped their wings and chirruped – lorikeets, fairy wrens, magpies, kingfishers, native robins in yellow, pink and red. The paper bird wagged its tail haughtily.

  ‘I-H-U,’ Vally told it under his breath.

  At the end of the aisle, they found a large array of blocks scattered about the bench. As the Coles came closer, the blocks hopped to attention and lined up side by side, in long multicoloured rows:

  L O N G N O C R I T E X S K R Q V S H D E M S N T K T M

  ‘Long … nocrit … ex,’ Pearl said. ‘Is that Latin?’

  ‘No, it’s gibberish.’

  Small wooden tiles lay face up in front of the blocks. These began to shuffle around as well. Soon they formed proper words, in clear black capitals.

  spell the following in as few letters as possible

  rot

  nemesis

  jealous

  surpass

  hollow

  crooked

  taunt

  the remaining letters will lead you to flowers and freedom

  ‘Oh, wonderful,’ said Pearl, after Vally read the message aloud. ‘I forget how to read and he gives us a word puzzle.’

  ‘That might be an advantage.’ Vally picked up an M. ‘You’ll be able to pay more attention to the individual letters.’

  ‘What’s that word?’ She pointed at the second clue.

  ‘Nemesis.’

  ‘What does it mean?’

  Her memories must have been escaping fast. ‘Your worst enemy.’

  ‘Enemy?’ said Pearl. ‘N-M-E?’

  Vally gave her a nudge of encouragement. ‘See? You can do it!’ He pulled out the N, M and E blocks and placed them beside their clue. ‘Rot. Um … break down, decompose, perish, decay – D-K!’ This was proving not to be too bad after all. ‘What about jealous, Pearlie? What do you think?’

  She was grimacing, tapping her toes on the floor. ‘I think something’s wrong with my feet.’

  ‘Well, bring a chair over.’ He moved the D and the K. ‘Come on, give me a word.’

  ‘No, Val. I can’t even wiggle them.’ She bent down, jerked at her shoelaces and pulled off her shoe.

  ‘Put that back on,’ Vally said. ‘No one wants to smell your socks.’

  The sock was off before he finished. Pearl, overbalancing, gripped the bench and touched her bare foot to the floor. It went clink.

  Clink?

  Vally looked again – and recoiled. Her toes were no longer separate, but fused into a solid block.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Panic was creeping into his sister’s voice as she gripped her ankle. ‘It’s like stone!’

  But stone, in Vally’s experience, didn’t go clink. He looked at the row of porcelain dolls on the shelves and had another shock. They
were climbing down from their places now. Girls in summer clothes, girls in winter clothes, baby girls, horseriding girls, white girls, brown girls. All rigid, with glass eyes. All crawling, tottering, lurching towards the Coles.

  ‘It says freedom,’ he pointed out, as calmly as he could. ‘As in, freedom from the obstacle, the snare. We solve this, find the flowers, and your feet go back to normal.’

  ‘Yours, too,’ said Pearl.

  Vally’s legs slid out from under him in opposite directions. His shoes fell off and rolled aside.

  He caught himself on the edge of the bench, bracing on his elbows. He couldn’t see, didn’t want to see, what was happening to him. He could feel it, though – a tingle in his bones, his skin, a peculiar sense of his legs relaxing against his will.

  Magnus Maximillian was mocking them. It was the game he liked, and they were his playthings.

  Mocking. That was another word for taunting. Vally turned his attention back to the puzzle. ‘Mock,’ he said aloud. It was partly to hear the pronunciation, partly to drown out the rustling and scuttling of a thousand tiny wheels and feet and strings. No letters seemed to work. ‘Insult, tease, I don’t know … hassle?’

  ‘It’s tease,’ said Pearl, picking out two T blocks. ‘Jealous?’

  ‘Bitter,’ said Vally. ‘Resentful, envy – oh! N-V-S.’

  ‘Hollow,’ Pearl read slowly. ‘Um … M-T!’

  ‘Good,’ said Vally, trying to ignore the strange unpleasant heaviness filling him up from below. ‘Surpass?’

  His sister glanced at him and cringed. ‘Doesn’t that hurt?’

  Vally looked down. His legs were curving off to the left and right, bent like bananas. The moment he noticed it, the last muscles that were keeping him standing went slack. He slid to the floor with a soft thud. It should have been painful, bumping down on his tailbone. Instead, it felt like landing on a pillow.

  His breath came short and shallow. His lungs seemed to be running out of space. He tugged up the hem of his trousers.

  Where his leg should have been was something crude and plump and boneless. He grabbed at what had been his knee. It squashed under his touch. No joint there now – only cottonwool and calico. He lifted his shirt. His body was changing before his eyes. Hip bones disappearing. Stomach expanding. Skin turning from pink to paper-white.

  A ragdoll. He would rather have fought a hundred of the horrible puppets than this.

  Vally looked up at the bench. He’d never solve the puzzle standing, not without his human legs. ‘Pearl, quick. How many clues do we have left?’

  ‘Two!’ She kicked off her other shoe and held onto the bench, steadying herself on her flat feet. ‘Sur-pass and, um, kuh-rr-ooh–’

  ‘Crooked. That word is crooked. Do we have a Q?’

  ‘We do!’

  ‘Then the answer is S-Q, askew. Pass down the rest.’

  Pearl struggled to bend her arm against the transformation taking hold of it. She managed to grip two blocks in one hand, passing them down in pairs. ‘L, O … N, G … O, C … R, I … E, X …’ They slipped from her grasp. ‘Oh, Val, I’m sorry!’

  The X tumbled across the floor. He reached for it, only to find he couldn’t separate his fingers.

  He glanced down again. He wished he hadn’t.

  His hands were mittens. His legs were limp sausages. His fat bag of a body bulged with cottonwool, making his shirt ride up around his chest. Vally moaned aloud in dismay.

  Pearl swivelled her head to face him. A dark line was already appearing at her throat. ‘You’re lucky, Val. At least you’re soft.’

  She was right: he could still move. He couldn’t stand, but he was stuffed firm enough to sit up. His elbows were gone, but with effort he could bend his arms where he wanted elbows to be, the way a child might have done while playing with him. Pearl, meanwhile, was totally inflexible. She was all hard segments. She still had her fingers, but she couldn’t do anything with them.

  And around them, the swarm was closing in. Marbles rolling. Jacks flipping. A tin platoon marching in formation. Dolls of all sizes, from the simplest paper fashion dolls to blinking babies with noisemaker mechanisms in their throats to an entire family of Russian matryoshkas. A menagerie of creatures from every continent, of clockwork, wood and fabric.

  A wooden duck with flapping leather feet – the kind a toddler would pull around – reached out and snatched Vally’s X block. He batted the duck in the head. The block fell, and he began sweeping it back towards the others when he had a brainwave. Surpass meant something close to …

  ‘X-L!’ He pawed at the X and L, shoving them away from the other blocks. ‘That’s the last one!’

  ‘K, R, H, S!’ Pearl said, and stiffly knocked the rest of the letters to the floor. They were still nonsensical, but now they looked more like a scrambled word: K O N G I H O S C R E R.

  Gecko was unlikely to be part of it. Corgi even less so. But there was an H, an O, an R, an S and an E. And plenty of horses were in the approaching mob of toys – stuffed horses, hobby horses, tin soldiers’ horses.

  Strands of wool were falling across Vally’s face by the time he had removed HORSE from the last letters. All that remained was an R, an O, a K, an N …

  ‘Rocking horse!’ He slapped the floor with a faint paf. ‘The bouquet is at the rocking horse near the register! Go!’

  Pearl tottered along beside the bench with stiff little steps. She looked precarious, fragile, but at least her legs could swing back and forth. They kicked rogue toys out of her way, carrying her towards the rocking horse at a speed Vally could only envy. He had to drag himself along like a seal. He had to shove all the little insistent bodies and objects out of his way. They were trying to bar his path, to slow him down. His hands kept slipping out from under him. The stuffing was dense and heavy in his belly, like too much pudding. ‘You could – at least – have made me – clockwork,’ he grunted, hoping Magnus Maximillian would be listening. ‘Even a puppet – would haffmm …’

  He’d meant to say would have been better than this, but his mouth had shut without his permission. He touched it with a mitten hand.

  It wasn’t there. In its place were two stitches – a mouth in image only.

  All right. Maximillian was definitely listening.

  On the ceiling, the hanging displays swung perilously, as if at any moment the ropes and strings might give way and drop a hailstorm of kites and bicycles. On the shelves, the paper bird peered down. The throng of toys on the floor did not move quickly, but there were so many that it was like crawling over rocks on the beach. Vally shook a wheelie caterpillar off his back, only for a skipping rope to lash itself around his ankle. It was like a parent’s nightmare of a child’s untidy room, every plaything an obstacle.

  Ahead of him, nearer the rocking horse, Pearl made a little squeak of alarm. Vally pushed himself up on his not-elbows to see. She had tried to dash from the benches to the horse, and was wobbling in open space as dozens of toys clustered around her feet. Horrible possibilities flashed through Vally’s mind. Pearl could shatter. She might be unable to transform back until she was fixed. Or perhaps the porcelain would turn to flesh then and there, scattering the floor with pieces of bone and brain and –

  ‘I’m falling!’ Half of Pearl’s face was china. Her eyes were glass. Only her mouth was left. ‘Vally, I’ll break!’

  He had to push her upright – but how could he, stuck like this? He couldn’t even hold himself up. He was just a limp, pudgy cushion …

  Pearl toppled.

  With all the strength of his floppy arms, Vally flung himself across the floor. Checkers and dominoes and spinning tops crunched under him. A memory rang in his mind as she fell – little sailor-suit Vally sitting on the chaise longue in their old house, allowed at last to hold the baby, the beautiful new baby – ‘careful of her head, Vally dear’ – and she was all round and smooth like a treasure from the sea – and he pulled her close, away from Ruby’s grasping toddler-greed, because he was a big b
oy and he had to protect her head, her head, her head …

  Pearl’s face hit his belly.

  The force of it punched the air out of him. The momentum of his dive carried him rolling onwards, and in the roll his arms fell across his sister, and he held her cold fragility to the pillow of himself until they came to a halt at the horse’s feet.

  Lucky to be soft, indeed.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  FIERY COLES

  Pearl couldn’t see. She couldn’t move. Her hard face was pressed into Vally’s tummy, and her arms could not be persuaded to lift her off him.

  Gradually, warmth crept back into her. She rolled onto her side. She felt the beating of her heart, the tingle of nerves in her fingers, the complex miracle of her body. The terrible hollowness inside her was melting away. She sat up and looked across Toy Land. It was a bright shop no longer. The toys on the floor were so thickly coated with dust that they looked like mossy stones. The hanging displays had collapsed, covering the benches and floor with the twisted frames of outdoor toys and sport equipment. The rocking horse above her had fallen off one of its rockers, and its mane of real horsehair was almost bald. Between the rockers lay a bouquet of pink and purple blooms.

  Behind her, Vally emitted a low groan. He was curled on his side with one arm across his stomach and the other hand on his chest. ‘Affuw uh foffuwm.’

  Pearl massaged her jaw as the softness came back into her face. ‘Wha’?’

  ‘Acck.’ Her brother extracted a ball of fluff from his mouth and blew a raspberry. ‘I said, that was a close one.’

  ‘Can you get up?’

  ‘Give me a minute,’ he said, in a breathless grunt. ‘Are you OK?’

  She touched her cheeks, her neck, her arms. If she had fractured, she didn’t know how it would affect her now – a long gash, like a crack in her skin? Or would she have broken less like a doll and more like a human, shattering bones? She found no blood and no pain. And it was because of him. The pancake-faced ragdoll boy. The brother who, until recently, she hadn’t felt she knew.