The white smoke writhed and curled above the cottage chimney. For a fraction of an instant Adam saw, outlined in the smoke, a handsome, female face. A face that hadn’t been seen on Earth for over three hundred years.
Agnes Nutter winked at him.
The light summer breeze dispersed the smoke; and the face and the laughter were gone.
Adam grinned, and began to run once more.
In a meadow a short distance away, across a stream, the boy caught up with the wet and muddy dog. “Bad Dog,” said Adam, scratching Dog behind the ears. Dog yapped ecstatically.
Adam looked up. Above him hung an old apple tree, gnarled and heavy. It might have been there since the dawn of time. Its boughs were bent with the weight of apples, small and green and unripe.
With the speed of a striking cobra the boy was up the tree. He returned to the ground seconds later with his pockets bulging, munching noisily on a tart and perfect apple.
“Hey! You! Boy!” came a gruff voice from behind him. “You’re that Adam Young! I can see you! I’ll tell your father about you, you see if I don’t!”
Parental retribution was now a certainty, thought Adam, as he bolted, his dog by his side, his pockets stuffed with stolen fruit.
It always was. But it wouldn’t be till this evening.
And this evening was a long way off.
He threw the apple core back in the general direction of his pursuer, and he reached into a pocket for another.
He couldn’t see why people made such a fuss about peo
ple eating their silly old fruit anyway, but life would be a lot less fun if they didn’t. And there never was an apple, in Adam’s opinion, that wasn’t worth the trouble you got into for eating it.
IF YOU WANT TO IMAGINE the future, imagine a boy and his dog and his friends. And a summer that never ends.
And if you want to imagine the future, imagine a boot … no, imagine a sneaker, laces trailing, kicking a pebble; imagine a stick, to poke at interesting things, and throw for a dog that may or may not decide to retrieve it; imagine a tuneless whistle, pounding some luckless popular song into insensibility; imagine a figure, half angel, half devil, all human …
Slouching hopefully towards Tadfield. …
. . . forever.
About the Authors
TERRY PRATCHETT is the internationally bestselling author of more than thirty books, including his phenomenally successful Discworld series. His young adult novel The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents won the Carnegie Medal, and Where’s My Cow?, his Discworld book for “readers of all ages,” was a New York Times bestseller. Named an Officer of the British Empire “for services to literature,” Pratchett lives in England. (He has drunk enough banana daiquiris, thank you. It’s G & Ts from now on.)
www.terrypratchettbooks.com
NEIL GAIMAN is the critically acclaimed and award-winning creator of the Sandman series of graphic novels and author of the novels Anansi Boys, American Gods, Neverwhere, Stardust, and Coraline, the short fiction collections Fragile Things and Smoke and Mirrors, and the New York Times bestselling children’s books The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish and The Wolves in the Walls. Originally from England, Gaiman now lives in the United States. (He is still 5’11” tall and continues to be partial to black T-shirts.)
www.neilgaiman.com
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HEAVENLY PRAISE FOR
Good Omens
“Full-bore contemporary lunacy. A steamroller of silliness that made me giggle out loud.”
—San Diego Union-Tribune
“Something like what would have happened if Thomas Pynchon, Tom Robbins, and Don DeLillo had collaborated on the screenplay of a remake of the Jack Benny film The Horn Blows at Midnight. … It’s a wow. … It would make one hell of a movie. Or a heavenly one. Take your pick.”
—Washington Post