We That Are Left Read Online Free PDF

down to the drawing room. The castle was perhaps the most interesting place Oskar knew but it was tiring always being with people who were waiting for you to go away again.
    Resting the book on his chest Oskar turned the pages. It turned out that the Wise Man did not just tell people things. He answered their questions, like
WHAT IS THE AETHER?
The Wise Man said that the aether was everywhere, thateverything travelled through it, even the planets and their moons. He said it was because of the aether that X-rays could look into people’s bodies and telegraphs could be sent through the air without any wires for the messages to travel along. Oskar knew about telegraphs. Mr Kingsley at his school had told them all about Mr Marconi from Italy, who had invented wireless telegraphy and who was presently inventing a machine that would pick up voice rays from the Next World, which meant dead people. Mr Kingsley said that perhaps in their lifetimes a wireless would be invented that could pick up the voice rays from God.
    The Wise Man did not say anything about God. He just said that aether was in everything, even in the electrons in atoms, which were the fundamental building blocks of matter. Oskar had never heard of atoms but the Wise Man said that everything that existed in the world was made of atoms, particles so small that millions of them would fit on the head of a pin. And yet, tiny as they were, they were packed with much, much smaller things called electrons. These electrons were so tiny that the best way to imagine them, the Wise Man suggested, was to picture tennis balls bouncing in violent random motion inside the dome of a cathedral.
    At the bottom of the page the Wise Man warned that scientists did not yet know for certain if this was how atoms worked, that it remained a hypothesis, but by then it was already too late. Oskar’s head felt hot and bright, lit up from the inside like a lantern. He touched the wall beside him, the stone flowers and the fishbone ridge in the plaster where the hair from a paintbrush had stuck, and the thought of it, that the plaster and the paint and the paintbrush hair and his own hair and the tips of his fingers were all made up of atoms, that everything in the world, whatever it was and however it looked, was made of the same specks of matter, each one a tiny universe with its own wildly ricocheting solar system, the astonishing thrill of it, made the hair stand up on the back of his neck.
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    The slam of the library door made him jump. Instinctively Oskar slid down inside his window-seat house. He knew that he was allowed to be here, that Sir Aubrey had said he could come whenever he wanted as long as he did not touch the special books in the shelves like cages, but that did not mean that he wanted to be found. Very slowly, to keep himself from breathing, he counted the cubes in his head: 1, 8, 27, 64, 125, 216 . . .
    It was only one person. You could tell that from the footsteps. Whoever it was was talking to themself or maybe singing. He wondered hopefully if it might be his mother. His mother was always singing. Sometimes she and Oskar went to the Clapham Grand, which was a music hall with lots of singing and magic tricks and people telling jokes. His mother sang along with all the songs.
    There was a scraping noise as though something was being dragged across the floor, then a crash and another and another. Whoever the someone was they were throwing books on the floor. The crashes made him wince, as though a bit of him was inside the pages. There was another bigger bang, several books at once, and a high shriek of fury.
    â€˜Damn you all to bloody hell! I hope all the ghosts of all the dead people ever in the whole world come back in one big cloud and scare you all
to death
.’
    The voice was Jessica’s. Oskar screwed up his face and prayed on the encyclopaedia for her to turn around and go away. If Jessica discovered his window then she would be sure to tell