The Second Forever Read online

  About the Book

  Save the world – but live forever.

  Peter and Festival have a terrifying choice to make . . .

  When Peter and his friend Festival destroyed the book called How To Live Forever so it could no longer work its spell, they didn’t know it would have disastrous consequences.

  Now, Peter’s world is in the worst drought ever – and Festival’s world, inside the museum, is drowning. The only solution is to re-create the book.

  Can they reverse the water flow? And if they re-create the evil book, can they hide it so it can never be read again?

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title

  Dedication

  Author Introduction

  Introduction

  Chapter 01

  Chapter 02

  Chapter 03

  Chapter 04

  Chapter 05

  Chapter 06

  Chapter 07

  Chapter 08

  Chapter 09

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  About the Author

  How To Live Forever ad

  Copyright Notice

  More at Random House Australia

  For Charlotte

  The Second Forever is the second volume of the How To Live Forever trilogy of novels.

  The first novel was published in 2004. So even if you have read it, you’ve probably forgotten most of it.

  I almost never read introductions like this at the beginning of books, but I think it would be a really good idea for you to read the next three pages before you start the book itself. It will mean you won’t keep saying to yourself, ‘What?’

  If you read this introduction and still keep saying, ‘What?’, maybe you should just read the first book first.

  Enjoy.

  What happened before this . . .

  Peter lives in a vast museum with his mother and his grandfather. Before Peter was born, his father, who was the museum caretaker, went on his rounds one night and was never seen again. Peter’s grandfather has now taken on this job, but Peter soon finds out that he suffers from a life-threatening heart disease.

  As well as having a copy of every book ever published in its massive library, the museum has hundreds of hidden corridors and storerooms full of forgotten treasures. In the ten years since he was born Peter has been exploring these lost places, the only person to do so in living memory – apart from his cat, Archimedes, who mysteriously keeps appearing.

  In a remote attic Peter meets Bathline, an old woman who gives him his father’s broken watch and a book called How To Live Forever. She tells him he must never read it or else he will become immortal. Like most people, Peter finds the idea of immortality very appealing – until Bathline shows him her son, who is a shrunken, twisted figure as ill as he was when he read the book but now unable to die.

  Bathline tells Peter to take the book to the Ancient Child, who will explain everything. She does not, however, tell him who the Ancient Child is, or where to find him. One night, as he is exploring the lost rooms, Peter falls through a wall into another world – a world that looks like a giant copy of the great reading room at the heart of the museum. Here the books are not only as big as houses, they are houses, on thirteen iron balconies surrounding what in his world is a floor full of tables, but is now an inland sea.

  Peter is met by a girl called Festival, who tells him she will be his caretaker while he is there. This is because she was born at exactly the same second he was. She asks him if he has the book and is confused and distressed when he tells her no.

  They are told to go and see Foreclaw, a wise man who lives on the top gallery. The floors above the ninth level are a no-go zone, especially for children. They are dark, derelict places of crumbling books, misfits and runaways, but Peter and Festival have no choice.

  On the way, they are attacked by a twisted creature called Throatgall, who tears one of Peter’s fingers off with his teeth. Festival manages to drag Peter to safety and save him.

  When the children finally reach the thirteenth gallery, Foreclaw tells them that to find the Ancient Child they must sail out to the island in the middle of the sea. The only one who can take them there is a deaf, dumb and blind man called Earshader, who

  sails them to their destination and then leaves. The children descend into a valley, its walls made of giant encyclopaedias. As they do so, the path crumbles behind them, blocking the river’s escape so that it begins to rise, following them up the valley.

  During the night the evil Darkwood brings the book to Peter on the condition that he reads it and becomes immortal. Believing that this will help cure his grandfather’s heart disease, Peter does as he is told.

  The next day, when the rising river threatens to flood the valley where Peter and Festival are, Festival reads the book out loud and the river reverses direction, allowing the children to be carried up to the waterfall on a fallen tree. The cave leads to another world within Festival’s world where, on a small island, they find the Ancient Child and Peter’s father.

  The Ancient Child tells them if they can read the book one thousand times before midnight – it is their birthdays – the book will be destroyed forever, because with each read the book dies a little and will eventually turn to dust. When Peter and Festival succeed with this, Darkwood tries to force Peter to re-write the book but fails, and the two children and Peter’s father find their way back to Peter’s world.

  Five years later . . .

  The thin dust covered everything, taking most of the colour away. It filled the air like weak smoke, and even in the quietest hours of night when nothing moved it never settled. The tiniest breath of wind or the blink of a moth’s wing would send clouds swirling round in nervous spirals. There were times during the day, as the traffic and people moved slowly through the city, when it was impossible to see across the road. Although there was almost no traffic now, the dust the few remaining cars stirred up hung around for hours.

  Peter walked through the dust, trying to keep his footsteps as light as possible even though there was really no point. Everyone was surrounded by their own little whirlwind. He pressed his mask against his face, but, like always, the dust was so fine that it blocked the airways and made it hard to breathe. He reached the museum railings and paused for oxygen. The trees that lined the street struggled to breathe too, their clogged leaves dying long before autumn.

  No one could remember when it had last rained.

  Water was the gold of the world now, rare and almost priceless; everyone rationed it to a few litres a day and, as the months passed, the allocations grew smaller.

  Peter turned in through the gates, feeling, as he always did, that he was safe home again. Of course the air was no clearer in the museum grounds, breathing no easier. The dust still collected in endless drifts, into every single corner, and no one removed them anymore.

  When the drought had begun about five years ago and the dust had started to appear, people had swept it up. Large trucks had moved through the city streets, sucking it into their tanks, but after a few months it had stopped making a difference. The smoke came back overnight.

  Nor was there anywhere left to take the dust. At first they had tipped it into the rivers, where it had turned to mud, which slowly drifted down to the sea. But as the rivers dried up, there wasn’t enough water to carry it away and the mud had settled on the riverbeds. Then the river water became too valuable to choke with mud, and dams were built across the estuaries to stop it escaping into the salt-laden oceans. The same was happening in the sea as evaporation took away the oxygen, and the river fish were long gone.

  Peter remembered going down to the river with his father to see the last pools dying in the endless sun. The sunlight had eventually turned the rivers to concrete and you could walk right down the middle on ground as hard as a road. The seas were shrinking so much that some countries that had been separated by water were now walking distance apart. They were still receding too, and it seemed as if one day the whole world would be one large single country with no borders.

  People asked where all the water was going, but no one knew the answer. In the old days, a drought in one part of the world was balanced by floods in another. There were empty arid deserts, but there were rainforests too where even the air was heavy with water. Now the world’s entire surface was turning to desert, and no matter how deep the people drilled, there was no sign of the vanished water. The clouds had also disappeared, leaving the sky flat and uneventful as far as the eye could see. At least the dust that hung in the air weakened the sunshine and calmed its fierce heat.

  The noises that helped make a city had almost gone too. Footsteps no longer clicked on pavements. Traffic had almost stopped, same as conversation – people were reluctant to remove their masks to talk. The dust soaked up everything like fresh snow, but where snow wore down as the world moved through it and washed everything clean, the dust didn’t. It just piled up on itself.

/>   Peter walked up the museum steps and pushed through the first of the dust screens that had been built between the great stone columns. The screen closed behind him and he stood still while a powerful vacuum over his head sucked the dust from his clothes. The green light came on and he went through the second and third screens, where the same thing happened again before he was finally allowed to go through the final doors and into the museum.

  Even with all the screens and every one of the five thousand and seven windows sealed shut, the dust still managed to find its way into the building. It had even got into sealed glass cases, some of which would not have been opened for over a hundred years. It was nothing like the blanket outside, but it covered everything with a thin skin. You could still see inside all the display cases, but the glass had no shine as if it had been frosted. Fine cobwebs inside the cases collected the dust in their nets and became more visible, but removing them would have meant opening the cases and letting even more dust in.

  As the colour of things had faded, so had hope and enthusiasm. It was the same all over the world – such a great disaster should have united mankind, but now it just subdued them. All the ideas to fix things had run out and everything had taken on an air of defeat. Almost no one visited the museum now. People were too busy thinking about today and tomorrow to be bothered with yesterday.

  Peter walked through the fossil gallery and towards the staircase that led up to the top floor, where he lived in an apartment behind a door of books with his parents and grandfather. This was his world. The museum was his front room, his back garden and his playground. It was a world that most people would have seen as a cold, lifeless place, room after room of history. Nothing living, nothing of today, but to Peter it was not only where he had lived all his life, it was the very place he had been born fifteen years before.

  Peter’s father, like his father before him, was the museum caretaker. Every night at sunset he followed the last people towards the exit, waiting patiently as they went back into the outside world. Then he locked the main gates, shutting it all out until the next morning. He could see unrecognised glimpses of the museum’s magic in those last visitors’ eyes, especially in the faces of their children. It never occurred to them, especially to the adults, that the museum was something more than huge granite halls full of dead history.

  Each day, having locked the gates, Peter’s father walked across the courtyard, locked the museum doors and switched off the vacuums in the dust screens. This evening routine was more than simply keys and switches being turned. It was the closing of the gap into everywhere else, and it was only after the vacuums had fallen silent that total calm settled over the museum. The constant hum of their motors had become invisible and only when it actually stopped did Peter and his father notice it. The first seconds of complete silence were a perfect moment at the end of each day.

  ‘School boring again, I suppose,’ he said as he joined Peter, who would be waiting at the foot of the stairs.

  ‘Yes, no different.’

  ‘It never is. It was just the same for me when I was younger. I couldn’t wait to get back here each afternoon.’

  ‘Well, at least you had rain and trees and the river,’ said Peter. ‘Now everywhere seems like the inside of an ancient pyramid.’

  ‘True,’ his father agreed. ‘We had seasons. Remember?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Never thought about them, either. They came no matter what we did,’ said Peter’s father. ‘We always moaned about the rain and the cold. If only we’d known what was to come. Even the worst global warming threats never predicted this.’

  They walked through the empty galleries and upstairs to the apartment behind the glass door of fake books that was their home. Peter’s mother was still at work downstairs in her office and Peter’s grandfather was in his room propped up in his bed, waiting for his grandson to get back from school.

  The old man spent more and more time in bed now. He seemed to grow older every day, though the light in his eyes showed windows into a brain that was a sharp as it had ever been. Some mornings, before the museum opened, he and Peter would go down to the Egyptian galleries and visit the mummies or walk slowly around the great halls of fossils.

  ‘I’m one of them now,’ he would say laughingly, ‘the mummies and the fossils.’

  ‘If it doesn’t rain soon,’ Peter said, ‘we all will be.’

  But the old man’s visits were growing fewer and he often spent whole days in bed. Yet no matter how tired he was, and he usually fell asleep every afternoon, he was always awake when Peter came home from school, awaiting his grandson’s reports of the world outside.

  ‘How are you feeling today, Grandfather?’ Peter would ask.

  ‘Like the world outside,’ the old man would reply and laugh. ‘All dried up.’

  ‘I wonder how it’s all going to end,’ said Peter.

  ‘I imagine I’ll go to sleep one day and never wake up.’

  ‘I meant outside,’ Peter replied.

  ‘I suppose that could be the same,’ said the old man. ‘Everything will slowly come to a halt. And then one day, when we’ve all gone and all the books and bones have turned to dust so there’s no memory of us ever having been here, maybe it will start to rain and everything will begin all over again.’

  ‘Do you think so?’ said Peter.

  ‘Who knows? There are people who think nature is shutting down deliberately to rid the world of mankind. They claim that when we are all gone, then the world will re-awaken, rain will come and the world will be reborn, but without mankind to spoil it,’ said the old man.

  Peter said nothing. The thought of everything, not just people and animals, but every last blade of grass dying was too big to imagine. No matter how bad things got he always thought something else would happen that could fix it. Most people thought this, but it was more a wish than a belief.

  ‘And who can say,’ the old man continued, ‘that it hasn’t all happened before? There are some people who even believe that.’

  Since he had found his father and brought him back from the other world in the heart of the library, Peter had a head full of questions for his grandfather. Yet whenever he had tried to put them to the old man, his grandfather had always managed to avoid them. Now with him in his bed and growing visibly older, Peter had become determined to finally get some answers.

  And now, for the first time, Peter began to wonder if the way he and Festival had reversed the river by reading the book was connected to the drought in his world. This wasn’t something he’d thought about before. He had no reason to, and the idea had just appeared from nowhere, but the river running backwards in the other world and the rivers drying up in Peter’s world suddenly felt like they could have something in common. If not, it was an incredible coincidence.

  ‘You don’t think the drought has anything to do with the book, do you?’ asked Peter.

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought so,’ said the old man. ‘Yet, now that you mention it, the two things do kind of have a similar strangeness in common.’

  ‘But,’ said Peter, ‘if they are connected, that would mean Festival and I caused this drought.’

  ‘No, no, it can’t be anything to do with that,’ said Peter’s grandfather. ‘I’m sure it’s what the scientists are saying. It’s global warming and it has accelerated past the point of us being able to do anything about it.’

  ‘Do you think so?’

  ‘Yes, of course. I mean, they’re experts, these people, and look at the evidence.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Peter, but there was a disturbing doubt in his head that wouldn’t go away.

  The old man lay back and closed his eyes. He’d been doing that more and more lately, slipping into a world of his own that Peter could only guess about. Maybe he was thinking about his youth and things that his grandson would never know about. Or maybe he was just old and tired . . .

  ‘Grandfather,’ Peter continued, ‘I met your sister and her daughter, Victoria, in the other world. Why did they go there?’