Adventures of a Cat-Whiskered Girl Read Free

hospital, is very sad reading, I can tell you. Not everyone enjoys being crazy like the professor here."
    "So, what am I thinking right now?" I asked Molly.
    "You're wondering if I wasn't lying when I said that I lie," Molly said. "You're wondering if what I am saying is true and whether you can trust me."
    "That's more or less right," I said.
    "Is it more or is it less?"
    "More."
    "And, by the way, you can, if you want to."
    "Can what?"
    "Trust me."
    "So what is the professor thinking?"
    "He's thinking about how many cows could be put to graze on the hospital lawn."
    "Forty-two!" the professor said. "I would suggest Guernseys. They're very nice cows."
    "So they put you in here because you can read minds? Why would they do that if you really can?"
    "Well, to begin with, they think I can't. They think I'm imagining it. And then there are the voices."
    "Voices?"
    "I hear 'em. It's one of the big signs that you're cuckoo."
    "Are they real voices or voices because you're cuckoo?"
    "They're in my head. They sound real to me, but that is what every voice-hearing loony thinks."
    "Whose voices are these, and what are they saying?"
    "No idea about who. And they seem to be talking to one another, not to me. It's like ... well, did you ever pick up the phone and hear another conversation faintly going on in the background?"
    "I think so. Are you able to make out what they're saying?"
    "Not usually. I have an idea they are not of this world."
    "Like ghosts?"
    "Maybe ghosts, or little men in flying saucers, or maybe they aren't there at all and I'm a nutcase. It's puzzling."

CHAPTER 5
Walkabout

    While we talked we had been walking. Away from the big spooky castle of a main building and the big lawn, there were trees, streets, and houses, bungalows, little apartment houses, playgrounds, a little old-fashioned schoolhouse that appeared to be closed, a church. Some of the houses were for the people who worked at the old insane asylum and their families. It really was like a little town.
    "When I was quite a small child, my father, Professor Tag, would take me to New York City of a Sunday."
    "Your father was a professor too?"
    "No, that was his first name. He worked for a commercial dairy in the town of Poughkeepsie. I am
named after him, and I am also a professor, so my name and title is Professor Professor Tag. Anyway, in those days, men would sell things in the street. I remember a wonderful toy. It was a limber dancing man, with stretchy arms and legs made of accordion-pleated crepe paper, with a cardboard head, hands, and feet.
    "The sidewalk sellers would make them dance amazingly, and they also—though I did not know or understand it—would conceal in their mouths a tiny device known as a ventrilo, with which they would make music and funny noises. Understand, I was very small, and didn't have any knowledge of mechanical things, and I was nearsighted and not yet fitted for glasses, so I never saw the thin black thread by which the dancing men were suspended, and was unable to figure out that a paper toy would not be able to dance by itself.
    "I begged my father to buy me one of the amazing things, and as it only cost a few coins, he obliged me. I rode home with him, on the train to Poughkeepsie, in a state of high excitement. I was going to amaze my mother, my little siblings, and all of my friends with the magical toy.
    "Naturally, when unwrapped, it was nothing but a cheap paper doll with a string attached. It did not dance, let alone make amusing noises. Had my father
not been completely inept and ignorant of mechanics, he might have explained to me that it was the skill of the sidewalk salesman that made the doll perform, and perhaps together we might have made some kind of attempt to work it. But he was as baffled as I was and thought we had been cheated—that a useless copy of the dancing man had been fobbed off on us. He swore vengeance on the dishonest tradesman, and made me swear too that I would track him down