There was a clock, but at some time in the past the mains had gone off for a while and although people must have sorted out every other clock in the house, they’d forgotten about this one, so it just sat and flashed 7:41 continuously, day and night. But an absence of sound from below suggested that it was still early in the morning.

He snuggled down, treasuring this time stolen between dreaming and waking.

So . . . what next? He’d have to talk to Kirsty, who dreamed of being Sigourney and forgot that she was trying to be someone who was acting. And he had a suspicion that he’d see his parents before long. He was probably going to be talked at a lot, but at least that’d make a change.

These were still Trying Times. There was still school. Nothing actually was better, probably. No one was doing anything with a magic wand.

But the fleet had got away. Compared to that, everything else was . . . well, not easy. But less like a wall and more like steps.

You might never win, but at least you could try. If not you, who else?

He turned over and went back to sleep.

The Border hung in the sky.

Huge white letters, thousands of miles high. They spelled:

And the fleet roared past. Tankers, battleships, fighters . . . they soared and rolled, their shadows streaking across the letters as ship after ship escaped, for ever.

Read On

If you enjoyed ONLY YOU CAN SAVE MANKIND, you’ll love JOHNNY AND THE DEAD, the next adventure starring Johnny Maxwell.

Here’s the first chapter to get you started . . .

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.