Lord of the Nutcracker Men Read Online Free PDF

your auntie, son?”
    “Ivy Briggs,” I told him.
    “Ah, you're Johnny then. The boy who gets packages that I have to carry, don't I?” He pretended to shake his fist at me. Then he smiled and said, “Why aren't you in school?”
    “I don't like it there,” I said.
    “Ah. So you've come out here so your aunt will think you're there.” He pushed back in his chair. “Well, you're James Briggs's son all right, that's for certain. Many a day I found him sitting in one place when he was supposed to be at another.”
    “Really?” I said.
    “Oh, Lord yes.” He got up to see to his kettle. “Usually I'd find him out at the station. He was madabout trains, your father. Quite the spotter; keen as mustard.”
    I laughed at that, my father watching trains. I only knew that he complained all the time about the noise and smoke they made.
    “Yes, keen as mustard,” the postman said again, as though he hoped I would laugh a second time.
    A bell rang then, a sharp jangle that made the old postman jump. “Oh, Lord,” he said. “Here's another one.”
    “Another what?” I asked.
    “Another broken heart.” He leaned over the table and clamped a set of earphones on his head. He closed his eyes for a moment, took up a pencil, and started jotting letters on a pad of paper. His letters became words, his words a sentence. Then he tapped a few times on his telegraph key, took off his earphones, and folded the paper.
    “Yes, it's another lad gone,” he said, with a heavy sigh. “Another soldier who won't be home.”
    He put his paper in an envelope. “I'd better be off,” he told me. “Crikey. It's a blasted job being a messenger for cold Mr. Death.”
    He put on his cape and a pillbox hat, and went out again to the drizzle. This time I went with him, around to the side of the building.
    “What happened?” I asked. “Did a soldier get killed?”
    “Another one, yes. ‘Died of his wounds,’” he said. “That's five for little Cliffe since the war began.”
    There was a bicycle leaning against the wall, below the cables and wires that came in from the telegraph poles. It was covered with rust, from the pedals to the little round bell on the handlebars. When the postmanclimbed onto the saddle, his feet sat flat on the ground. “Do you want a lift home?” he asked.
    “No, thank you,” I said.
    “Go to school, son. It's where a boy belongs.” He pushed himself forward, put his feet on the pedals, and wobbled away on his journey. The bell, when he rang it, sounded just like the one in his office.
    I looked up at the wires, tracing them from pole to pole as far as I could see. I wondered if they stretched somehow all the way to France, to the trenches and the battlefields. Then I wondered who sat at the other end, sending the news of soldiers dying. I had an image of cold Mr. Death in a black hood and black robes, tapping away with his skeleton fingers.
    I was frightened that the office bell would ring again, jangling through the empty building. It would summon me into the little room, and I would put on those earphones. What would I hear? A voice: a creaky old voice? “Died of his wounds,” it would say, and whisper a name.
    I hurried away. My feet pattered on the road, over mud and through puddles. I ran and ran along the footpath, until I heard a scream that stopped me cold. Only once had I heard a sound like that, when a dog had been crushed by the wheels of a coach. But those cries had ended quickly, and this went on and on.
    I was close enough to the little cemetery to see the tombstones standing among heaps of khaki-colored leaves. They were ringed by trees with twisted branches, like old umbrellas that the wind had torn apart. Beyond them was the farmhouse, the home of old Storey Sims.Square and white, with an upstairs balcony facing toward me, it looked like a tombstone itself.
    The screams were coming from there.
    A door opened, a slit of darkness on the whitewashed wall, and out came the postman with his