Otto Tattercoat and the Forest of Lost Things Read online

  Frida hauled her crate to the desk. Her arms shook under the weight. She looked happy about this. The heavier the crate, the closer you were to passing the counting.

  “Three hundred and sixty-one jars,” Helmut said when he’d counted them all. He marked the number beside her name in the ledger and said, “Good work.”

  One by one the children were called forward. When Gunter approached the table he looked nervous. But luckily he scraped through with three hundred and five jars.

  “That was close,” he said to Otto when he returned to their table. He gave a nervous laugh.

  Otto was the last to be called. Even though he had never been to a counting before, he knew just by watching the other children that he had failed to reach the quota. He’d been slow to fill his bucket with paste and he still hadn’t got the hang of putting it into the jars.

  Helmut was quick to verify Otto’s fear. He counted the jars and said with a smirk, “One hundred and eighty six. That’s a fail, Otto. No dinner for you.”

  As if on cue, Otto’s stomach rumbled. He hadn’t eaten anything for over a day. If he didn’t eat tonight, he’d have to wait another full day before he got the chance to eat again. Considering how slow he was at filling the jars, he had a strong suspicion he would fail tomorrow night as well. At this rate, he would starve to death in a week.

  Frau Ferber’s children ate dinner at the same table they worked at.

  “What is that stuff?” Otto asked when a bowl was placed in front of Gunter along with a thin slice of bread.

  “Water, mostly,” Gunter said. “With a bit of cabbage thrown in. If we’re lucky, there might even be some carrot. And once, I swear there was rabbit in there. Though Klaus swears even more it was rat.”

  “Well, it was,” Klaus objected. “I found a tail.”

  “I don’t understand why it’s always so bad,” Frida said. “Frau Ferber has fresh food delivered to the factory each week. A whole truckload of meat comes in, but none of it ends up with us. I’ve got no idea where it goes.”

  “I do,” Gunter said. “It goes to them and their mother.” He nodded to Helmut and Heinz. They were watching from the corner of the room, but they weren’t touching any of the food.

  For a moment, Otto was glad he hadn’t passed the counting. The food looked disgusting. But once everyone else started eating, his hunger returned. Exhausted from a day of constant work, he needed to eat almost as much as he needed to sleep.

  “Don’t worry,” Gunter said. “Frau Ferber might not look after us, but we look after each other.” He tore off half of his bread and dunked it in the soup. He passed it to Otto under the table.

  “Thanks,” Otto said. He checked to make sure Helmut and Heinz weren’t watching and quickly shoved the food into his mouth.

  The meal tasted even worse than Otto had imagined, like the cook had added a bucket of dirt to the soup to thicken it up. There was only one positive: Otto was certain there was no rat because there wasn’t anything in there at all, apart from the water and dirt.

  “Frau Ferber must have had a bad day,” Gunter mumbled. “But,” he added optimistically, “at least she didn’t take away the bread.”

  7

  THE MELTING SLIPPER

  The tattercoats left their chimneys at dawn and slipped down on to the quiet streets below. Early in the morning, the air was so still and clear you could see all the way to the woods.

  When Nim was little she had always wanted to venture into the woods surrounding Hodeldorf. But then she’d heard some truly terrible stories – stories of people going into the woods and never coming out – and her dreams of venturing beyond the city walls disappeared.

  With nickels to spare, Nibbles and Nim headed to the main square where they bought pancakes for breakfast. Unless someone dropped one on the ground, you never usually got to eat them. It was a special treat to have a warm pancake that wasn’t covered in dirt.

  While they ate, Nim saw several other tattercoats darting about the square stealing their own breakfast: mostly bruised fruit that no one would buy or scraps they found on the cobbled ground.

  If you had your eyes peeled for tattercoats in Hodeldorf you’d see them all around, but most people looked the other way. Nim wasn’t upset about this. She found it quite handy. It was a lot easier to steal things – like food and matches and milk – when people weren’t looking.

  By the time the city was awake, Nim only had one nickel left.

  “We’ll save this for later,” she said to Nibbles. The morning was so cold he had yet to rise from her pocket. Even the scent of freshly cooked pancakes hadn’t been enough to lure him out. She’d had to drop pieces in for him to gobble up. “Besides, we don’t need to buy anything else today. We already have everything we need. We have a coat, a stomach full of pancakes and a friend for constant company. We’re doing pretty well for ourselves, aren’t we?”

  Nibbles was still hiding away from the cold when Nim spotted two of her favourite tattercoats.

  Skid and Roe were busy stealing a patch of cloth to mend their old coats when they noticed Nim watching. While the tattercoats may have gone unnoticed by most of the city folk, they never went unnoticed by each other. They came over to say hello.

  “Morning, Nim,” Skid said cheerfully. Skid was a short boy who had high hopes for himself: high hopes he would grow to be as tall as the man whose coat he’d stolen. Unfortunately, his hope had yet to come true, and he needed to hitch the coat up with rope so he didn’t trip over it.

  “Hi, Skid,” Nim said. “Nibbles says morning too, only he can’t be bothered to get out of my pocket today.”

  “I couldn’t be bothered to get up from my chimney either,” said Roe. “It feels like the cold in Hodeldorf is always getting colder.” As if to ward the cold away, Roe had decorated her coat with scraps of material cut into the shape of suns. Most of the suns had faded to grey, but a few still held a semblance of colour and sparkled in the weak light of the day.

  Nim would have sewn a few suns into her own coat if she’d thought it would make a difference. But she knew Hodeldorf would still be cold even if she wore a coat full of suns.

  Once Skid and Roe had snatched their own breakfast, they walked with Nim to an old alley near the train station. The alley was filled with all sorts of broken things – chairs with missing legs, rickety tables, and cupboards without doors or shelves – that the tattercoats had found discarded in the streets and fixed up. When they arrived, almost twenty other tattercoats were already there, including their leader, Sage.

  Over the years, the group of homeless children had remained steady at about thirty members. When a coldstorm hit a few tattercoats would die and a few others would join the group. If the city was warm there probably wouldn’t have been any need for the group. But the cold kept robbing their parents away – along with a few other things – and if they didn’t become a tattercoat there was only one other place they could go: Frau Ferber’s factory.

  “Morning, Sage,” Nim called as she sat beside the others.

  “Good morning, Nim,” Sage replied with a cheerful wave.

  Sage was currently the oldest tattercoat. She’d joined the group at the age of eight when a coldstorm killed her father. A sickness had killed her mother the year before. Seven years later she was the leader of the group.

  Most of the tattercoats came from poor families who couldn’t afford to keep a fire burning through the cold. But Sage was smart. When she joined the group she could already read and write. By the age of ten she’d written down the Tattercode: a set of rules developed by the founders of the group to keep everyone in line. At the age of eleven she’d begun to teach the other tattercoats how to read it. Now, she gave lessons in writing it.

  Nim and the other tattercoats gathered as Sage began the day’s lesson.

  Every lesson started the same way: the tattercoats would write the Tattercode. Nim was almost as quick with a pen as she was with her feet. She nimbly wrote the five rules down:
<
br />   THE TATTERCODE

  RULE 1 – You must choose your own name

  RULE 2 – You must always help a tattercoat in need

  RULE 3 – You must only steal what you need, not what you want

  RULE 4 – You must not leave a trail or else you will get caught

  RULE 5 – You must only own one coat at a time. You can only get a new coat when your old one has turned to tatters.

  Nim checked all the words to make sure she had spelled them right. Then, she showed them to Sage.

  “Very good, Nim,” she said with an approving nod. “I think you’ll be able to teach your own lessons soon.”

  “Really?” Nim said. She’d like that.

  When the other tattercoats had finished, Nim asked Sage to tell them a story. Sage knew hundreds of them: stories about giants who left the woods and trampled the city, stories about witches who turned princes into frogs, and stories about princesses who were never happy, no matter how many wishes they got.

  “All right,” Sage said. She loved telling stories as much as the younger tattercoats loved listening to them. “Have you heard the one about the prince of Hodeldorf?”

  “We don’t have a prince,” Nim said.

  “Not any more,” Sage corrected her.

  Two hundred years ago, the king of Hodeldorf held a magnificent ball for his only son. He invited the finest ladies in the land to attend. At the end of the ball the prince was going to choose a wife.

  The ball began at dusk. One by one the finest ladies in the land arrived. The prince greeted each one at the steps to the castle.

  “Good evening, Lady Lang,” he said to the first maiden who arrived. She wore a fine blue dress and a necklace that glinted in the light of the setting sun.

  “Good evening, Lady Wolff. You do look splendid tonight,” he said to the second maiden.

  The prince had greeted one hundred maidens – all the ladies his father had invited to the ball – and was about to enter the castle when he heard the clink of distant, but approaching, horseshoes.

  In the lamplight, a silver carriage appeared. It was drawn by six white horses adorned with feathered plumes. The carriage stopped before the prince, and a lady stepped out.

  She wore a splendid dress with silk stockings, pearl earrings and diamond slippers. She was the most beautiful woman the prince had ever seen, but strangely, she didn’t have an invitation. So taken with her beauty as he was, the prince invited her inside nonetheless. She said her name was Lady Snow.

  Under the sparkling light of four hundred chandeliers, the prince and the lady in the diamond slippers shared one and then two and then three dances. The other ladies realized the prince had already chosen his wife. So, while the prince and his chosen lady continued to dance, the other ladies gorged on the fine feast which had been prepared for them.

  They shovelled whole pheasants into their mouths and soaked the gravy up with the frills on their dresses. They guzzled rosehip wine and slurped up elderberry jelly. They tore apart the cherry and cream pie, and while they ate the dessert with their hands, they cursed the maiden who had come to the ball without an invitation.

  The clock tower chimed ten and then eleven. As it neared midnight the prince prepared to make an announcement. By now the hall had grown very warm. As Lady Snow spun round and round, droplets of water began to fall on to the floor.

  It was then that the other ladies realized Lady Snow wasn’t wearing fine pearls and expensive diamonds. She was dressed in frozen water and ice shaped into jewels. Their awe turned to laughter and they pointed at Lady Snow as her finery melted away.

  In shame, Lady Snow fled from the castle. She jumped into her carriage and disappeared into the night.

  While the ladies laughed, the prince ran after Lady Snow. He called out her name but she was too upset to hear. As the clock tower chimed midnight, the castle began to swing and shake. The chandeliers hanging from the ceiling rattled and swayed. Candles, still alight, crashed to the ground. Then the glass chandeliers themselves began to topple to the floor. The windows of the castle shook and then the castle itself. The crowd began to scream with fear. An earthquake was striking the city.

  The ladies and the prince and the king and the queen fled from the crumbling castle. All around them, they watched the great monuments of the city tumble down. Down crashed the cathedral. Down crashed the clock tower. And down crashed Hodeldorf Castle. By the time the ground stilled, half the city had fallen.

  “I bet it was Lady Snow,” one of the maidens said.

  “She probably wasn’t even a lady,” said another. “She was a witch who came to curse the castle and our wonderful prince.”

  By the time dawn rose – slightly later than the day before – everyone in the city believed witchcraft was behind the great disaster. Everyone except the prince, that is. He set out to find his love for years and years until finally, after a decade searching for the beautiful lady in the melting slippers, the prince of Hodeldorf began to believe it too. In grief, he left Hodeldorf and never returned.

  But the most curious thing about that night wasn’t the mysterious guest or the earthquake that made the city fall. The strangest thing was that it was warm. Not warm from the heat of fires burning in the night. It was so warm that no fires had even been lit. It was, as the people back then had called it, a time known as summer.

  During summer, the sun shone brighter and the nights grew shorter. There was no snow or icy wind. Instead, a warm breeze floated throughout the city. It was so warm – both day and night – that no one even needed a coat.

  When Nim heard this last bit of the story she started to laugh. The other tattercoats did as well.

  “Well, that’s just silly, Sage,” Nim said. “Maybe not the earthquake bit.” For she had felt a few little tremors herself over the years. “But definitely the part about the coat. No one in Hodeldorf would ever go outside without one of those.”

  “But it’s true,” Sage said. “Years ago, long before any of us were born, the whole city was warm. Then the coldstorms began and summer disappeared. Now, every year is colder than the one before.”

  “How come?” Nim asked.

  “No idea.” Sage paused for a moment and then said, almost to herself, “Maybe Lady Snow really did curse the city.”

  Nim doubted that. Curses were like magic. They weren’t real. Something else was behind the cold, but what?

  8

  THE COUNTING

  As each day passed in Frau Ferber’s factory, a sense of dread grew heavier upon Otto. Not only had he failed every daily quota, but he was no closer to finding out what had happened to his mother. He couldn’t believe he had been tricked by Bertha. He should have been searching every street and every home for his mother; instead, he was filling stupid jars with stupid boot polish, and he wasn’t even good at it.

  Otto’s mind was filled with another fear. He’d been in the factory for a week. A lot could change during that time. His mother could have come back. What if she had been lost or stuck somewhere but had now returned to Mister Kruger’s Inn? What if she thought he had left? What if she’d given up on him and gone back to Dortzig? How would she ever find him here?

  Otto’s sense of despair was shared by the other children, only for a different reason. Bertha had left the factory a week ago. If she had said something about the factory, someone would have freed them by now. Either something had happened to her so she couldn’t tell anyone the truth or she’d never planned to help them at all. Otto couldn’t decide which would be worse. He didn’t want Bertha to be hurt or injured, but he also didn’t want to have been lured into this factory for nothing. Something must have happened to her. But what?

  At the end of each week Helmut and Heinz took the ledger up to their mother’s office. The children waited in their room for their names to be called. Unlike the daily counting, where most of the children looked confident, every child looked frightened before the weekly counting.

  “The daily quota’s always
the same, but the weekly one changes,” Gunter explained. “Sometimes it’s three thousand jars, sometimes it’s four thousand, and if Frau Ferber’s having a bad week she might make it five thousand. No one’s ever passed that one. Even if you pass every daily quota, you could still fail the weekly one.”

  “But that’s not fair,” Otto said.

  “But it’s fun,” Klaus replied. “At least it’s fun for Frau Ferber.”

  “Don’t be too worried,” Gunter said when he saw the look on Otto’s face. “Everyone is punished eventually.”

  One by one the children were called into Frau Ferber’s study. If they passed the counting they returned to the room. If they failed, they were led back to the factory floor to await their punishment.

  The weekly counting took a lot longer than the daily one.

  “That’s because Frau Ferber likes to make us wait,” Frida said before she was called into the office.

  A further hour passed before it was Otto’s turn to enter. So far every child called into the study had passed and returned to their room. Helmut told Otto to be silent so Frau Ferber could read out his numbers.

  “Hmm,” Frau Ferber said as she looked down at the ledger. “My, my. It hasn’t been a good week for you. You haven’t passed a single daily counting.” She looked up from the ledger and smiled. “You must be awfully hungry.”

  “I’d probably still be hungry even if I had passed the countings,” Otto mumbled.

  “You don’t think I feed you enough?” Frau Ferber said.

  “You haven’t fed me anything,” Otto pointed out. Luckily the other children had. Each day a different one would share their meal with him so he didn’t starve. The best thing about the factory was all the kind children inside of it.

  “You like to talk back, don’t you?” Frau Ferber said. “I’d stop doing that if I were you. The last boy who talked back hasn’t talked again.”

  “Mouse?” Otto said. He thought of the boy who sat in silence day in and day out. Otto sealed his lips shut.