playing for England against the Aussies: one of his long-term dreams, after playing Premier League football and rugby against the Springboks.
Finally he reached a valley draped with the flags of nations and saw that they were intact. If those same flags had been in scissor country they would have been shredded, so he knew he was out of danger. He divested himself of his cricket gear, keeping only the bag. There was a forest ahead and he walked towards it.
*
They got by Katerfelto. It was the boy who did it.
‘Yes,’ replies the bat, ‘but with matches.’
A dangerous way to do it, I agree. But he hasn’t yet learned to use a mirror like us.
The board-comber always carries a woman’s powder compact on his person. Alex had used matches to provide the light to drive away Katerfelto, but board-combers and other attic-dwellers used mirrors. They redirected the sunlight, reflecting it on to Katerfelto’s form, thus obliterating him. Katerfelto, after all, was but a bundle of shadows. And shadows are easily made to vanish in the blinding light of mirror-directed sunbeams.
I still think it was very clever of him.
‘You won’t think it so clever of him when he burns down the attic.’
We’re coming up to the Land of Masks. Is she still around? The mask collector?
‘No, you know she’s not. That board-comber has gone.’
Where do board-combers go when they go?
‘Oh my,’ murmured the bat, folding and unfolding its wings, ‘here we go. A long philosophical debate that goes absolutely nowhere …’
CHAPTER 9
The Boy in the Wooden Mask
The voodoo dolls are gathering – see!
‘They seem pretty mad, don’t they? I’m glad I’m not in your shoes.’
I’m not my shoes – they belong to someone else.
‘That cat who bit the head off their chieftain belongs to the visitors. Now the voodoo dolls want revenge.’
They’re after the humans, not me.
‘They’re after all of you.’
The board-comber is scurrying across the attic in the wake of Chloe and Alex with the bat hanging from his earlobe, his Cocalino mask slightly askew. His collection of soapstone carvings bounce painfully on his back. It’s hot and stuffy inside the layers of clothing. He raises dust clouds as he runs, looking for hiding places, knowing that just falling down and pretending to be a pile of rags won’t work with the voodoo dolls. The whole nest of wax effigies has been roused by the lingering smell of humans and they have swarmed out of the mouths of the giant masks. The board-comber is almost surrounded, but he manages to outrun the voodoo dolls.
‘They know a live pile of old clothes when they see it. And we can’t go back. The mannequins are waiting for you. They know you got the boy away from them.’
You’re a great help.
The voodoo dolls have knife-long needles stuck in their soft little wax forms. Each doll has about twenty of these weapons, which it pulls from its own body and plunges into the bodies of its enemies. The board-comber knows that these dolls bear so much hatred for humans they won’t hesitate to drive their needles into flesh. In the attic they call it ‘the death of a thousand points’ and the victim bleeds to death slowly. The board-comber, who was once human and is still flesh and blood, is terrified. He has seen victims of the voodoo dolls staggering around, covered in needles. Living pin-cushions, helpless, blind and bleeding from a thousand tiny piercings.
Are they still coming?
‘As relentless as a disturbed nest of hornets.’
Their legs are short.
‘But they move faster than yours.’
The voodoo dolls of the attic might well be likened to a nest of furious wild hornets, carrying multiple stings in their vicious little fingers. They bear a horrible but often only passing likeness to members of the human race: some very pale, some very dark, some the shades between. They have been made by voodoo priests out of raggle-taggle materials and the resemblance to the humans they represent is purely superficial. They are loose-limbed and mostly ugly, though one or two have features which make them appear benign. The mild-looking ones are the worst: they carry the dreadful curse of not being quite what they ought to be.
How did voodoo dolls get up here? Did the one who collected the masks collect voodoo dolls?
‘Who knows? He’s gone now. Dead or back to the world he came from. How’s a bat supposed to know? Like will find like up here, won’t it? Now they’re on our tail and won’t give up. We have