Luka and the Fire of Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

for you to have crossed over when you’re in perfect health. And your dog and bear, too, by the by. The whole thing is exceedingly irregular. The Frontier is not supposed to be this easily ignored.’
    ‘What do you mean?’ Luka demanded. ‘What Frontier? Who are you here for?’ The moment he asked the second question, he knew the answer, and it drove the first question out of his mind. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Oh. Then is my father …?’
    ‘Not yet,’ said the see-through Rashid. ‘But I’m the patient type.’
    ‘Go away,’ Luka said. ‘You’re not wanted around here, Mr … what is your name, anyway?’
    The see-through Rashid smiled a friendly smile that somehow wasn’t entirely friendly. ‘I,’ he began to explain, in a kindly voice that somehow didn’t feel completely kind, ‘I am your father’s dea—’
    ‘Don’t say that word!’ Luka shouted.
    ‘The point I’m trying to make, if I may be allowed to continue,’ the phantom insisted, ‘is that everyone’s dea—’
    ‘Don’t
say
it!’ Luka yelled.
    ‘—is different,’ the phantom said. ‘No two are alike. Each living being is an individual unlike all others; their lives have unique and personal beginnings, personal and unique middles, and consequently, at the end, it follows that everyone has their own unique and personal dea—’
    ‘Don’t!’ Luka screamed.
    ‘—and I am your father’s, or I will be soon enough, and at that time you will no longer be able to see through me, because then I will be the real thing and he, I’m sorry to say, will no longer be at all.’
    ‘Nobody is going to take my father away,’ Luka cried. ‘Not even you, Mr – whatever your name is – with your scary tales.’
    ‘Nobody,’ said the see-through Rashid. ‘Yes, you can call me that. That’s who I am. Nobody is going to take your father away: that is exactly right, and I am the Nobody in question. I am your, you might say, Nobodaddy.’
    ‘That’s nonsense,’ said Luka.
    ‘No, no,’ the see-through Rashid corrected him. ‘I’m afraid that Nonsense is not involved. You will discover that I am a no-Nonsense kind of guy.’
    Luka sat down on the front step of the house and put his head in his hands.
Nobodaddy
. He understood what the see-through Rashid was telling him. As his father faded away, the phantom Rashid would grow stronger, and in the end there would be only this Nobodaddy and no father at all. But he was very sureof one thing: he was not ready to do without a father. He would never be ready for that. The certainty of this knowledge grew in him and gave him strength. There was only one thing for it, he told himself. This, this Nobodaddy had to be stopped, and he had to think of a way to stop him.
    ‘To be fair,’ said Nobodaddy, ‘and in a spirit of full disclosure, I should repeat that you have already achieved something extraordinary – by crossing the line, I mean – so perhaps you are capable of further extraordinary things. Maybe you are even capable of bringing about the thing you are even now dreaming up; maybe – ha ha! – you will succeed in bringing about my destruction. An adversary! How enjoyable! How positively …
darling
. I’m
so
excited.’
    Luka looked up. ‘What do you mean exactly, “crossing the line”?’ he asked.
    ‘Here, where you are, is not there, where you were,’ explained Nobodaddy, helpfully. ‘This, all of this that you see, is not that which you saw before. This lane is not that lane, this house is not that house, and this daddy, as I have explained, is not that one. If the whole of your world took half a step to the right, then it would bump into this world. If it took half a step to the left … well, let’s not go into that just now. Don’t you see how much more brightly coloured everything is here than it is back home? This, you see … I shouldn’t even tell you, really … this is the World of Magic.’
    Luka remembered his stumble in the doorway, and his brief but