The Emperor of Any Place by Tim Wynne-Jones Read Free Book Online

poster for
The Exorcist.
    “Oh, shit,” he murmurs to himself.
    The old man shakes his head slowly, turns, and heads up the pathway toward the front porch. His face is disgruntled, stern, and creased like old stone, eroded. Evan wants to lock the door against him. Run around the house and lock all the doors and windows. Pull down the shades. Instead he just steps back three long paces and then two more and waits for the door to open.
    If Griff is surprised to see him standing there, he doesn’t act it. Evan hears his father whispering in his ear. “He has stormed a thousand beaches. He’s used to hostile welcoming parties.”
    “Ah, you’re up,” he says.
    “Hi,” says Evan, nodding. He watches Griff size him up — sees himself through the old soldier’s eyes: lanky, underweight, with a loaf of dirty-blond hair, the sides buzzed, and a vertical tat on his skinny neck that reads: “.44 caliber love letter.” He’s dressed in sprayed-on black jeans, a studded belt, and a wrinkled and torn red T-shirt. It’s the one with the “March of Evolution” on it: an ape following a less hairy ape walking on his hind legs, following a guy with a club in his hands, following one with a spear on his shoulder. Modern man leads the parade, but this one is turned to face the posse and he looks pissed. “Stop following me!” say the words in the balloon.
    Evan is barefoot. And where was it he left his club?
    In the same instant he sizes up his grandfather: under the dripping black raincoat, a yellow golf shirt and tan chinos with pleats so sharp you could cut your finger on them. There’s no bunching at the knees to suggest the man was sitting on a plane or riding in a taxi. Maybe he stood at attention the whole way from Raleigh-Durham. There’s a scar above his right eye, a little white zigzag, where the gray eyebrow hair doesn’t grow.
    Evan takes the man’s raincoat and hangs it up, separating it from what’s already hanging there, his father’s coats and jackets. He watches Griff open the front zippered pocket of his luggage and pull out a clear plastic bag with a drawstring. He takes out a pair of brown cordovans. With tassels. Griff steps out of his shiny black shoes, beaded with raindrops, and into the cordovans. The skin of his arms and face is almost as brown as his shoes and several degrees darker than healthy. His hair is nothing but gray bristle. “Not a buzz cut,” his father’s voice whispers to him. “It’s called a ‘high and tight.’” Evan smiles to himself, remembering his father rubbing his own balding scalp. “The first battleground between the old man and me was the top of my head.”
    Griff holds Evan’s eye as if uncertain where the smile lingering there might have come from. He manages something like a smile, a slight rearrangement of the deep crevices in his face. His eyes are the Griffin-clan blue, except that Griff ’s are darker, clouded by how much they’ve seen. The two of them shake hands stiffly. There’s nothing old about the man’s grip; Evan holds on for dear life.
    He clears his throat. “Was it an okay flight?”
    “No, since you asked. Our ETD was pushed back three times, the coffee was rancid, and there was a mother with a newborn beside me who cried the whole way.”
    “The mother or the baby?”
    Griff does not favor him with a reply.
Note to self: Joking doesn’t seem to have any good effect.
The look in Griff ’s eye reminds Evan of a word he’s only ever heard in war movies: insubordination. Whoever is accused of it usually ends up in the brig.
    There’s this awkward moment.
I should be doing something,
Evan thinks.
Something other than running away, screaming.
    “We can talk in the morning,” says Griff, taking charge of the situation. “Where do you want to put me?”
    “Uh, the family room,” says Evan. “There’s a bathroom down there, flat-screen TV, a mini-fridge in the bar, and it’s a lot cooler in the summer.”
    “I’m not buying the