Terry Pratchett - Johnny 2 - Johnny and the Dead

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because he was mental.

But Yo-less, who read medical books, said it was probably because he

couldn't focus his mind like normal people. Normal people just ignored al-

most everything that was going on around them, so that they could con-

centrate on important things like, well, getting up, going to the lavatory and

getting on with their lives. Whereas Johnny just opened his eyes in the

morning and the whole universe hit him in the face.

Wobbler said this sounded like 'mental' to him.

Whatever it was called, what it meant was this. Johnny saw things other

people didn't.

Like the dead people hanging around in the cemetery.

The Alderman - at least, the old Alderman - was a bit snobby about

most of the rest of the dead, even about Mr Vicenti, who had a huge black

marble grave with angels and a photograph of Mr Vicenti (1897-1958)

looking not at all dead behind a little window. The Alderman said Mr Vicenti

had been a Capo de Monte in the Mafia. Mr Vicenti told Johnny that, on the

contrary, he had spent his entire life being a wholesale novelty salesman,

amateur escapologist and children's entertainer, which in a number of im-

portant respects was as exactly like not being in the Mafia as it was possi-

ble to get.

the whole, he tried not to think about it.

He'd started using the path along the canal instead of going home on

the bus, and found that if you climbed over the place where the wall had

fallen down, and then went around behind the crematorium, you could cut

off half the journey.

The graves went right up to the canal's edge.

It was one of those old cemeteries you got owls and foxes in and some-

times, in the Sunday papers, people going on about Our Victorian Heritage,

although they didn't go on about this one because it was the wrong kind of

heritage, being too far from London.

Wobbler said it was spooky and sometimes went home the long way,

but Johnny was disappointed that it wasn't spookier. Once you sort of put

out of your mind what it was — once you forgot about all the skeletons un-

derground, grinning away in the dark - it was quite friendly. Birds sang. All

the traffic sounded a long way off. It was peaceful.

He'd had to check a few things, though. Some of the older graves had

big stone boxes on top, and in the wilder parts these had cracked and even

fallen open. He'd had a look inside, just in case.

It had been sort of disappointing to find nothing there.

And then there were the mausoleums. These were much bigger and

had doors in, like little houses. They looked a bit like allotment sheds with

'You notice how there's a lot more Halloween stuff in the shops these

days?' said Wobbler.

'It's because of Bonfire Night,' said Johnny. 'Too many people were

blowing themselves up with fireworks, so they invented Halloween, where

you just wear masks and stuff'

'Mrs Nugent says all that sort of thing is tampering with the occult,' said

Wobbler. Mrs Nugent was the Johnsons' next door neighbour, and known

to be unreasonable on subjects like Madonna played at full volume at 3

a.m.

'Probably it is,' said Johnny.

'She says witches are abroad on Halloween,' said Wobbler.

'What?' Johnny's forehead wrinkled. 'Like ... Marjorca and places?'

'Suppose so,' said Wobbler.

'Makes ... sense, I suppose. They probably get special out-of-season

bargains, being old ladies,' said Johnny. 'My aunt can go anywhere on the

buses for almost nothing and she's not even a witch.'

'Don't see why Mrs Nugent is worried, then,' said Wobbler. 'It ort to be a

lot safer round here, with all the witches on holiday.'

They passed a very ornate mausoleum, which even had little stained-

glass windows. It was hard to imagine who'd want to see in, but then, it was

even harder to imagine who'd want to look out.

'Funny, really,' said Johnny.

'What?'

'I saw a thing in a book once,' said Johnny,' about these people in Mex-

ico or somewhere, where they all go down to the cemetery for a big fiesta

at Halloween every year. Like, they don't see why people should be left out

of things just because they're dead.'

'Yuk. A picnic? In the actual cemetery?'

'Yes.'

'Reckon you'd get green glowing hands pushing up through the earth

and nicking the sarnies?'

'Don't think so. Anyway ... they don't eat sarnies in Mexico. They eat tort

... something.'

'Tortoises.'

'Yeah?'

'I bet,' said Wobbler, looking around, 'I bet ... I bet you wouldn't dare

knock on one of those doors. I bet you'd hear dead people lurchin' about

inside.'

'Why do they lurch?'

Wobbler thought about this.

'They always lurch,' he said. 'Dunno why. I've seen them in videos. And

they can push their way through walls.'

'Being dead, you mean?'

'Probably,' said Wobbler. 'It can't be much of a life.'

Johnny thought about this that evening, after meeting the Alderman.

The only dead people he had known had been Mr Page, who'd died in hos-

pital of something, and his great-grandmother, who'd been ninety-six and

had just generally died. Neither of them had been particularly angry people.

His great-grandmother had been a bit confused about things, but never

angry. He'd visited her in Sunshine Acres, when she watched a lot of tele-

vision and waited for the next meal to turn up. And Mr Page had walked

around quietly, the only man in the street still at home in the middle of the

day.

They didn't seem the sort of people who would get up after being dead

just to dance with Michael Jackson. And the only thing his great-

grandmother would have pushed her way through walls for would be a

television that she could watch without having to fight fifteen other old la-

dies for the remote control.

It seemed to Johnny that a lot of people were getting things all wrong.

He said this to Wobbler. Wobbler disagreed.

'It's prob'ly all different from a dead point of view,' he said.

Now they were walking along West Avenue. The cemetery was laid out

like a town, with streets. They weren't named very originally — North Drive

'That's what he said,' said Wobbler. Even he looked a bit uncertain. 'He

said it was a scandal.'

'Even the bit with the poplar trees?'

'All of it,' said Wobbler. 'It's going to be offices or something.'

Johnny looked at the cemetery. It was the only open space for miles.

'I'd have given them at least a pound,' he said.

'Yes, but you wouldn't have been able to build things on it,' said Wob-

bler. 'That's the important thing.'

'I wouldn't want to build anything on it. I'd have given them a pound just

to leave it as it is.

'Yes,' said Wobbler, the voice of reason, 'but people have got to work

somewhere. We Need jobs.'

'I bet the people here won't be very happy about it,' said Johnny. 'If they

knew.'

'I think they get moved somewhere else,' said Wobbler. 'It's got to be

something like that. Otherwise you'll never dare dig your garden.'

Johnny looked up at the nearest tomb. It was one of the ones that

looked like a shed built of marble. Bronze lettering over the door said:

ALDERMAN THOMAS BOWLER

1822-1906 Pro Bono Publico

Anyway,' he said, lowering his voice a bit, 'it's wrong to try to talk to the

dead. It can lead to satanic practices, it said on television.'

'Don't see why,' said Johnny.

He knocked again.

And the door opened.

Alderman Thomas Bowler blinked in the sunlight, and then glared at

Johnny.

'Yes?' he said.

Johnny turned and ran for it.

Wobbler caught him up halfway along North Drive. Wobbler wasn't nor-

mally the athletic type, and his speed would have surprised quite a lot of

people who knew him.

'What happened? What happened?' he panted.

'Didn't you see?' said Johnny.

'I didn't see anything!'

'The door opened!'

'It never!'

'It did!'

Wobbler slowed down.

'No, it didn't,' he muttered. 'No one of 'em can open. I've looked at 'em.

They've all got padlocks on.'

It was true, actually. He'd noticed it in the past.

All the mausoleums had locks on them, to stop vandals getting in.

And yet ... and yet ...

If he shut his eyes he could see Alderman Thomas Bowler. Not one of

the lurchin' dead from out of Wobbler's videos, but a huge fat man in a fur-

trimmed robe and a gold chain and a hat with corners on.

He stopped running and then, slowly, walked back the way he had

come.

There was a padlock on the door of the Alderman's tomb. It had a rusty

look.

It was the talking to Wobbler that did it, Johnny decided. It had given

him silly ideas.

He knocked again, anyway.

'Yes?' said Alderman Thomas Bowler.

'Er ... hah ... sorry...'

'What do you want?'

'Are you dead?

The Alderman raised his eyes to the bronze letters over the door.

'See what it says up there?' he said.

'Er ... '

'Was that all?'

'Er ... yes.'

The Alderman nodded sadly. 'I didn't think it'd be anything important,' he

said. 'I haven't had a visitor since nineteen twenty-three. And then they'd

got the name wrong! They weren't even relatives. And they were American.

Oh, well. Goodbye, then.'

Johnny hesitated. I could turn around now, he thought, and go home.

And if I turn around, I'll never find out what happens next. I'll go away

and I'll never know why it happened now and what would have happened

next. I'll go away and grow up and get a job and get married and have chil-

dren and become a grandad and retire and take up bowls and go into Sun-

shine Acres and watch daytime television until I die, and I'll never know.

And he thought: perhaps I did. Perhaps that all happened and then, just

when I was dying, some kind of angel turned up and said would you like a

wish? And I said, yes, I'd like to know what would have happened if I hadn't

run away, and the angel said, OK, you can go back. And here I am, back

again. I can't let myself down.

The world waited.

Johnny took a step forward.

'You're dead, right?' he said slowly.

'Oh, yes. It's one of those things one is pretty certain about.'

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摘要：

becausehewasmental.ButYo-less,whoreadmedicalbooks,saiditwasprobablybecausehecouldn'tfocushismindlikenormalpeople.Normalpeoplejustignoredal-mosteverythingthatwasgoingonaroundthem,sothattheycouldcon-centrateonimportantthingslike,well,gettingup,goingtothelavatoryandgettingonwiththeirlives.WhereasJohnny...

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