The boy nodded his head proudly. ‘I reckernise most of them,’ he said, ‘but they’re nearly all accidents. I said “sorry” for each one.’
‘That, you see,’ Nixie interrupted, ‘makes all the difference. If you break a thing on purpose in a temper, you murder it; but the accidents come down here and feel nothing. They hardly know who broke them. In the end they all find their pieces. It’s the heaven of broken things, we call it. But now let’s send them away.’
‘How?’ asked Paul.
‘By forgetting them,’ cried Jonah.
They turned their faces away and began to think of other things, and at once the figures began to fade and grow dim. The lights went out one by one. The grotesque shapes melted into the trees, and a minute later there was nothing to be seen but the slender larch stems and the play of sunlight and shadow beneath their branches.
‘You see how it works, at any rate,’ Nixie said. ‘Anything you’ve lost or broken will come back if you think hard enough—nice things as well as nasty things—but they must be real, real things, and you must want them in a real, real way.’
It was, indeed, he saw, the region where thoughts come true.
‘Then do broken people come here too?’ Paul asked gravely after a considerable pause, during which his thoughts went profoundly wandering.
‘Yes; only we don’t happen to know any. But all our dead animals are here, all the kittens that had to be drowned, and the puppies that died, and the collie the Burdons’ motor killed, and Birthday, our old horse that had to be shot. They’re all here, and all happy.’
‘Let’s go and see them then,’ he cried, delighted with this idea of a heaven of broken animals.