Embarrassment of Corpses, An Read Online Free PDF Page A

fellow cried gaily. “Isn’t it a lovely spring morning? The pussy-willows are bursting on the branch, the coltsfoot is in the meadow, the daffodils are splashing the embankments with their bobbing yellow heads, and the leaping woolly lambkins will soon be off to the abattoir. Aren’t you glad to be alive on such a beautiful day, Finsbury?”
    The ferret turned his bleary pink eyes on the tiny mouse. Were they even pinker than usual?
    â€œPiss off, Billy, you annoying little wanker, or I’ll devour you,” Finsbury drawled in his bored patrician tones. “Stanford the Stoat slipped some ’ludes into my Stoli last night and next thing I knew I was…I was…trying to…What? Come on, Ollie, something suitably lubricous. And do you mean ‘patrician’? You know you always have to look that one up.”
    Oliver grumpily erased the last paragraph, got up from his desk, and stumbled over to the shelf where he kept the thesaurus. It was ten o’clock on Tuesday morning, the day after he had found his old friend, Sir Hargreaves Random, taking his final early morning dip, and Oliver was back in the small suite of offices off the Cromwell Road, occupying his role as general assistant and sole employee of the firm of Woodcock and Oakhampton, Ltd. Or rather, because neither Mr. Woodcock nor Mr. Oakhampton ever gave him any work to do, he was back in the persona of O.C. Blithely, using the firm’s word processor to write the next novel about the Railway Mice, and wondering what foul deeds Finsbury would be up to in this story. Last time, the vicious creature had introduced little Billy to glue-sniffing, got young Tracy Field Mouse drunk on hazelnut gin, and attempted to open a brothel for badgers in the station waiting room. And once again, the Mouse family had thwarted him and made him see the error of his ways. So what now? Depravity never came easily to Oliver. He often wished he had never created Finsbury the Ferret.
    Finsbury’s birth had been an accident. Oliver had made up a few picaresque tales about a family of mice who lived on a train to entertain his young godson, and at Sir Harry’s urging, he had submitted them to a children’s book publisher, which bought them and wanted more. It was easy enough—only a few thousand words and a ready-made denouement: Get Billy Field Mouse safely back on the train before it left. With an old Bradshaw’s guide and his AA Book of the British Countryside for technical reference (Oliver rarely ventured outside London, to his rural parents’ relief), he was able to keep Tadpole Tomes for Tiny Tots supplied with a fresh story every couple of months. The income just about paid his gas bill and gave him an excuse for not thinking about a career.
    But then came the Day of the Ferret.
    Frustrated with yet another tale of Billy, who this time was trying to help some Boy Scout voles deliver mushrooms to old Mrs. Quackenbush, the motherly Aylesbury duck, and reeling from a bagful of snooty letters informing him that bluebells are not to be found in March, as he had stated in The Railway Mice and the Tender-Hearted Tortoise ,Oliver had let fly. He typed a few paragraphs about a foulmouthed, chain-smoking, ex-public-schoolboy ferret called Finsbury. For ten inspired minutes, Oliver indulged his alter-ego, giving the beast all the vices he had never possessed, and one or two he couldn’t even spell. Finsbury sang the praises of Oliver North, coconut-flavored chewing tobacco, video-nasties, Japanese whisky, the piano-accordion, and brown polyester safari suits; then he bit Mrs. Quackenbush and slipped a magic mushroom into Billy’s basket. And then Oliver deleted him. Or so he thought.
    Unfortunately, Oliver’s ignorance of Woodcock and Oak-hampton’s cheap word processor caused the words to disappear from the glowing screen but not from the document. Finsbury was alive and well on the page when Oliver hurriedly