Far Far Away by Tom McNeal Read Free Book Online Page A

that
digital
comes from the Latin
digitus
, meaning
finger
, but had forgotten the Greek root for
podiatry
. “Don’t tell me,” he would say, but finally I would have to tell him.
    “Pous, podos,”
he repeated,
“pous, podos,”
and, really, he was so earnest that something in my ancient soul went out to him.
    Accord
, I said, and he said, “
Agreement
, from the Latin
ac
or
ad
, meaning
to
or
toward
, and
cor, cordis
meaning
heart
.”
    Exzellent
, I said, and had begun to pronounce the next word when suddenly I heard a strange tapping sound.
    Jeremy cocked his head.
    And then it came again:
tap, tap, tap
.
    It seemed to come from the small door between the attic and the tiny gabled balcony.
    By the clock, it was 9:40 p.m., a time when few in the village ventured out.
    Louder now:
tap, tap, tap, tap
.
    “See what it is,” Jeremy whispered to me, but he knew I could not, not unless he opened the door. (As a rule of thumb, I tell Jeremy that if a cricket can get in, so can a ghost.)
    The tapping grew even sharper and more insistent:
tap, tap, tap, tap, tap!
    Jeremy crept slowly toward the half door, but as he approached, the tapping stopped as abruptly as it had started. Now silence itself seemed eerie. Jeremy leaned toward the window and was staring out when a masked face suddenly appeared in the glass!
    “Eh!” Jeremy said, or perhaps, “Ek!” and lurched backward. Who could blame him?—a masked face in the window will give any mortal a turn—but now the terror in Jeremy’s expression was caught by a beam of light directed in from the window.
    How was this? How did a lantern get up to this high balcony?
    But look! The light slowly turned on itself and a hand appeared,gripped the knitted mask, and slowly pulled it free to reveal the face of … a grinning Ginger Boultinghouse!
    And perched precariously on the balcony behind her were her two girlfriends, also in high mirth.
    Ginger motioned for Jeremy to open the small door, and the girls came spilling and laughing into the attic, each carrying a rucksack and each dressed from head to toe in black clothes.
    “Very funny,” Jeremy said in a peevish tone.
    But Ginger was unrepentant. “You’re right,” she said, grinning. “It was, very.” She looked around. “Zounds,” she said. “Kind of stuffy up here in Johnson-Johnsonville.”
    Maddy walked over to the window that gave onto the back of the alleyway and began to unlatch it.
    “Wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Jeremy said, but she already had, and a foul smell streamed in.
    The girl slammed the window closed and held a hand over her nose. “Wow,” she gasped. “Are you storing, like, a thousand rotten eggs out there?”
    “It’s the hot springs behind the building. It can be kind of bad when the wind’s from the north.”
    “Kind of bad?”
Maddy said. “How about cruel and unusual?”
    Ginger meanwhile was looking around the attic. “This is pretty fabulous, Jeremy. Awful snug, though. You’d have more room if you had fewer books.”
    He glanced at the shelves. “Yeah, well. They aren’t really mine. They’re my mother’s.”
    She regarded a small cane-seated rocking chair. “That for when elves visit?”
    “No,” Jeremy said. “It was mine. When I was …”
    “Little?” Ginger said.
    “Yeah.”
    Ginger plopped onto Jeremy’s mattress, the other girls sprawled on the floor, and Jeremy said, “So how’d you get up here?”
    “Not hard,” Ginger said. “Only tricky stretch was climbing the cast-iron pipe to the roof. From there, your cute little balcony is within arm’s reach.”
    Marjory said, “That’s if you have monkey arms like Ginger. For me and Maddy, we’re talking near-death experience.”
    It was true. I often took this route myself, but I would not have thought it easy for mortals.
    Jeremy, too, seemed impressed. I could see that his peevishness was receding.
    “Okay,” he said, “that takes care of
how
. What I don’t get is
why
.”
    “He’s