Doctor Illuminatus Read Online Free PDF Page A

shut.
    Tim ran to the window and hissed, “Mum and Dad are back.”
    Sebastian went quickly to the open panel in the wall and eased himself through it.
    “I shall return,” he said, his face framed by the sides of the secret door. “Be ready after midnight. I have much yet to tell and show you.”
    Pip and Tim slid the bed towards the window so as not to obstruct the hidden entrance, then went downstairs, ready to explain away the empty tins in the bin and the dirty plates in the dishwasher.
    After tea, Pip and Tim walked down to the river. Beneath the overhang of a weeping willow stood an old oak bench. It had clearly not been used in a long while, for the slats of the seat were mottled with lichen and the back was stained with dried squirts of bird droppings. Half submerged in the water was a rowing boat, its rotting mooring rope still tied to a root of the willow. The evening sun shone through the trees across the water meadows on the far bank. In a reedy creek over the river, an unseen moorhen was calling. Beyond it, a heron stalked meticulously through the long buttercup-and daisy-filled grass, watching for frogs, newts or eels.
    Side by side, they sat on the bench. It was some minutes before Tim finally spoke.
    “Do you actually think he’s for real?”
    Pip considered all that had happened and said, “What other explanation can there be?”
    “He can be lying through his teeth,” Tim remarked. “I mean, it’s ridiculous! He says he’s twelve going on six hundred. The oldest person ever to have lived was only a hundred and twenty-two. I looked it up on the Internet. As for hibernation: a few months, maybe, but years at a stretch?”
    “I’ve been thinking about that,” Pip replied. “What about a coma? People can be in a coma for years.”
    “And then they die,” Tim said. “Comas are caused by brain damage.”
    “Sometimes they come out of it. No one knows why. What if,” Pip speculated, “you could control a coma? Like, with meditation? So it’s not a coma but a sort of a trance. And there’s something else. When some young children fall through the ice on freezing ponds, it’s sometimes up to thirty minutes before the rescuers get them out. You’d think they’d drown, but they don’t. With the sudden shock of hitting the icy water, they stop breathing and their brains close down. He told us his body went cold. What’s more, he said his father had found out how to do it.”
    “All right,” Tim allowed. “But what about his father being an alchemist? You know what alchemists did? Or
said
they did, more like.” He did not wait for his sister’s response. “They turned iron into gold. Like, yes?” He gave a short, sarcastic laugh. “And we’re meant to believe he was an expert in human medicine too? C’mon, sis, wake up and smell the toast burning.”
    “But,” Pip persisted, “if he was lying, then what’s the truth? He came out of a secret passage in an old house, dressed in clothes Grandad would have worn as a schoolboy. And the way he talks. It’s not exactly Bart Simpson, is it?”
    Tim picked up a twig and tossed it into the river. The moorhen, alarmed by the splash, took to the wing, its feet stepping across the surface as if it were walking upon the water.
    “Dungeons and Dragons,” he replied, watching as the moorhen veered clumsily and vanished into a bed of bulrushes. “He could have picked up that kind of thing watching Robin Hood movies.”
    “Maybe . . .” Pip mused.
    They stood up and set off along the riverbank. The grounds of Rawne Barton included a quarter of a mile of river frontage and, as they walked in silence, Tim watched out for likely pools and eddies where trout might linger and he might fly-fish for them.
    “In some ways, he’s scary,” Pip went on. “He seems so . . . so self-contained. And what was all that about living in a dangerous time and having to be certain of us? When he stared at us, I went all goose pimply.”
    “Look, when a