Read Online Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde - Free Book Online Page A

reserved to accommodate any of the Previous who might return. Once, it was presumed, the houses had simply stood empty, waiting. But time, weather and neglect had taken their toll, and all that remained was these soft grassy mounds and an inviolable Rule that they be kept that way. No one seriously considered that the once-numerous Previous would come back, but Rules are rules.
    “What do you think of our crackletrap?” asked Stafford, indicating the large structure that had been placed atop the flak tower.
    “Impressive,” I murmured.
    “The prefects—Mrs. Gamboge in particular—are very big on the dangers of lightning,” explained the porter. “It’s been finished only since Winternox, and has already been struck over a hundred times.”
    The lightning lure was a wooden latticework affair topped with a domed bronze attractor about thirty feet in diameter. Since every house in the Collective had a metallic daylight-collection device on its roof, homes were highly susceptible to a wayward bolt, which would course down the steel adjustment rods and cause electrical mayhem within the house. The luckless were sometimes fused to anything metallic, sometimes half vaporized and at other times simply dead in their beds, their eyeballs and internal organs boiled to something closely resembling minestrone soup. Lurid accounts and photographs were published every week in Spectrum .
    “I expect you take lightning-avoidance issues seriously where you come from?” asked Stafford.
    “Our Council are more concerned about swan attack, but lightning isn’t ignored,” replied my father. “We have a fleet of a half-dozen specially adapted Fords, each with a bronze attractor mounted on a pylon in the flatbed. They’re driven in to intercept a storm when the direction and severity are known.”
    “We have an anomaly ten miles or so upwind,” said Stafford, “so ball lightning can be a problem in these parts. There are plans to erect a steel catch-net on the Western Hills, but it’s mostly talk.”
    Fork lightning could be easily lured from areas of habitation, but ball lightning was a law unto itself. It drifted along with the breeze, became caught in eddies and sometimes entered houses. It was sticky, too, and would attach itself to anything organic. A bad ball strike could leave the victim almost completely incinerated; nervous residents who were unspooned etched their names on steel plates to keep in their pockets, just in case.
    We continued on the road down to the village itself, a knot of houses on a raised hillock. The dwellings were built in the Salvagesque style, a hodgepodge of construction methods using a wide variety of materials ranging from the deeply ancient carved stone to reused timber, rubber roof tiles, brick, adobe and, in some places, the more modern oak-framed wattle and daub. As we moved off the Perpetulite and onto the cobbled street, Dad asked the porter about Robin Ochre, the previous swatchman.
    “Mr. Ochre’s absence is deeply regretted,” he remarked. “He left a wife and daughter.”
    “He will send for them in due course, I suppose?” I asked, wholly misunderstanding the comment.
    “I’m not sure he’s in much of a condition to do anything.”
    “I was led to believe,” said Dad slowly, “that Mr. Ochre had retired from the profession.”
    “Ah!” said Stafford. “While euphemistically true, the phrase is also potentially misleading. I can only repeat the Council’s own findings: that Mr. Ochre was . . . fatally self-misdiagnosed. ”
    “Robin is dead?” asked my father.
    “I’m no medical expert, of course,” replied the porter thoughtfully, “but yes, that’s precisely what he is. Four weeks ago to the day.”
    Dad and I glanced at each other. For some unknown reason we hadn’t been told, and as I was trying to figure out what “fatally self-misdiagnosed” might mean, we arrived at a red door set into an unbroken terrace that made up the south end of the town square.