by Heide Goody
“I just wondered,” she said. “They are very beautiful. Does someone carve them all?”
“Yes, yes,” he said and waved to the unseen space behind the stall. “All carved.”
He continued to pack clocks, spooling the weight chains in his hands before laying them flat. He moved sluggishly, failing to co-ordinate left hand and right.
“You make them back here?” said Esther. There was a narrow space between this stall and the next, little more than a crawlspace but, looking round, Esther could see a dim light and hear the sounds of industry.
“Yes, yes,” said the old man, waving. “All carved.”
“I mean, if you don’t mind me looking—”
The old man didn’t seem to care. She took a step towards the little cut-through. Newton and Guin would be coming along soon. They might miss her if she wasn’t standing out front. Then again, Newton could just phone her if there was problem or they failed to spot one another.
“I’ll just—” She slipped down the space. There was a surprising amount of room: the stalls weren’t arranged precisely back to back. A surprisingly wide alley was laid out between them, covered over with sheltering canvas, in parts lit by an inferior sort of fairy light.
The sounds of construction came from the dim shanty town. There was almost no light here and Esther stepped carefully, waiting for her eyes to adjust. There were low tables – roughly made things – little more than split logs laid across trestles. Worn hand tools, too dark to make out clearly were strewn around.
Workers sat at the benches. She could not make them out properly, although they seemed happy enough in the near darkness. She guessed, purely from the sounds they made, there were three or four or them; no more than five. They must have been cramped: there couldn’t be room for more than two people to sit comfortably in that space. Suggestions of hands moved across their materials. A chisel glinted here, a saw there.
“Hello?” she said. “I didn’t mean to interrupt but the man said it was okay.”
The work stopped instantly.
“If you don’t mind,” said Esther.
Five pairs of eyes turned to regard her. Eyes set widely in round faces, far lower down than she expected.
***
16
Newton checked his phone for the umpteenth time. Still no signal.
Unconsciously he’d begun to make a methodical search of the market, spiralling out from the place he had last seen Guin. He’d taken to asking every passer-by he met but they were growing fewer by the minute.
When he came by the church, something made him stop. There was a lane, a driveway of sorts, running up the hill, churchyard on one side and a thick line of fir trees on the other. He wouldn’t have been able to articulate what drew him to that driveway but he felt it was somewhere Guin might have gone. There were small footprints in the snow, along the side of the driveway nearest the trees. Perhaps too small to be Guin’s, but then again…
He followed them, sick at the thought something terrible had happened to Guin, that he would have to face his mum and Dave and face the unbearable anguish, the guilt and the disappointment of what he had done.
The little footprints drifted nearer to the line of trees before disappearing under the low boughs.
“Guin!”
He did a three-sixty, looking across the driveway, the churchyard and back to the town square. He called again.
There was silence. The tinny music playing over the Christmas market had ended. A grey, dead hush had fallen over the town.
He looked at the footprints. They entered the trees. For whatever reason, perhaps this was where Guin had gone.
He crouched next to the trees and tried to see what was on the other side.
***
17
Dave hurried to the riverside and to where they’d left the car. Departing traffic was queuing on the narrow bridge out of town. Definitely time to leave.
He was almost running by the time he got to the lane where they’d parked: a kind of shuffling jog full of high-shouldered arm actions and evident urgency, which wasn’t actually any faster than a brisk walk. It was a gesture of intent – “Look, I’m in a hurry” – rather than an attempt to go faster.
The snow had fallen heavily in the lane, banked up against the short wall by the riverside and the stone barns on the other. Dave saw the car but did not immediately recognise it. The bonnet was up, and in the blue-white gloom of dusk he saw a large, broad figure leaning over it.
“Hey!” Dave called. “What are you doing?”
The figure ignored him and continued pawing at the engine.
“Hey!”
Dave stopped jogging. He stepped forward in slow, careful footsteps. He didn’t want to be a statistic, stabbed to death in the act of confronting a car thief. The figure held up a curve of piping, inspected it – seemed to sniff it! – and then tossed it away.
“Get away from that car!” commanded Dave in his best manly voice (which he considered to be quite manly indeed). He waved his hands firmly in a gesture he’d seen demonstrated on a nature documentary as a way of driving away a grizzly bear. “That’s my car!”
The figure, hunched and black, shifted as though to look at him and then went back to ripping things out of the engine.
Well, that was just rude!
“Oi!” Dave squeaked, losing much of the manliness he had mustered earlier. “I’m going to call the police, you know!”
The figure took note of that. It turned, coming apart as it moved, splitting and collapsing. It wasn’t one large person. It was four or five much smaller people. Children? Dave held his hands up against the obscuring snow to see better.
It was children, he guessed. Children or a travelling band of circus dwarfs.
“What the hell are you playing at?” he demanded, advancing towards them.
***
18
The craftsmen – no, they were too small to be craftsmen – the individuals in the makeshift space behind the stalls watched Esther.
“Stinga henni með hníf”
They were no bigger than children; small children at that.
“Do you work here?” she asked in her most gentle, mumsiest voice.
They said nothing, merely looked.
“Are you … are you children?”
There was an utterly obvious explanation. This was some sort of child labour sweatshop. Children forced to make traditional cuckoo clocks by the cruel taskmasters of a travelling market. She could see it so clearly: an itinerant community, undocumented children, always moving from place to place so that even in the enlightened West, child slaves and indentured labourers could go unnoticed.
“My name’s Esther,” she said.
“Esther,” said one of them.
“Yes, I work with a charity that helps families and children. I can help you.”
“Help?”
“Yes,” she said. “If you want to come with me.” She held out her hand. “I’ll keep you safe.”
There was a scrape on the table top as a shining chisel was picked up. Another small figure swapped its saw for a sharp-edged carving knife. They moved towards her slowly, but even in the dark she could see it wasn’t fearful caution. She sensed something more purposeful, the slowness of a crocodile drifting towards an unsuspecting wildebeest.
“Or maybe you don’t need my help,” she said faintly.
The chisel was raised up high, ready to strike down.
***
19
A branch creaked and snapped beneath the trees. It could just have been the snow, weighing the trees down, shifting as it settled.
“Guin, are you there?” hissed Newton.
There were rustles and definite movement.
He had a sudden mental image of an injured Guin, stuck under there somewhere. He crouched right down and pushed aside the nearest branch so he could crawl in. Something chittered in the dark; something that was not nice.
“What are you doing?”
He whipped round. Guin stood a short distance away, down the lane. “What the—?”
“Did you see something?” she asked. She stood with her wooden box and a thick book clutched to her chest. Snow stuck to her fleecy collar in mounding clumps.
He stood quickly, taking two jittery steps away from the edge of the trees. “I was looking for you,” he said. He’d meant to sound angry and accusatory, but he was so overcome with relief it came out as a higgledy-piggledy jumble.
“I’m here,” she said.
“I can see that.”
“Our parents are going to be wondering where we are,” she said, as though it was his fault.
“I was looking for you,” he pointed out.
“Good job I found you then,” she said. “Come on.”
He crunched through the snow towards her. At the bottom of the driveway, he looked back at the line of trees. Close to where he had just been, the heavy bottom boughs swayed.
***
20
Esther ran, clutching her injured hand, squeezing against the pain. She collided clumsily with a wooden wall. On the other side, something fell and banged with a clockwork sproing and a plaintive cuckoo. She rebounded and ran on, looking for the turning, the channel that would lead out into the lanes of the market.
It had only been a few feet from where she had stood, but somehow she had missed it, and now she was running between the backs of what felt like endless stalls. She jumped over trailing electric cables, clattered past neatly stored gas heater canisters.
The child in the darkness had stabbed her! They had actually stabbed her!
She knew in her heart of hearts the poor kid was a victim of trafficking or forced labour or something, and that whatever they had done it wasn’t their fault. Just a reaction to circumstance. She couldn’t blame them. Although right now, with a sharp pain gripping her hand and blood seeping through her fingerless gloves, she was finding forgiveness a little difficult to come by.
Something made a noise behind her. Something was chasing her!
“Oh, God,” she whispered. “I didn’t mean to—”
She didn’t look back. She didn’t want to.
Seeing a gap between two stalls she thrust herself down it. It was far narrower than the one she had come through. She had to force herself sideways between two walls of slatted panels, her thick coat catching on both sides, at least two buttons snapping off. The space narrowed further. She propelled herself the last few feet by digging in her heels.
Something touched her elbow. Something grabbed for her elbow.
She couldn’t look back now if she wanted to. There wasn’t even room enough to turn her head. She keened with anguish and pushed on, scraping knees and pulling her shoulder, exploding out into the market.
“Oh, God! Oh, God!” she panted.
“There you are,” said Newton.
Newton and Guin were coming towards her, along the avenue of mostly closed up stalls. The last few stallholders were drawing the shutters down on their little chalet huts.
Still breathless, still bewildered, Esther looked back at the space she had squeezed through. There was nothing to be seen and little light to see by. No one had followed her. She had imagined it. Nonetheless, her coat was ripped and studded with pine splinters along the one side. Her hand—
She carefully uncurled her hand, gasping at the sight.
“Mum, what have you done?” cried Newton.
The palm of her glove was saturated with blood. She winced just looking at it. “I went back there to have a look. I shouldn’t have and I—” She hissed as the cold air brought sensation back into her hand.
“Here’s dad,” said Guin. “Dad!”
Dave jogged up the lane towards them. He had Newton’s suitcase in one hand, Esther’s big ancient rucksack in the other and a grave look on his face. “You’ll never guess what’s happened,” he said tersely.
“Mum’s hurt herself,” said Newton.
“What?” Dave dropped the bags.
“It’s nothing,” Esther said automatically, immediately hated herself for saying it. Clearly it was not nothing. That was the kind of stupid thing people said, the kind of stiff upper lip nonsense that got people killed. “I mean, I’ve cut my hand.”
Dave had a first aid kit in his hand, magicked from nowhere. Before she’d met Dave, Esther had briefly dated a teacher. The man had carried a green biro with him at all times. He had used it to correct spelling mistakes and misplaced apostrophes on restaurant menus. Paramedic Dave and his ever-present first aid kit was the same sort thing, only much less annoying. The relationship with the teacher had ended quickly, after an argument in a pub over the correct placing of the apostrophe in shepherd’s pie. One of the last things she heard him shouting at the barman before she quietly slipped out and blocked his number on her phone was, “But how many shepherds, huh? Huh? Is that a pie for one shepherd or are several of them sharing it, eh?”
The much more sane and lovely Dave calmly peeled off Esther’s glove, inspected the narrow cut in the fleshy heel of her hand and removed the excess blood with a wipe. She sucked in at the tingle.
“What did this?” he asked.
“A chisel, I think,” she said.
He sprayed something onto the cut, something cold and wonderfully numbing. He produced a dressing. “And how did that happen?”
“I just wanted to have a look at how the clocks were made,” she said.
“Clocks.”
“Cuckoo clocks.”
He gave little smirk.
“It’s not funny,” she said.
“No, it’s not,” agreed Newton.
Dave wrapped sticky blue gauze over the dressing. “It’s not deep, but we’ll have to get it checked to make sure you haven’t damaged any tendons.” He kissed her on the cheek. “I didn’t mean to laugh, it’s just been a weird—”
“Why have your brought our bags, dad?” asked Guin.
Dave looked to the heavens and shook his head. The look on his face wasn’t a good one.
“What?” said Esther.
“Some b—” Dave’s mouth stiffened, unable to find a ‘b’ word he was willing to say in front of his daughter. “Some people have broken into our car.”
There were universally shared groans and “Oh no!”s.
“Stolen anything?” said Esther.
“Engine parts, if you’d believe it,” said Dave. “Caught the b—”
“Criminals,” suggested Esther.
“Ne’er-do-wells,” offered Newton.
“Bastards,” said Guin with gusto.
“I caught them in the act,” said Dave. “I challenged them and they ran off, but that car’s going nowhere.” He sighed. “I brought the bags because I didn’t want to leave them. I was going to call the police and the RAC but—” He took out his phone. “—no signal. Any of you guys?”
Newton had his out. Esther found hers.
“No.”
“Nope.”
“We should find a phone box,” said Newton.
“Huh. When was the last time you saw one of those?” said Dave.
Esther looked round for a stallholder. They’d know where to find a phone. All along the lane, stalls were closed or in the last seconds of closing. There was still light and an open front at one at the far end.
“Let’s go ask,” she said.
Newton hurried to pick up the bags before anyone else could. The pull-along suitcase dragged a deep furrow in the snow. The shutters on the final stall were drawing down as they approached.
“Wait up!” called Dave but this only made the shutters close all the quicker. He rapped on the shutters. “We just want to find a telephone box.”
“Busy,” said a rasping voice from within.
“We’ve broken down,” said Dave.
“We need to call the cops,” added Newton.
“Try pub,” said the rasping voice.
Dave huffed. Esther put a comforting hand on his back
and then led the way to the pub. Which also turned out to be closed.
“What kind of pub closes at tea time?” said Dave. “Pubs should be open all hours!”
“Alcoholic,” whispered Guin.
Dave gave his daughter a sharp, tight-lipped look.
The town was closed for the evening. Apart from the fairy lights strung between buildings and stalls, all life and activity had gone from the market. There were no traders or visitors, no open stalls, no sounds. The early winter night had come and shut everything down.
“There,” said Newton. Hands occupied with luggage, he pointed with a nod of his head. There was an open doorway and a warm yellow light a few doors down. Esther scurried ahead.
A woman stood in the doorway. She wore horn-rimmed glasses on a chain, her ash-blonde haired tied up in a bun. On her face was the kind of expression which declared she didn’t approve of snow and was trying to drive it away with a good hard glare. That expression softened a mite as she saw Esther and family approaching.
“Oh, come in, come in,” she said, waving them over.
“Thank you,” said Esther. “We were just wondering if you had a telephone. We—”
“Come in, come in,” she repeated.
The porch way between the outer and inner front doors contained a huge upright hoover. As Esther squeezed past it loops of tubes and pipes fell outwards her. The woman wrestled silently with them, kicking the huge and ancient vacuum cleaner they were attached to for good measure as the family squeezed past.
“R2-D2’s let himself go a bit,” said Newton.
“Stamp the snow off your boots and then you can put them over there,” said the woman.
Esther was already in the hallway before she registered the sentence. “No. We just wanted to use your phone, if we could.”
“Of course,” said the woman, shutting the door on the defeated vacuum cleaner. “Time enough. Boots there. Are there four of you?”
“Is there a phone?” Dave asked.