Something rotten by Jasper Fforde Read Free Book Online Page A

Alexander the Great turned up when I was nine. Nice enough fellow—but shocking table manners.
    “So, how are you enjoying 1988, Herr Bismarck?”
    “I am especially taken with the concept of dry cleaning,” replied the Prussian, “and I see big things ahead for the gasoline engine.” He turned back to my mother: “But I am most eager to speak to the Danish prime minister. Where might he be?”
    “I think we’re having a teensy-weensy bit of trouble locating him,” replied my mother, waving the cake knife. “Would you care for a slice of Battenberg instead?”
    “Ah!” replied Bismarck, his demeanor softening. He stepped delicately over DH-82 to sit next to my mother. “The finest Battenberg I have ever tasted!”
    “Oh, Herr B,” said my flustered mother. “You do flatter me so!”
    She made shooing motions at us out of vision of Bismarck and, obedient children that we were, we withdrew from the living room.
    “Well!” said Joffy as we shut the door. “How about that? Mum’s after a bit of Teutonic slap and tickle!”
    I raised an eyebrow and stared at him.
    “I hardly think so, Joff. Dad doesn’t turn up that often and intelligent male company can be hard to find.”
    Joffy chuckled.
    “Just good friends, eh? Okay. Here’s the deal: I’ll bet you a tenner Mum and the Iron Chancellor are doing the wild thing by this time next week.”
    “Done.”
    We shook hands and with Emma, Hamlet, Bismarck and my mother thus engaged, I asked Joffy to look after Friday so I could slip out of the house to get some air.
    I turned left and wandered up Marlborough Road, looking about at the changes that two years’ absence had wrought. I had walked this way to school for almost eight years, and every wall and tree and house was as familiar to me as an old friend. A new hotel had gone up on Piper’s Way, and a few shops in the Old Town had either changed hands or been updated. It all felt very familiar, and I wondered whether the feeling of wanting to belong somewhere would stay with me or fade, like my fondness for Caversham Heights, the book in which I had made my home these past few years.
    I walked down Bath Road, took a right and found myself in the street where Landen and I had lived before he was eradicated. I had returned home one afternoon to find his mother and father in residence. Since they hadn’t known who I was and considered—not unreasonably—that I was dangerously insane, I decided to play it safe today and just walk past slowly on the other side of the street.
    Nothing looked very different. A tub of withered Tickia orologica was still on the porch next to an old pogo stick, and the curtains in the windows were certainly his mother’s. I walked on, then retraced my steps and returned, my resolve to get him back mixed with a certain fatalism that perhaps ultimately I wouldn’t and the thought that I should prepare myself. After all, he had died when he was two years old, and I had no memories of how it had been, but only of how things might have turned out had he lived.
    I shrugged my shoulders and chastised myself upon the morbidity of my own thoughts, then walked towards the Goliath Twilight Homes, where my gran was staying these days.
    Granny Next was in her room watching a nature documentary called Walking with Ducks when I was shown in by the nurse. Gran was wearing a blue gingham nightie, had wispy gray hair and looked all of her 110 years. She had got it into her head that she couldn’t shuffle off this mortal coil until she had read the ten most boring books, but since “boring” was about as impossible to quantify as “not boring,” it was difficult to know how to help.
    “Shhh!” she muttered as soon as I walked in. “This program’s fascinating! ” She was staring at the TV screen earnestly. “Just think,” she went on, “by analyzing the bones of the extinct duck Anas platyrhynchos, they can actually figure out how it walked.”
    I stared at the small screen where an