by Garth Nix
‘Because generally you’re an idiot!’ shouted Monday in a rage. He flicked a finger and an unseen force struck Sneezer and Arthur, sending them tumbling roughly across the grass. ‘Whose game are you playing here, Sneezer? You’re in league with the Morrow Days, aren’t you? You and that Inspector, and the Will safe as ever? Do you expect to take over my office?’
‘No,’ said Sneezer. He slowly stood up and began to advance upon the bath-chair. With each step, his voice changed, becoming louder and clearer, booming into the distance. Trumpets sounded as he trod, and Arthur saw letters of sharp black ink form upon his skin. The letters danced and joined into lines of type that rushed across Sneezer’s face like living, shining tattoos.
‘Into the trust of my good Monday, I place the administration of the Lower House,’ said both the type and the booming voice that came out of his mouth, but was not Sneezer’s. ‘Until –’ Arthur couldn’t believe the languid Monday could move so fast. He drew something from his sleeve, a glittering object that he pointed at Sneezer as he shouted deafening words that sounded like thunderclaps, the vibration of them smashing through the air and shaking the ground where Arthur lay.
There was a flash of light, a concussion that shook the earth, and a stifled scream, though Arthur did not know who it came from, Sneezer or Mister Monday.
Arthur shut his eyes. When he opened them again, Monday, bath-chair, and Sneezer had disappeared, but there was still black type running in a thread through the air, moving too quickly for him to read the words. The letters twirled above Arthur into a spiral, a whirlwind of shiny letters. Something heavy materialised between the lines of type and fell down, striking him sharply on the head.
It was a book, a slim notebook, no bigger than Arthur’s hand. It was bound in green cloth. Arthur absently picked it up and slid it into his shirt pocket. He looked up and around again, but the lines of type were gone. They had slowed down just long enough for him to make out only four words: Heir, Monday, and The Will.
Arthur could see Mister Weightman sprinting towards him now, a phone at his ear, and the school nurse running much more slowly from the direction of the gym, an Oxy-Viva case in her hand. Behind Weightman came the whole of Arthur’s gym class. Even the walkers were running.
Arthur looked at them and would have groaned if any air could have got out of his lungs. Not only was he going to die, it would be in front of everybody. They would all be interviewed on TV and say things that sounded sort of nice but really meant they thought he was a stupid loser.
Then he noticed that he could breathe. For a while there his brain had been tripping out from lack of oxygen, with visions and everything, but the inhaler had worked sufficiently well to get him over the worst. He could breathe a bit, and it was worth the pain in his hand – Arthur looked at that hand. It was still clenched in a fist, with a trickle of blood running out below his little finger. He’d thought he was clutching his inhaler, but he wasn’t. He was holding a weird strip of metal, sharp-pointed on one end with a circular loop on the other. It was heavy and was made of silver with fancy gold inlay, all swirls and curlicues.
Arthur stared at it for a second before he realised what it was. It was the minute hand of some sort of antique clock. It was real and so was the notebook in his pocket. Mister Monday and Sneezer had been there. It wasn’t all an oxygen-deprivation dream.
Weightman and the nurse would be on him in a minute. Arthur looked around wildly, trying to think of somewhere he could hide the clock hand. It would be taken away from him for sure.
There was a patch of discoloured grass a few paces away. Arthur crawled over to it and plunged the minute hand into the earth, until only the hollow circle remained, hidden by some tufts of yellow grass.
As soon as he let the hand go, he felt his chest tighten. That catch had snapped shut again, and there was no more air. Arthur rolled over, trying to put some distance between himself and the minute hand. He didn’t want anyone else to find it.
He’d come back to get it as soon as he could, he thought.
If he lived.
Two
ARTHUR WAS STILL in the hospital twenty-four hours after the strange events of Monday morning. He had spent most of that time unconscious and still felt dazed and confused. Though he was breathing reasonably well again, the doctors wanted to keep him in for a few more days because of his history.
Fortunately Arthur’s mother was a very important medical researcher who worked for the government, so not only did the whole family have the best medical insurance, doctors all around the country knew Dr. Emily Penhaligon and her work. Arthur always got good treatment and was kept in the hospital even when they made other sicker people leave. He usually felt bad about that later, but when he was actually in the hospital he was too ill to think about it.
Arthur’s father was a musician. He was a very good musician, but not always a very commercially minded one. He wrote brilliant songs and then forgot to do anything with them. He’d been the guitar player in a famous band called The Ratz thirty-five years ago, and sometimes people still recognised him. He’d been called Plague Rat then, but had long since gone back to his original name, Robert ‘Bob’ Penhaligon. He still got a lot of money from his time in The Ratz, since he’d written most of the songs, some of which were multiplatinum sellers. They still got played on some radio stations quite a lot and new bands used samples from them, particularly Bob’s guitar parts.
These days, Bob Penhaligon looked after the family and noodled away on one of his three pianos or one of his twelve guitars, while Emily Penhaligon spent more time than she wanted to in her laboratory doing things with DNA and computers that benefited the whole human race but took her away from her own family.
Arthur had six brothers and sisters. The eldest three, two boys and a girl, were from Bob’s liaisons with three different women when he was on tour with The Ratz. The fourth was from Emily’s first marriage. The next two were both Bob and Emily’s.
Then there was Arthur. He was adopted. His birth parents had both been doctors who worked with Emily. They’d died in the last really big influenza epidemic, the one that had finally been controlled by a new anti-flu drug they’d helped to discover – as part of Emily’s team. Arthur had only been a week old when they died. He’d lived through the flu, but he was probably an asthmatic because of it. Besides his parents, he had no immediate family, so Emily and Bob had been successful in their application to adopt.
It didn’t worry Arthur that he was adopted. But every now and then he would leaf through the photo album that was almost all he had to remember his birth parents. The other thing was a short video from their wedding, which he found almost unbearable to watch. The influenza plague had killed them only eighteen months later, and even to Arthur they looked ridiculously young. He liked that as he got older he looked more like both his birth parents, in different ways. So they lived on in him.
Arthur had known he was adopted since he was little. Bob and Emily treated all the children the same way, and the children considered themselves all brothers and sisters. They never introduced one another as ‘half brother’ or ‘half sister’ and never explained the fact that there were twenty years between the eldest, Erazmuz (born in Bob’s rock music heyday), and the youngest, Arthur. They also didn’t explain the difference in looks, skin colour, or anything else. They were simply all part of the family, even if only the youngest three were still at home.
The four eldest were Erazmuz, who was a major in the army and had children of his own; Staria, a serious theatre actress; Eminor, a musician, who’d changed his name to Patrick; and Suzanne, who was at college. The three at home were Michaeli, who was at a local college; Eric, who was in his last year of high school; and Arthur.
Arthur’s father, Michaeli, and Eric had already been to see him the night before, and his mother had popped in early in the morning to check that he was okay. Once she was sure of that, she lectured him about it being better to look like a total loser in everyone’s
eyes than to be dead.
Arthur always knew when his mother was approaching, because doctors and nurses would appear from all over the place, and, by the time she arrived, Emily would be trailing eight or nine white-coated people behind her. Arthur was used to her being a Medical Legend, just as he was used to his father being a Former Musical Legend.
Since all of his family in town had already visited once, Arthur was surprised when two more people came to see him early on Tuesday afternoon. Kids his own age. He didn’t recognise them for a second, since they weren’t wearing black. Then he realised who they were. Ed and the girl who had helped him use the inhaler. This time they were in regular school uniform, white shirts, grey trousers, blue ties.
‘Hi,’ said the girl from the door. ‘Can we come in?’
‘Uh, sure,’ mumbled Arthur. What could these two want?
‘We didn’t meet properly yesterday,’ said the girl. ‘I’m Leaf.’
‘Leith?’ asked Arthur. She’d pronounced it strangely.
‘No, Leaf, as in from a tree,’ said Leaf reluctantly. ‘Our parents changed their names to reflect their commitment to the environment.’
‘Dad calls himself Tree,’ said the boy. ‘I’m supposed to be Branch but I don’t use it. Call me Ed.’
‘Right,’ said Arthur. ‘Leaf and Ed. My dad used to be called Plague Rat.’
‘No!’ exclaimed Leaf and Ed. ‘You mean from The Ratz?’
‘Yeah.’ Arthur was surprised. Normally only old people knew the names of the individual members of The Ratz.
‘We’re into music,’ said Leaf, seeing his surprise. She looked down at her school uniform. ‘That’s why we were wearing real clothes yesterday. There was a lunchtime appearance by Zeus Suit at the mall and we didn’t want to look stupid.’
‘But we missed it anyway,’ said Ed. ‘Because of you.’
‘Uh, what do you mean?’ asked Arthur warily. ‘I’m really grateful to you guys –’ ‘It’s okay,’ said Leaf. ‘What Ed means is we missed Zeus Suit because we had something more important to do after we . . . I mean I . . . saw those two weird guys and the wheelchair thing.’
‘Wheelchair thing? Weird guys?’ Arthur repeated. He’d managed to convince himself that he’d flipped out and imagined everything, though he hadn’t wanted to put it to the test by checking his school shirt pocket for the notebook. The shirt was hanging up in the closet.
‘Yeah, really weird,’ said Leaf. ‘I saw them appear in a flash of light and they disappeared the same way, just before we got back to you. It was mighty strange, but nobody else blinked an eye. I reckon it’s because I’ve got second sight from our great-great-grandmother. She was an Irish witch.’
‘She was Irish, anyway,’ said Ed. ‘I didn’t see what Leaf said she saw. But we went back to have a look around later. We’d only been there five minutes when these guys came out of the park and started saying, “Go away. Go away.” They were plenty weird.’
‘Kind of dog-faced, with jowly cheeks and mean-looking little eyes, like bloodhounds,’ interrupted Leaf. ‘And they had really foul breath and all they could say was “Go away.”’
‘Yeah, and they kept sniffing. I saw one of them get down on the ground and sniff it as we were walking away. There were lots of them – at least a dozen – wearing kind of . . . Charlie Chaplin suits and bowler hats. Weird and scary, so we took off and I reported them to the office for trespassing on the school grounds, and the Octopus came out to check. Only he couldn’t see them, though we still could, and I got a week’s detention for “wasting valuable time.”’
‘I only got three days detention,’ said Leaf.
‘The Octopus?’ asked Arthur weakly.
‘Assistant Principal Doyle. ‘The Octopus’ because he likes to confiscate stuff.’
‘So what’s going on, Arthur?’ asked Leaf. ‘Who were those two guys?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Arthur, shaking his head in mystification. ‘I . . . I thought it was all a hallucination.’
‘Maybe it was,’ offered Ed. ‘Only both of you had it.’
Leaf punched him hard on the arm. Ed winced. Definitely brother and sister, thought Arthur.
‘Of course, that doesn’t explain why the Octopus couldn’t see the guys with the bowler hats,’ Ed added quickly, rubbing his arm. ‘Unless all three of us were affected by something like a gas or weird pollen.’
‘If it wasn’t a hallucination, then there will be a small notebook in my shirt,’ Arthur said. ‘Hanging up in the closet.’
Leaf quickly opened the closet, then hesitated.
‘Go on,’ said Arthur. ‘I only wore the shirt for a couple of hours and I hardly ran in it.’
‘I wasn’t worried about the smell,’ said Leaf. She reached in and felt the pocket. ‘It’s just that if there is a notebook, then I did see something, and those dog-faced guys were scary, even in daylight with Ed there –’ She stopped talking and withdrew her hand. The notebook was in it, held tightly. Arthur noticed she had black nail polish on, with red streaks. Just like his father used to wear years ago in The Ratz.
‘It feels strange,’ Leaf whispered as she handed the book to Arthur. ‘Kind of electric. Tingly.’
‘What does it say on the cover?’ asked Ed.
‘I don’t know,’ replied Leaf. There were symbols on the cover, but they didn’t make sense. She didn’t seem able to focus on them somehow. At the same time, she felt a strong urge to give the notebook to Arthur. ‘Here, it’s yours.’
‘Actually, it fell out of the sky,’ said Arthur as he took it. ‘Or kind of out of a whirlwind made out of lines of letters . . . type . . . swirling in the air.’
He looked at the notebook. It had hard covers, bound in green cloth that reminded him of old library books. There was some type embossed on the cover. Golden letters that slowly swam into focus and rearranged themselves. Arthur blinked a couple of times as the letters climbed over one another and shoved others out of the way to make room so the words would be spelled properly.
‘It says A Compleat Atlas of the House and Immediate Environs,’ Arthur read aloud. ‘The letters all moved around.’
‘Hi-tech,’ said Ed, but he didn’t sound very convinced, or convincing.
‘Magic,’ said Leaf, very matter-of-fact. ‘Open it up.’
Arthur tried to open the book, but the covers wouldn’t budge. It wasn’t as if they were stuck together. He could see the pages rippling a bit between the covers like they were free, but he simply couldn’t open the book. Even when he applied so much force that he would have ripped the covers off any normal book.
The sudden effort made him cough, and then it was hard to get his breath back. He could feel another asthma attack coming on, that sudden tightening of the lungs. The monitor that was checking the oxygen level in his blood began to beep, and there was the sudden sound of a nurse’s hurrying footsteps in the corridor outside.
‘Uh-oh, I guess that our set’s over,’ said Leaf.
‘Did you see if the dog-faced men found anything?’ Arthur wheezed hurriedly. ‘A piece of metal?’
‘Like what?’
‘The minute hand of a clock,’ Arthur gasped out. ‘Silver, with gold inlay.’
Ed and Leaf both shook their heads.
‘All right, visiting time is over,’ said the nurse as she hurried over. ‘We can’t get Master Penhaligon overexcited.’
Arthur grimaced at being called Master Penhaligon. Ed and Leaf mirrored his reaction and Leaf made a gagging sound.
‘Okay, Arthur,’ said the nurse, who was no fool. ‘Sorry about that. I was on the children’s ward all morning. Now get going, you two.’
‘We didn’t see anything like you mentioned,’ Ed said. ‘And the dog-fay . . . the dogs were gone this morning. But the whole oval had been dug up and then the turf replaced. They did a good job; you couldn’t tell from a distance. I couldn’t believe they did it so quickly.’
‘The whole oval?’ asked Arthur. That didn’t make sense.
He’d buried the clock hand somewhere in the middle. Surely as soon as they found it they’d stop digging? Or were they just covering up what they were doing?
‘Out!’ said the nurse. ‘I have to give Arthur an injection.’
‘All of it,’ confirmed Leaf from the door. ‘We’ll come back and see you later!’
‘Tomorrow,’ said the nurse firmly.
Arthur waved good-bye, his mind racing. He hardly paid attention as the nurse instructed him to roll over, lifted his ridiculous hospital gown, and swabbed the area she was about to inject.
Mister Monday and Sneezer. Who could they possibly be? From what they’d said, the minute hand was part of some Key that Mister Monday had given to Arthur in the expectation that he would die. Then Monday would take it back. And the whole plan had been set up by Sneezer, but there was some double cross involved. At the end, Sneezer was under the power of something else. Those glowing words. The same ones that had given him the notebook. The Compleat Atlas that he couldn’t open, so it didn’t really matter how ‘compleat’ it was.
Arthur had taken the minute hand – he would call it a Key, he decided – and he hadn’t died. So whatever it was, he felt as if he still owned it. Though the dog- faced men in the bowler hats probably worked for Mister Monday. If they’d dug up the whole oval, then they would have found the Key for sure and taken it back to him.
Maybe that would be the end of the whole mystery, but Arthur didn’t think so. He felt a deep certainty that something was only just beginning. He’d been given the Key and the Atlas for a reason, and he would find out what it was. Everyone in his family said that he was too curious about everything. This was the biggest thing he’d ever encountered to be curious about.
I’ll get the Key back, for starters, he thought fiercely, thrusting his hands under his pillow as the prick of the needle brought him back to the immediate reality.
As he felt the injection going in, Arthur stretched out his fingers – and touched something cold and metallic. For an instant, he thought it was the bed frame. But the shape and feel were completely different. Then Arthur realised what it was.
