Read Online The Boy at the Top of the Mountain by John Boyne - Free Book Online

showed a man walking down a yellow street while three boys peered out at him from behind a pillar. In the lower right-hand corner was the word
Trier
. He read the opening lines:
    ‘Now then, Emil,’ Mrs Tischbein said, ‘just carry in that jug of hot water for me, will you?’ She picked up one jug and a little blue bowl of liquid camomile shampoo, and hurried out of the kitchen into the front room. Emil took his jug and followed her.
    Before long Pierrot was surprised to discover that the boy in the book, Emil, had a few things in common with him – or at least with the person he used to be. Emil lives alone with his mother – although in Berlin, not Paris – and his father is dead. And early in the novel Emil, like Pierrot, goes on a train journey, and a man seated in his carriage steals his money, just like Rottenführer Kotler had stolen his sandwiches. Pierrot was glad that he didn’t have any money, but he had a suitcase filled with clothes, his toothbrush, a photograph of his parents, and a new story that Anshel had sent him just before he left the orphanage which he had already read twice. It was about a boy who was the subject of name-calling from people he used to think of as his friends, and Pierrot found the whole thing a little disturbing. He preferred the stories Anshel had written before, about magicians and talking animals. He moved his suitcase closer to him now in case anyone came in and did to him what Max Grundeis had done to Emil. Finally the motion of the train became so soothing that he could no longer keep his eyes open, the book slipped from his hands and he dozed off.
    In what felt like only a few moments he jumped as a loud rapping on the window woke him up. He looked around in surprise, wondering for a moment where he was, and then panicking that he had arrived in Russia after all. The train had come to a stop and there was an eerie silence.
    The knocking came again, sharper this time, but there was so much condensation on the glass that he couldn’t see out to the platform. Sweeping his hand across it in a perfect arc, he cleared a section that allowed him to see an enormous sign – which, to his relief, read
Salzburg
. A rather beautiful woman with long red hair was standing outside looking in at him. She was saying something, but he couldn’t make out the words. She said it again – still nothing. He reached up, opened the small window at the top, and now her words carried through to him at last.
    ‘Pierrot,’ she cried. ‘It’s me! I’m your aunt Beatrix!’

C HAPTER F IVE
The House at the Top of the Mountain
    Pierrot woke the next morning to find himself in an unfamiliar room. The ceiling was made up of a series of long wooden beams crisscrossed by darker columns, and inhabiting the corner of the plank above his head was a large spider’s web whose architect hung menacingly by a rotating silken thread.
    He lay still for a few minutes, trying to recall more about the journey that had brought him there. The last thing he remembered was getting off the train and walking along the platform with a woman who said she was his aunt, before climbing into the back of a car driven by a man wearing a dark grey uniform and chauffeur’s cap. After that, everything went dark. He had a vague idea that he had mentioned how one of the boys from the Hitlerjugend had bullied him out of his sandwiches. The chauffeur had said something about the way those boys behaved, but Aunt Beatrix had silenced him quickly, and soon he must have fallen asleep – to dream that he was soaring into the clouds, higher and higher, growing colder by the minute. And then a pair of strong arms had lifted him from the car and carried him through to a bedroom, where a woman tucked him in and kissed him on the forehead before turning out the lights.
    He sat up now and looked around. The room was quite small – smaller even than the one he had slept in at home in Paris – and contained nothing more than the bed he was