by Sophie Green
Inside the room were shelves, cabinets and chests, all full of the kind of toys that gave her the creeps: clockwork monkeys, jack-in-the-boxes and china dolls, but after Wool, the toy Gallows had used to bind his first ghost, Mr Glimmer, all toys had taken on a sinister shade for Lil.
At the back of the room was a workbench with a magnifying lamp bent over it and sitting there was a man in a loud checked suit and a pork-pie hat. He was holding a limp figure in one of his stubby hands and in the other he had a needle and thread.
‘That must be the new owner,’ Nedly whispered.
Lil tried the door handle. It was locked. She rattled it a few times. The new owner looked up and frowned. Lil put a harmless grin on her face as she waved at him and then knocked briskly on the window.
The man got to his feet, hefted his way over and opened the door, just enough to wedge his whole body in the gap. Nedly backed away out of range.
‘Can I help you?’ The toymaker had been right about his eyes, they were small and close, but a startling blue.
‘Hey, mister,’ Lil said brightly. ‘Can I have my doll back? I brought it in for fixing a while ago.’
The man cocked his head to one side. ‘Aren’t you a bit old for toys?’
‘It was quite a long while ago.’
He opened the door a little more. ‘Why don’t I get it for you? What does it look like?’
‘If I could just get inside I’ll find it.’ Lil tried to sidestep him.
He stuck out his arm to block her path. ‘No can do.’ He smiled again. He was wearing enough cologne to make Lil’s eyes water.
She tried a more direct approach. ‘The old woman who used to run this place, I bumped into her the other day – that’s what reminded me about my doll,’ she added.
‘That old bird! She’s always hanging around here, sticking her beak where it doesn’t belong, am I right?’ It wasn’t really a question but he punctuated it with a companionable jab to Lil’s arm.
‘Look, don’t get me wrong, I feel sorry for her. The place obviously meant a lot, but this is my business now and I got a lot to do before I can reopen. Look at what a mess it is!’
Lil took the opportunity to peer over his arm. It was a mess.
‘So –’ his voice dropped to a conspiratorial level – ‘she’s been talking to you, has she?’
‘No,’ Lil replied honestly.
‘Glad to hear it. The last thing any new businessman needs is someone putting out a bad word against him in the local community, am I right?’ He gave Lil another quick jab and the blue eyes twinkled again. ‘Now, you’ll have to excuse me – I’ve got a lot to do. But come back in a couple of weeks, by then I’ll have the place straightened out and we can reunite you with your precious doll, no problem! What’s the point of all these toys with no kids to play with them, am I right?’
Lil ducked out of the reach of his hand and hit the pavement at a jog, calling over her shoulder: ‘Thanks anyway!’
‘My pleasure!’ he called after her. ‘And if you see that old toymaker, you tell her I said hello.’ He froze there in the doorway for a few moments, hand raised in a wave.
Lil waited until they got to the corner before muttering to Nedly, ‘What a knucklehead! I think maybe I’ll come back when he’s gone. Have a proper poke around.’
As they crossed the road and set off for the library, neither one saw the new owner’s expression change as he lowered his hand. The sparkling eyes narrowed and the smile slipped from his face as easily as a greasy egg off a dirty plate.
Chapter 6
The Locked Door
Peligan City Library had been closed for more than a decade. Beneath the crumbling stone figures of the old gods of wisdom and knowledge that watched over it, the building was boarded up, its bricks darkened by algae, graffiti and exhaust fumes.
Inside was another story. Only a handful of people knew the access code, or the way in through the loose window in the courtyard, and they worked hard to keep its secrets until the day came that they could open its doors to the public once again. For as long as there is a librarian within its walls there will be a library and Logan MacKay had enough grit to outlast crooked mayors such as Tantalus Dean, who had shut this particular branch, and even those like Gordian who let it stay shut. And she wasn’t alone.
Lil Potkin had been a frequent visitor since she was a tot, drawn to the great newspaper archive that it held, amongst other things. Lately she had started working some volunteer hours to help out, sorting and returning the newspapers that other people had been reading into their rightful places in the basement stacks. Apart from her own research, the only person Lil had ever seen using the library was Logan; nevertheless there were always plenty of papers to be refiled.
In the large circular reading room Nedly sat at one end of a polished wood table, rereading his way through an old edition of More Adventure Comics! They had found a whole box of them in the basement of the library. The green-glass lamp on the table flickered and dimmed softly each time a page wafted over.
Thwump! Lil dropped a muddled stack of Heralds down on the other end of the table with a thud, sending a ripple of echoes around the room. She laid them out in a row as though she was about to play a giant hand of Solitaire. The newspapers were only a few months old and the front pages mostly ran stories on the new legislation of the acting mayor, Police Commissioner Gordian, for the clean-up of the city.
Lil leafed through them, pausing as she came across a paper with the headline: ‘Homelessness on the Decline in Peligan City!’
‘Really?’ She frowned and scanned through the article. ‘I thought it was getting worse. If you ask me, they’re just cleaning up the city centre by moving all the problems to the outskirts. Nedly, we should have checked Delilah’s doorway again! We’ll go on the way home.’
She glanced over at where Nedly was sitting. He was no longer absorbed in the comic, but glaring at one of her old chewed pencils and pointing his finger commandingly at it. Lil realised she had been talking to herself, maybe for a long while.
‘Nedly?’
He looked up at her. ‘Sorry. What?’
‘What are you doing?’
‘Just practising some moves.’
Lil watched the pencil roll haltingly across the desk. ‘Does it help if you hold your hand out like that?’
Nedly shrugged. ‘I think it focuses my energy.’
‘Really?’
‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘But it looks good, doesn’t it?’ The pencil rolled slowly off the edge of the desk and fell onto the floor.
Lil retrieved it. ‘Where did you get the idea from, about focusing your energy like that?’
‘It’s just something that people do.’
‘What people?’
‘Just people.’ Nedly went back to his comic book.
‘Haven’t you read that one a hundred times already?’
‘Number fifty-three – it’s the best one,’ he explained. ‘There’s this guy, Tom Conaghan, and in the last issue he was killed by this hoodlum who had just got out of prison –’
Lil gasped suddenly. ‘The prison! Of course!’ And abandoned Nedly for the other side of the room. She rifled through one of the index boxes, pulled out a card, then ran back to the table and flicked through the corresponding papers to confirm her theory. ‘That’s the link! All these papers have a story on the Needle!’
She pushed them into a neatish stack. ‘Which means that someone here at the library has been checking out the archive on Fellgate Prison. And there was that article in the Klaxon about the epidemic just last night …’
Nedly pursed his lips. He knew what was coming.
‘So, who do you think has been checking them out?’ Lil let her gaze drift knowingly towards the door of the librarian’s office.
Nedly sighed. ‘Not this again.’
‘Just a tiny glimpse.’
‘I already did that the first time you asked me, and the time after that, and the time afte
r that, and I told you it’s just an office.’
‘I know it’s an office but the big question is whose?’ Lil tapped her chewed pencil against the side of her nose. ‘It’s the Klaxon HQ; I know it is. It’s got to be in there. Are you sure you didn’t see any files lying around?’
‘Nothing.’ He shrugged. ‘There was a filing cabinet but it was locked, with a combination – like a safe.’
Lil sighed enviously. ‘Sounds like top-secret stuff. Just like I suspected. Something’s going on in there. Something they don’t want anyone to know about.’ Her eyes took on a dangerous gleam.
Nedly gave up on his comic. ‘Why don’t you just knock on the door and see if they’ll let you in – now that you’re on the staff, I mean?’
That smarted. ‘You know why: no one ever answers. Except Logan that once.’
‘So maybe, for now at least, the office is out of bounds.’
Lil stared at him.
‘You know,’ Nedly continued uncomfortably, ‘snooping around and spying on crooks, that’s OK, but spying on your friends …’
His words struck Lil like a slammed door. ‘You don’t want to help me?’
He sighed. ‘No, I’ll always help if you ask me to; I just wish that sometimes you wouldn’t ask.’
Lil toyed with a grim smile she’d been working on, the one she would do if she got betrayed by a fellow journalist, but it wasn’t the right moment so she let it fall. ‘All right. That’s fair I suppose. It’s just that I can’t help being curious, and sometimes I wish I could do the stuff you can do.’
Nedly looked at her gravely. ‘No you don’t.’
‘No.’ She chewed on her lip. ‘I didn’t mean that. Sorry.’
He gave her a lopsided smile. ‘Anyway, if your theory is right, why would Klaxon reporters be using the Herald for information? You said it doesn’t have any real news in it.’
Lil raised a finger in an Ahhh! ‘I’ve revised my opinion on that. You see, the thing about the Herald is that the news is in there; it’s just that it’s buried, or spun so hard that it’s difficult to see the real story. It’s not what they’re saying, it’s what they’re not saying that’s important, and why they’re not saying it. You have to read between the lines.’
Nedly stared at Lil.
‘What?’
‘You really sound like you know what you’re talking about.’
‘Do I? I mean, I do.’ She drew in enough puff to make herself stand a bit taller. ‘I may not be allowed in that office but I am a reporter myself now and I’ve been doing that correspondence course in journalism, looking at context and all that stuff.’ She brushed away Nedly’s admiring gaze with a bad attempt at an embarrassed shrug and heaved the stack of newspapers into her arms.
Nedly looked shyly down at the table. ‘You know, I’ve been wondering too, about the future and everything.’ Lil hoisted the bundle onto her hip and started staggering towards the lift. ‘I know things will never be normal for me … because of my … condition.’
Lil carried on walking, even though the papers had suddenly become twice as heavy as they were a moment ago. Even though there was a tight feeling in her chest like someone was standing on it. She swallowed it all down and then said:
‘Who wants “normal” anyway?’ Her voice sounded thicker than she’d hoped for. She cleared her throat. ‘Don’t let that stop you. You deserve to have a shot, same as everyone else.’
Nedly overtook her at a jog and then wheeled round to catch her eye, strolling backwards. ‘There’s a little something I’ve been working on. Something maybe only I can do.’
As they stepped into the service lift a siren passed in the distance, breaking the silence of the library. They both listened until the sound had faded.
‘So, are you going to tell me what it is?’
‘I haven’t got it all figured out yet, but as soon as I do you’ll be the first to know.’
Lil knew she would be. ‘Whatever it is, you’ll be great at it.’ She forced her lips into a grin. ‘OK, now,’ she said, nodding at the grille that had to be drawn across before the lift would work. ‘Give it a go.’
Nedly took a deep breath and closed his eyes. Breathing out slowly he opened them again.
Swallowing back an impatient sigh Lil transferred the weight of the papers to her other arm.
Nedly glared at the grille, and the metal began to hum – Lil could feel the vibration in the soles of her feet – then it rattled violently. She flicked a look across at Nedly. His eyeballs were almost out of the sockets as the grille began to move at no more than an ant’s pace, unfolding as it stretched.
Lil’s arms were aching. ‘Is that as fast as it will go?’
Cautiously Nedly raised his hand and pointed at it. The grille continued to creep along. The tip of his finger started glowing slightly, as though there was a strong light beneath the skin. The grille suddenly shot the last foot and slammed shut with a bone-shattering clang.
‘Sorry,’ Nedly winced. ‘I lost control of it a bit at the end there. But I think this hand thing really does work.’ He blew on the end of his finger and grinned.
Lil backed towards the control panel and pushed the ‘down’ button with her elbow. ‘Either way, it was definitely better than last time.’
As they began their descent the trill of a ringing phone cut through the reading room. Lil’s head whipped up, and she stared at the door to the librarian’s office, holding her breath. The ringing stopped. They were only head and shoulders above floor level when the office door was suddenly flung open and they saw a knot of legs and feet hurry past, their footsteps pounding the carpet tiles.
‘Whaaaat!!!’ Lil watched them helplessly as she sank out of sight. She let the bundle of papers fall and then turned on Nedly. ‘You said it was empty!’
‘I said the last time I looked it was empty.’
‘Then where have all those people come from? It’s the Klaxon reporters, I know it is!’ Lil slip-slid across the scattered Heralds and hammered on the ‘stop’ button. ‘Quick! They’re getting away!’ The lift was barely stationary before she started pumping the ‘up’ button furiously and the machinery groaned in protest, the cogs reversed direction and they began their ascent.
Lil held on to the metal grille like a prisoner clings to the bars of their cell, willing the lift to pick up speed as they clanked slowly between floors. ‘Nedly, quick follow them!’
‘I will!’ he cried. ‘Just get the lift to the next floor.’
Lil gritted her teeth. ‘You don’t need to wait for the lift; you can just melt through the shaft, or something.’
Nedly gave her an incredulous look. ‘It’s a hole. I can’t melt through a hole; there’s nothing there to melt through.’
‘Can’t you just do that relocation thing?’
‘That’s not how it works. I can only do that to where you are and you’re here.’
Lil gritted her teeth again. When the lift reached the reading room Nedly cast her a last disapproving look as he climbed up through the grille, then set off in pursuit.
‘Don’t let them get away,’ she yelled.
When the lift finally reached the ground level she yanked the grille aside, but by then everyone was gone.
Chapter 7
Multi-Storey Murder
It didn’t take Lil long to work out where they had gone to; she just followed the sound of sirens to where the snow was tinted ultraviolet with flashing blue lights. The multi-storey car park, a crate of grey concrete squatting against the plum-coloured sky was only three blocks away.
On the pavement beyond the cordon a murmuring crowd had gathered, but the police weren’t letting anyone through. They stood sentry all down the line, dressed in hi-vis jackets with thin plastic shower caps over their hats.
Lil weaved through the bystanders, casing the cordon for gaps. The mouth of the car park was open but the light inside was dim. She could just make out low ceilings, ramps, concrete pillars, and Nedly. He was standing rig
ht at the entrance, waving to get her attention and then pointing towards the back of the crowd. Lil tried to subtly nod to him to go in to the car park and have a look at the crime scene but he either couldn’t understand her, or he didn’t want to.
‘Hey!’ he called out as he passed through the cordon, drawing shivers from two of the police officers who shrank away from each other, their eyes meeting in horror. The tightly packed crowd seemed to unzip before Nedly as he moved through it, towards Lil.
‘Look!’ He grinned excitedly. ‘There’s Abe!’
Leaning against a plaster pillar in an ornate but crumbling doorway was Abe Mandrel, watching the scene from under his battered trilby. Margaret sat by his feet, sheltering under his shabby old mac.
Abe looked up to meet Lil’s gaze. He offered her a brief nod and his once-steely jaw stretched a fraction in a whisper of a smile.
‘Aren’t you supposed to be at the library?’
‘I knocked off early.’
Abe pulled his collar up and buried his chin in it. He took a furtive glance around and then trying not to move his mouth he mumbled, ‘Nedly,’ and nodded at the strip of empty space beside Lil.
Nedly was actually crouching on the floor on her other side. ‘Hey, Margaret!’ He beamed at the little dog. Margaret sort of grinned back but it was a smile that showed all her teeth and set her back hair on end.
Lil tried to mirror Abe’s casual pose against the pillar. ‘So, what’s happening?’
Abe gave the tableau before him a suspicious frown. ‘No one knows. Something they were trying to hush up, but word got out. Then the cops arrived to keep everyone calm and caused a scene.’
‘Maybe Nedly could go in and get a closer look?’ Lil suggested.
Nedly backed away a little.
Abe shook his head grimly. ‘There are some things you can’t unsee. That guy over there.’ He pointed his rubber hand at a squad car behind the police lines. ‘He was the first on the scene.’ The officer in question was sitting in the passenger seat, slumped over his knees, white-faced and with his head in his hands.