by Alex Bell
CHAPTER 5
A Terrible Picnic
Tess and the other children spent the whole morning cleaning the foyer. It was dirty, grubby work and nobody enjoyed it.
Tess was scrubbing at a very stubborn bit of mould growing on the base of the reception desk when she heard a long, loud “Atishoo!”
She glanced up and said, “Bless you, Oliver.”
Her younger brother looked startled. “I didn’t sneeze,” Oliver said. “I thought it was you.”
Tess frowned. She could see Niles and Stacy outside emptying a bucket, so it hadn’t been one of them. She stood up and stared around the foyer, looking for the phantom sneezer.
“There!” Oliver said as he raised his hand and pointed at the supply cupboard.
Tess was sure she had firmly closed the door, but now it was open a crack. And there on the floor, poking out from behind the door, was a mass of pale yarn that looked very much like doll’s hair.
Oliver gave Tess a horrified look. “There’s a doll hiding in the cupboard!” he whispered. His lower lip started to tremble. “How did it get there?” Oliver asked.
Tess rolled up her sleeves and marched over. If there was a doll hiding in the cupboard, then Tess would soon drag her out.
But when she threw open the door, she saw that the mass of yarn was just a mop head. There was no sign of a doll or of any other toys in there at all.
“It’s just a mop,” Tess said, holding it up.
“But then … who sneezed?” Oliver asked.
Tess gazed around the empty foyer, unable to answer the question. Niles and Stacy walked back in then and asked Tess what they should do next.
Tess sighed and said, “This room is spotless. There’s nothing left to clean here, which means we’re going to have to move on. Into the factory.”
Nobody wanted to do this, of course, but the foyer was as clean as it could be. They had no choice but to set off down one of the corridors with their cleaning supplies.
Tess led the way and saw that the corridor was covered in the same awful teddy-bear-picnic wallpaper as the foyer. There were no windows, but lamps lined the walls, giving everything a sickly sort of glow. She could see several closed doors stretching away from them down the corridor.
Tess was about to walk up to the first door when Stacy let out a squeak and pointed at the wallpaper.
“I know,” Tess sighed. “It’s very ugly.”
“No, look!” Stacy gasped. “Look at what they’re eating. Look what’s in the sandwiches!”
Tess looked more closely and then sucked in her breath. She hadn’t paid much attention to the picnic before, but now she saw what seemed to be dolls’ fingers sticking out of the teddy bears’ sandwiches. And dolls’ eyes in the bowls. There was even a doll’s head being used as a ball in some kind of game in the background.
Tess shuddered and then glanced back at the younger ones. “We all knew that the teddy bears were warped and evil before we came here, didn’t we?”
Her siblings nodded back, looking miserable.
“Come on, then,” Tess said.
They carried on walking, but then something dropped off the wall just in front of Tess. It rolled across the floor until it came to rest against her shoe and stopped. She thought it was a marble at first, but then she picked it up and saw it was a doll’s eye. A cold white ball, with a blue iris painted in the middle. The eye even had several thick eyelashes glued to the top.
“What is that?” Oliver demanded.
Tess showed it to him without saying a word. They all jumped as another eye popped right out of the wall, and another and another, until there were dozens of eyes rolling around on the floor.
“They’re coming out of the wallpaper!” Stacy cried, pointing.
Tess saw she was right. One of the bowls of eyeballs on the wallpaper was somehow spilling real dolls’ eyes out into the corridor.
“But … that’s not possible!” Tess exclaimed. She stared at the wall, feeling cross. Evil, rampaging teddy bears was one thing – she had expected those. But dolls’ eyes coming out of the wall was something else altogether and Tess wasn’t going to put up with it.
Oliver went to run towards the nearest door, but Tess grabbed his collar and yanked him back. “No!” she snapped. “We stay together.”
Oliver whimpered but said nothing. And then the flood of eyeballs stopped as quickly as it had begun and the wallpaper was just innocent drawings once again.
“I can’t do this, Tess,” Oliver whispered. “Please. Let me go home.”
Before Tess could reply, there was another sudden sneeze that made everyone jump.
“ATISHOO!”
“Who was that?” Stacy asked. She pushed her glasses further up her nose and stared around wildly.
“There’s something in the walls,” Tess said as she let go of Oliver and tightened her grip on the mop in case she needed it as a weapon.
The other children gasped and looked worried.
“Do you think it’s one of the evil teddy bears?” Niles asked in a low voice.
“I don’t know,” Tess said, and she narrowed her eyes at the nearby wall. The picnicking teddy bears gazed back at her with what seemed to be challenging looks. Tess thought there was something smug about the bears’ whiskers.
She raised her mop and banged on the wall hard with the handle.
“Is something in there?” Tess demanded, trying to sound stronger than she felt.
There was no reply, but one teddy bear in the wallpaper suddenly caught Tess’s eye. There was something different about it and Tess realised what it was. The bear didn’t have painted eyes like the rest of them. Instead its eyes were holes. It was as if something might be hunched behind the wall, peering out at them unseen …
Tess lunged forwards before she could lose her nerve, and pressed her face up close to the teddy bear’s eye holes. To her horror, Tess saw two pale-yellow eyes staring straight back at her from behind the wall.
She screamed and jumped back, banging into the others, who all started yelling too.
“What is it? What is it?” they cried.
“There’s something behind the wall!” Tess gasped.
As if to prove it, the sneeze came loudly once again.
“Atishoo!”
There was a scrabbling sound, as if whatever was back there had started to move. It was followed by a flurry of sneezes.
Tess was afraid it might be coming out to get them, so she started banging her mop handle on the wall as hard as she could.
“Get out of here!” she yelled. “Scram! And don’t come back or we’ll bash you with mops!”
The scurrying sound seemed to get lower, as if the thing was going down underneath the floor. Finally, there was silence and when Tess peered into the eye holes again there was nothing there.
“Is it gone?” Stacy asked, trembling as she gripped Tess’s hand.
“I think so,” Tess replied, wiping sweat from her brow.
“What was it?” Niles asked. “A teddy bear?”
“I’m not sure,” Tess said. “I couldn’t see it properly. All I know is it had big yellow eyes.”
The children gave each other dark looks.
Then Tess said sharply, “Where’s Oliver?”
CHAPTER 6
The Rocking-Horse Room
Tess looked frantically up and down the corridor, but her youngest brother was nowhere to be seen.
Niles shook his head and said, “He got scared and ran in there.”
He pointed to the nearest door, which was now wide open. Tess scowled and stalked towards it.
“Stupid, stupid!” she muttered. “I told him not to go anywhere by himself. I told him!”
The sign on the door read: “Teddy-Bear Room”. Tess very much hoped that Oliver hadn’t gone inside. It would be just like him to make everything ten times worse.
Tess poked her head into the room and stared at the sight of dozens of teddies. Row upon row of them, all lined
up neatly on shelves attached to the walls. They were all identical to Biffy, the bear that had tried to stab Mika – white and fluffy, with black noses and shiny, watchful eyes.
There was a big pile of rusted machinery in the centre of the room. Tess guessed it had been used to make teddy bears.
“Oliver!” Tess called. “Oliver, it’s all right! You can come out!”
But there was still no sign of him, and no reply.
“Perhaps he’s hiding behind the machinery,” Tess said, thinking out loud.
She strode into the room and poked around the machinery from every angle, as well as underneath, but there was no Oliver.
Tess looked back at Niles and said, “Are you sure he came into this room?”
“I don’t know,” Niles said. He pushed his glasses up his nose and looked unsure. “I thought it was this one. And the door was open …”
Niles trailed off and Tess groaned aloud. “I can’t believe he ran off like that!” she said. She suddenly felt both angry and worried at the same time.
“He can’t have gone far,” Tess said. She was trying to reassure herself as much as the other two. “We’ll just have to search for him.”
Tess walked back over to the twins, fighting to control the panic rising inside her. It was her fault that Oliver was lost. She was responsible for him and now he was gone.
“The bears,” Stacy said, pointing at them and staring. “They’re completely clean.”
Tess realised Stacy was right. The floor of the room was as dirty as the foyer had been, and the machinery was covered in rust. But the white bears were spotless, as if they’d been made yesterday.
“Perhaps Hoggle only just made these ones,” Tess said.
But it seemed like an awful lot of bears to have produced so fast. And the machine in the centre looked as if it hadn’t been used in years.
“Never mind about the bears,” Tess said, shaking her head. “The important thing right now is to find Oliver. He must have gone into one of the other rooms.”
They returned to the corridor and hurried back to the foyer to see if he had gone that way, but there was no sign of him.
“Perhaps he ran home?” Stacy suggested.
“But I really thought I saw him go into the Teddy-Bear Room,” Niles said.
Tess clenched her hands into fists and tried to think.
Maybe Oliver had simply run off home. It sounded like the sort of dumb thing he’d do. On the other hand, perhaps he was lost somewhere inside the factory. Teddy bears could be stabbing Oliver with forks at this very minute!
Finally, Tess looked at the twins and said, “Someone should run home to check if he’s there. Stacy, you’re the fastest. You go and then come back to tell us.”
Stacy nodded, her face serious. “I’ll run as fast as I can,” she promised.
Tess and Niles watched Stacy whizz out of the front doors. She sprinted down the drive and past the entrance gates, kicking up clouds of dust behind her. Then Niles and Tess returned to the corridor. They had put down most of their cleaning stuff, but Tess kept hold of the mop, as it was the closest thing they had to a weapon. They went to the next door in the corridor, which had a sign glued to it that read: “Rocking-Horse Room”.
Tess had never been too fussed about dolls and teddy bears, even when she was small. But she had always adored rocking horses. Her family had never been able to afford to buy her one, but whenever she’d seen a rocking horse in a toy shop, she’d pressed her nose up against the window longingly.
Tess opened the door and she and Niles walked into another large room, with grey light coming in through the dirty windows. Tess couldn’t prevent herself from gasping. Inside were some of the most beautiful rocking horses she’d ever seen. They were all different colours, with real hair for their manes and tails. Some of the horses leaned against the wall, half finished, while others were scattered around the floor. They all had proper saddles and reins made from leather.
But the strange thing about the rocking horses was that they all looked terrified. Some of them had wide, staring eyes, as if they’d just seen something dreadful. Other horses had flaring nostrils or open mouths. One horse in particular caught Tess’s eye and she walked over to it.
Most of the horses were brown or black or dappled grey, but this one was white, with a golden mane and pink ribbons in its tail. It had a silver twisted pole in the middle and reminded Tess of the horses she’d seen on fairground carousels.
“You’re beautiful,” Tess breathed.
Like all the others, this horse had a wild, desperate look on its painted face. Tess slowly reached her hand out to stroke its nose. Her hand rested there for a moment as she looked into the horse’s frightened eyes.
And then the horse snorted into her hand. Tess felt the warm puff of its breath against her skin. Niles heard it and let out a yelp behind her, then shouted a warning. But Tess didn’t think the horse meant to hurt her. In fact, there was a look in its eye that seemed almost … pleading.
“Tess, let’s go,” Niles said. “We know these horses are evil, and Oliver isn’t here.”
Tess turned away from the white horse reluctantly. She was halfway back to the door when there was a soft whinny behind her. The kind of sound she’d heard real horses make in the fields around their farm. Tess turned back towards the white rocking horse and saw that its face had changed. It now looked more heartbroken than scared and Tess felt guilt twist in her stomach.
“Let’s go!” Niles said again.
Tess joined her brother and they walked out of the Rocking-Horse Room.
“Maybe it’s not what we thought,” Tess said as she closed the door behind them. “Those horses didn’t seem evil. They just seemed scared.”
She glanced at the horrible wallpaper of the teddy bears’ picnic and thought about what they’d done to the dolls.
“We know the bears are dangerous,” Tess went on, remembering Biffy. “But perhaps the other toys aren’t like them?”
Niles shrugged. “Who cares?” he said. “I hate this place. The sooner we find Oliver, the sooner we can leave.”
Tess didn’t say anything more, but the encounter with the rocking horses had got her thinking.
She and Niles started to make their way down the corridor to the room next door. Then they heard the sound of whistling. Something was coming towards them from the corridor up ahead – and it was getting closer.
CHAPTER 7
A Buffalo Hunt
Tess tightened her grip on the mop. The whistling sounded loud, so whatever it was must be big. Tess’s mind filled with visions of giant teddy bears that could squeeze the life right out of her with one evil cuddle.
But there was no time to hide, because it was almost upon them. Tess shoved Niles behind her, stood firm and raised the mop, ready to strike.
But it was only Hoggle who charged around the corner. He was still wearing his large green coat, purple top hat and mismatched gloves, but now he also gripped a stick with a huge net hanging from the end of it. It looked like a butterfly net but was much, much bigger.
Hoggle stopped whistling when he saw them and came to an abrupt halt. For a moment he looked startled, but then he said, “Ah, yes, the children. Good day to you.” He tipped his top hat. “Excellent job in the foyer.”
Tess stared at the net in Hoggle’s hand. “What’s that for?” she asked, pointing.
“This?” Hoggle asked. He held up the net and gazed at it. For a moment, he was silent, but then he said, “Just a spot of dragonfly hunting, my dear.”
“But that net’s big enough to capture a … a buffalo!”
It wasn’t quite large enough for a buffalo, but it was a very big net just the same – almost as large as Hoggle himself.
“Not many buffalo herds around here that I’m aware of,” Hoggle said cheerfully. “No, I think I’ll stick to dragonflies.” He looked at them again and said, “Weren’t there more of you small people this morning?”
“Our brot
her, Oliver, went into the—” Niles began, but Tess cut him off.
“Oliver and Stacy are cleaning a different part of the factory,” Tess said firmly. She was afraid that if Hoggle knew that Oliver had vanished, then he might not let them stay in the factory – and then they’d never find their brother. Oliver would become nothing more than a sad memory.
Tess found herself wondering just how much Hoggle did know about the toys. Surely he must have known there was something strange about them or else he wouldn’t be walking around the factory with a gigantic net. Whatever Hoggle had said, Tess was pretty sure he wasn’t really hunting for dragonflies.
“Mr Hoggle, I was just wondering,” Tess said, “was the man who built this factory a relation of yours?”
“Yes, indeed,” Hoggle replied. “Caractacus Hoggle was my grandfather.”
“People around here tell stories about the factory, you know,” Tess said.
“Do they now?” Hoggle replied.
“Yes.” Tess nodded. “They say that Caractacus Hoggle went mad and started making evil toys.”
“Well, well,” Hoggle said.
“Do you think it’s true?” Tess pressed.
“Do I think it’s true?” Hoggle repeated. He paused, then said, “After my grandpops closed the factory and moved back home, he used to tell me the most dreadful stories about this place. I thought he’d just lost his marbles a bit. The Hoggle family are prone to losing their marbles, you know.” Hoggle scratched his neck and said, “When I inherited the factory, I thought I’d come and take a look for myself.”
“And what do you think now?” Tess asked.
Hoggle adjusted his top hat and said, “You ask an awful lot of questions, small girl. And I’m not paying you to ask questions. I’m paying you to scare away … that is to say, I’m paying you to clean the place.”