CHAPTER 5A Terrible Picnic
Tess and the other children spent the whole morning cleaning the foyer. It was dirty, grubby work and nobody enjoyed it.
Tess was scrubbing at a very stubborn bit of mould growing on the base of the reception desk when she heard a long, loud “Atishoo!”
She glanced up and said, “Bless you, Oliver.”
Her younger brother looked startled. “I didn’t sneeze,” Oliver said. “I thought it was you.”
Tess frowned. She could see Niles and Stacy outside emptying a bucket, so it hadn’t been one of them. She stood up and stared around the foyer, looking for the phantom sneezer.
“There!” Oliver said as he raised his hand and pointed at the supply cupboard.
Tess was sure she had firmly closed the door, but now it was open a crack. And there on the floor, poking out from behind the door, was a mass of pale yarn that looked very much like doll’s hair.
Oliver gave Tess a horrified look. “There’s a doll hiding in the cupboard!” he whispered. His lower lip started to tremble. “How did it get there?” Oliver asked.
Tess rolled up her sleeves and marched over. If there was a doll hiding in the cupboard, then Tess would soon drag her out.
But when she threw open the door, she saw that the mass of yarn was just a mop head. There was no sign of a doll or of any other toys in there at all.
“It’s just a mop,” Tess said, holding it up.
“But then … who sneezed?” Oliver asked.
Tess gazed around the empty foyer, unable to answer the question. Niles and Stacy walked back in then and asked Tess what they should do next.
Tess sighed and said, “This room is spotless. There’s nothing left to clean here, which means we’re going to have to move on. Into the factory.”
Nobody wanted to do this, of course, but the foyer was as clean as it could be. They had no choice but to set off down one of the corridors with their cleaning supplies.
Tess led the way and saw that the corridor was covered in the same awful teddy-bear-picnic wallpaper as the foyer. There were no windows, but lamps lined the walls, giving everything a sickly sort of glow. She could see several closed doors stretching away from them down the corridor.
Tess was about to walk up to the first door when Stacy let out a squeak and pointed at the wallpaper.
“I know,” Tess sighed. “It’s very ugly.”
“No, look!” Stacy gasped. “Look at what they’re eating. Look what’s in the sandwiches!”
Tess looked more closely and then sucked in her breath. She hadn’t paid much attention to the picnic before, but now she saw what seemed to be dolls’ fingers sticking out of the teddy bears’ sandwiches. And dolls’ eyes in the bowls. There was even a doll’s head being used as a ball in some kind of game in the background.
Tess shuddered and then glanced back at the younger ones. “We all knew that the teddy bears were warped and evil before we came here, didn’t we?”
Her siblings nodded back, looking miserable.
“Come on, then,” Tess said.
They carried on walking, but then something dropped off the wall just in front of Tess. It rolled across the floor until it came to rest against her shoe and stopped. She thought it was a marble at first, but then she picked it up and saw it was a doll’s eye. A cold white ball, with a blue iris painted in the middle. The eye even had several thick eyelashes glued to the top.
“What is that?” Oliver demanded.
Tess showed it to him without saying a word. They all jumped as another eye popped right out of the wall, and another and another, until there were dozens of eyes rolling around on the floor.
“They’re coming out of the wallpaper!” Stacy cried, pointing.
Tess saw she was right. One of the bowls of eyeballs on the wallpaper was somehow spilling real dolls’ eyes out into the corridor.
“But … that’s not possible!” Tess exclaimed. She stared at the wall, feeling cross. Evil, rampaging teddy bears was one thing – she had expected those. But dolls’ eyes coming out of the wall was something else altogether and Tess wasn’t going to put up with it.
Oliver went to run towards the nearest door, but Tess grabbed his collar and yanked him back. “No!” she snapped. “We stay together.”
Oliver whimpered but said nothing. And then the flood of eyeballs stopped as quickly as it had begun and the wallpaper was just innocent drawings once again.
“I can’t do this, Tess,” Oliver whispered. “Please. Let me go home.”
Before Tess could reply, there was another sudden sneeze that made everyone jump.
“ATISHOO!”
“Who was that?” Stacy asked. She pushed her glasses further up her nose and stared around wildly.
“There’s something in the walls,” Tess said as she let go of Oliver and tightened her grip on the mop in case she needed it as a weapon.
The other children gasped and looked worried.
“Do you think it’s one of the evil teddy bears?” Niles asked in a low voice.
“I don’t know,” Tess said, and she narrowed her eyes at the nearby wall. The picnicking teddy bears gazed back at her with what seemed to be challenging looks. Tess thought there was something smug about the bears’ whiskers.
She raised her mop and banged on the wall hard with the handle.
“Is something in there?” Tess demanded, trying to sound stronger than she felt.
There was no reply, but one teddy bear in the wallpaper suddenly caught Tess’s eye. There was something different about it and Tess realised what it was. The bear didn’t have painted eyes like the rest of them. Instead its eyes were holes. It was as if something might be hunched behind the wall, peering out at them unseen …
Tess lunged forwards before she could lose her nerve, and pressed her face up close to the teddy bear’s eye holes. To her horror, Tess saw two pale-yellow eyes staring
