Floods 7 by Colin Thompson Read Free Book Online Page A

‘What do you have to be depressed about? You can leave here whenever you want. Just turn into that big bird again, fall off that rock and soar away over the horizon to somewhere else and a bright new tomorrow.’
    The Hearse Whisperer liked rats as much as she liked anything. They lived in disgusting places andcarried all sorts of awful diseases like the bubonic plague. They were her kind of animal.

    â€˜There is a somewhere else over the horizon, isn’t there?’ said the rat. ‘This island isn’t the whole world, is it?’
    â€˜No, there’s millions of other places and nearly all of them are a lot bigger than here,’ said the Hearse Whisperer.
    â€˜And do the humans in all these other places try to kill every rat they see like they do here?’
    â€˜Well, yes, actually they do.’
    â€˜Now I’m even more depressed,’ said the rat. ‘I was going to ask you to take me with you when you go, but there doesn’t seem much point. I might as well stay here and take my chances with the other rats on annual Ratting Day.’ 22
    The Hearse Whisperer had come to the conclusion that Tristan da Cunha rats were not cool harbingers of doom and destruction like rats everywhere else, but whingeing, boring creatures who thought the wickedest thing they could do was bite a potato.
    If I had my way , she thought, every day would be Ratting Day .
    â€˜See that little hole down there with the volcanic steam slipping out from underneath it,’ she said, pointing down into the sleeping volcano. ‘Did you know that it is a magic time-warp gate that leads to another world?’
    â€˜Wow, that’s amazing,’ said the rat. ‘So if I go down there I’ll be transported away from here and into a bright new tomorrow?’
    â€˜Oh yes,’ said the Hearse Whisperer. ‘I promise you that if you go down that hole, your future will be very bright indeed.’
    Very short, but very, very bright , she thought.
    â€˜Brilliant,’ said the rat and ran down into the volcano.
    â€˜BYE!’ he shouted back up to the Hearse Whisperer.
    â€˜Whatever.’ She held her nose because she couldn’t stand the smell of burning rat fur.

    By an unbelievable fluke, the hole was not a vent from the seething fires at the centre of the Earth as the Hearse Whisperer had presumed, but a real time-warp gate to another world, one of only three on this planet. 23 Well, not so much to another world, as to another country. So the poor innocent rat was not frizzled into oblivion, but whooshed away from Tristan da Cunha to a small cobbled square somewhere in Belgium. Unfortunately, the rat only had about 2.4 seconds to start thinking, Wow, this is brilliant , before he was flattened by a tram.
    The rat incident was the highlight of the Hearse Whisperer’s four weeks’ holiday on Tristan da Cunha.

‘My beloved,’ cried Queen Scratchrot, her eyes overflowing with tears of joy. ‘Is that really you?’
    Vessel, the Queen’s true love, was still trapped inside the enchanted birdcage in the body of a crow, and as one crow pretty much looks like another crow, even to another crow, Queen Scratchrot could only hope that the scruffy black bird looking up at her was indeed her beloved Vessel and not some devious fake planted there by the Hearse Whisperer.
    â€˜Yes, my beloved, it is I, your true love and faithful servant,’ said Vessel, who then spoilt theromance of the moment by adding, ‘Who’s a pretty boy then?’
    â€˜Snip-Snip think you truly gorgeous hunk,’ said Parsnip, who appreciated Vessel’s fine coal-black plumage as only another crow could. ‘Snip-Snip say you cool dude number one pretty boy.’
    â€˜Can you return my true love to his old self?’ the Queen asked Mordonna.
    â€˜Yes and no,’ said Mordonna. ‘First we must free him from the enchanted birdcage and to do that we must immerse