Toymaker, The

by Quidt, Jeremy De

  But Mathias didn’t look at her. His eyes were fixed on the other man in the cart, on his hat and silver-topped cane. He was sitting opposite Lutsmann at the small table. In the bright lamplight, Mathias was able to have a good look at him for the first time. He had dark, hard eyes in a face that was quite round, pudgy, like a small moon. There was an ill-disguised contempt for Lutsmann on his face, a not believing a word of the charade that was being played out before him.

  ‘This is Doctor …’

  ‘Leiter,’ said the man.

  ‘Yes,’ said Lutsmann, as though he in turn doubted that it was the man’s name at all. ‘Doctor Leiter has an offer to make to you, Mathias. A very generous offer.’

  Lutsmann’s eyes strayed to the table. Mathias noticed for the first time a small leather pouch, there by Lutsmann’s hand. He didn’t have to guess very hard what it might contain.

  ‘He has need of an assistant and has offered to take you on’ – here Lutsmann put his hand on his heart and shook his head mournfully – ‘now that Gustav is no more.’

  ‘Oh, Gustav!’ sobbed Anna-Maria.

  She lifted her hanky to her face, but Mathias saw that from behind the lace her eyes were watching Dr Leiter as carefully as a stalking cat.

  ‘The choice is yours, Mathias,’ said Lutsmann. ‘This circus is your family and your home.’ He turned to the other man. ‘We love him as if he were our own dear son,’ he explained. ‘But, Mathias, you must think on your future.’

  He’s going to sell me, thought Mathias.

  He looked again at the fat purse full of money. Anna-Maria’s hand rested lightly on his shoulder, and though that touch could have been mistaken for something more kindly, Mathias knew exactly what it meant – it meant, Shut up and don’t say a word.

  He stood there, looking from Lutsmann’s greedy face to the hard eyes of Dr Leiter. His nose still hurt from where the doctor had hit him.

  ‘See!’ said Lutsmann grandly. ‘The boy is speechless, no doubt with gratitude.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Leiter coldly. He looked at Mathias, then at Lutsmann. ‘The price includes all his things and those of the grandfather too.’

  Lutsmann pulled a new face, thoughtful. ‘I wonder if we should not reconsider that,’ he said. ‘They are after all valuable props and—’

  Almost carelessly, while Lutsmann had been speaking, Leiter had picked up his cane. Now he twisted the silver top. It parted from the rest of the stick, just an inch, but enough to show Lutsmann the hard, bright steel of the long blade that was hidden inside. Lutsmann swallowed.

  ‘The price we agreed was for everything, circus man,’ said Dr Leiter. ‘Boy. Baggage. Belongings. What was the grandfather’s is now the boy’s.’

  ‘Of c-course,’ said Lutsmann, stammering over the words. ‘But I was just thinking—’

  ‘Don’t,’ said Leiter. ‘Thinking can have such unfortunate consequences.’

  He stood up. ‘The boy can show me everything. He will know what can be taken and what cannot.’

  With that, he stepped across to the door and, pushing Mathias in front of him, opened it and went down the steps into the cold darkness.

  Anna-Maria closed the door but left enough of a crack to spy through. She pressed her eye up against it.

  ‘What a price!’ crowed Lutsmann, clapping the leather purse between his hands. ‘What a fool he was. Did you see how I nearly even got a bit more too.’

  ‘Ssshhh!’ hissed Anna-Maria. ‘I want to see what they do.’

  ‘Let the fool go. He has left his money.’

  ‘You’re the fool! Idiot!’ she hissed. ‘He wasn’t paying for the boy. He was paying for something else. He searched Gustav’s coat. Stripped the lining bare. Now he wants his things. Whatever it is has got to be in there.’

  ‘Then why did you let me sell them, my plum?’ said Lutsmann stupidly.

  ‘It was you who sold them, you fool.’ Without taking her eye from the crack in the door, Anna-Maria aimed a kick at Lutsmann. ‘I couldn’t stop you. I said sell the boy, not the old goat’s things. Now shut up and let me watch.’

  She could see the door of the stage cart and, by the spill of light from inside it, the shapes of Mathias and the doctor climbing the ladder at the back.

  Mathias was too frightened to think as he stepped down into the dark. It was so cold. He put his hands in his pockets, and at once his fingers touched and closed around the little roll of paper. He looked towards the stables, where Gustav was lying in the straw. Leiter saw him do it. He bent down and whispered in Mathias’s ear.

  ‘Don’t try to run away, boy. I won’t hurt you.’

  But Leiter had already hurt him once. Besides, Mathias had seen what was inside the silver-topped cane.

  When they climbed the steps, the stage cart seemed empty, though the small night lamp had been lit. Mathias knew that the others would be drinking and eating in a tavern, parting some fool from his money. Leiter stepped into the cart and turned up the wick of the lamp so that it burned brighter. He seemed suddenly much bigger than he had been in the dark. With his cane he lifted up the hanging canvas that served as the wings of the stage and peered behind it to see if there was anyone there. Mathias prayed there would be, but there wasn’t.

  The wooden floor was stacked with boxes and chests containing the things they had used in the show. The false weights for the strongman to lift, the hoops and rings that Estella spun and stepped through. By now they should all have been back in Lutsmann’s cart, but Lutsmann had had other business, and the boxes and chests lay where they had been left. Leiter took the lamp down.

  ‘Which were his?’ he said.

  Mathias pointed to two canvas bags. ‘That one and that one,’ he said.

  Leiter wanted to know if that was all. Mathias nodded.

  ‘Where did he sleep? Where are his other things?’

  ‘Over there.’ Mathias pointed to the place where Gustav unrolled his straw mattress to sleep. That’s how they all slept – on straw mattresses that during the day were slung in nets in the roof of the cart above their heads.

  Leiter held the lamp up, the better to see. ‘Get his down,’ he said. ‘Get yours too.’

  ‘I don’t have one,’ said Mathias.

  ‘Then get his.’

  While Mathias stretched up to unhook it, Leiter held the lamp to the wooden walls nearest where Gustav had slept. He was looking intently in every crack and crevice of the wood. The mattress tumbled from the net. Leiter hung the lamp back on its peg, then twisted the top from his cane and drew out the long steel blade. With one stroke he sliced through the canvas cover and shook the straw out onto the floorboards. Then he spread it about with his foot as though looking for something that might have been hidden. But there was nothing.

  ‘Get the bags,’ he said.

  Mathias picked up the bags.

  ‘And there is nothing else?’

  Mathias shook his head.

  ‘No secret place?’

  He shook his head again.

  ‘Where did he keep his money?’

  ‘He had no money.’

  Gustav never had any, or if he had, Mathias had never seen it.

  Leiter slid the blade back into his cane. He turned the lamp down again, then opened the door.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Mathias asked.

  ‘On a short journey,’ said Leiter.

  The bags were awkward to carry. By the time Mathias was at the foot of the steps Leiter was already a dimly seen shape in the darkness.

  ‘What about my grandfather?’ he called.

  The shape stopped.

  ‘If you do not come now, boy,’ said Leiter, ‘something very bad will happen to you.’

  There was a movement in the darkness behind Mathias. He saw it from the corner of his eye. He turned round, but he could see nothing. There was something there though. He could hear it. It was dragging sharp fingernails along the side of the wooden cart. He felt suddenly alone and very frightened. He looked quick
ly across to the lights of the tavern. They were too far to run to.

  ‘Very bad,’ breathed a whisper close beside his ear.

  He whirled round but there was still no one there. Something picked at his coat sleeve. He tried to brush it away. He could feel a whimper rising in his throat.

  ‘Come along, boy,’ called Leiter from the dark.

  Mathias had no choice. He picked up the bags and, not daring to look behind him, started to run as fast as he could after the disappearing shape of Dr Leiter.

  4

  The Road Through the Wood

  Lamps burned at the corners of the narrow streets. It was late now and quite dark. There were no other people to see them. Leiter walked so fast that his long black coat-tails trailed out behind him. Mathias tried to keep up, but it was hard. The bags were heavy and kept catching him in the same place behind his knee so that it blistered and scraped. If he stopped for breath, he thought he could hear other steps in the dark behind him stop and wait. When he started, they started again. Only once did he dare glance behind him. He snatched a look over his shoulder and saw a shape, small as a child, but much broader, wider, slip out of the lamplight and back into the shadow.

  At last Leiter stopped. There was a low black carriage waiting beneath one of the corner lamps. Its two horses stood strangely still – not shaking their heads or chewing on their bits. They were immobile, like statues of horses. They didn’t even turn their heads when Leiter opened the carriage door and climbed in. Mathias put the bags down on the street beside the carriage and hesitated. He didn’t want to get in, but when he looked back, there was the shape again, flitting from shadow to shadow between the lamps in a low, scuttling run. It was getting nearer. Leiter leaned forward and, crooking his finger through the open door, beckoned to Mathias.

  ‘Get in, boy,’ he said. ‘Believe me, you really do not want to let him catch you.’

  Mathias scrambled through the door and onto the hard leather seat beside Leiter.

  ‘And the bags,’ said Leiter. ‘Don’t forget the bags.’

  Mathias had left them on the ground outside.

  ‘You’d better be quick, mind,’ said Leiter.

  Mathias scrambled down from the carriage, grabbed the bags and pushed them in through the door, but they wedged halfway. He could see the shape – it was in the shadows by the horses. He gave the bags one last desperate heave and, with a sound of tearing canvas, they shot through the door like a cork from a bottle. Leiter grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and pulled him in after them, then someone slammed the door from outside.

  ‘Good,’ said Leiter.

  The carriage rocked on its springs as though someone had climbed onto the driver’s bench and was picking up the reins. Leiter rapped sharply on the roof with the silver top of his cane. The carriage jolted and began to move.

  Back in the circus cart, Anna-Maria held the lamp.

  ‘Try that one again,’ she said.

  Lutsmann was on his hands and knees, opening the chests and boxes that held the circus things.

  ‘There is nothing of Gustav’s here,’ he said.

  ‘Look again, fool!’

  ‘There is not, my lamb. It has all gone.’

  The straw from the mattress was spread across the floor. Under Anna-Maria’s direction Lutsmann had emptied everything else from the chests on top of it.

  ‘Fool!’ she said again. ‘Ass!’

  She kicked his fat behind hard with her pointed shoe, so that he fell forward into one of the open boxes.

  ‘What was he looking for?’

  ‘I don’t know, my dove,’ said Lutsmann, emerging from the box, pulling pieces of straw from his mouth and hair.

  ‘What could it have been?’

  ‘We’ll never know now, my cake-bread,’ said Lutsmann.

  Anna-Maria bent down and, grabbing him by his scarf, twisted it tight. ‘Oh, yes we will,’ she hissed through clenched teeth. ‘Whatever it was, it must be worth a very great deal and we are going to find it.’

  ‘But how?’

  ‘Men who can tip gold coins out like that don’t just disappear,’ she said in the singsong voice she reserved for idiots. ‘They go somewhere else, and that is where we are going to go too.’

  ‘But how?’

  ‘Dolt!’ she shouted and hit him with the lamp. ‘We follow him and the boy. Don’t forget the boy. He’s a sly one. He knows more than he pretends to.’

  The carriage carrying Dr Leiter and Mathias rolled on through the night. Mathias wanted to sleep, but he could not. When he closed his eyes, he kept seeing Gustav’s face washed clean of its paint. If he managed to shut that out, he saw instead Gustav in the flickering torchlight and shadow, falling from the stage over and over again.

  Then there was something else too. Though the leather blinds of the carriage were drawn, Mathias knew where they were. They were on the road that ran away from the town and through the thick forest. The same road that he had come down before in the circus cart. Even if it’s dark and you cannot see a forest, you can hear when you are in one. You can. A forest sounds like no other thing anywhere. It buries sound like a blanket of fallen snow does, but it smells quite different. Even if you cannot see it, you can hear it. Even if you cannot hear it, you can smell the leaf mould and the damp earth.

  So Mathias didn’t need to see the forest to know where they were. He could hear the dead sound of it all around them. And he could hear something else as well.

  He could hear wolves.

  They had been following the carriage for a while now. He was certain of it. Sometimes there would be a bark like that of a dog, far away, then another one in answer, closer. If he listened carefully, he thought that he could hear them too – the sound of their running feet in the brush and bracken, keeping pace with the carriage.

  There was a small night lamp in the carriage. It was turned down as low as it could go – barely a glimmer. By that single worm of light Mathias could see that Leiter had his eyes shut. His head was jogging, keeping time to the motion of the carriage, as though he were asleep. Mathias didn’t know whether he really was asleep or not. If he was, Mathias didn’t want to wake him. But if he didn’t, what might happen then? Finally he couldn’t bear it any more. He tugged hard at Leiter’s sleeve. Leiter’s eyes opened instantly.

  ‘There are wolves,’ Mathias said.

  Leiter closed his eyes again. ‘It does not matter,’ he said.

  ‘We have to build a fire.’

  ‘We do not need a fire.’

  Mathias had to make him understand. ‘But they will kill the horses,’ he said.

  ‘They will not kill the horses,’ said Leiter quietly, his eyes still shut. ‘Valter will see to that.’ He rapped on the roof again.

  The carriage began to slow. Then it stopped. There was a bark from the forest to their left, answered by another, nearer, but from the other side. Then another. The wolves were all about them. The carriage rocked on its springs as if someone were climbing down, and all at once there was a confusion of noise, of the wolves seizing hold of something to tear it apart, each fighting for the chance to sink its teeth in. Mathias pressed his hands over his ears, but he still heard what happened next: the yelping of an animal in terrible pain, the noise cut short as though the life had been ripped out of whatever had made it. Then the same noise again, and suddenly all about the carriage, like a wind through the bracken, there was a rushing of wolves yelping and baying like curs chased with a whip. Then silence. Utter, incomprehensible silence.

  Mathias turned his head one way then the other, listening. But there was no sound. The travelling box at the back of the carriage was opened and he heard what seemed like a long length of chain being drawn out. There were other sounds too. Of the chain being handled, of something being fastened to the axle of the carriage. Then the carriage rocked on its springs again as the driver climbed back into the seat. There was the smallest of jolts and the carriage began to move. In the far distance came one long mournfu
l howl, then silence.

  ‘You can sleep,’ said Leiter. He leaned forward and snuffed out the light with his fingers. ‘They will not bother us again.’

  Mathias sat wide-eyed in the darkness. He didn’t know what it was that had followed him in the shadows or what had climbed down from the carriage in the dark, but he was certain it was one and the same, and he knew in his bones that it was something to be very frightened of.

  It even had a name.

  Valter.

  He couldn’t remember going to sleep. He opened his eyes and it was bright daylight. The carriage was empty, the door open. He could hear the sound of hens scratching on the ground. Somewhere nearby a cock crowed and beat its wings. A girl was peering round the open door. It was she who’d woken him. She pushed at his boot and then snatched her hand back as though she were frightened he might bite her.

  ‘Are you the boy?’ she said. ‘You’ve got to come. He’s waiting.’

  Muddled with sleep, Mathias stepped down from the carriage. He had to screw his eyes up against the brightness. They had stopped in a dirt road outside a small inn. Hens were pecking at the ground between the wheels. A small group of people stood staring at him and the carriage. There was frost in the air. In the daylight the horses seemed even bigger than they had looked in the night. Huge and black. The carriage was black too, like ink. But the people were looking at something else as well. Mathias turned and gasped.

  Behind the carriage, fastened to it by a chain around their necks, were the bodies of two of the largest wolves Mathias had ever seen. Each was the size of a pony. They were stone dead, throats torn out, their eyes bulging with the terror of their deaths.

  The people stepped back and made way for him as he walked towards the door. The girl went in front of him. She kept her distance, looking over her shoulder to make sure that he was following.

  Inside, the inn was dark. It smelled of last night’s wood smoke, and beer and spiced sausage. A man was sweeping the floor but he stopped working to watch Mathias follow the girl up the wooden staircase.

  She was about Mathias’s age, perhaps a little older. She wore a work apron over a rough skirt and blouse. She had deep auburn red hair tied tight at the back; it stuck out from beneath a padded leather cap. When they got to the top of the stairs, he followed her along a narrow corridor with windows that looked down onto the stable yard. At the end was a wooden door. She stood to one side.