Free The Thief of Broken Toys by Tim Lebbon Page A

his shoulders
straighten, his head lifts, and perhaps there’s
a smile on his lips. He walks faster. He smells
dead things, because that’s much of what
the sea’s smell is — a familiar and nostalgic
scent. He wonders whether the sea has always
smelled the same, even before humans settled
here hundreds, thousands of years ago.
Almost
,
he guesses. Though without humans here to
sense, did the sea even smell at all?
    He starts climbing the path that leads
up onto the hillside, where his home is
balanced amongst many others, walls set into
precarious footings, the buildings huddled
and clinging like eager observers of the
harbour down below. Up beyond his home,
the path to the cliffs is empty for now. There
are footprints in the mud, and a seagull is
cracking a shelled thing against a rock tucked
beneath a gorse bush at the path’s edge. Its
own feet add more delicate prints as it dances
back and forth, picking up the sea creature in
its beak, dropping it on the rock, again and
again. It knows that it could take flight and
drop it from a greater height, but already the
slick saltiness of the shell’s innards is exposed
and leaking. A few more impacts and it will be
able to prise the thing apart and swallow the
insides.
    The sounds reach the old man’s ears where
he stands up on the cliff path looking out to
sea. We know that he is waiting for someone
who will come from a different direction.
The old man has intrigued, has entwined the
younger man’s perception like a blade of grass
around his finger, and now it is time to finish.
    He sighs and waits, and hopes that this
time it will work. He has been doing these
things for far too long.
    This time he took a brightly coloured toy that
was supposed to be a hand-held saw. When it
was pushed across the floor, the wheel beneath
would turn, lights would flash, and it made a
saw-like buzzing. Ray had bought it for his son
on a work trip to the States, and it had been
well-used over the following few months.
Then one day, it had stopped working. He’d
changed the batteries, to no avail. He took
the thing apart, but he’d never been that
handy, and the electronics of the thing just
confused him. He saw no loose wires or broken
connections, and he remembered screwing
the toy back together thinking,
It’ll work now;
I’ve taken it apart, put it back together, and it’ll
work, and I’ll never know what was wrong
. But it
had not worked, and after an evening sulking
about it, he thought perhaps Toby had never
considered it again.
    He slammed the front door behind him,
didn’t bother locking it, strode up the hillside.
Ray had never been as fit as he would have
liked, and by the time the path levelled out, he
was sweating and panting, but eager to reach
his goal.
    It was mid-afternoon. The old man was
waiting for him, dressed in jeans and a shirt, a
light coat, and walking boots. He smiled gently
as Ray approached, then held out his hand.
    â€œHere,” Ray said. “Whatever it is you do . . .”
He placed the colourful plastic toy in the man’s
hand, and stepped back.
    The old man looked down at the saw for a
few seconds, and his face was so expressionless
that Ray’s guts sank, his shoulders slumped,
and he thought,
Has anything been happening
here at all?
The man turned the toy this way
and that, and sunlight shone between clouds
and glinted from its garish colours.
    â€œCome with me,” he said at last. He lifted
the toy, then nodded out toward the sea.
“Something to show you.”
    â€œCome with you where?”
    But today, the old man was not wasting
words. He turned and walked farther along
the cliff, and then turned right from the path
and forced his way into the plants growing
thick at its edge. They seemed hardly to touch
him, and when he glanced back to see if Ray
was following, there was a strange look in his
eyes. He appeared almost nervous.
    â€œNot far,” he said. “You’ve