by Hana Tooke
“How?”
Lotta smiled. “Math, of course.” She took a tape measure out of her toolbox and handed it to Sem. “Here. Measure my stride, from rear heel to front toe.”
Lotta stepped one foot forward and held her pose as Sem measured the distance between her feet. Milou rubbed her arms for warmth as Lotta and Sem repeated their measurements a few more times. After just a few minutes, Egg had finished his map, and Sem was handing the tape measure back.
“Don’t you need to make your . . . calculations?” Milou asked Lotta.
“It’s fine. I’ll do the math while we walk. Come on, we should hurry.”
* * *
They were already limping by the time they reached the Amstel River, just as a distant church clocktower chimed ten o’clock. Milou felt as if her coffin basket had a heavy body inside it; her arms ached as much as her empty stomach. The river meandered past factories and warehouses. Every now and again, they would hide behind whatever they could find as a boat went past, but for the most part, the snow-drenched streets were empty, as the people of Amsterdam sought shelter from the cold.
Milou and Lotta leaned heavily on each other as they crossed a bridge on the outskirts of the city and finally stepped out into the first slice of open country they had ever seen.
“It’s like the fields have been rolled flat with a giant rolling pin,” Milou said. She blew snow from her eyelashes and huddled closer to Lotta.
“And the c . . . canals drawn in precisely with a g . . . giant ruler,” Sem said, teeth chattering.
Now they’d left the city, the air no longer smelled of stale ash and horse dung. It was so fresh it tickled Milou’s nostrils. They shuffled along deserted dirt road after deserted dirt road for what felt like hours, the houses becoming shorter and wider and farther apart the farther they got from the city.
They were halfway down a painfully long, completely houseless road when Egg came to a sudden stop.
“Here’s your junction, Lot,” Egg said in a wheeze. He pointed down a road that ran perpendicular to the one they were on. “Milou’s coordinates lead that way.”
The road stretched endlessly ahead of them, flanked on either side by crisscrossing canals and a patchwork of fields, with a smattering of farmhouses that Milou could just about make out if she squinted. She had spent her entire life wanting more space, but right then she’d have given anything to not have to walk another step more.
“Have you worked out the distance?” Milou asked Lotta breathlessly.
“Of course I have.” Lotta swayed slightly with exhaustion, but she shook herself and straightened up. “One thousand, four hundred, and seventy-three strides.”
Four groans sounded.
Lotta took a step forward, wobbling precariously. Milou took her elbow with her free hand, careful not to get her feet in the way of Lotta’s stride. They walked onward, feet dragging and breathing raggedly, as Lotta counted quietly, then silently, to herself.
As they passed a pyramid-roofed farmhouse, Milou’s heart gave a little flutter of anticipation. Further down the road, they passed another farmhouse, smoke pluming out of its chimney, and Milou’s hope burned stronger.
The mist rising from the canals thickened as they walked, first curling around their ankles, then up to their knees. Then it seemed to draw inward on them from the horizon. Soon they would be able to see the next farmhouse only when they were right beside it.
“We’ll be warm soon,” Milou promised. “They probably have fresh, creamy milk we can heat up. And plenty of blankets and a roaring fire. I’m a little tired, so I might not be able to tell a bedtime story, but I’m sure either my mother or father will.”
They passed another farmhouse. It had the same pyramid-shaped roof as the others, but instead of brown thatch, this one had a bright copper roof. Instead of the usual red and white, its shutters were a bright, bold blue. And instead of a plain wooden gate at the end of its bridge, it had a stone gargoyle on each post.
It looked both ridiculous and wondrous at the same time, and nothing like anything Milou’s imagination could have conjured up after a lifetime of seeing nothing but towering town houses. Her heart sank just a little when they walked past it instead of stopping.
They didn’t make it much further down the road, however.
Lotta came to a sudden halt midstep, leaning heavily on Milou.
Milou sagged beneath the added weight. “Come on, Lot, it can’t be much farther.”
Lotta shrugged herself free. “No. We’re here.” She lifted an arm and pointed weakly to the side of the road. “Your coordinates,” she said breathlessly. “Right there.”
Milou looked to where she was indicating and frowned.
Lotta was pointing to a tree.
TWELVE
TINGLES ERUPTED ALL OVER Milou’s scalp as she craned her neck to look more closely. The top half of the tree emerged from the mist in long, twisting, gnarled, branches. It was leafless, frost-covered, and entirely not what Milou had expected.
Milou shook her head. This couldn’t be right.
“Maybe you miscounted—”
Lotta huffed indignantly. “I did not miscount.”
Sem sighed heavily.
“It must be the copper-roofed farmhouse,” Milou said, ignoring him. “This tree is so close.”
“Milou,” Sem said, half impatiently, half pityingly. “I’m sorry, I really am, but this so-called clue of yours is futile. There’s nothing here.”
“No!” A shiver of despair coursed through her. “You’re wrong, Sem. There must be something—”
“Over here,” called a disembodied voice from the mist beyond, which sounded suspiciously like Egg. “I’ve found it.”
Milou looked to the others. Egg had been standing with them moments before. Now he was gone.
“Just carry on further down the road a little way,” he called out. “Hurry, I’m freezing.”
They shuffled forward, as quickly as their aching legs could manage, and found Egg standing at the canal edge, in front of a set of gates. The gates were not like any of the others they had passed, not even the ones with the gargoyles. They were, Milou decided, like the gates of a graveyard. Milou’s heart felt like it was about to leap out of her mouth.
Rusted iron railings rose like spears from the ground, their painted-gold tips gleaming in the moonlight. Ivy creepers curled around the two tall posts on either side, and a heavy padlock hung from a chain that had been wrapped around the middle of the gate several times. Above the lock was a weathered wooden sign. Milou stepped closer and read: POPPENMILL. Except, the word “POPPEN” had been scratched out and replaced with “ghost.” And then below that, in the same scratchy scrawl, someone had etched: DANGER! KEEP OUT!
She pressed her face up against the gates and squinted into the gloom, but the mist was now too thick. She could not see any red and white shutters, nor a triangular roof.
“Where is it?” she asked in frustration.
“Look up,” Sem said breathlessly.
Milou followed his wide-eyed gaze, to where the mist had opened slightly above them. Emerging through the gloom, further back from the road than the farmhouses had been, was the shadowy cross of skeletal sails.
A thrill coursed through Milou’s aching body as she realized what she was seeing.
It wasn’t a farmhouse at all.
It was a windmill.
The fog drew back in, and the windmill’s sails disappeared again, but this did nothing to cloud Milou’s delight.
The pocket watch had led her home.
Goose bumps danced all over her arms and neck, and her ears tingled pleasantly. Not a warning this time, she thought, but an encouragement, urging her forward.
She had a good feeling about this place.
“I have a bad feeling about this place,” Lotta grumbled beside her. �
��It looks—”
“Old,” Sem whispered.
“Haunted,” Egg said, eliciting a tiny gasp from Fenna.
“Perfect,” Milou breathed.
“I was going to say ‘uninviting,’” Lotta said. “The gate is locked, there are no lights on, and the sign isn’t exactly welcoming.”
“They’ve probably just gone to bed. Come on, there’ll be food and warmth inside.”
And my parents, she thought.
She resisted shooting Sem an I-told-you-so look and, instead, approached the thin canal that ran along either side of the entrance and underneath the wooden bridge upon which the gates stood. Hefting her coffin basket up onto her shoulder, she edged herself and Lotta toward the ice. It was too low for her to step down onto, so, hoping for the best, she jumped down, pulling Lotta with her. Their feet landed with a solid thud, but the frozen canal did not crack.
“Milou!” Sem called out. “I’m not sure this is a good idea. The sign says—”
“That sign is for other people, not family,” Milou said over her shoulder. “Come on.”
The sound of feet dropping onto the ice behind her was the only response she received. With her free hand, Milou grabbed the iron post and pulled herself and Lotta up onto the bank on the other side of the gates. Egg, Sem, and Fenna followed a moment later. Fresh snow crunched loudly beneath them as they edged almost blindly toward the mill. As they got closer, all Milou could see was the redbrick wall of the lowest level.
It took them a few minutes to find the front door. There was a scratch and a hiss as Sem struck a match and passed a candle to Milou. She held it up. The door seemed to be made of equal parts thick oak and peeling black paint. Two lanterns, held up by iron hands, hung on either side, unlit, their glass shattered. In the middle of the door was a knocker: an iron ring, held in the mouth of a lion.
A thrill of delight ran through her.
This was the moment she had waited twelve long years for.
Her family was a mere heartbeat away.
Milou had to stretch up on tiptoes to reach the knocker. She wrapped her frozen fingers around the ring and gave three short, sharp knocks, loud in the eerily calm night. She held her breath, listening intently for approaching footsteps, trying to picture the look of surprise on her parents’ faces when they opened the door and found her standing there. Would it be her mother or her father who answered? Would they recognize her? Of course they would. Just like she would recognize them.
She waited, biting her lip, but the silence rang on, long and deafening.
Milou’s smile faltered. She rattled the handle, and the door swung inward, groaning as it opened fully.
Darkness greeted them.
The candle puffed out.
“I don’t want to go in there,” Egg whispered nervously, his and Fenna’s worried faces peeking out of the top of their shared coat.
“There’s nothing to worry about,” Milou said and stepped forward.
“Hang on,” Sem said.
Milou thought he was going to try to stop her. She readied herself for another argument, but he just rummaged in his wheat sack and produced some more matches and candles, handed them out to the others, then relit Milou’s and gave her a smile of encouragement. Huddling close, they held their candles above their heads, forming a halo of light around them, and stepped inside.
They entered a small, square hallway. A row of clogs hung from hooks beside the door. Milou took another step and caught sight of a figure in the deep darkness beside a cupboard. Her candle flickered as she spun toward it, shadows dancing wildly across the stone floor.
“Papa . . . ?”
Her voice died as the shadows stilled. Milou realized it wasn’t a figure at all but a coat stand, a cap balanced at a jaunty angle atop it.
She hurried onward, through a low doorway to the left that led into a kitchen that was not quite a semicircle, but almost. Against the middle wall was a stove, pots and pans dangling from hooks above it. A small table with two chairs sat beneath the window. Milou held the lantern higher. A tall wardrobe and two smaller cabinets were lined neatly along one side wall. And a cupboard bed, its doors wide open, took up almost the entirety of the other wall. Milou could see it was empty, its bright-green quilt tucked neatly in.
Milou licked her dry, cracked lips. “Papa? Mama? It’s me . . . it’s Milou.”
She put her coffin basket down on the table and ran her finger over the back of one of the chairs. Her fingertip came away coated in a thick layer of black dust. She squinted into the deep shadows and took another step; something crunched beneath her boot. Smashed crockery littered the floor.
“What a mess,” Lotta said, shivering beneath their shared coat. “I wonder what happened.”
“They’re probably just too busy to clean,” Milou said. “They’ll be thrilled to know I can help them with the housework now that I’m back.”
She walked briskly toward the next doorway, into a similarly proportioned living room. A fireplace sat within the middle wall this time, cold and empty, its mantel bare. Two rocking chairs sat opposite it, in front of another window, blankets draped over the backs and thick cushions on the seats. There were bookcases filled with tomes, and another cupboard bed, its mahogany doors closed.
Giving Lotta her candle, Milou wriggled out of their coat, ignoring the sharp sting of cold, and opened the cupboard-bed doors. She found herself staring at a red-quilted bed this time, as cold and empty as the first one.
A small gasp of despair left her lips.
“Milou,” Egg said. “Perhaps we should come back—”
But Milou was hurrying through the next door, only to find herself back in the hallway they had started in, having lapped the ground floor entirely.
She looked despairingly at her friends. “They’ll be upstairs, no doubt.”
Then she took the candle back from Lotta, hurried toward the ladder, and climbed, breathless and swaying with exhaustion, up to the next floor. The walls were rounder upstairs, with a small landing and a single door blocking off the room beyond.
Milou pushed it open.
A white face greeted her from beyond the door, its head flopped slightly to the side.
Milou’s heart seemed to stop entirely.
Then she saw that the face had a snout.
And pointed ears.
And . . . stitches all over its . . . cotton skin.
Milou squinted at the figure.
Its eyes were painted.
On the tip of its snout was a button.
There was stuffing sticking out the side of its neck, and it was wearing a finely tailored suit of soft Amsterdam velvet in a deep shade of burgundy. Lotta and Sem emerged from the stairwell to stand beside her, their faces as pale as the one before them.
“It’s a puppet,” Milou said, a giggle of hope bursting from her lips. “A fox puppet.” She could see strings now, suspending the puppet from a hook on the side of some shelving. “This is definitely the right place.”
She stepped in and looked around the circular room. The dust was thicker up here, and Milou gagged on a cloud of it, waving it away from her candle’s light to get a look at the room. Running down the middle of the room, from a hole through the ceiling, was a thick, square, wooden pole. The rounded thatch walls were covered in puppets of all shapes and sizes. There were rolls of fabric, spools of string, tools, a desk filled with paintbrushes and paint pots, and a cast-iron sewing machine.
Bram Poppenmaker’s puppet-making workshop.
“We’re only halfway up the windmill,” she whispered, the room swaying beneath her weary legs. “They’ll be upstairs.”
They had to be here.
They just had to.
With renewed hope, Milou ran across the room toward a ladder that led up to a large, rectangular hole in the puppet-room ceiling. Her arms
and legs ached as she hauled herself up and over the ledge, her candle nearly losing its flame.
Lotta reached for her. “Milou—”
But Milou was already scaling the next ladder up to the next floor.
She crawled through to the next level, and her head hit something hard as she tried to stand. Milou hissed, dropping to a crouch and feeling her way toward an empty place to sit. As the dust settled and her candle stilled, Milou realized why there was barely any room to move: Huge wooden cog wheels interconnected, horizontally and vertically, in a complex array from the ceiling right down to the floor.
There was a thud and then another hiss of pain beside her as Lotta emerged through the hatch and crawled toward her.
“Holy Gouda,” Lotta breathed, staring up at the mechanisms with her mouth hanging open.
Milou stood, carefully, and held the candle up to the domed ceiling, illuminating more shadows and more dust, but no ladders or stairwells.
This was the very top of the windmill. There were no more rooms for her to search.
Milou’s shoulders drooped, as if her invisible puppet strings had been snipped clean, and her legs finally collapsed under her. Her knees hit the floor hard, but the pain of it hurt less than the way her heart seemed to be squeezing in on itself.
“Oh, Lotta,” Milou said, her voice cracking. “They’re gone.”
THIRTEEN
MILOU WAS ONLY VAGUELY aware of being led by Lotta and Sem back down to the kitchen. Her eyes were wet, and, despite the fur coat now draped around her shoulders, a numbness had settled heavily over her, making it almost impossible to walk.
Sem had been right.
She’d come all this way for nothing.
The Poppenmakers were gone.
Her friends’ voices sounded muffled behind the raging despair in Milou’s mind.
“What’s wrong?” Egg was asking.
“Milou needs to sleep this ordeal off,” Lotta was saying. “Help me get her into bed.”
Milou was ushered into the green-quilted cupboard bed by Lotta and Sem. It smelled musty, but it was softer than anything she had ever lain upon. Fenna was already in the bed. She pulled Milou close and wrapped her arms around her, resting her chin on Milou’s brow. The blankets were heavy, but not scratchy in the slightest. Despite all this, Milou still could not stop shaking.