Whisper For The Reaper, Jack Gatland [good books for high schoolers txt] 📗

have with us one of the original Magpies, a man who has written new introductions for the upcoming reprints, celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the group’s first adventure,’ she gushed. ‘He's here today to sign them for you, but before we put him to work, let's hear it for 'Tommy' from the Magpies, Thomas Williams!’

As the audience applauded and cheered, Thomas walked to the lectern, waving to the audience and nodding to the manager as she backed away to give him space. Now at the lectern, he gave a second brief wave to his adoring fans and then spoke, a prepared speech that he’d spoken at events around the world for over twenty years; one so well rehearsed that he could alter it on the fly.

‘When my cousin Luke and I started the Magpies, it was to prove that our milkman wasn't a killer,’ he explained. ‘We couldn't even conceive the global phenomenon that it would become. But Reginald Troughton did. He believed the stories he would write about us would become famous. Would make us famous.’

He paused, thrown for a moment.

There was a gap at the back of the crowd that shouldn’t be there, and a cryptic message he’d had earlier that day suddenly made sense.

‘Uh... Unfortunately Reginald can't be with us today as he's suffering from a head cold in Scotland,’ he continued on, recovering. ‘But he sends his regards to all of you.’

He looked to Jane who, realising what he was about to do, started shaking her head.

‘But that's not to say I'm the only one from the Magpies here today,’ Thomas smiled, pointing to her. ‘I’d like to introduce to you another member of the Magpies, my good friend Jane Taylor!’

As the audience, surprised at such a celebrity in their midst, looked to Jane and applauded, Thomas took a deep breath, grateful to her for the distraction.

Because Reginald Troughton wasn’t in Scotland and didn’t have a cold.

He was supposed to have appeared, out of nowhere, from the back of the audience. It was a ‘surprise appearance’ skit that he’d performed for years, and one that was as far from a ’surprise’ as you could get these days.

So where the hell was he this time?

Reginald Troughton sat in the office of his Temple Inn apartment, facing his desk and MacBook with an air of frantic desperation. He was on a deadline, and he was failing it. He remembered some kind of anecdote by Douglas Adams about deadlines and whooshing noises, but it didn’t really help that as far as he was concerned, Adams was a hack who could write a novel in a week, while he, the great and lauded Reginald Troughton couldn’t write a sodding children’s book in a month.

His agent had called earlier that day, passive aggressively demanding the finished manuscript by the end of the week, or else the advance was being taken away. Reginald had taken the scolding before pointing out that he only heard from her when she needed something, and where the hell was the auction for his adult thriller series she’d been promising. However, as he’d already spent the pittance the publisher had sent him months earlier, and he didn’t have it to give back, this meant that he had to buckle down and finish the bloody thing which meant he couldn’t go to the Waterstones event.

Which was fine by him; now in his mid-sixties, he wasn’t interested in fanboy totty anymore, and Thomas Williams was an insufferable bastard to be around, who’s only income was milking people’s nostalgia for pennies. He’d passed the message that he wasn’t attending down the line, but he’d left it vague in case he managed to actually make it.

He hadn’t.

And now he was finishing up the ‘lost’ Magpie adventure, trying to work out how to say what he wanted to say without shitting the bed too much. It was supposed to be called The Adventure of the Blacksmith’s Apron, but halfway through he’d had a revelation. He was going to write the truth. And so the book had been re-titled The Adventure of the Blatant Lie, and instead of some made-up bollocks about a blacksmith in a Devonshire village, the book was now the truth about the bloody Magpies, and why they’d been formed. He knew it’d piss people off, but quite frankly he didn’t care. The contract didn’t state what the novel had to be about, and they didn’t pay him enough to keep silent anymore.

There was the sound of a sudden crack in the other room, as if a stone had been thrown at a window, breaking it, and Reginald rose wearily from the chair. The bloody teenagers were buggers for smashing windows on the estate—

He didn’t finish the thought, as a man entered the doorway to the office. That was, it looked like a man because of the full-head latex mask of a bald man that the figure wore. The black clothing, a hoodie, gloves and cargo pants were shapeless and could have been of either sex, but the one thing that was obvious was the intention, shown by the rusty tyre iron that the bald man held in their left hand, likely the item that had made the glass cracking noise as they’d forced entry.

Reginald swallowed nervously.

‘So,’ he whispered. ‘Which one of you finally had the balls to face me?’

The ‘bald man’ didn’t reply as they moved in, striking down hard with the tyre iron.

The audience laughed as Thomas finished reading aloud from the first of the books, The Adventure Of The Rusty Crowbar. He’d learned many years ago that they’d eat up anything he said, and it was easier to read books they knew by heart than to actively work on something original. Looking up at them, he grinned.

‘I think you all know what happens next,’ he finished. The audience nodded and murmured in agreement, before applauding.

Of course they knew what happened next, he thought to himself, as the manager leaned past him, a little