Johnny and the Dead

Terry Pratchett

Summary

Not many people can see the dead (not many would want to). But twelve-year-old Johnny Maxwell can. And the dead are nothing like he expected.

They don't lurch about. They don't push through walls. They can't even dance like they do in videos. They're just people -- post-senior citizens -- and they're always in.

At least, up until now. Now the council want to move them out so the cemetery can be sold as a building site.

But the dead have learned a thing or two from Johnny. They're not going to take it lying down... especially since it's Halloween tomorrow.

Besides, they're beginning to find that life is a lot more fun than it was when they were... well... alive. Especially if they break a few rules...

Quotes

The angels [on the masoleums] were generally more lifelike than you'd expect, especially one near the entrance who looked as though he'd just remembered that he should have gone to the toilet before he left heaven.

Mrs. Nugent was the Johnson's next door neighbour, and known to be unreasonable on subjects like Madonna played at full volume at 3 a.m.

They passed a very ornate masoleum, which even had little stained-glass windows. It was hard to imagine who'd want to see in, but then, it was even harder to imagine who'd want to look out.

"[Zombies] always lurch," [Wobbler] said. Dunno why. I've seen them in videos. And they can push their way through walls."

"Why?" said Johnny.

"Why what?"

"Why push their way through walls? I mean ... living people can't do that. Why should dead people do it?"

Johnny: "You're dead, right?"
Alderman: "Oh, yes. It's one of those things one is pretty sure about."

"I knew you could see me," said William Stickers. "I could see you looking right at me while the old man was talking."

"I could tell you were you," said Johnny. "You look ... um ... thinner."

He wanted to say: not thin like in thick. Just ... not all there. Transparent.

"Ghost? I'm just ... dead." He waved a transparent finger in the air. "Hah! But they're not getting me that way," he snapped. "Just because it turns out I'm still ... here after I'm dead, doesn't mean I'm prepared to believe in the whole stupid nonsense, you know."

Johnny vaguely remembered there'd been something in the papers. People had been protesting about something -- but then, they always were. There was always so much news going on you never had time to find out anything important.

"My mum spends more time in church than the Pope," said Yo-less. "My mum spends more time in church than God."

If you had to be somewhere frightening when it got dark, Johnny thought, the Joshua N'Clement block rated a lot higher on the Aaargh scale than any cemetary. At least the dead don't mug you.

No-one liked the Joshua N'Clement block. There were two schools of thought about what should be done with it. The people who lived there thought everyone should be taken out and then the block should be blown up, and the people who lived near the block just wanted it blown up.

Clint was Bigmac's brother's dog, which had reportedly been banned from the Rottweiler/Pit Bull Terrier Crosssbreed Club for being too nasty.

"It's not Transylvania! There's just dead people here! That doesn't make it scary, does it? Dead people are people who were living once! You wouldn't be so daft if it were living people buried here, would you?"

-- Er, wait a minute...

"Why bother with such a big stone arch?" said Wobbler.

"It's just showing off," said Yo-less. "There's probably a sticker on the back saying 'My Other Grave Is A Porch'".

"Escaping from things. ... Sacks and chains and handcuffs and so on. Like the Great Houdini? Only in a semi-professional way, of course. My greatest trick involved getting out of a locked sack underwater while wearing twenty feet of chain and three pairs of handcuffs."

"Gosh, how often did you do that?" said Johnny.

"Nearly once," said Mr. Vicenti.

"It says in this newspaper," said William Stickers, "that the cemetery is going to be closed. Going to be built on. Do you know about it?"

"Um. Yes. Yes. Um. Didn't you [ghosts] know?"

"Was anyone supposed to tell us?"

"They won't listen to me! I'm twelve! I can't even vote!"

"Yes, but we can," said the Alderman.

"Can we?" said Mr. Vicenti.

The dead clustered around him, like an American football team.

"We're still over twenty-one, aren't we? I mean, technically."

-- This would be easier in Chicago

"I served this city faithfully for more than fifty years," said the Alderman. "I do not see why I should lose my vote just because I'm dead."

"And we were right behind Wobbler when he got into trouble for complaining to the record shop about the messages from God he heard when he played Cliff Richards records backwards--"

"You said you heard it too," said Wobbler. "Hey, you said you heard it!"

"Only after you told me what it was," said Yo-less. "Before you told me what I was listening for, it just shounded like someone going ayip-ayeep-mwerp-ayeep."

[Footnote: But according to Wobbler it was really: "Hey, kids! Go to school and get a good education! Listen to your parents! It's cool to go to church!"]

"Now, personally, I think you're very nearly totally disturbed and suffering from psychosomatica and hearing voices and seeing delusions," [Yo-less] said, "and probably ought to be locked up in one of those white jackets with the stylish long sleeves. But that doesn't matter, 'cos we're friends."

"I'm touched," said Johnny.

"Probably," said Wobbler, "but we don't care, do we, guys?"

Granddad was superstitious about books. He thought that if you had enough of them around, education leaked out, like radioactivity.

Johnny hesitated. He was by nature an honest person, because apart from anything else, lying was always too complicated.

There was a new library in the Civic Centre. It was so new it didn't even have librarians. It had Assistant Information Officers.

Wobbler was banned from the computers because of an incident involving a library terminal, the telephone connection to the main computer, another telephone line to the computer at East Slate Air Base ten miles away, another telephone line to a much bigger computer under a mountain somewhere in America, and almost World War Three.

At least, that's what Wobbler said. The Assistant Information Officers said it was because he got chocolate in the keyboard.

"I always thought it was unfair, the way the Americans got Superman. They've got all the superheroes. I don't see why we couldn't have Superman round here."

They thought about it. Wobbler then spoke for them all.

"Mind you," he said, "round here he would have had trouble even being Clark Kent."

"When did Columbus discover America, anyway?" said Wobbler.

"Fourteen ninety-two," said Johnny. "There's a rhyme: In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue."

Wobbler and Bigmac looked at him.

"Actually, he could have got there in fourteen ninety-one," said Yo-less, without looking up, "but he had to sail around a bit because no-one could think up a rhyme for 'one'."

"I think it's impossible for anyone famous to come from here," said Wobbler, "because everyone around here is mental."

"This is from ninteen sixteen," said Yo-less. "They're all going off to war."

"Which one?" said Wobbler.

"The first one, you nerd. World War One."

"I always wondered why they numbered it," said Bigmac. "Like they expected to have a few more. You know. Like Buy Two, Get One Free."

Johnny had seen films of American shopping malls. They must have different sorts of people in America, he'd thought. They all looked cool, all the girls were beautiful, and the place wasn't crowded with little kamikaze grandmothers. Or mothers with seven children.

"You ever listen to Mad Jim's Late Night Explosion?"

"He's not mad," said Yo-less. "He just says he is. And all he does is play old records and go 'yeah!' and 'yowsahyowsah!' a lot. That's not mad. That's just pathetic."

...all through history there have been people who couldn't invent things because the rest of the world wasn't ready. Leonardo da Vinci hadn't got the motors or materials to make his helicopter. Sir George Cayley invented the internal combustion engine befor anyone else had invented petrol.

[Footnote: So he ran it on pellets of gunpowder. Really. It was nearly the external combustion engine.]

You could get away with anything if you said you were doing a project.

"--yowsahyowsahyowsah! And the next caller on Uncle Mad Jim's bodaaaacious Problem Corner iiiissss--"

Johnny froze. He had a feeling...

"William Stickers, Mad Jim."

"Hi, Bill. You sound a bit depressed, to me."

"It's worse than that. I'm dead, Jim."

"Wow! I can see that could be a real downer, Bill."

"So tell us all out here in the land of the living, Bill -- what's it like, being dead?"

"Like? LIKE? It is extremely DULL."

Mr. Vicenti: "What exactly is a DJ?"
Johnny: "A disc jockey. He plays the discs and stuff."
Mr. Vicenti: "Is it some kind of punishment?"
Johnny: "Quite a lot of people like to do it."
Mr. Vicenti: "How very strange. They are not mentally ill, or anything?"

"The point about being dead in this town," said Wobbler, as they mooched along the towpath, "is that it's probably hard to tell the difference."

"I'm going to join the Army," said Bigmac. "The SAS."

"Huh. The flat feet and the asthma will be a big help there, then," said Wobbler. "I can just see they'll want you to limp out and wheeze on terrorists."

"I'm pretty certain I want to get a law degree and a medical degree," said Yo-less, to keep the peace.

"That's good. That way they won't be able to sue you if you chop the wrong bits off," said Bigmac.

Johnny: "I was only going to--"
Mr. Vicenti: "Yes, you were. And what would you say? That you'd seen [ghosts]? What good would that do? ... If you did something like that a few hundred years ago you'd probably be hung for witchcraft. Last century they'd lock you up. I don't know what they'd do now."
Johnny: "Put me on television, I expect."

Johnny peered inside the case. It was full of old leaves and stained, twisted metal. But over the top of it, shimmering gently, was the pearly outline of the ghost of the machine, purring away without electricity. At least, apparently without electricity. Who knew where the electricity went when the light was switched off?

"Sounds a bit occult," said Johnny.

"No! It is physics! It is beyond physics. It is--" he waved both hands excitedly, "metaphysics. From the Greek meta, meaning 'beyond', and physika, meaning ... er..."

"Physics," said Mr. Vicenti.

"Exactly!"

"Correct! Are you a physicist?"

"Me?" said Johnny. "I don't know anything about science!"

"Marvellous! Ideal qualification!" said Einstein.

"I must say," said the Alderman, "I thought Australia was a bit different. More kangaroos and fewer young women in unsuitable clothing."

"I'm quite happy with the young women," said William Stickers.

"Mr. Stickers! For shame! You're dead!"

"But I have a very good memory, Mrs. Liberty."

"We're dead. So we wait here, like decent people. Not go dabbling in the Ordinary."

Johnny wondered if Mrs. Liberty was her great-grandmother or something, but it would be hard to ask; you couldn't very well say, "Hey, you look like this dead lady, are you related?"

Mad is a word used about people who've either got no senses or several more than most other people.

"Well ... the thing is ... the thing I want to know is ... is there anything than anyone can say here, tonight, that's going to make any difference?"

"It's wrong to think the past is something that's just gone. It's still there. It's just that you've gone past. If you drive through a town, it's still there in the rear-view mirror. Time is a road, but it doesn't roll up behind you. Things aren't over just because they're past."

Chairman: "The dead are no longer here and I am afraid they do not vote."
Johnny: "You're wrong. They are here and they have got a vote. ... It's called tradition. And they outvote us twenty to one."

"I feel I have no alternative but to close the meeting," said the chairman stiffly. "This was supposed to be an informative occassion."

"I think it has been," said Mr. Atterbury.

"But you can't close the meeting," said Johnny.

"Indeed, I can!"

"You can't," said Johnny, "because this is a public hall, and we're all public, and no-one's done anything wrong."

"If we start off not knowing what we're going to do, we could do anything."

"You've got a lot of time for abstract thought when you've got your hand stuck up a dead badger."

"Off all the forces in the universe, the hardest to overcome is force of habit. Gravity is easy-peasy by comparison."

The figures the telescope was producing were all that was left of an exploding star twenty million years ago. A billion small rubbery things on two planets who had been getting on with life in a quiet sort of way had been totally destroyed, but they were certainly helping Adrian get his Ph.D. and, who knows, they might have thought it all worthwhile if anyone had asked them.

"I saw a film about this, Sarge," said another policeman. "These aliens landed and replaced everyone in the town with giant vegetables."

"Really? Round here it'd be days before anyone noticed," said the sergeant.

"So we know the following. Strange invisible aliens have invaded Blackbury. They dropped in at the Dirty Duck, where they blew up the Space Invaders machine, which makes sense. And then they went to the pictures. Well, that makes sense too. It's probably years before new films get as far as Alfred Centuri..."

"Not me," said William Stickers. "Belief in the survival of what is laughably called the soul after death is a primitive superstition which has no place in a dynamic socialist society!"

They looked at him.

"You don't tzink," said Solomon Einstein, carefully, "that it is worth reconsidering your opinions in the light of experimental evidence?"

"Don't think you can get round me just because you're accidentally right!"

"Can we have fun in Iceland?" said the Alderman.

"How do you feel about fish?"

"Can't abide fish."

"Not Iceland, then. I believe it's very hard to have fun in Iceland without fish being involved in some way."

"America?" said Mrs. Liberty. "Won't we get scalped?"

"Good grief, no!" said William Stickers, who was a bit more up to date about the world.

"Probably not," said Mr. Fletcher, who had been watching the news lately and was even more up to date than William Stickers.

"New York, New York."

"Why did they name it twice?"

"Well, they ARE Americans. I suppose they wanted to be sure."

There was something about Mr. Grimm that made Johnny want to hit him, except that it wouldn't work anyway and, besides, hitting him would be like hitting mud. You'd get dirtier for doing it.

Sergeant Comely was working on the general assumption that where you got lots of people gathered together, something illegal was bound to happen sooner or later.

It occurred to Johnny, not for the first time, that the human mind ... was like a compass. Not matter how much you shook it up, no matter what happened to it, sooner or later it'd carry on pointing the same way. If three-metre tall green Martians landed on the shopping mall, bought some greeting cards and a bag of sugar cookies and took off again, within a day or two people would believe it never happened.

They were somewhere in the high plateaus of Asia, where once camel trains had traded silk across five thousand miles and now madmen with guns shot one another in the various names of God.

"Tarot cards are European occult. Voodoo is African occult."

"Don't be daft, it's American," said Wobbler.

"No, American occult is Elvis Presley not being dead and that sort of thing," said Yo-less.

Making a fuss about cards and heavy metal and going on about Dungeons and Dragons stuff because it's got demon gods in it is like guarding the door when it is really coming up through the floorboards.

"Scared?" said Bigmac.

"What? Me? Scared? Huh? Me? I'm not scared."

"Actually, it is a bit risky," said Baron Yo-less.

"Yes, risky," said Wobbler hurriedly.

"I mean, you never know," said Yo-less.

"Never know," Wobbler echoed.

"Look, it's a street in our town. There's lights and a phone box and everything," said Johnny. "I just ... I won't be happy until I've checked, OK? Anyway, there's four of us, after all."

"That just mean something bad can happen four times," said Wobbler.

Mr. Vicenti: "We cam back to say goodbye. And thank you."
Johnny: "I hardly did anything."
Mr. Vicenti: "You listened. You tried. You were there. You can get metals just for being there. People forget the people who were just there."

Johnny: "Are there ... angels involved? You know? Or ... devils and things? A lot of people would like to know."
Mr. Vicenti: "Oh, no. I don't think so. That sort of thing ... no. That's for the living. No."
Alderman: "I rather think it's going to be a lot more interesting than that."

"You know those games where this ball runs up and bounces around and ends up in a slot at the bottom? ... Well ... when you're bouncing around from pin to pin, it is probably very difficult to know that outside the game there's a room and outside the room there's a town and outside the town there's a country and outside the country there's a world and outside the world there's a billion trillion stars and that's only the start of it ... but it's there, d'you see? Once you know about it, you can stop worrying about the slot at the bottom. And you might bounce around a good deal longer."

"Why are you all leaving?" said Johnny.

"Oh, yes. It's Judgement Day," said Mr. Vicenti. "We decided."

"I thought that was chariots and things."

"I think you'll have to use your own judgement on that one. No point in waiting for what you've already got."

Mr. Grimm had taken life very seriously, starting with his own.

Suicide was against the law. Johnny had wondered why. It meant that if you missed, or the gas ran out, or the rope broke, you could get locked up in prison to show you that life was really very jolly and thoroughly worth living.