There wasn’t a great deal of junk in that area. Nothing of any significance for Alex, anyway. He found some old vinyl jazz records, but nothing to play them on, and he wasn’t sure he liked jazz anyway. And some golf clubs in a rotting leather bag. And a Chinese screen. He wiped the dust away from the lacquered surface to find some beautiful pictures cut into the wood beneath. But even these did not do a great deal for him.
What he really wanted, what he was really looking for, were model steam engines. Engines like the showman’s traction engine and the others he had in his pack. He wanted more of them. A steam car, for example. He’d like one of those. Or a steam roller. Or even a static traction engine. He told himself there must be more of them in Attica – many more. If he searched long and hard enough, he’d surely find as many as he wanted. He didn’t know how many he wanted, but at the moment there was just a yearning for model steam engines of steel and brass.
Alex continued to search, oblivious of the time it was taking, quite unconcerned that his brother and sister might be looking for him.
‘I know where you can find one.’
Alex was in an area where several shafts of light were coming down from the roof and striking the floor in splashes of golden dust. He stared into the gloomy spaces behind the pillars of light, but could see nothing. There were the ubiquitous piles of clothes everywhere, but nothing that looked as if it could speak. Then one of the piles began moving. Eventually it stood up and, like a walking haystack, shuffled over to where Alex was standing. Its face looked hideously ugly at first, until Alex realised it was just a painted mask, a clownish face. Unlike his own mask, it was unthreatening.
Alex was not terrified, exactly, but he was afraid.
‘Are you some sort of cloth creature?’ he asked in a shaky voice. ‘Some kind of walking basket of washing?’
‘No,’ said the clothes, ‘I’m flesh and blood. Just like you.’
Alex looked down at himself and then stared at the thing before him, realising they were of the same ilk. Then he saw, deep within the many folds of cloth, behind the ceramic mask, two human eyes. He had to look down a long tunnel of fabric to find those human features. Even then, they didn’t look that human. They were small and wizened, shrunken, like walnuts left too long in their shells. It was difficult to tell where this creature began and ended, there were so many ends of cloth: trailing empty sleeves, trouser legs, bits of scarves, shirt tails and socks flopping from pockets.
‘You dress like me,’ Alex cried excitedly.
‘No,’ replied the board-comber, ‘you will be like me. But not yet. You’re not quite there. You’ve just started going that way.’
‘Is that a bat hanging from your ear? Will I get one of those?’
‘I’m sure some creature has got you marked out already.’
‘I’ve seen it following me. Are they pets?’
The board-comber shrugged inside its many layers.
‘I suppose you could call them that. Me and my bat, we talk to each other. I think. But,’ the board-comber sighed, ‘now I’ve spoken to you, it’ll be a longish time before my bat speaks to me again. You have to get in the right frame of mind, you see, to converse with bats. You have to be alone a very long while. You have to be alone so long you start seeing forms that aren’t really there. Figures made of dark shadow that dance in the moonlight. Horses made of sunlight rearing on their hind legs and prancing silently across the attic. These things come after a long time of not speaking with another human, of being alone. Do you understand?’
‘I think so,’ replied Alex, ‘but it doesn’t matter.’
‘No,’ agreed the board-comber, ‘none of this really matters.’
Alex peered hard down that fabric tunnel.
‘Are you a girl or a boy?’
‘I can’t remember, but I think he and him.’
Alex then said, ‘You called to me.’
‘Ah.’ The board-comber rubbed its many woollen mittens together. ‘Business. Your female companion …’
‘My sister.’
‘Yes, she. She has a carving. A green carving. It’s – it’s a walrus. I collect carvings like that. I want it.’