Toby Alone

  Bubble suggested a nap. At first Pulp and Mince refused, but when they saw how soundly Bernie was asleep, they gave in. Bubble escorted them to a dark cave, which was pleasantly cool for a snooze. She promised them that nobody would hurt Bernie while they were asleep.

  The two guards nodded off peacefully, with the skin on their bellies pulled taut. They were woken by blows. Blows in the darkness. Blows on their heads. Somebody was clubbing them to death with great big thwacks. An expert, who handled the bludgeon with cold-blooded efficiency, dividing the bumps evenly between the two guards’ heads. A real artist.

  But Pulp and Mince had no time to admire such talent. In seconds they were on their feet and giving the thrashing of the century to the club-wielder. Oddly, for someone of this calibre, their attacker seemed surprised, as if they’d spent their whole life fighting lifeless dolls.

  When the two bodyguards were satisfied they would be leaving nothing behind but a small pile of bones in a bag of skin, they stopped. And it was at exactly this point that Bubble appeared holding a firebrand.

  “Why did you do that?” she asked.

  “What d’you mean?” said Mince.

  “Self-defence,” Pulp piped up.

  “What are we going to say to the governor?” asked Bubble.

  “What d’you mean?” said Mince.

  “Where’s Bernie?” asked Pulp, who was getting worried now.

  “She’s there.”

  Bubble held her firebrand towards the floor, lighting up Bernie’s remains. Pulp made a strange noise with his mouth, and Mince pulled back his hair to reveal his eyes for the first time: he squinted monstrously.

  “We’ve battered her to death,” he said.

  Bubble looked very annoyed.

  “I promised you that nobody would hurt her while you were asleep … but it never occurred to me that it would be it would be you who…”

  Barely an hour after Pulp’s return to the prison at Tumble, a strange-looking team turned up at the main gates. There was a stretcher made of twigs, with Mince carrying the front end and Bubble bringing up the rear. On the stretcher lay a strange object, like a reclining wax statue.

  Gus Alzan rushed over to Bubble.

  “Bernie! Where’s Bernie?”

  Bubble nodded towards the stretcher.

  “There.”

  Gus leant over the white shape. He turned very pale.

  “WHAT? But what happened?”

  Pulp had appeared behind Gus. He and Mince were both winking manically at Bubble to try and stop her from telling the truth. But seeing as one of them had eyes the size of dots, and the other had a curtain for a fringe, it was impossible to read their clumsy signals.

  Bubble remained very vague. “She fell. She disobeyed instructions and she fell right down to the bottom of a hole.”

  Mince and Pulp relaxed.

  “But where is she?” her poor father roared.

  “In this wax shell… It was the only way of putting her back together again. She has to stay in the shell for thirty days. I found a worm beetle farmer-woman who was happy to cast Bernie in the wax. Her bones need to mend and her organs must return to their proper places.”

  “You’ll get a brand new Bernie,” Pulp added clumsily, immediately getting Gus’s fist on his big rubbery mouth.

  Feeling better for having hit somebody, Gus removed his hand from the sucker and went over to the wax shape. He could now see the place where the head must be, as well as the arms and the legs. It was like a white star.

  “One month! How’s she going to eat?”

  “There are tubes in all the right places. It’s specially designed. You have to put sapwood purée down that feeding tube there, three times a day.”

  Gus approached the end that presumably held the head. Very gently, he went tap-tap with his finger. When the only answer he got was a tiny movement inside the shell, he started to cry.

  Wax-Bernie was allowed through the gates of Tumble, as were Mince and Pulp. But when Bubble tried to come through, Gus turned on her violently.

  “Go to hell! And don’t ever set foot here again.”

  Bubble was caught off guard. For the first time, she showed visible signs of distress. “But I have to look after her…” she said.

  “Out of my sight!”

  Bubble seemed genuinely shaken. But she wouldn’t give up. “Just give me one more night, because Bernie—”

  Bubble knew she could win Gus over, if she was given a chance to speak. But Gus Alzan was already roaring.

  “Throw her out!”

  Fifteen guards rushed over to stop Bubble getting in. They drove her back beyond the main entrance. She wasn’t shouting loud enough for Gus to be able to hear her any more.

  It was too late. In a flash, Bubble had turned back into Elisha, and she was trembling all over with fear. What she didn’t know was that same evening, Mince and Pulp would be offered up to the birds on a mistletoe berry. So there were some fates that were even worse than her own. But when the stretcher disappeared off into the heart of the prison at Tumble, she turned away, ashen-faced, heart pounding, and ran off.

  If you’ve never spent even a minute inside a wax sarcophagus, then you have no idea how hot Toby was after several hours. He could barely hear the voices around him. Earlier he had been shaken about inside his shell, but nothing seemed to be moving now. He must be inside Bernie’s room. A few more noises, the muffled sound of footsteps receding, then silence again.

  He thought about Elisha, who would be right next to him, waiting for the perfect moment. She would warn him with five slow taps on the wax. That was their code. The two of them would split the wax shell open. And the great escape would start right there, in the heart of Tumble.

  Time went by. The heat was becoming suffocating. Suddenly, there were heavy footsteps, the wax vibrated. Someone had entered the room. Toby heard a sort of sucking noise and then a warm substance was piped directly into his mouth. Sapwood purée. They were feeding him. He ate everything he was given. He had no choice. Anything he didn’t swallow went inside his collar and, combined with the heat, turned the shell into a cesspit.

  Luckily, the force-feeding stopped in time. New noises. Then silence again. Once more, Toby thought about Elisha, so close by. She had taken every risk, against all odds.

  For a week now, Toby had let himself be led by Elisha’s intuition. She had decided to spend some time going around the prison, looking for the right angle of attack. Her first stroke of luck had been meeting Clot on the very first day, who had told her about nightmare Bernie. It hadn’t taken Elisha long to hatch a plan.

  At first, Toby categorically refused to let her take a job inside the prison. She couldn’t face the danger by herself, to rescue parents who weren’t even her own, especially since she’d never even met them before! Elisha vehemently defended her plan. This was too good an opportunity to miss.

  Toby and Elisha operated very differently. Toby thought things over, looked at situations from every angle, made plans. He was prepared to take risks, but he always had several solutions as a lifeline. Elisha, on the other hand, seized opportunities without thinking about them too much. She jumped straight into the water, skinny-dipping as usual.

  Faced with Bernie, she instinctively knew what to do. Without even glancing at her charge, Elisha made for the opposite corner where she spent the first day fashioning a little figurine out of wood, a simple character the size of her thumb.

  In no time, Bernie was driven to respond to this indifference. She picked up a club lying among her toys and went over.

  Elisha didn’t make any kind of gesture towards her, but calmly said, “I know some heads that will never have a single bump on them.”

  Bernie was beside herself. She dropped the club on her toe and groaned.

  “Where?”

  “In my house,” Elisha answered.

  Bernie bellowed as she waved the club, ready to crush Elisha’s head along with that of the wooden figurine.

&nbs
p; Just in time, Elisha whispered, “I’ll take you there, if you don’t hit me.”

  Bernie stopped.

  “If you don’t batter anybody for six days, I’ll show you the heads with no bumps.”

  The taming of Bernie had begun. A simple case of blackmail.

  Two days later, on 26 April, Elisha issued the same instructions, but that evening, on her way out, she left the little wooden figurine in the corner. When she came back two days later, Elisha found the figurine shattered into a thousand pieces.

  “Did you hit the toy man?”

  “Who?”

  “The toy man!”

  “What toy man?” Bernie asked again.

  Elisha paused and was surprised at the name that escaped her own lips. “Lolness,” she said. “He was called Lolness.”

  Why had she said that name? She had no idea. It just came out that way, words and gestures happening before thoughts, showing her the way.

  “Lolness,” Bernie repeated after her.

  That evening, Elisha went to Gus Alzan to complain. Bernie had attacked someone called Lolness while she’d been away. Which was how she got to find out exactly where the Lolness parents were being held captive. She was even going to see them, after all these years of never meeting them.

  Then came the idea for the picnic. In order to get the governor’s permission, Elisha had been forced to carry out the worst act of her life. She had crushed the hand of an innocent person. Disgusted by the cruelty of her own actions, she made herself think of Toby’s parents, of the lives she was trying to save. Yes, it really was a matter of life or death. But how far do you go in order to save somebody? During the nights that followed, this question often kept her awake when she was trying to sleep.

  When Bernie set out from Tumble in her lace dress, she was looking forward to making a thousand bumps on new heads, as promised. It was this reward that got her through the walk.

  After Bernie’s nap, all Elisha had to do was lead her to the cave, offer her the guards’ heads to bash in the darkness, and then take her battered charge to Isha Lee, who would finish off the job by casting her in wax. Shooing aside the guards out of respect for the girl’s modesty, they slid Toby into the shell in place of Bernie. The plan was set.

  Yes, too well set… Toby reflected ironically, finding it more and more difficult to breathe.

  He thought of little Bernie waiting in another wax case, in the worm beetle’s hut. Elisha’s mother would be looking after her attentively. They were going to put her in a low-cut chrysalis that only went as far as her face – much more comfortable.

  What was Elisha doing? Toby couldn’t bear it any more. Shut inside his wax casing, he was still waiting for the five taps. He couldn’t hear any sounds around him now. Night must have fallen.

  Suddenly, Toby felt very alone – abandoned. But there wasn’t a moment to lose. His parents were due to be executed at dawn the next day.

  Elisha! Why was there no signal from her?

  Toby was running out of patience. He started wriggling around inside the wax to make it crack. He’d had enough. He would have to risk making an exit. But his first movement made him realise just how trapped he was. No matter how much he tried to convince himself otherwise, the wax armour wasn’t budging. Toby had already been trapped in the cave by the lake, but this coffin was far worse. He couldn’t even turn round. At this rate, he would be stuck here, helpless, while his parents mounted the scaffold. He would die of grief, slowly, over a whole month, showered in tepid purée, drowning in his own tears. Young Toby baked alive in a wax pie.

  Perhaps it was midnight. Sim and Maya Lolness would be crouching down in their cell, just a few centimetres away, counting down the hours to death. And in a month’s time, when they prised him out of his stinking shell, Toby would join them, victim of the same punishment.

  “Elisha… Elisha!”

  Toby was shouting now from the depths of his casing. He would have given anything to bang with his fists, but he couldn’t, because his hands had been sealed in an open position in the wax. His thoughts were becoming increasingly jumbled. His heart was racing.

  Questions were pounding in his head, like in a nightmare.

  Why do I have to die? Why? I want to get out of here! Leave the Tree! Find another world! Go wherever sticks go when they’re thrown off the end of a branch! I want to get my fists back again, and my strength! My fists! Where do my fists go when my fingers are outstretched? Elisha! Whose side are you on? You’ve deserted me! And so has Leo! Why don’t friends last for life?

  Nothing could stop his descent into this infernal spiral.

  Nothing?

  He heard the first tiny tap, and then the second. Someone was knocking very gently on his coffin.

  24

  Flown Away

  Elisha was crying, close to the fire.

  Isha Lee had seen how upset her daughter was when she came back home. Elisha no longer looked like the valiant little soldier Isha used to watch setting out every morning. She looked like a thirteen-year-old girl who had seen all the hopes she had slowly built up come crashing down around her.

  Isha wrapped a grey blanket round Elisha’s shoulders. Not even the flames could bring the colour back to this shadow of her former self.

  Nobody has ever seen swallows at rest, but if they were suddenly unable to fly they might look a bit like Elisha: stopped in action, disorientated, their crestfallen faces looking for a way out.

  Elisha hadn’t been able to pass through the gates to Tumble with Toby, and that was all it took for their whole project to crumble. Their plans relied on the two of them being inside the prison. Once the wax shell had been split open, Elisha was supposed to attract the guards’ attention by shouting out that Bernie had disappeared. Toby would use the chaos as a cover to go with the key to the high-security zone. After that, Toby had a secret plan.

  All Elisha knew was that the following day, after the scandal of the Lolness family escaping, the real Bernie would be discovered in front of the prison gates. No one would be surprised by this final twist involving the little pest. They certainly wouldn’t link it to Sim and Maya’s escape, so Elisha wouldn’t even come under suspicion. She would take a break after a few days of good and loyal service.

  This had been their plan. But none of it would work without Elisha.

  The thick layer of wax couldn’t be broken by one person alone. And that was only the first problem. She felt horribly guilty for deserting Toby, even though she hadn’t made a single mistake.

  And now here she was, watching the flames in her own home. It was the only thing she could do. She had watched them so many times before, with her shoulder against Toby’s. When they were out camping in the wild, at the far edges of the Low Branches or in the cave by the lake – watching the fire always sparked the same sense of wonder. Where did the force come from to lift those golden curtains? What invisible breath, what arm stirred all those flaming banners? Fire was a mystery that troubled Elisha.

  Isha served a bowl of herbal tea to her daughter who was wrapped in her swallow-grey blanket. She had put the bowl on a tray with a candle. More fire, thought Elisha. She stared at the candle. Her eyes suddenly opened wide. She looked hypnotised.

  “Is something wrong, Elisha?” asked her mother.

  Elisha couldn’t take her eyes off the candle. Isha took her hand.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “Look,” Elisha said flatly. “The candle. It’s melting.”

  Isha looked at her poor daughter. Something had snapped inside her. But when Elisha slowly turned away from the candle, it was with a much calmer expression that she faced her mother. All was not lost. Toby would escape after all.

  Because Bernie was scared of the dark, her bedroom always had to be lit by flares. Late that evening, once the wax chrysalis had been put down in the girl’s bedroom, her father had lit all the flares as usual. There were even brands at each corner of the bed, which gave the wax mummy a funereal air.
r />   The shell’s feeding tube rose up almost as high as the flames. The gentle taps Toby heard weren’t made by anybody. They came from the drops of melted wax that, after some hours exposed to the heat of the room, were falling, one by one, onto the shell. Toby had been expecting five taps, but he heard a lot more than that. His whole shell was melting in the overheated atmosphere of the bedroom, and the thin trickle of wax was dripping onto the bedsheet.

  Toby still had no idea what was going on, and the heat was making him increasingly uncomfortable. He felt sticky. He had no idea that in a minute the layer of wax would become thin enough for him to break it. He had no idea that in a few moments he would be free.

  But things are never that simple. At the same time as the melting wax was slowly freeing Toby, it was also soaking into the sheet underneath him. What do you call a piece of material dipped in wax? A flare. A giant flare was being created under Toby’s body, ready to catch fire.

  It all happened at once. Toby burst through the last layer of wax at the very moment the bed caught fire. Like a piece of rebellious steak refusing to accept its fate and rising up dramatically out of the flames, in one leap, Toby shot to the other side of the room.

  FIRE!

  The door was open. Toby rushed outside. Following Elisha’s directions, he ran straight towards cell number 001 to free his parents. The alarm still hadn’t been raised. A crescent moon watched over him with an ideal light: not too strong but not too veiled either.

  On the soles of Toby’s feet, the blue line drawn by Elisha glowed like war paint.

  Toby heard a weak groaning at a crossroads, close to where he was. He pulled up short. It was the kind of groan that sickened you to the core, a desolate whine. As he drew near, Toby found a prisoner in a small cage.

  The man’s eyes were wet with tears. He was blowing gently on his hand as he moaned. On the back of his hand was an obvious wound; it looked as if someone had crushed it underfoot.