The Neverending Story Read Online Free PDF Page B

her death would have meant the end of them all, the end of the boundless Fantastican realm.
    Bastian’s thoughts wandered.
    Suddenly he remembered the long corridor in the hospital where his mother had been operated on. He and his father had sat waiting for hours outside the operating room. Doctors and nurses hurried this way and that. When his father asked about his wife, the answer was always evasive. No one really seemed to know how she was doing.
    Finally a bald-headed man in a white smock had come out to them. He looked tired and sad. Much as he regretted it, he said, his efforts had been in vain. He had pressed their hands and mumbled something about “heartfelt sympathy.”
    After that, everything had changed between Bastion and his father. Not outwardly. Bastion had everything he could have wished for. He had a three-speed bicycle, an electric train, plenty of vitamin pills, fifty-three books, a golden hamster, an aquarium with tropical fish in it, a small camera, six pocketknives, and so forth and so on. But none of all this really meant anything to him.
    Bastian remembered that his father had often played with him in the past. He had even told him stories. No longer. He couldn’t talk to his father anymore. There was an invisible wall around his father, and no one could get through to him. He never found fault and he never praised. Even when Bastian was put back in school, his father hadn’t said anything. He had only looked at him in his sad, absent way, and Bastian felt that as far as his father was concerned he wasn’t there at all. That was how his father usually made him feel. When they sat in front of the television screen in the evening, Bastian saw that his father wasn’t even looking at it, that his thoughts were far away. Or when they both sat there with books, Bastian saw that his father wasn’t reading at all. He’d been looking at the same page for hours and had forgotten to turn it.
    Bastian knew his father was sad. He himself had cried for many nights—sometimes he had been so shaken by sobs that he had to vomit—but little by little it had passed. And after all he was still there. Why didn’t his father ever speak to him, not about his mother, not about important things, but just for the feel of talking together?
    “If only we knew,” said a tall, thin fire sprite, with a beard of red flames, “if only we knew what her illness is. There’s no fever, no swelling, no rash, no inflammation. She just seems to be fading away—no one knows why.”
    As he spoke, little clouds of smoke came out of his mouth and formed figures.
    This time they were question marks.
    A bedraggled old raven, who looked like a potato with feathers stuck onto it every which way, answered in a croaking voice (he was a head cold and sore throat specialist):
    “She doesn’t cough, she hasn’t got a cold. Medically speaking, it’s no disease at all.” He adjusted the big spectacles on his beak and a cast a challenging look around.
    “One thing seems obvious,” buzzed a scarab (a beetle, sometimes known as a pill roller): “There is some mysterious connection between her illness and the terrible happenings these messengers from all Fantastica have been reporting.”
    “Oh yes!” scoffed an ink goblin. “You see mysterious connections everywhere.”
    “My dear colleague!” pleaded a hollow-cheeked ghost in a long white gown.
    “Let’s not get personal. Such remarks are quite irrelevant. And please—lower your voices.”
    Conversations of this kind were going on in every part of the throne room. It may seem strange that creatures of so many different kinds were able to communicate with one another. But nearly all the inhabitants of Fantastica, even the animals, knew at least two languages: their own, which they spoke only with members of their own species and which no outsider understood, and the universal language known as High Fantastican. All Fantasticans used it, though some in a rather peculiar