Free The Imaginary by A. F. Harrold Page A

having a Friend.’
    â€˜Yes they do,’ Snowflake said. ‘What I heard was that he eats Friends to give himself enough imagination to keep believing in his Friend. Now he’s a grownup, and has been for years and years, he should’ve forgotten her. But he doesn’t want to, and the only way to keep believing is to eat…imagination.’
    â€˜I never heard that,’ Emily said.
    â€˜How does he find Friends?’ Rudger asked.
    â€˜Oh, he sniffs them out,’ Cruncher-of-Bones answered. ‘He can smell Fading, like cats do. Get a whiff of that up one nostril and he’ll be on the trail like a bloodhound. And once he finds you it’s cutlery out and eyes down for some speedy gobbling before you’re all Faded away. Would you like another cake, Rudger?’
    Rudger shook his head at the cake. He could smell Fading, eh? Well, that wasn’t how he’d found Amanda’s house and found him. Mr Bunting had been hunting for Friends then, not just waiting. He’d been searching for them door-to-door. And from the moment Amanda had seen the girl on the doorstep Mr Bunting had known there was a girl living there who could see imaginary people, and that meant…
    â€˜Can he be killed?’ he asked.
    Emily looked at him. ‘I don’t remember any story where he got killed. Anyone?’
    There was a general shaking of heads.
    â€˜Zinzan said,’ Rudger said, ‘that we just disappear if our children are killed. Is that true?’
    â€˜Yeah,’ said Emily, chewing a marshmallow. ‘And it happens the other way round too.’
    â€˜What do you mean?’
    â€˜If an imaginary dies, then the real friend dies too.’
    â€˜I’ve not heard that,’ said the bouncing ping pong ball.
    â€˜It’s true,’ said Emily. ‘There was this kid I heard of once. Him and his Friend, PikPik, fell off this cliff, yeah? They’d been mucking about and there was an accident. And they were falling, and PikPik hit the ground first. She smashed to pieces…vanished, poof! And then her real friend died too.’
    There was a moment’s silence before Snowflake said, ‘But they’d fallen off a cliff. Of course the real friend died.’
    â€˜No,’ said Emily, lowering her voice so everyone had to lean in to hear, ‘you didn’t listen proper. The imaginary died, then the real kid.’
    â€˜But they both fell from a great height,’ Snowflake protested.
    â€˜ Yeah, but the real kid was dead before it hit the ground.’
    The silence dragged out a little longer before the dinosaur said, ‘How do you know?’
    Emily shrugged. ‘That’s just what I heard.’

    It had grown late. The fire was dying down.
    Some imaginaries were already heading off to bed.
    Emily led Rudger between bookcases and down aisles until they reached one where there were hammocks slung from side to side.
    â€˜Here, let me give you a leg up,’ she said, cupping her hands together and helping Rudger climb into the dangling bed.
    He’d spent all his life sleeping in the bottom of a wardrobe, so this was new to him. There were blankets and a pillow and the hammock rocked a little, as if the whole library were out at sea. It gentled and soothed him. After the long, dark day he’d had, the library was singing him a lullaby.
    He didn’t expect to sleep. So much had happened and was running round in his head. He was wondering where Amanda was. Was she at home or was she in a hospital? Was she thinking of him? And where was Mr Bunting, and was he thinking of Rudger too?
    But he did sleep, without even noticing it, and the next thing he knew it was morning.

When he woke up, with the electric lights of the library flickering overhead and real people flicking through books either side of his hammock, he climbed down and made his way through the stacks back to the clearing where they’d had the campfire the