Mister Monday (8 page)

He glanced back at the burning library as he desperately tried to work out a plan. The smoke was still a mighty column, but a wisp of it was curling out to one side, as if it were being pulled like a strand of cotton candy. Then that strand was suddenly twisted and stretched and bent in ways no normal smoke would ever follow.

The smoke was forming letters, Arthur realized. Complete words. He rapidly looked around and noticed no one else was looking in the same direction. Perhaps, as with the Fetchers, only he could see this happening.

The words were compressed and overlapped one another, so it was a bit difficult for Arthur to work out what they said. Then it became clear.

Arthur. Get near the House and I will help you. Will

“Easy for you to say,” muttered Arthur, and the smoky words broke apart and drifted off like regular smoke once more.

It was
much
easier said than done. First of all, Arthur had to get out of quarantine without being shot or stunned. Once he was on that bus, it would be almost impossible to escape.

All sorts of possibilities raced through his head. But most of them were imagined scenes of himself running away from the bus, all the policemen and soldiers shouting and chasing him, one of them finally drawing a gun and then a fusillade of shots…

There had to be another way. Arthur slowed down so he would have more time to think. He was halfway there, he had less than a minute of freedom. There had to be an answer. Could he use the Key in some way?

He looked down at it, keeping it by his side, and realized he had another problem. The police officer was searching all the kids before they got on, and there was a pile of small knives, mace sprays, and other stuff by his feet. A lot smaller pile than he would have gotten from Arthur’s old school, and no guns, but still quite a few deadly weapons.

By the police officer’s standards, the Key would not be a metalwork project he needed to keep, but a long, thin, and weird-looking knife. It would be taken away from him for sure, and then…

Arthur would have an asthma attack. He had his inhaler, but after his running, fighting, and smoke inhalation, he didn’t think it would do any good at all.

He suddenly realized the Key was the only thing keeping him alive.

“Hey, kid! Hurry up!” shouted the policeman.

Chapter Eight

T
he policeman’s voice was more menacing through his mask, made deeper and buzzy and much less human. The last student had gone on the bus, and now the sergeant’s full attention was on Arthur.

That shout made up Arthur’s mind, and a plan suddenly popped into his head. Without further thought, he put it into action.

“I’m…” said Arthur. “I’m…”

He pushed the Key deep into his pocket, the point ripping through the bottom so the metal slid through and touched his leg. Then he let go.

The effect was instantaneous. Though he still had some contact with the Key, his breathing immediately changed. It was as if someone had winded him, reducing the capacity of his lungs by fifty percent with a single blow.

“Asthmatic!” wheezed Arthur, collapsing to the ground ten paces from the sergeant. Despite the protection of his biosuit and Arthur’s explanation, the sergeant’s first reaction was to jump back onto the steps of the bus, as if he were seeing the new virus in immediate action.

Arthur fumbled in his other pocket for his inhaler and brought it to his mouth. He also rolled over so that more of the Key touched his leg. About half of it was through his pocket, the metal cool upon his skin, bringing ease to his lungs. He hoped that the circle on the end of the Key would prevent it from falling out of his trouser leg if he stood up.

“Medic!” shouted the policeman. As he shouted, he undid the strap on his holster and his hand went to the butt of his pistol. “Medic!”

“Asthma!” wheezed Arthur again. He took a couple of puffs, then held the inhaler up so the policeman could see it. Arthur hadn’t counted on the man being so afraid of the virus that he might shoot.

The paramedic who’d checked Arthur out a minute before was already running over, as was another paramedic, several policemen, and a pair of soldiers. It looked like Arthur’s sudden collapse was the invitation to action they’d all been waiting for. He hoped the soldiers weren’t as jumpy as the policeman. They both had some sort of hi-tech submachine gun.

The paramedic was the first to reach him. He held the inhaler up and helped Arthur take some puffs, at the same time flipping his bag open and checking through it for something. Though Arthur couldn’t see his face through the mask, it was clear he was cross.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were an asthmatic?” he asked. “It’s okay, Sergeant. He’s got asthma, not the Sleepy Plague. Besides, shooting patients would just spread bits of infectious material around, so I wouldn’t recommend it.”

“S…s…sorry,” gasped Arthur.

“Okay, just relax,” replied the paramedic. He turned to his partner. “We’d better take him. Grab the roller, will you?”

Within a minute, the two paramedics had injected Arthur with something that helped him breathe much more easily, though it made him sleepy and he had to fight against that. Then they bundled him onto a stretcher, ran it across the street, and slid him, stretcher and all, into an ambulance.

In three minutes, they were on their way, overtaking the buses as they headed for the designated quarantine hospital. Arthur was counting on it being East Area Hospital, because that was the closest to the school. It was also close to the House, and if he was right they would pass that weird building on the way, though on the other side and several blocks over from the road he took going home.

Arthur was also counting on the promised intervention by “Will,” who he supposed was the same person or entity as “The Will” that Mister Monday and Sneezer had talked about, who he presumed was also the giver of the Atlas. He figured that if he could get close to the House, it would do something to help him get inside.

Unfortunately he couldn’t see out from inside the ambulance. He was loosely strapped to the stretcher so he couldn’t sit up, and there were no windows anyway, except for the one in the hatch at the back.

“Where are we going?” Arthur asked.

“East Area,” said the paramedic who was sitting next to him. “Don’t talk. Save your breath.”

Arthur smiled. At least that part of the plan was working. Now he just had to wait five minutes or so, when they would be driving along Parks Way, which would border the House. Then something would happen, he felt sure.

They drove on, without the siren. As the minutes passed—or what felt like minutes—Arthur began to get anxious. What if he was wrong? It seemed like they must already be past Parks Way, just about to turn into the hospital. He must have been wrong about the Will helping out. Or maybe it had tried and failed. Perhaps Mister Monday’s minions were trying some scheme of their own to regain the Key…

Then there was a sudden noise on the roof of the ambulance and it slowed dramatically.

“What in the world!” exclaimed the driver. Except that through his mask it came out as, “Werrin der wold!”

The other paramedic climbed past Arthur to stare out through the front to the windshield. Arthur took the opportunity to draw the Key from his pocket. As he gripped it firmly, all traces of his asthma vanished.

The ambulance came to a complete stop, the drumming sound of rain now a constant roar on the roof, as if they were parked next to the ocean and the waves were crashing very close.

“Local cloudburst!” shouted Arthur’s paramedic to the driver. He kept leaning through to the front, only his waist and legs still in the back part of the ambulance. “We’ll just wait it out. The boy’s doing fine.”

Arthur took a deep breath and touched the Key to the strap at his side.

“Release! Undo! Unlatch!” he whispered. He hoped that would work.

The strap fell away, the click swallowed up by the sound of the beating rain. Arthur quickly whispered the words again and touched the other strap. Then he sat up, and repeated the process with the strap over his legs.

Then he threw himself forward, pulled the hatch handle, pushed the door open, and half-jumped, half-fell out into the heaviest rain he had ever experienced. Rain that actually hurt, the drops as big as his fist, so big that when they broke over his face he thought he might drown.

It was so heavy that Arthur couldn’t see a thing. Blindly, he waded around the back of the ambulance and struck out in what he hoped was the right direction. The road was already knee-deep in rushing water, the drains totally overwhelmed by the downpour.

Arthur clutched the key and pushed on, his chin tucked in to his chest to try to keep the rain out of his eyes, nose, and mouth. Water rushed past him, roaring and gurgling. He dimly heard a shout from the ambulance.

Then, all of a sudden, the rain stopped. Arthur lifted his head and looked around, only to see that the rain had not stopped everywhere. He’d walked out of it. Only a few steps behind him, it was coming down as hard as ever. But the rain was only falling on the road, and the dark cloud above wasn’t much bigger than the ambulance.

It was hard to see into this weird, incredibly localized cloudburst, but Arthur saw a blurry shape leap from the back of the ambulance. The paramedic had come after him!

Arthur tensed to run, but the paramedic didn’t get very far. The rain intensified even more, so that it was no longer individual drops but more like a solid ocean wave being dumped horizontally from the sky. The paramedic was bowled over and swept away, bobbing like a cork as he was washed down the road. Fortunately, thought Arthur, he couldn’t drown in his biosuit, with its independent supply of oxygen.

A moment later the ambulance slid sideways, accompanied by the great groan of rubber letting go, and it followed the paramedic down the road, much more slowly. Arthur watched ambulance and man wash down the street in the strangest flash flood that anybody had ever seen. It wouldn’t take them far, but far enough for Arthur to get away. Already the rain was lessening and the cloud was shrinking.

Arthur turned away from the road. As he had hoped and half-expected, he saw the cool marble of the wall and looming up above it, the crazy architecture of the House.

Though he had lost the Atlas, Arthur still remembered the map/drawing of the House. He’d stared at it long enough, and he knew exactly where he should find the spot on the map that had been marked as Monday’s Postern. Once he was through that, he needed only to walk across to the point that was marked
FRONT DOOR
in one of the hall-like buildings that occupied the central mass of the House. Through the Front Door and then…

Then what? Arthur had no idea. But he knew he could not turn back. He had to find a cure or at least find out more about the disease the paramedic had called the Sleepy Plague. And he had to find out why he had been given the Key and the Atlas.

All the answers lay inside the House, so it was to the House he would go. Arthur walked right up to the wall, touched the cool stone surface, and—keeping one hand brushing the stone—started to walk along the wall southward towards where he thought Monday’s Postern should be.

Arthur reached the southwestern corner of the House’s border in ten minutes. He found that while he touched the wall, he couldn’t see or hear any traffic on Parks Way, or see any people in the houses or yards across the street. It was as if the street and the houses were a painted backdrop, waiting for the cast to come on that evening.

But if he moved away from the wall and stopped trailing his finger along it, then he could see cars passing by and people going into their homes. He could hear dogs barking and children crying and, most of all, distant sirens and the constant clatter of helicopters. It was clear that the quarantine had been extended past the school.

Mostly Arthur kept touching the wall. He figured that if he couldn’t see or hear other people, they wouldn’t be able to see or hear him.

Monday’s Postern was along the south wall, only a few hundred yards from the western corner. Just before he got to where he thought it would be, Arthur walked away from the wall. But when he looked for a door or a gate or some means of entry, there was nothing. Just the cold marble, smooth and shining.

Arthur frowned and walked closer. He still couldn’t see anything. So he raised the Key and touched it to the wall.

This had an immediate effect. The marble where he touched the Key glowed brightly and the dark veins in the stone began to throb and move as if they were living, fluid conduits. Ten or twelve paces away, the dark shape of an open, shadowed doorway appeared.

Arthur didn’t like the look of it, but he moved closer, keeping the Key touching the wall. As he moved, the marble quieted where he’d left and quickened where he touched.

The doorway was so black Arthur couldn’t work out whether it was open or shut. Somehow it absorbed the light, so it was like looking into the deepest shadow. That shadow could be just an image upon the wall, or it could be a deep, dark entrance to somewhere else.

Arthur felt himself shiver as he moved closer to the postern. A convulsive shiver that he was unable to stop. But he had to pass through that doorway to get to the House proper and to the Front Door.

The first step was to see whether it was open or not.

Hesitantly, Arthur reached out with the Key. He met no resistance, the silver-and-gold clock hand still shining as it sank into the darkness, though its light did not illuminate the doorway.

There was a faintly electric sensation around his hand and wrist, but it didn’t hurt. Arthur leaned forward and extended his arm so that it disappeared up to the elbow in the inky doorway. It still didn’t hurt, and he couldn’t feel anything on the other side. There was no resistance, no hard object for the Key to strike.

Arthur pulled out his hand and inspected it. Both the Key and his arm looked exactly the same as they had before he reached into the doorway. His skin hadn’t been transformed or injured or affected in any way that he could see or feel.

Still Arthur hesitated. Not being able to see what was beyond the open doorway scared him. He’d also lost his backpack and the salt, his weapon against the Fetchers. It was probably still in the ambulance.

But he had the Key and he couldn’t help feeling excited as well as afraid. The House and all its mysteries—and answers—lay behind this wall. As far as he knew, Monday’s Postern was the only way in.

He had to go through.

Arthur took a very deep breath, something that he wasn’t often able to do. He enjoyed the feel of his lungs expanding to their maximum capacity. Then, holding the Key in front of himself like a sword fighter about to duel, he stepped completely into the doorway.