Read Online The Second Forever by Colin Thompson - Free Book Online

know about,’ said Festival.
    It was dark when they returned to the museum and Peter’s father was waiting anxiously inside the locked gates, the keys in his hand. ‘I was getting worried,’ he said.
    â€˜I told Mum we were going to the botanic gardens,’ Peter said.
    â€˜I know, but we thought you’d be back before it got dark.’

    â€˜Sorry,’ said Peter. ‘We just got talking to someone who works there and forgot the time.’ He remembered that Susan had made them promise not to tell anyone about the Great Palm House. ‘Not even your parents,’ she had said.
    â€˜And how are the gardens?’ said Peter’s father as they entered the museum.
    â€˜The same as everywhere else,’ said Peter. ‘Dying.’
    â€˜Even the big greenhouses,’ Festival added.

The next morning while it was still dark, Peter was shaken awake by his grandfather.
    â€˜We have had a visitor,’ he whispered. ‘Come with me.’
    The main fossil gallery was completely wrecked. Every case was smashed, every door torn off its hinges and every drawer thrown upside down to the floor and shattered. Papers were ripped to shreds, the models re-created from the fossilised skeletons were all broken to pieces; armatures, feathers, fur and papier-mâché skin ripped apart.
    â€˜See?’ said the old man. ‘We’re being listened to.’

    The gallery looked as if it had been devastated bywar. Nothing had been left untouched, not even the ancient panelling, which had been smashed to pieces, revealing the granite walls behind it that would not have seen the light of day since the museum had been built over two hundred and fifty years earlier.
    But of all the destruction, none was more detailed and total than the annihilation of the giant bat. It had been torn apart over and over again until nothing larger than a fingernail was left. This had not been the work of someone just searching for the book. This had been a deliberate massacre. This had been done to make sure that Peter and Festival would never be able to return to Festival’s world.
    â€˜Or,’ said Peter’s grandfather, ‘to make sure that if you did find some way back there, you would not be able to come back here. Look.’ He bent down and picked up a handful of tiny bronze shards from among the debris that littered the floor. ‘They didn’t need to obliterate the bat,’ he said. ‘They had already shattered the Journey Bell.’
    Peter’s grandfather picked up a notebook and a pencil from his bedside table and wrote: Or so they think.
    Peter then took the pencil and notebook from his grandfather and wrote: Do you think there is anywhere in the museum where we’re not being bugged?

    The old man shook his head before writing: Though things that may seem bad can often be used to one’s advantage.
    He beckoned them to follow him and they left the museum. A mile or so away was a park, which, since the drought, had become completely empty. The three of them went out into the middle of a large empty space that had once been grass on which people had walked and played and picnicked and sat down.
    â€˜We are safe here,’ said Peter’s grandfather.
    â€˜Take this,’ he continued, and handed Peter a tiny music player. ‘On here is a recording of the Journey Bell. I could be wrong, but I think if you play it during the full moon, all the pieces of the great bat, even down to the last hair, will be put together again and the bat will come to you. It’s not as though it’s “alive” in the normal sense of the word.’
    â€˜So I can still go home?’ said Festival.
    â€˜Not with the bat,’ said the old man. ‘You need to leave now, before the full moon. If you wait for Darkwood, who probably knows how you got back here, he will come before then and force you to give him the book.’
    â€˜But why?’