‘Isn’t it? WOOF!’
‘And the shop. It’s very colourful.’
‘Well, of course it is. WOOF! It’s a toy shop.’
The boy’s eyes opened wide. ‘A toy shop!’ he said, gasping. ‘My three favourite words!’
‘Not mine,’ said the dachshund. ‘I like “a” very much, but I’ve never been much of a one for “toy shop”. I’ve always quite liked the word “resilient” myself. An ability to weather trouble without succumbing. I feel that’s a word you might think about a little, young man.’
‘I like “fresh fruit flan”,’ said the donkey. ‘Three excellent words.’
‘I don’t have one,’ said Noah immediately before the question could even be asked, and the donkey opened his eyes wide in surprise, and for a moment Noah wondered whether he might even be considering eating him.
‘I can see that I’ve lost your attention,’ said the dachshund after a minute, sounding offended again as he tightened the scarf around his neck with his teeth, for the wind had picked up very suddenly and it was starting to grow cold. ‘And we won’t detain you any longer if that’s the case. We shall be on our way. Good day to you, sir.’
‘Yes, good day,’ said the donkey, turning away with a sigh.
Noah offered a goodbye in return but it was less than it might have been, considering all the help the dachshund (and, to a lesser extent, the hungry donkey) had offered him, and a few moments later he found himself walking across the street. He stopped at the tree and reached out to touch it, but before his fingers could make contact with the bark, he thought he heard it growling at him, so he pulled away in fright. This wasn’t the gentle whisper of the apple tree from the first village; it was something far more aggressive, like the snarl of a tiger protecting her cubs.
For a moment – for a very brief moment – he thought of his parents at home and how worried they would be when they discovered he had run away, which they surely would have by now. They wouldn’t understand, of course. They would think him selfish. But the idea of staying … and watching … He shivered, knowing that he shouldn’t think about such things.
He turned away from the tree now, trying to push his father and mother out of his mind entirely, and focused all his attention on the toy shop instead.
And the front door.
And the handle.
And without really intending to, he found his hand stretching out, grasping it, turning it, opening it, and before he knew it he was inside the shop and the door had closed firmly behind him.
Chapter Four
Puppets
Stepping inside the toy shop had not been Noah’s original intention. All he really wanted to do at first was take a look in the window and see what was on display. He didn’t have any money to buy anything, of course, but it didn’t do any harm to take a look at what he couldn’t afford. He also wanted to make sure that there were not too many customers milling around in case they realized he didn’t belong there and called the village police.
But somehow he felt as if he had been sucked inside the shop without his making any decision at all, as if the whole thing had all been entirely outside of his control. Of course, this was most unexpected, but he felt that now he was here, the best thing to do was simply take a look around and see what the shop was like.
The first thing he noticed was how quiet it was. This was nothing like the kind of quiet he heard when he woke up in the middle of the night after a bad dream. When that happened, there were always strange, unidentifiable sounds seeping into his room from the tiny gaps where the windowpanes weren’t sealed together correctly. At those moments he could always tell there was life outside, even if all that life was fast asleep. It was a silence that wasn’t silence at all.
But here, inside the shop, things were very different. Here the quiet wasn’t just quiet; it was a total absence of sound.
Noah had been inside a lot of toy shops in his life. Whenever his family went shopping for the day he made a point of being on his best behaviour, because if he was good, then he knew that he would be taken to one before they went home again. And if he was very good, there was even a chance that his parents might buy him a special treat, even if he was eating them out of house and home and they had no money to spend on luxuries. So it didn’t matter if his mother insisted on his trying on every pair of school trousers in the shop before choosing the first pair she’d taken off the rack seven hours earlier, he still kept a cheerful smile on his face, as if shopping for clothes was quite the most exciting thing that an eight-year-old boy could do, and not something that made him want to scream at the top of his voice, so loudly that the walls of the shopping centre would break apart and every shopper, salesperson, cash register, rack, shirt, tie, pants and pair of socks would disappear off into the furthest regions of the solar system and never be heard from again.
But this shop was very unlike all the others he had ever visited in his life. He looked around, trying to understand what made it so different, and at first he couldn’t quite put his finger on it.
And then he did.
The difference between this toy shop and all the others was that in this one there was absolutely no plastic to be seen anywhere. In fact, every toy he saw was made of wood.
There were train sets laid out along shelves, long, rolling carriages and tracks that stretched from corner to corner – all made of wood.
There were marching armies making their way forward to new countries and fresh adventures, and these were spread across counter tops – all made of wood too.
There were houses and villages, boats and trucks, every conceivable toy that an interested mind like his could dream of – and every one of them was made of a solid, dark wood which seemed to give off a glow of richness and, yes, even a sort of distant hum.
In fact, they didn’t seem like toys at all, but like something far more important than that. Everything he saw on display was very new and different, and Noah had a sense that this might be the only shop in the world where these particular toys were sold.
Almost everything was painted carefully – and not with just any old colours either, like the toys he had at home, which had surfaces that cracked and peeled if he so much as looked at them for too long. These were colours he’d never even seen before; ones he couldn’t possibly begin to name. Here, to his left, was a wooden clock, and it was painted, well, not green exactly, but a colour that green might like to be if it had any imagination at all. And over there, beside the wooden pencil holder, was a wooden board game whose overriding colour was not red, but something that red might look at enviously, blushing with embarrassment at its own dull appearance. And the wooden letter sets, well, there were those who might have said that they were painted yellow and blue, but they would have said this knowing that such plain words were an outrageous insult to the colouring on the letters themselves.
But as curious as all this was, as surprising and unusual as all this felt to Noah’s eyes, it was as nothing compared to those toys that dominated the walls of the shop in such numbers.
The puppets.
There were dozens of them. No, not dozens, scores. Not even scores, but hundreds, perhaps more than a person could count in one day, even with the help of one of the multi-coloured wooden abacuses that were placed on a nearby counter top. They were crafted in different shapes and sizes, varying heights and widths, dissimilar colours and shapes, but every single one was made of wood and painted with bright colours that filled them with life and energy and a sense that they were fully alive.