Free The Second Forever by Colin Thompson Page B

shiny and gold.’
    â€˜All right, and next time we come I will definitely remember to bring your own gold, too.’
    â€˜I can buy a house in Switzerland, then,’ said the old lady, ‘right next door to yours.’
    They continued to walk until finally they reached Foreclaw’s door and stopped. The old lady wandered off in her own little world, stroking and kissing Peter’s watch and talking to herself about the best real-estate agent to go to if you wanted to buy a house on Lake Geneva.

    Foreclaw was surprised to see them. When Peter and Festival had first met him five years earlier he had been a thin dark man with straggly hair. He was still thin and dark, but now his straggly hair was streaked with whiteas though he had been dusted with icing sugar.
    He greeted them warmly, hurried them inside and shut the door. ‘I was not expecting you for another twelve days,’ he said. ‘Not until the full moon.’
    As the old man sat there nodding, Festival and Peter explained what had happened.
    â€˜Hardly surprising,’ said Foreclaw. ‘But fortunately your grandfather had the presence of mind to control the situation.’
    â€˜He sends you his greetings,’ said Peter.
    â€˜And I welcome them,’ Foreclaw replied. ‘It’s a lifetime since we saw each other face-to-face. He was like the son I never had, you know, and I was the last person he spoke to before he fled to your world.’
    â€˜Do we need to write everything down here?’ said Peter, looking around the room, but Foreclaw waved his concern away.
    â€˜Not here, but I can’t say the same for everywhere else,’ he said. ‘I suggest you keep your wits about you and be very careful who you trust.’

    The journey into Festival’s world, although only less than a minute long, had left the two children exhausted. Years ago they had been uncertain how to think of Foreclaw, not sure if they could trust him or not, but now that Peter’s grandfather had reassured them, they felt safe. Since Festival had come back to Peter’s world, they felt as if they had been holdingtheir breaths and, at last, they could relax.
    While the children fell asleep by the fire, Foreclaw pottered around his cramped apartment tidying up. This involved picking things up from one overcrowded place and moving them to another overcrowded place, which then meant he had to move something else to make room for the thing he had just moved and so on, until he could finally manage to squeeze something into a gap between two other things. It was more like musical chairs, without the chairs or the music, than tidying up. As he moved things around, he dusted and polished them and hummed happily to himself.
    â€˜One of the good things about getting old,’ he said when Peter woke up a couple of hours later, ‘is the stuff that bored you out of your head when you were young actually becomes quite fun. I can spend a whole day re-arranging bits of nothing and enjoy every moment of it.’
    Later, when they had eaten, Foreclaw sat the two children down with a serious look on his face. ‘It is actually fortunate that you have come early,’ he began. ‘The way things are, every day we can save is good.’
    â€˜Yes,’ said Festival. ‘I noticed how the water had risen since I left. It seems to be coming up faster and faster.’

    â€˜I think it is,’ said Foreclaw. ‘But for all the floodsin my world, and all the drought in yours, and all the pain and chaos they have brought, there is an even greater problem.’
    â€˜How could there be?’ said Festival. ‘Millions of people are going to die, maybe even everyone! What could be worse than that?’
    â€˜What happens after that,’ said the old man. ‘After they have passed away. Even now, as people die of old age or disease or from accidents, the disaster is too great to comprehend.’
    â€˜What