Read Online The Orphan of Awkward Falls by Keith Graves - Free Book Online

toward the door to the stairs. “I have work to do.” He made little sweeping motions with the back of his hand toward her, as if he were brushing away a mess of cookie crumbs. “You are released.”
    “But…couldn’t I stay just a little longer?” Josephine couldn’t believe what she was saying. She suddenly had no interest in escape. Her brain’s reckless driver had taken over again and thrown caution out the window. “My parents won’t be getting up for a few hours. Maybe I could watch you repair the weasel.”
    “Unthinkable. My work is top secret, spy or not. Besides, I tire of your chatter.”
    The robot’s claw seized Josephine’s arm firmly and led her toward the double doors.
    “But I won’t chatter.”
    Thaddeus did not look back.
    “I promise!” She tried a new strategy. “Please, I’ve never watched a true genius work before. I could learn so much from a great scientist like you.”
    This time he hesitated. His posture improved slightly.
    “It would be such an honor. After all,” she continued, piling it on now, “you’re so much more brilliant than my father. He’s a microbiophysicist at the university.”
    Thaddeus stopped and looked back at her. “I suppose I am a rather singular talent, though few are aware of it, due to my seclusion.”
    “I saw it right away,” Josephine said. “You’ve got that genius twinkle in your eye. Kind of like Einstein.”
    A small, cavity-dotted smile creased his face. “He is my idol. How perceptive of you to notice the similarity.”
    She had him now. Simple flattery was often all it took to get what one wanted. “Oh, yes, you’re very similar. Though Einstein, of course, loved an audience. But,” she sighed dramatically, “if you’re not up to it, I certainly understand. I’ll just go away and let you work your magic all by yourself.” Josephine turned to leave.
    Thaddeus’s brow wrinkled as he took the bait. “Well…I suppose I could allow you to watch, just this once, if you promise not to bother me again.”
    “I promise.” But she knew it was a promise she would never be able to keep. Bothering Thaddeus Hibble was about to become Josephine’s primary occupation.

Fetid Stenchley sloshed through a bog in the foggy darkness, deep in the forest that stretched beyond the Asylum for the Dangerously Insane. He had been running steadily for hours, fleeing from the wailing sirens and thumping helicopters that were hunting him. The police had badly underestimated the mad hunchback’s speed, however, and he was miles farther away than anyone would have thought possible. Loping swiftly through the forest on all fours, leaving barely a footprint behind, Stenchley ran like a creature born to the wilderness.
    Since clearing the asylum wall, the madman had stopped only once, and then only long enough to remove Lulu, the hairless Egyptian spaniel, from his nose. The little dog’s viselike jaws had remained clamped stubbornly to the madman’s face after his escape, and it had somehow held on as Stenchley tore through the woods. At the first opportunity, the madman had crouched in a gulley and wrung the pooch’s neck, carefully detaching its teeth from his swollen andbleeding nose. He made a quick snack of the pampered pet, then ran on, not daring to stop again until after nightfall.
    Feeling his way through the murk of the bog, Stenchley found a grotto beneath a fallen hemlock tree where he could rest and feed. Wild-eyed and panting, he lapped water from a black puddle at the foot of the tree, jerking his head up nervously every couple of seconds to scan the area for any sign of his pursuers. After he drank his fill, he crawled under the curtain of dripping roots and munched on beetles plucked from the mossy underside of the tree. As Stenchley crouched there in his muddy hooch, enjoying the crunch and pop of the bugs’ exoskeletons between his teeth, it dawned on him that after so many nightmarish years of captivity, he was finally free. No