Monday 9th November 2015

Lola and Mouse arrived back this morning. It turns out that they hadn't been in Norway all this time after all, but had flown over to Ireland to find Kuriana (who had been staying near Professor Spotiswode, Atticus and his new family) and ask her to come over to Wales. Then, the three of them had travelled to the Welsh island containing the Peculiars' home in which Mouse was made. Kuriana is now hiding in the (modern-day) ruins of the bombed-out building which used to be the orphanage. Mouse is hoping to pass through the Time Loop that leads back to 3rd September 1940, so that he can rescue any of his clay brothers who want to leave, and bring them out of the Loop to meet Kuriana, so that she can harden them into proper golems, like him.

'Couldn't Kuriana go into the Loop?' I asked. 'After all, if these Peculiars are used to seeing unusual things, they might not panic too much about seeing a dragon.'

I could imagine some of the other children in the Loop whom Mouse had told me about – maybe the little levitating girl, the brawny super-strong girl, or the invisible boy – even wanting to come and pat Kuriana. But if she talked to Enoch about abusing his power over the people he brought into the world – well, she might be able to make more of an impression on him than punishment could ever do.

'She was too big,' said Mouse. 'You have to walk through a tunnel to go back in time, and it's low enough that even a human would have to crawl rather than walking upright. Not that any humans apart from Peculiars can travel in time anyway, of course. I can – or I could before, when I left – and I don't know whether that's something all enchanted creatures, like homunculi and enchanted ravens, can do, or whether it's because I was born in a Loop.'

'Did you go back in?' I asked.

'I didn't dare,' Mouse admitted. 'At least – Lola flew me through the tunnel and we just came out in the present day, but that could just be because she's not a Peculiar and you couldn't get toy aeroplanes like hers in 1940. I ought to have walked in on my own and faced Enoch myself, but I was too much of coward. So, I was wondering whether – maybe if you came with me…'

'I'm a coward, too,' I said. 'I can't cope with frightening things unless I'm with my Master.' Mouse looked so despondent that I added, 'But I'll come with you anyway, if it helps. That way, whichever of us starts screaming first, the other one will need to comfort him, and will probably be too busy with that to think of panicking.'

'I can come with you,' my Master offered. 'After all, if I am a Peculiar, I can come through the tunnel with you. And if not, at least you'll know that I'm just at the other end.'

'It's a nice idea,' said Professor Greenbloom. 'And I've got to admit that I wouldn't mind visiting Wales again. I've heard some interesting rumours of sightings of afancs (pronounced avancs) and water leapers. Water leapers are like a sort of giant frog with bat wings, no legs, a long tail with a stinger on the end, but nobody seems to be sure what afancs look like – they've been compared to everything from crocodiles to beavers. But we'd better not go anywhere until the weekend, at least. We've got another appointment with your social worker on Wednesday, and we need to be able to satisfy her that while you're suspended from school, I'm keeping you at home and making sure you get on with the work the school sends you, rather than constantly rushing off on holiday.'

'Do you want to wait until the weekend?' my Master asked Mouse and me.

'I suppose a few more days probably won't make much difference after seventy-five years, but – I just don't want to leave it any longer,' said Mouse. 'At the very least, I need to go in, confront Enoch, and talk to any of the clay men who'll listen. But we need to set up a sculpting programme to do what Twigleg did for me – give them facial features, mouths, and hands, before Kuriana fires them. If you could lend me any sculpture tools – things like pins or cocktail sticks for carving fine detail, brushes for creating hair texture, and so on – I can make a start as soon as I get back.'

'I'll come with you – that is, if you can spare me,' I added to my Master, who nodded encouragingly. 'I think I'll be all right, because the place you came from isn't my nightmare. If we sculpt a couple of the volunteers and bring them through the loop and then Kuriana fires them, they might be able to come back and sculpt some more.'

'What about us?' put in Bwbach indignantly. 'I bet brownies can get through magical tunnels into the past, and we've got sharp claws for sculpting with – well, except Blue, and he's handier with tools than the rest of us put together.'

'And birds are renowned for their skill as time travellers, so enchanted birds should have even more of an advantage,' added Miranda, 'and we've got claws and beaks.'

After some discussion, we realised that all the humans and several of the ravens wanted to visit Wales, and get into the Loop if possible, but that none of the brownies except Bwbach wanted to leave the house. Lola, on the other hand, wants to go back to Ireland to catch up on seeing friends there whom she'd barely had time to talk to when they were looking for Kuriana. So the plan is that Johan will drive his van down tomorrow with me, Mouse, Bwbach, Miranda, Pete, Rupert, and Rupert's girlfriend Bess, and that we'll do what we can before everyone else comes to join us at the weekend. It's a hundred miles from here to the island, so about two hours' drive followed by a ferry ride onto the island itself.

In the meantime, Mouse has spent the evening telling us everything he knows about the home in the Loop, the Headmistress who runs it and who can turn into a peregrine falcon, the children, the slobbery old dog, the topiary centaur in the garden who comes alive when a certain girl pulls on his tail, the way it's always a sunny day there, and the way the people in the Loop feast on roast goose and salmon every day, and the way there's a bombing raid every night, like the firework parties last Thursday but even noisier, with the Loop re-setting to the previous day just before a bomb can destroy the house.

I don't know where they get so much food from, as they're living in a time when there is a war on, and everyone else in Britain is living on rations. Mouse couldn't explain that – as he doesn't eat, I suppose he'd never thought about it. Possibly the orphanage has some kind of farm – but if time never passes there, how could animals or plants grow to adulthood and be killed and eaten?

Mouse said that his creator and some of the other older children make a game of stealing from the neighbouring village, outside the Loop, knowing that everything will be back to normal there by the next day. Johan and Professor Greenbloom smiled in an embarrassed way and admitted that when they were children, they did that, too. Apparently, leaving a Loop is dangerous for Peculiars as it can cause sudden ageing, but only if they stay out for more than an hour or so – a brief visit is safe enough. (Of course, for a shapeshifter like Johan, it doesn't matter anyway, as he can just morph into the form of someone younger.) So perhaps, even in a Loop set during a war, the Headmistress could go to the shops earlier in the day – before her charges have been causing trouble – and buy food, using up a week's worth of money and rationing points, because tomorrow is exactly the same day and by then the ration book will be unmarked again and the money back in her purse.

At any rate, there is a ready supply of animal hearts from the butcher. Enoch uses the chicken hearts, as well as the hearts of trapped mice, for animating his clay men, and transplants the hearts of bigger animals like pigs into a dead friend of his, to revive him for a few minutes so that everyone can chat to him. Mouse says that when the clay battles aren't just all-against-all (which they frequently are), the Mouse-Hearts join into one army to fight against the Chicken-Hearts.

Mouse isn't sure what to do about this tribal rivalry. If the Mouse-Hearts accept him, the Chicken-Hearts might regard him as their enemy and want to smash him to pieces – but on the other hand, the Mouse-Hearts might still regard him as a traitor because he ran away rather than help to mash Chicken-Hearts.

If they want to be made into golems, we don't know whether they'll want to be sculpted first (Mouse did, but he admits he's unusual), nor what forms they'll want to take. They might not want to be humanoid at all. Possibly the Mouse-Hearts will want rodent features (Mouse quite likes the idea of sculpting statues of Lola), and the Chicken-Hearts might want birdlike beaks (the ravens hope they will, anyway).

What we aren't sure of is what the 'clay men' are made of apart from their hearts. Mouse was made from plasticine, but, as a child's toy, that might have been even more difficult than food to buy in wartime. If a lot of them are made out of mud scooped out of the ground, what's to stop them drying and cracking before we can bring them to Kuriana?

Still, we can work out the details when we get there and have a chance to talk to them. I'd better get some sleep now. But with an adventure like this waiting to start, it's going to be hard to settle down.