can I do?” he asked, making the words come out slowly and not too loud. “Is there any way of stopping Grim Tuesday?”
“There is one way…” mused the Will. “But you have to come back to the House. Once here, you would then need to—”
A loud beep cut off the Will and a new voice spoke, accompanied by a crackling buzz.
“This is the Operator. Please insert two and six to continue your call.”
Arthur heard the Will reply, but its voice was very faint.
“I haven’t got two roundels! Put it on our bill.”
“Your credit has been revoked by order of the Court of Days. Please insert two roundels and six demi-crowns. Ten… nine… eight… seven… six…”
“Arthur!” called the Will, very distantly. “Come to the House!”
“Two… one… This call is terminated. Thank you.”
Arthur kept holding the earpiece, but it was silent. Even the background buzzing had stopped. All he could hear was the rasping of his own breath, struggling to get in and out of his lungs. Or, rather, struggling inside his right lung. His left side felt fine, which was weird since that was the lung that had been punctured by the Hour Key in his life-or-death battle with Mister Monday.
Three hundred and sixty-three tons of gold.
Arthur lay down while he thought about that. How would Grim Tuesday try to get him to pay? Would he send Fetchers again, or other creatures of Nothing? If he did, would they bring a new plague?
He was so tired he couldn’t think of any answers. Only questions. They raced round and round inside his head.
I have to get up and do something, Arthur thought. I should look in the Compleat Atlas of the House or write down some kind of action plan. It’s Tuesday already, so there’s no time to waste. Grim Tuesday will only be able to do things here in my world on Tuesday, so he won’t waste any time… I mustn’t waste any time… waste any…
Arthur woke up with a start. The sun was streaming in through his window. For a moment he couldn’t work out what had happened or where he was. Then the fog of sleep began to clear. He’d flaked out completely and now it was after ten a.m.
On Tuesday morning.
Arthur jumped out of bed. After the fire and the plague of the day before, there was no chance of having to go to school. But that wasn’t what worried him. Grim Tuesday could have been doing something for hours while Arthur slept. He had to find out what was going on.
When he got downstairs, everyone else was either out or still asleep. There was the very faint echo of music from the studio, which meant his adoptive father, Bob, was playing with the door open. Arthur checked the screen on the fridge and saw that his mum was still at the hospital lab. His brother Eric was practising basketball at the back of the house and didn’t want to be disturbed by anyone. There was no message from his sister Michaeli, so he guessed she was still asleep.
Arthur turned on the television and found the news channel. It was still full of the “miraculous” escape from the Sleepy Plague, with the genetic structure of the virus sequenced overnight and so many sufferers coming out of their comas without going into the final, lethal stage. The fire at his school got some coverage too. Apparently it had been a very strange blaze, destroying every book in the library – even melting the metal shelves with its intensity – but the building itself had been hardly damaged and the fire had spontaneously extinguished itself. About the same time Arthur had entered the House, he thought.
The quarantine was still in place around the city, but within the city people were allowed to move about during daylight hours if they had “urgent business that could not be delayed”. There were checkpoints maintained by police and Federal Biocontrol authorities, who would test anyone passing through. Arthur could still hear the constant dull chatter of quarantine helicopters flying a cordon around the city.
There was no new news, at least none that Arthur could identify as the work of Grim Tuesday. He shut the television off and looked outside. Everything appeared normal. The only people in the street were across the road, putting a SOLD sign in the front yard of the house there.
Which, Arthur thought, was more than a bit weird on the morning after a city-wide biohazard emergency.
Arthur looked again. There was an expensive, clean, new car, the kind estate agents always used. There were two men in dark suits, with the usual kind of SOLD sign. But as Arthur looked, his eyes teared up and his vision blurred. When he rubbed his eyes and looked again, the men were much shorter, wider and misshapen than they had been. In fact, one looked like he had a hunchback as well, and both had arms that reached down almost to their knees.
Arthur kept staring. The two men looked a bit blurry, but as he focused on them he saw their suits fade. Those clothes were an illusion – they were actually wearing old-fashioned coats with huge cuffs, odd breeches, wooden clogs and leather aprons.
Arthur felt a chill run through his whole body. They weren’t estate agents. Or even human. They had to be Denizens of the House, or perhaps creatures summoned from Nothing.
Agents of Grim Tuesday.
Whatever was about to happen had already begun.
Arthur ran back up the stairs, taking three at each jump. Before he got to the top he was wheezing and clutching his side. But he didn’t stop. He grabbed the Compleat Atlas of the House from his room and went up again, out on to the rooftop balcony.
The two… whatever they were… had finished hammering in the SOLD sign, had taken another sign out of their car and were hammering that in as well. Arthur couldn’t quite see what it said till they stepped out of the way. When he read the bold foot-high words it took a second for them to penetrate.
DUE FOR DEMOLITION. THE NEW LEAFY GLADE SHOPPING MALL COMING SOON
A shopping mall! Across the street!
Arthur put the Atlas on his knees and looked at the two estate agents. Still staring at them, he placed his hands on the book and willed it open. He’d needed the Key before, but the Will had assured him that at least some pages would be accessible without it.
Who are those people? Are they servants of Grim Tuesday? What does Grim Tuesday oversee in the House? Thoughts tumbled through Arthur’s head, though he tried to concentrate on the two “estate agents”.
He felt the book shiver under his hands, then it suddenly exploded open. Arthur almost toppled over backwards. It always shocked him, even when he was expecting it, that the book trebled in size.
It was open at a blank page, but he’d expected that too. A small spot of ink appeared, then stretched into a stroke. Some unseen hand rapidly drew a portrait of the two estate agents. But not with the illusory dark suits. The Atlas showed them as they had appeared once Arthur rubbed his eyes, wearing large leather aprons that stretched from the neck to the ankle. Only in the illustration they both carried large hammers and had forked beards.
After the illustration was done, the invisible pen started to write. As it had before, it started in some weird alphabet and language, but changed into English as Arthur watched, though the writing was still very old-fashioned.
