Something rotten by Jasper Fforde Read Free Book Online Page B

odd animated bird waddled strangely in a backwards direction as the narrator explained just how they had managed to deduce such a thing.
    “How could they know that just by looking at a few old bones?” I asked doubtfully, having learned my lesson long ago that an “expert” was usually anything but.
    “Scoff not, young Thursday,” replied Gran. “A panel of expert avian paleontologists have even deduced that a duck’s call might have sounded something like this: ‘Quock, quock.’ ”
    “ ‘Quock’? Hardly seems likely.”
    “Perhaps you’re right,” she replied, switching off the TV and tossing the remote aside. “What do experts know?”
    Like me, Gran was able to jump inside fiction. I wasn’t sure how either of us did it, but I was very glad that she could—it was she who helped me not to forget my husband, something at one time I was in a clear and real danger of doing thanks to Aornis, the mnemonomorph, of course. But Gran had left me about a year ago, announcing that I could fend for myself and she wouldn’t waste any more time laboring for me hand and foot, which was a bit of cheek really, as I generally looked after her. But no matter. She was my gran, and I loved her a great deal.
    “Goodness!” I said, looking at her soft and wrinkled skin, which put me oddly in mind of a baby echidna I had once seen in National Geographic .
    “What?” she asked sharply.
    “Nothing.”
    “Nothing? You were thinking of how old I was looking, weren’t you?”
    It was hard to deny it. Every time I saw her, I felt she couldn’t look any older, but the next time, with startling regularity, she did.
    “When did you get back?”
    “This morning.”
    “And how are you finding things?”
    I brought her up to date with current events. She made “tuttutting” noises when I told her about Hamlet and Lady Hamilton, then even louder “tut-tut” noises when I mentioned my mother and Bismarck.
    “Risky business, that.”
    “Mum and Bismarck?”
    “Emma and Hamlet.”
    “He’s fictional and she’s historical—what could be wrong about that?”
    “I was thinking,” she said slowly, raising an eyebrow, “about what would happen if Ophelia found out.”
    I hadn’t thought of that, and she was right. Hamlet could be difficult, but Ophelia was impossible.
    “I always thought the reason Sir John Falstaff retired from policing Elizabethan drama was to get away from Ophelia’s sometimes unreasonable demands,” I mused, “such as having petting animals and a goodly supply of mineral water and fresh sushi on hand at Elsinore whenever she was working. Do you think I should insist Hamlet return to Hamlet ?”
    “Perhaps not right away,” said Gran, coughing into her hanky. “Let him see what the real world is like. Might do him good to realize it needn’t take five acts to make up one’s mind.”
    She started coughing again, so I called the nurse, who told me I should probably leave her. I kissed her good-bye and walked out of the rest home deep in thought, trying to work up a strategy for the next few days. I dreaded to think what my overdraft was like, and if I was to catch Kaine I’d be better off inside SpecOps than outside. There were no two ways about it: I needed my old job back. I’d attempt that tomorrow and take it from there. Kaine certainly needed dealing with, and I’d play it by ear at the TV studios tonight. I’d probably have to find a speech therapist for Friday to try to wean him off the Lorem Ipsum, and then, of course, there was Landen. How do I even begin to get someone returned to the here-and-now after they were deleted from the there-and-then by a chronupt official from the supposedly incorruptible ChronoGuard.

    I was jolted from my thoughts as I approached Mum’s house. There appeared to be someone partially hidden from view in the alleyway opposite. I nipped into the nearest front garden, ran between the houses, across two back gardens and then stood on a dustbin to peak