The Stranger - Max Frei [1]
I should add that I met Sir Juffin Hully in my dreams. Little by little, you could say, we became acquainted.
Sir Juffin could easily be taken for Rutger Hauer’s older brother. (If your imagination stretches that far, try to augment his striking image with a pair of light, slightly slanting eyes.) This effervescent gentleman, with the mannerisms and flair of an emperor of the Orient or a ringmaster in a circus, immediately won the heart of the boy I once was, the boy I remember still.
In one of my dreams we began nodding hello to each another. Soon we would chat about the weather, like regulars in a café. Such superficial banter continued for several years, when out of the blue Sir Juffin offered to help me find employment.
He announced that I had, as he put it, an extraordinary bent for magic, which I simply had to develop if I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life in an asylum. He then offered his services as a coach, employer, and considerate uncle, all rolled into one. This absurd announcement was nevertheless very attractive, considering that until then I hadn’t discovered a single latent talent in myself. Even in my dreams I realized that no matter how you looked at it, my career wasn’t going anywhere. Sir Juffin, inspired by my apparent willingness, plucked me out of reality like a dumpling from a bowl of soup. Up until then, I was certain that I had been a victim of my own imagination—how strange we humans are, when all is said and done!
I will, I think, postpone the saga of my very first journey between worlds—if only because I remembered almost nothing during the earliest days of my sojourn on Echo. In fact, I couldn’t make sense of anything that had happened. Quite frankly, I suspected that it was all a protracted dream, if not a convoluted hallucination. I tried not to analyze the situation, but to concentrate on solving the problems at hand, since there seemed to be plenty of them. For a start, I had to undergo an intensive period of adaptation to my new life, for I had arrived in this World far less prepared than an ordinary newborn. From the first moments of their lives babies squall and dirty their diapers without disrupting the local traditions. But from the very first I did everything all wrong. I had to sweat like a horse before I could even pass for the village idiot.
When I found myself in the home of Sir Juffin Hully for the first time, he was absent from the premises. Indeed, being the Most Venerable Head of the Minor Secret Investigative Force of the Capital of the Unified Kingdom was a busy job, and my protector had been detained somewhere.
The Head Butler, Kimpa, who had strict instructions from his master to give me the red-carpet treatment, was somewhat perplexed. Until now he had welcomed only respectable people to the house.
I began my new life with a question: where to find the bathroom. Even this turned out to be a faux pas. Every citizen of the Unified Kingdom older than two knows that the bathroom facilities of every dwelling occupy the basement and are reached by a special staircase.
And my attire! Jeans, a sweater, a vest made of thick un-dyed leather, and heavy blunt-nosed boots, all succeeded in shocking the old gentleman, usually as unflappable as an Indian chieftain. He looked me up and down from head to foot for ten seconds at least. Sir Juffin swears that Kimpa hadn’t fixed his stare on anyone for so long since the day of his wedding, two hundred years before, to the now-departed Mrs. Kimpa. The result of this inspection was that he suggested I change my clothes. I didn’t object—I simply couldn’t disappoint the expectations of the old fellow with ruffled feathers.
What happened next was painfully awkward. I was given a pile of colored fabric. I bunched up these masses of formless material in my hands, damp from agitation, and blinked my eyes wildly. Luckily, Mr. Kimpa had led a long and undoubtedly colorful life. In his time he had seen many wonders,