Johnny and the Dead
Contents (19)
Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Author’s Note
Read On
About the Author
Also by Terry Pratchett
Copyright
ABOUT THE BOOK
Sell the cemetery?
Over their dead bodies . . .
Not many people can see the dead (not many would want to). Twelve-year-old Johnny Maxwell can. And he’s got bad news for them: the council want to sell the cemetery as a building site. But the dead aren’t going to take it lying down … especially since it’s Halloween tomorrow.
Besides, they’re beginning to find that life is a lot more fun than it was when they were … well … alive. Particularly if they break a few rules …
TERRY
PRATCHETT
A JOHNNY MAXWELL Story
JOHNNY
AND THE
DEAD
Chapter 1
Johnny never knew for certain why he started seeing the dead.
The Alderman said it was probably because he was too lazy not to.
Most people’s minds don’t let them see things that might upset them, he said. The Alderman said he should know if anyone did, because he’d spent his whole life (1822–1906) not seeing things.
Wobbler Johnson, who was technically Johnny’s best friend, said it was 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 almost everything that was going on around them, so that they could concentrate 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 important respects was as exactly like not being in the Mafia as it was possible to get.
But all this was later. After he’d got to know the dead a lot better. After the raising of the ghost of the Ford Capri.
*
Johnny really discovered the cemetery after he’d started living at Grandad’s. This was Phase Three of Trying Times, after the shouting, which had been bad, and the Being Sensible About Things (which had been worse; people are better at shouting). Now his dad was getting a new job somewhere on the other side of the country. There was a vague feeling that it might all work out, now that people had stopped trying to be sensible. On the whole, he tried not to think about it.