The Alchemaster's Apprentice - By Walter Moers Page 0,70

just right for someone his size, with a white tablecloth, a vase of flowers, and - most important of all - a crisply roasted fowl on a china plate. He sniffed it. It was a wildfowl of some kind - not his favourite fare. He preferred roast chicken, but that was quite immaterial now. He was starving!

He devoured the bird greedily, legs, breast, wings and all. But he still felt hungry.

That left the giblets. They weren’t his favourite fare either, in the normal way, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. He wolfed the kidneys and liver, even the tough little heart. Then he tackled the gizzard. First he’d better see if there was anything unappetising in there. What had the bird been eating? Echo slit the stomach wall with his claws as deftly as a pathologist performing an autopsy.

The first thing that tumbled out was a juniper berry. Hardly surprising in the case of a wildfowl, thought Echo. He rolled the undigested berry aside and continued his investigation. A hazelnut came to light. Opening the stomach a little wider, he discovered a neat little pellet consisting of tender blades of grass. ‘Hm,’ he thought. A juniper berry, a hazelnut and some blades of grass - why did that sound so familiar?

And then the truth dawned. His appetite abruptly deserted him and an icy shiver ran the length of his spine. A ghostly voice - the voice of someone he knew well - seemed to ring in his ears:

‘I always have a vegetarian breakfast: a juniper berry, a few blades of grass, a hazelnut and three wild strawberries. A healthy start to the day does my gidestive sestym good.’

Echo recoiled, staring in horror at the bird’s gnawed remains. Yes, the proportions and dimensions were about right … There was only one way of finding out for sure. Paws trembling, he opened the stomach completely. Sure enough, it contained three wild strawberries. He went hot and cold in turn, overwhelmed by a terrible feeling of nausea, and backed away from the remains of his frightful repast.

‘No,’ he thought, ‘it’s not possible!’

He walked unsteadily to the window and leapt on to the sill for some fresh air. But that brought him no relief either. On the contrary, he felt more nauseous than ever and couldn’t help gagging.

‘It can’t be true,’ he whispered. Yet he knew that, in his boundless greed, he had just devoured his friend Theodore T. Theodore.

He tottered to the edge of the windowsill and looked down at the town, which seemed to be spinning below him like a top. Then he vomited into space until he felt as if he’d turned himself completely inside out.

Uggly Lane

On a misty night, Uggly Lane looked as if a gang of huge brigands in pointed hats had settled down beside a winding street and were lying in wait for passers-by. As he stole past them, Echo was overcome by the uneasy feeling that the crouching giants might rise to their feet at a secret signal and cudgel him to death. There was something both dead and alive about them - something that reminded him unpleasantly of the horrific taxidermal specimens in Ghoolion’s castle. He was as reluctant to turn his back on those figures as he was on the houses in this lane. He had entered a melancholy limbo midway between this world and the next.

The wooden boardwalk gave an agonised groan as Echo put his weight on it. He flinched and quickly got down in the roadway, which wasn’t paved like the rest of the streets in the town and consisted of stamped earth. Plump beetles and other insects were scuttling around on it, but he felt marginally safer in the middle of the lane than he did in the immediate vicinity of the spooky-looking houses.

Wisps of mist were flitting around like Cooked Ghosts, sometimes concealing whole houses from view. An owl hooted, and Echo shivered because the sound reminded him of Theodore.

‘Tuwituwu! Tuwituwu!’

‘What on earth am I doing here?’ he asked himself, peering anxiously in all directions. ‘No one with any sense visits Uggly Lane in the middle of the night. Why didn’t I come here during the day?’

Then he remembered why: because he wouldn’t be able to tell which of the houses was occupied until it was lit up after dark - Theodore had made a point of that. But with all due respect to the Tuwituwu’s good advice, not even the most foolhardy of Malaisea’s stray cats and dogs would ever