Grim Tuesday

On the way back down, the question came up again in his head. Just one simple word that covered a lot of problems.

How?

How am I going to get into the House? It doesn’t exist in my world any more.

Arthur groaned and pulled at his hair, just as Michaeli came rushing back up the stairs.

“You think you’ve got problems?!” she snapped as she went past. “It looks like Dad is going to have to go back on tour, like, for ever, and I’m going to have to get a job. All you have to do is go to school!”

Arthur didn’t get a chance to reply before she was gone.

“Yeah, that’s all I have to worry about!” he shouted after her. He slowly continued down the stairs, thinking hard. The House had physically manifested itself before, taking over several city blocks. That manifestation had disappeared when Arthur came back after defeating Mister Monday. But maybe the House had returned with the Grotesques?

There was only one way to find out. After a quick look to check that no one – particularly a Grotesque or two – was watching, Arthur went out the back door and got on his bike.

Provided he wasn’t held up at a quarantine checkpoint, it would only take ten minutes to ride over to where the House had been. If it had reappeared, he would try to get in through Monday’s Postern or maybe even the Front Door, if he could find it.

If it wasn’t there, he would have to think of something else. Each minute gave the Grotesques more time to do something financially horrible to his family, or his neighbours, or…

Arthur pushed off hard and accelerated out the drive, pedalling furiously for a minute, until his wheezing warned him to ease off.

Behind him, the SOLD sign on his front lawn shivered and dug itself a little further in.

CHAPTER THREE

The House was gone. At least, its manifestation in Arthur’s world had not returned. Instead of a vast edifice of mixed-up architecture, there were only the usual suburban houses, with their lawns and garages.

Arthur rode his bike around several blocks, hoping some trace of the House remained. If there was just one of its strange outbuildings or even a stretch of the white marble wall that surrounded the House, he felt he could somehow get inside. But there was nothing; no sign at all that the House had ever been there.

He felt strange riding around, looking for something that wasn’t there, a feeling made stronger because the streets were deserted. Though the quarantine had been slightly relaxed inside the city, most people were sensibly staying at home with their doors and windows shut. Arthur was passed by only one car on the road, and that was an ambulance. Arthur looked the other way, in case it was the same ambulance he’d escaped from the day before. He was thankful it didn’t slow down or stop.

As he finished his circumnavigation of the last block, Arthur began to feel panicky. Time was slipping away. It was already 11.15. He only had forty-five minutes to find some way to enter the House, but he had no idea how he was going to do that.

The sight of several moss-covered garden steps reminded him of the Improbable Stair. That bizarre stairway went from everywhere and everywhen, through the House and the Secondary Realms. But the Stair was dangerous and there was a good chance of ending up somewhere he really didn’t want to be. It wasn’t worth trying the Stair unless he must. Even then, he probably wouldn’t be able to enter it without the Key.

There had to be another way. Perhaps if he could track down the Grotesques’ headquarters, he could find their doorway back to the House—

Something moved at the corner of his eye. Arthur twisted his head around, immediately alert. There was something in the movement he didn’t like. Something that gave him a slight electric tingle across the back of his neck and up behind his ears.

There it was again – something flitting across the garden of the house opposite. Moving from the letterbox to the tree, from the tree to the car in the driveway.

Arthur put one foot on the pedal, ready to move off, and watched. Nothing happened for a minute. Everything was quiet, save for the constant drone of the distant helicopters patrolling the perimeter of the city.

It moved again, and this time Arthur saw it dash from behind the car to a fire hydrant. Something about the size and shape of a rabbit, but one made of pale pink jelly-like flesh that changed and rippled as it moved.

Arthur got off his bike, laid it down and got out the Atlas, readying himself for its explosive opening. He didn’t like the look of this thing, which he guessed was some sort of Nithling. But at least it was timid, hiding and scuttling.

Arthur could still see a single paw poking out from behind the hydrant. A paw that slowly melted and re-formed through several shapes. Paw, claw, even a rudimentary hand. He concentrated his thoughts on that sight, gripping the green cloth binding of the Atlas tight.

What is the thing that hides behind the hydrant?

The Atlas burst open. Even though he was ready, Arthur took a step back and nearly fell over his bike.

This time, the invisible writer wrote quickly and in instant English, ink splattering all over the page.

Arthur looked up. The Scoucher was leaping towards him, no longer small and innocuous, but an eight-foot-tall, paper-thin human figure whose arms did not end in hands but split into hundreds of ribbon-thin tentacles that whipped out towards the boy. They sliced the air in front of Arthur’s face, though he was at least fifteen feet away.

There was no time to get on his bike. Arthur twisted away from the tentacles and threw himself into a sprint, the Atlas still open under his arm. It closed itself and shrank as he ran, but he didn’t try to put it in his pocket. He couldn’t pause even for a second or those tentacles would latch on. They might sting, or paralyse, or hold him tight so the Scoucher could do whatever it did—

These thoughts drove him to the end of the street. He hesitated for an instant, uncertain of which way to turn, till the Atlas twitched to his right and he instinctively followed its lead. It twitched again at the next corner and then again a minute later, directing him down a partly hidden laneway – all at high speed. A speed Arthur soon realised he couldn’t keep up. Whatever had happened to his lungs in the House had improved them, but he wasn’t cured. He was wheezing heavily and the tightness on his right side was spreading to the left. He’d run further and faster than he’d ever done before, but he couldn’t sustain his speed.

Arthur slowed a little as he exited the lane and looked over his shoulder. The Scoucher was nowhere to be seen. He slowed down a bit more, then stopped, panting and wheezing heavily. He looked around. He’d thought he was headed towards home, but in his panic he’d gone in a different direction. Now he wasn’t sure where he was, and he couldn’t think of any possible refuge.

Something flickered at the corner of his eye. Arthur spun round. The Scoucher was back in its small fluid shape, sneaking again. It was about thirty yards back, zipping from cover to cover, slinking forward whenever he couldn’t see it.

Arthur wasn’t even sure it was a Nithling. Perhaps it was something else, something made by Grim Tuesday that the Grotesques had set upon him. He needed to know more, but he didn’t dare to stop and look at the Atlas while the thing was creeping up on him. He needed somewhere to hide, perhaps a house—

The moment he looked away, the Scoucher stormed out from behind a pile of paving stones next to an unfinished path. One reaching tentacle even longer than the rest brushed the back of Arthur’s hand as he turned to flee. It wasn’t much thicker than a shoelace and he hardly felt its touch, but when he glanced down, blood was flowing freely. More blood than seemed possible from such a tiny scratch.

Arthur was halfway across a well-mown front lawn when someone called his name from the neighbouring house.

“Arthur?!”

He knew that voice. It came from Leaf, the girl who had helped him after his asthma attack, whose brother and family were among the first afflicted by the Sleepy Plague. He’d seen her briefly the day before while travelling via the Improbable Stair. He had no idea where she actually lived, but here she was on the porch next door, staring at him in surprise. Or staring at the Scoucher—

“Look out!” she cried.

Arthur changed direction, narrowly avoiding a sweep of the Scoucher’s tendrils. He jumped over a low brick wall, trampled through Leaf’s parents’ prize vegetable garden, leaped up the front steps of her house and charged through the front door. Leaf slammed it shut after him. A second later it was hit by a sound like rain drumming on the roof – the impact of hundreds of tentacles upon the heavy door.

“Your hand’s bleeding!” Leaf exclaimed as she slammed home a large bolt. “I’ll get a bandage—”

“No time!” gasped Arthur. A lot of blood had come from the simple scratch, but the flow was already slowing.

Arthur opened the Atlas, ignoring its sudden expansion. He added in a low wheeze, “Have to… see how… fight…”

The drumming sound came again. Leaf gasped and jumped back as several tentacles ripped the draft excluder off the bottom of the door and slithered inside. She picked up an umbrella and struck at them, but the tentacles gripped the umbrella and cut it into pieces. More and more tentacles came through under the door. Then they started sawing backwards and forwards.

“It’s cutting its way through!” screamed Leaf. She pushed over a plant in a heavy earthenware pot and rolled it against the door. The Scoucher’s tentacles struck at the spilled earth for a second, then went back to their sawing. The door had a steel frame, but the tentacles cut through it quite easily.

Arthur concentrated on the Atlas.

What are a Scoucher’s weaknesses? How can it be defeated?

An ink spot appeared on the page, but was not blotted up. Words came quickly, and once again were in English and the regular alphabet straightaway. The penmanship was not up to its usual standard.

Scouchers are a particularly unpleasant type of Nithling. They issue from the narrowest cracks and fractures, and are consequently short of substance. Typically they gain a greater and more defined physical presence in the Secondary Realms by consuming the blood or ichor of the local inhabitants. Scouchers in their earlier phases may take a variety of shapes but always have several limbs that end in very fine tentacles, which are lined with tiny but extremely sharp teeth. They use these tentacles to cut their victims, who usually fall unconscious. The Scoucher then laps up the free-flowing blood—

“Arthur! The door—”

“How can I defeat a Scoucher?” Arthur asked furiously.

Silver is anathema to Scouchers, as is ruthenium, rhodium, palladium, osmium, iridium and platinum. Scoucher hunters typically use silver dust blown through—

“Silver! Have you got anything silver?” Arthur wheezed, clapping the Atlas shut.

At the same time Leaf grabbed his arm and dragged him across the room and into the kitchen. She slammed the kitchen door behind them and threw herself at the refrigerator, trying to slide it across. Arthur shoved the Atlas into his pocket and grabbed one corner of the fridge, rocking it out from the wall as the terrible sound of splintering wood suddenly stopped in the other room.

“It’s inside!”

The fridge was barely set down before it rocked forward. Tentacles punched through the flimsy kitchen door and rasped across the steel sides of the fridge.

“Silver! Silver will kill it!” Arthur repeated. He opened the nearest drawer, but all he could see were chopsticks and wooden utensils. “A silver fork will do!”

“We don’t have anything metal!” Leaf cried out. “My parents won’t eat with metal.”

Several tentacles ripped the freezer door off and flung it on the ground. More tentacles swarmed in to grip the edges and the whole refrigerator shifted across the floor with the squeal of metal feet on tiles.

“Jewellery!” exclaimed Arthur as he looked around for something, anything silver. “You must have some silver earrings!”

“No,” said Leaf, shaking her head wildly. Her earrings swung too, without any sort of metallic jangle. They were ceramic and wood.

Another squeal alerted Arthur a second before the refrigerator started to topple over. He jumped away an instant before it fell and followed Leaf as she raced through the door at the opposite end of the kitchen.

Arthur slammed the rear kitchen door shut behind him. But this one had no lock, and from the weight of it, could barely stop a determined fist, let alone otherworldly tentacles.

“Come on!” screamed Leaf. She ran down a flight of concrete steps to the back door, Arthur close behind. “I know… we have got some silver!”

The back door led into a garage that had obviously never housed a car. It was part plant nursery and part storage area, with bags of potting mix stacked up next to boxes identified by contents and date.

“Look for a box marked MEDALS or SKI JUMPING!” instructed Leaf urgently, pushing Arthur on. She turned back herself and locked the door, using a key from the drip tray of a hanging planter. She was just withdrawing the key when several tentacles punched through the door and lashed across her arm. They cut deeply and Leaf staggered back, shocked into silence. She tripped over a tray of seedlings and fell heavily on to a sack of sand.

Arthur took a step towards her, but she waved him back, before pushing her hand hard against the cuts to try and slow the bleeding.

“Silver medals,” she coughed out. “In a box. Dad won lots… that is, came second… silver medals ski jumping. Before he met Mum and became a neo-hippie. Hurry!”

Arthur glanced at the door. The Scoucher was cutting through it as easily as it had the front door. He would have less than a minute to find the medals, maybe only seconds.

Rapidly he scanned the boxes, dates and contents labels tumbling through his brain. Children’s toys from ten years ago, an encyclopedia, Aunt Mango’s paintings, tax records, Jumping—

Something splintered behind him and he heard Leaf’s sharp intake of breath.

Arthur grabbed the box marked JUMPING, pulling down three others at the same time. They fell on his feet but he ignored the pain, ripping through the cardboard. A shower of small velvet boxes fell out. Arthur caught one, flipped it open, grabbed the medal inside, spun on one foot and hurled it towards the Scoucher that was coming through the door.

The medal flew true, smacking into the thin figure as it bowed its head to pass through the doorway. The Scoucher took a step back, puzzled, but otherwise seemed unharmed as the medal slid down its chest.

“Gold!” shrieked Leaf.

Arthur was already bending down to get another medal. This time he opened the box and threw the contents in one swift motion. Something silver flashed through the air as the Scoucher charged forward. The medal hit with a satisfying clunk, but did not slide down. It stuck like a fried egg to a pan and started to sizzle like one as well.

The Scoucher let out a pathetic groan and folded in on itself. Within a second, it was rabbit-sized again, but without the shape of a rabbit. Just a blob of pinky flesh with the silver medal still sizzling on top of it. Arthur and Leaf stared as black smoke poured out of the blob – smoke that curled round and round but didn’t rise or dissipate. Then the Scoucher disappeared, and the silver medal spun and rattled on the concrete floor.

“How’s your arm?” asked Arthur anxiously before the medal came to a stop. He could see the blood coming out between Leaf’s fingers. She looked very pale.

“It’s OK. There’s a first-aid kit in the kitchen, under the sink. Bring me that and the phone. What was that thing?”

“A Scoucher,” shouted Arthur over his shoulder as he ran inside. He found the first-aid kit and the phone and ran back, desperately afraid that he’d find Leaf dead on the ground. Strangely, the cut on his hand had completely closed up. Though it had bled profusely for a few minutes, he could hardly see where it was now. Arthur immediately forgot about it as he crashed through the remnants of the door.

Leaf’s eyes were shut but she opened them as Arthur knelt by her side.

“A Scoucher? What’s that?”

“I’m not really sure,” said Arthur. He opened the first-aid kit and prepared a wound dressing and a bandage, suddenly very glad he’d taken the course last year and knew what to do. “Keep the pressure on until I’m ready… OK… let go.”

Rapidly he got the dressing on to the deep cuts and bandaged Leaf’s arm firmly from the elbow to the wrist. There was a lot of blood, but it wasn’t arterial bleeding as he’d feared. Leaf would be all right, though she still needed an ambulance and professional help.

He picked up the phone and dialed 999, but before he could speak, Leaf snatched it away from him. She spoke quickly to the operator, shaking her head when Arthur tried to take the phone back.

“You can’t call,” she said after hanging up. “I’ll tell them some story. You have to go over to…”

She closed her eyes, and her mouth and forehead creased in concentration. “Go to the old Yeats Paper Mill on the river. Go under it to come to the House.”

It sounded like something Leaf had memorised from someone else.

“What?” asked Arthur. The Atlas had led him to Leaf, but – “How come… how…”

“The girl with the wings, the one who was with you yesterday,” Leaf said slowly. Shock was clearly taking hold. Arthur got a coat out of one of the fallen boxes and draped it over her as she kept talking. “Just then I kind of blacked out and it was like she was sitting next to me. She told me what I just told you. There was more, but you woke me up just when she was getting into it.”

“The Yeats Paper Mill?” asked Arthur. “Go under it?”

“That’s it,” confirmed Leaf. She had shut her eyes again. “It’s not the first true dream I’ve had. My great-grandmother was a witch, remember.”

Arthur looked at his watch. 11.32. He had less than half an hour and the paper mill was at least a mile away. He wasn’t even sure where his bicycle was. He could never make it into the House before the Grotesques unleashed their full plan.

“I can’t make it in time,” he said to himself.

“Take Ed’s bike,” whispered Leaf, pointing to the black and red racing bicycle racked up between three sturdy green mountain bikes. “He won’t be back from the hospital for a few days.”

Arthur stood up but hesitated. He felt he should wait for the paramedics to arrive.

“Go,” said Leaf. She tapped her forehead weakly. “They’ll be here in a few minutes. I can tell.”

Arthur hesitated until he heard the faint call of a siren. It got a little louder.

Leaf smiled. “Not second sight. Just good hearing.”

“Thanks,” said Arthur. He ran and wheeled the bike over to the garage door. The lack of an automatic opener puzzled him for a second, till he worked out he had to push the door up himself.

“Hey, Arthur!” Leaf called out as he got on the bike. Her voice was so weak that it came out a little louder than a whisper. “Promise you’ll tell me what this is all about.”

“I will,” replied Arthur. If I get the chance.

CHAPTER FOUR

Arthur pedalled furiously, coasted till he got his breath back, then pedalled furiously again. He wasn’t sure that he actually would get his breath back, as that familiar catch came and his lungs wouldn’t take in any air. But each time he felt his chest stop and bind, there was a breakthrough a moment later and in came the breath. His lungs, particularly the right one, felt like they were made of Velcro, resisting his efforts to expand them until they suddenly came unstuck.

He tried not to look at his watch as he cycled. But Arthur couldn’t help catching glimpses of its shining face as the minute hand moved so quickly towards the twelve. By the time he got to the high chain-link fence around the old Yeats Paper Mill, it was 11.50. Arthur only had ten minutes, and he didn’t know how to get through the fence, let alone get under the old mill – whatever that meant.

There were no obvious holes in the fence and the gate was chained and padlocked, so Arthur didn’t waste any more time looking. He leaned Ed’s bicycle against the fence, stood on the seat and pulled himself up on one of the posts. Despite being scratched by the top strands of old, rusty barbed wire, he managed to swing himself over and drop to the other side. At the bottom he checked his shirt pocket, to make sure it hadn’t been torn off with the Atlas inside. He’d lost it that way before and he was not going to lose it again.

“Underneath… underneath,” Arthur muttered to himself as he ran across the cracked concrete of the old parking lot towards the massive brick building and its six enormous chimneys. No paper had been made at the Yeats Paper Mill for at least a decade, and the whole place had been set aside for some sort of development that had never happened. Probably a shopping mall, Arthur thought sourly.

There had to be underground storage or something here, but how could he find a way down?

Wheezing, Arthur ran to the first door he could see. It was chained and padlocked. He kicked it, but the wood held firm. Arthur ran along the wall to the next door. This one looked like it had been opened recently, and the chain was loose. Arthur pushed it open just wide enough to squeeze himself through.

He hadn’t known what to expect inside, but he hadn’t thought it would be a huge open space. All the old machinery and huge piles of debris from former internal walls had been pushed to the sides, leaving an area about the size of a football field. Light streamed down in shafts from the huge skylights and many holes in the tin roof.

In the cleared area, a strange machine squatted. Arthur knew instantly it came from the House and was not a relic of past papermaking. It was the size of a bus and looked like a cross between a steam-engine and a mechanical spider, with eight forty-foot-long jointed limbs that sprouted from a bulbous cylindrical body – a boiler – with a thin smokestack at one end.

The limbs were made of a red metal that shone dully even where the sun did not fall, but the boiler was a deep black that sucked up the sunlight and did not reflect it.

There were several huge bottles of the same black metal near the spider-machine. Each one was taller than Arthur and easily three or four feet in diameter.

Arthur sneaked across to a pile of debris and took another look. He couldn’t see anyone, so he slinked along to the next pile and then the next. When he was level with the machine, he was surprised to see a very normal-looking office desk next to it. There was a giant plasma screen on the desk, and a PC beneath it. Arthur could see a green activity light flashing on the PC, despite the fact its electric lead was coiled up on the concrete floor, not plugged into anything. He could also see something on the screen. Graphs and rows of figures.

Arthur was just about to creep forward for a better look when a Grotesque walked around from the other side of the boiler. Arthur wasn’t sure if it was one of the two he’d seen before. Whoever it was, it was no longer disguised in a modern suit. Its leather apron had what looked like scorch marks all over it, and numerous tools were sticking out of the pockets on the front.

Arthur ducked down behind some fallen bricks and froze. The Grotesque sang to itself as it picked up a huge pair of long-handled tongs from the floor and went over to the dark bottles.