Mister Monday

“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.

“OK, 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 goodbye, 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.

The minute hand. The Key. It definitely hadn’t been there only a few minutes before. Arthur always put his hands under the pillow when he lay down. Perhaps it materialised when Leaf handed him the Atlas? Like the magical objects in stories that followed their owners around?

Only in the stories, most things like that were cursed, and you couldn’t get rid of them even if you wanted to…

“Stay still,” commanded the nurse. “It’s not like you to flinch, Arthur.”

CHAPTER THREE (#ue56d0d18-6d4d-51e9-8e9e-ecd766c1a5f5)

Arthur went home on Friday afternoon, with the Key and the Atlas securely wrapped up in a shirt inside a plastic bag. For some reason Ed and Leaf never returned to the hospital. Arthur had thought of trying to call them, but since he didn’t know their last name, that had proved impossible. He’d even asked Nurse Thomas if she knew who they were. But she didn’t, and the hospital had got busier and busier through the week. Arthur figured that he’d see them Monday at school.

His father picked him up and drove him home, humming a tune under his breath as they cruised through the streets. Arthur looked out idly, but his thoughts, as they had been the whole week, were on the Key, the Atlas and Mister Monday.

They were almost home when Arthur saw something that snapped him straight out of his reverie. They were coming down the second-to-last hill before their street when he saw it. Down in the valley ahead, occupying a whole block, was an enormous, ancient-looking house. A huge building made of stone, odd-shaped bricks of different sizes, and ancient timbers of many kinds and colours. It looked as if it had been extended and added to without thought or care, using many different styles of architecture. It had arches, aqueducts and apses; bartizans, belfries and buttresses; chimneys, crenellations and cupolas; galleries and gargoyles; pillars and portcullises; terraces and turrets.

It looked totally out of place, dropped into the middle of what was otherwise a modern suburb.

There was a reason for that, Arthur knew.

That huge, crazy-looking house had not been there when he left for school last Monday.

“What is that?” he asked, pointing. “What?” asked Bob. He slowed down and peered through the windshield.

“That place! It’s huge and it… it wasn’t there before!”

“Where?” Bob scanned the houses he saw. “They all look pretty much the same to me. Sizewise, that is. That’s why we went a bit further out. I mean if you’re going to have a garden, you’ve got to have a real garden, right? Oh, you mean the one with the Jeep out front. I think they painted the garage door. That’s why it looks different.”

Arthur nodded dumbly. It was clear that his father couldn’t see the enormous, castle-like building that they were driving towards. Bob could only see the houses that used to be there.

Or maybe they are still there, Arthur thought, and I’m seeing into another dimension or something. He would have thought he was going insane, but he had the Atlas and the Key, and his conversation with Ed and Leaf to fall back on.

As they went past, Arthur noticed that the house (or House, as he felt it should be called) had a wall around it. A slick, marble-faced wall about ten feet high, that looked smooth and very difficult to climb. There was no visible gate, at least on the side they drove along.

Arthur’s own new home was only another mile or so, on the far side of the next hill. It was in a transition area between the suburbs and the country. The Penhaligons had a very big block, most of which was a fairly out-of-control garden. Bob said he loved gardening, but what he really loved was thinking and planning things to do with the garden, not actually doing them. He and Emily had bought the land and established the garden several years before, but had only decided to build a house and move quite recently.

Their house was brand-new, notionally finished a few months before. There were still plumbers and electricians coming back every few weeks to fine-tune various bits and pieces. It had been designed by a famous architect and was on four levels, cut into the hill. The bottom level was the biggest, with garage, workshop, Bob’s studio and Emily’s home office. The next level was all living spaces and kitchen. The next was bedrooms and bathrooms: Bob and Emily’s and two guest rooms. The top level was the smallest and had bedrooms for Michaeli, Eric and Arthur, and one bathroom that they either fought over or were locked out of and had to go downstairs.

No one was home when Arthur and his father returned. A screen on the refrigerator door in the kitchen had the latest posts and e-mails from the various members of the family. Emily was held up at the lab, Michaeli was simply “out” and would be back “later”, and Eric was playing in a basketball game.

“Do you want to go out for dinner? Just the two of us?” asked Bob. He was humming again, a sure sign of imminent song composition. It was a sacrifice for him to offer to go out when it was obvious he was itching to get at a keyboard or a guitar.

“No thanks, Dad,” said Arthur. He really wanted to be alone so he could check out the Key and the Atlas. “I’ll grab a snack later, if that’s OK. I might just check out my room. Make sure the others didn’t trash it while I was gone.”

They both knew that was just Arthur being kind and letting Bob go and work on his song. But that was also OK with both of them.

“I’ll be in the studio, then,” said Bob. “Buzz me if you need anything. You’ve got your inhaler?”

Arthur nodded.

“We might get a pizza later,” Bob called out as he headed down the stairs. “Don’t tell Mum.”

Arthur went up to his own room, taking the stairs slowly. He was breathing fine, but was weak after five days of lying around in the hospital. Even a few flights of stairs was hard work.

After locking the door in case his older siblings returned, Arthur put the Atlas and the Key on the bed. Then, without knowing why, he turned off the light.

Moonlight shone through the open window, but it was quite dark. It would have been darker, but both the Key and the Atlas glowed with a strange blue light that shimmered like water. Arthur picked them up, the Key in his left hand and the Atlas in his right.

Without any effort on his part, the Atlas flipped open. Arthur was so surprised he dropped it back on the bed. It stayed open, and Arthur watched in amazement as it grew, becoming longer and wider, until it was about the same size as his pillow.

The open pages were blank for a moment, then lines began to appear, as if an invisible artist was hard at work. The lines were strong and sure, appearing faster and faster as Arthur stared. It only took a few seconds before he realised he was looking at a picture of the House he had seen. A picture so well drawn that it was almost like a photograph.

Next to the picture a handwritten note appeared:

The House: An Exterior Aspect as Manifested in Many Secondary Realms.

Then another few words appeared, written much smaller. Arthur craned forward as the writing appeared, with an arrow that pointed to an inked-in square on the outer wall.

“Monday Postern,” Arthur read aloud. “What’s a postern?”

There was a dictionary on the bookshelf above his desk. Arthur pulled it out, while keeping an eye on the Atlas in case it did something else interesting.

It did. Arthur had to put the Key down to get the dictionary out, as it was too jammed in with other books. As soon as he dropped the Key on the desk, the Atlas slammed shut, scaring the life out of him. In less than a second, it had also shrunk back to its pocket notebook size.