He had salvaged whatever he could. Oh, the removals men had tried, and then the bailiffs, and then the individual creditors (who had, to his opprobrium, been permitted to go into the storerooms and pick out whatever ephemera they wanted, if only to wipe out a little debt), but there were some things Emil was determined to keep. He piled them up behind his workshop door and wrote an inventory of all the things he had: three suitcases of journals, his father’s phoenix, a cloth bag lined with cotton and, nestling inside, all of his father’s pinecone figurines. This, the sum of a life. He didn’t even have ideas any more. He didn’t have imagination.
Emil stepped on to the shopfloor, so cavernous and empty that his footsteps echoed like the steps of a giant. There were still crates of bric-a-brac, perhaps even some older toys, in the stores, but across the shopfloor the shelf stacks were gone, the carousel dismantled, the Midnight Express taken to pieces for scrap. The cloud castle had been the first to go, sold off at auction to a charitable concern, and now there were only the floorboards (those would go too, before the demolition) and the disconnected pipes underneath.
Strange, but without everything in it, the shopfloor seemed so small. You could see straight through the glade where the Long War used to be played, up past the mezzanines, the corrals and seaport (where once the krakens had lurked beneath crêpe paper waves), over the stumps of the paper forest and the abandoned platforms of the Midnight Express. You could see one wall and then the next and, without anything in it, that was all the Emporium was: walls and walls and the space in between. He wondered that he had ever thought it as big as the world.
Emil did not dance across the empty expanse, because he had no feet for dancing. He did not charge around it, hollering into the dark, because even alone he felt foolish. He found a stool (stupid bailiffs, you could have had this stool!) and sat in the middle of the dusty expanse and, after a time, he dared to stare upwards, into the vaults where his cloud castle used to be.
Look, he thought, for as he watched ice was forming across the glass in the Emporium dome, a mist that hardened to occlude the night sky beyond. It’s the very last first frost …
So there it was: the shuttered-up shop at the end of the alley, lights still dangling from its awnings (but not lit up for a generation or more), sugar frost still in its windows (grown pitted and yellow with age).
Iron Duke Mews was already strung up in notices of demolition, the streetlights torn up or snuffed out. Notices dangled from the other shops along the cobbled row: the gentlemen’s tailors had been closed for months already, and the windows of the shoemakers were either boarded up or bare. Service trucks were arrayed in a great horseshoe around the end of the mews, and ribbons forbidding passage made a spiderweb across the entrance.
Sirius was the first to venture through, but the rattling chaos inside Cathy’s bag told her there were others demanding to make the march. Parting the ribbons to go into the mews, she knelt down and opened the clasp. First to venture out was the Imperial Kapitan. Turning a circuit across the cobbles, he lifted his bugle for a silent call. Then the wind-up soldiery marched out in procession. Poor creatures, thought Martha; they had not yet learned to think, but their time would come.
The Emporium doors had been boarded already, but the tradesman’s entrance was not yet barred. Cathy took out her key and together they peered into the barren blackness within.
It had been a decade and more since Martha came to this place – and, if she had expected fountains of colour and the swooping serpents of old, she was sorely disappointed. All was dark in the half-moon hall. Cathy had opened a cabinet on the wall and was flicking the switches contained within – but no lights sparked high up in the Emporium nave. ‘They’d been threatening to do this since 1949,’ she said, with an air of resignation. ‘I hadn’t wanted you to see it like this, Martha. It should have lived in your memory like it does for so many others. But …’
The tiny footsteps of the toy soldiers echoed lonesomely in the vast expanse – until, at last, the Imperial Kapitan came to a halt, devastated at discovering such dust, such decay. In his mind, his homeland had been scoured, his mother country razed to the ground. Thirty years he had been waiting. Thirty years – and now, this.
Cathy crouched down, pressed her finger gently to the finger of the Imperial Kapitan. ‘Which way?’ she whispered. ‘Why are we here?’
The question lifted the Kapitan up and out of his despair. Turning on his heel, he began directing the other soldiers to assemble – and, as he did, Martha lifted a finger to point.
‘Mama,’ she said, ‘we’re not alone.’
For there, where the aisles had once tapered to a point, where the shelves had once been stacked in such a spiral as to obscure completely the door on the other side, a lantern was burning. Emil Godman was in his workshop, alone, on this very last first frost.
The Imperial Kapitan led the soldiers in a quick, forced march. Though the aisles had long been torn down, the Kapitan made his way by the charts chipped into his wooden mind, following the lines where the aisles used to be, circling the old carousel, marching in mock triumph across the glade where the Long War had long ago been played. Cathy and Martha hurried in their wake, the light of Emil’s workshop fading to a point behind them – until, at last, they stood among the stumps of the old paper forest.
The soldiers amassed across the boards. WHERE? they asked and, with regret, Cathy whispered, ‘Felled so many years ago. Paper timber, sold off to schools and children’s homes and …’
THE HOUSE …
They formed and then re-formed again.
WENDY’S HOUSE …
The soldiers had not finished drilling their final word, its shape quivering and indistinct, when the Imperial Kapitan startled, wheeled around, and commanded them to line up behind them. Standing at the head of the phalanx, he lifted his wooden rifle, aiming into the darkness behind where Cathy stood. They had been the first to hear the footsteps but Cathy heard them now, tolling with a tread she had known for so many years.
Emil appeared out of the swirling motes of dust, his eyes swollen from lack of sleep, his beard an eruption of untended, wiry tufts. A broom hung at his side, wielded like a weapon.
‘Cathy,’ he gasped, ‘what are you—’
‘I might ask you the same thing. I thought you were long gone, Emil. We said goodbye, right there in the half-moon hall.’
‘I couldn’t go, Cathy, not until …’ It was only then, as his eyes panned down, that he saw the soldiers. In the same moment he recognised them, the Imperial Kapitan sounded the charge. Toy soldiers sallied forth. Wooden bullets flew. The first were drawing tiny balsa sabres to spear Emil’s shins when he brought down the broom and scattered them, a titan of the battlefield.
The Imperial Kapitan was scrambling to stop the rout, desperate not to lose his soldiers to Wind Down in the unmapped darkness, when Emil cried out, ‘Where did they … How did they … Cathy, tell me! Why are you here?’
His voice had risen to a shriek of desperation. ‘I don’t know, Emil,’ she snapped – but something had changed now. She had seen the faltering expression on Emil’s face. There was terror here, but it was not just terror of the toy soldiers.
Martha was gone to collect the scattered troops from the darkness, but Sirius remained. ‘Emil,’ Cathy whispered, ‘what’s going on?’
At her feet, the remaining soldiers formed up.
TELL HER!
‘Tell me what, Emil?’ She reached out, grappled with his wrist. ‘Tell me what?’
‘You’ve been hiding them,’ he stammered. ‘All this time, and you’d—’
‘The Kapitan stowed away in my bag, Emil. Hidden there, like I was, all those summers ago in our Wendy House. He’s been waiting thirty years … and for this. Emil, please. What is he trying to say?’
Emil tore his hand away, sank down to his haunches – and there he sat, a grown man with his arms wrapped around his knees like any bullied child. ‘He’s just a toy,’ he breathed. ‘He isn’t saying a thing. He isn’t to be trusted …’