Superior Saturday

“Item Two. If you encountered a wave of Nothing as high as Monday’s Dayroom, then it is likely that the entire Far Reaches and all of the Lower House have been destroyed. But there is a brighter note, which I shall label as Item Three.

“Item Three. If you got an operator on the line, the bulwark between the Lower and Middle House must have held. Or be holding, though everything below it has been lost.”

“Everything? But here…where we are right now,” said Arthur. “This is part of the Lower House, how come it’s not…uh…gone?”

“The Old One’s prison is very strong,” said Scamandros. He pointed to his left. Arthur looked and saw in the distance the faint sheen of blue light that he knew came from the clock face where the Old One was chained. “The Architect had to make it particularly resistant, to keep the Old One in check. Being of such adamant stuff, it has held against the initial inrush of Nothing. But now it is but a small islet, lost in the Void. We are entirely surrounded and totally cut off from the rest of the House. It is very interesting, but I have to confess I’m relieved you’re here, Lord Arthur. Without you, I fear that—”

Scamandros paused. The tattooed donkeys hung their heads and slowly became tumbledown stone cairns, memorial markers for the fallen.

“I fear that I would find the current situation, interesting as it is, likely to be fatal in a relatively short space of time, given that Nothing is eating this small refuge at a rate of approximately a yard an hour.”

“What? You were just saying this area is adamant and strong and all that!” protested Arthur. He peered into the darkness, but he couldn’t tell whether he was looking at advancing Nothing or just couldn’t see very far because the only immediate light came from the feeble lantern on the coal pile.

“Oh, the area immediately adjacent to the clock is doubtless proof against the Void,” said Scamandros. “But before your arrival I was weighing up the relative…er…benefits of being throttled by the Old One as opposed to being dissolved by Nothing.”

“The Old One wouldn’t throttle you…oh…I guess he might,” said Arthur. “He does hate Denizens…” Arthur stopped talking and looked over at the blue glow, thoughts of his very first encounter with the Old One going through his mind. He could well remember the feel of the prison chain around his neck. “I hope he’ll still talk to me. Since I’m here, I want to ask him some questions.”

Dr Scamandros peered owlishly at Arthur, with his half-moon spectacles glinting on his forehead, helping him focus his invisible third and fourth eyes.

“It is true that the Old One has a fondness for mortals. But I think you are no longer mortal. What does my…your ring indicate?”

Arthur looked. The gold had washed well into the seventh segment.

“About seventy-five per cent contaminated,” he said quietly. “I hope the Old One can recognise the quarter-part of humanity inside me.”

“Perhaps it would be best to simply depart,” said Scamandros nervously. “Though I should say that the ring has a margin—”

“I do need to at least try to get some answers from him,” said Arthur distractedly. “If I keep my distance it should be OK. Then we’d better get up to the Citadel and find out what’s happening from Dame Primus. Oh, and I need to ask you about something I’ve done back on Earth…”

Quickly Arthur described what he’d done with the Key, and the strangely red-lit environment of what appeared to be a town frozen in time.

“I cannot be entirely sure, Lord Arthur, without proper investigation,” said Scamandros. “But as you suspected, you may have separated your entire world from the general procession of time in the Secondary Realms, or have temporally dislocated just a portion of it, around your town. In either case, the cessation will slowly erode. In due course the march of time will resume its normal beat, and everything that was to happen will occur unless you return and prevent it before the erosion of the cessation, which you should be able to do given the elasticity of time between the House and the Secondary Realms. I’m sure Sneezer could tell you more, using the Seven Dials.”

“But the Seven Dials must have been destroyed,” said Arthur. “With Monday’s Dayroom.” He stopped and slapped the side of his head. “And all the records stored in the Lower House. They must have been destroyed too! Doesn’t that mean that whatever those records were about in the Secondary Realms will also be destroyed? My record was there!”

Scamandros shook his head.

“The Seven Dials will have moved to safety of its own accord, hopefully to some part of the House we control. As for the records, only dead observations are held in the Lower House. Admittedly their destruction will create holes in the past, but that is of no great concern. Monday must have been given your record temporarily, I presume by the Will, but it would normally have been held in the Upper House, as an active record.”

“Sneezer gave it to me after I defeated Monday, but I left it behind,” said Arthur. “So Dame Primus has probably got it.”

“Unless it has returned to the Upper House. Such documents cannot be long held out of their proper place.”

“But then Saturday can change my record and that would change me!” exclaimed Arthur. “She could destroy it…me…both!”

Scamandros shook his head again. A tattoo of a red-capped judge with a beaked nose appeared on his left cheek and also shook his head.

“No—even if Saturday knows where it is, she could not change or destroy it. Not once you had even a single Key.”

“I feel like my head is going to explode.” Arthur massaged his temples with his knuckles and sighed. “There’s just too much…What are you doing?”

Scamandros paused in the act of removing a very large hand-drill from inside his coat and a shining ten-inch-long drill bit from an external pocket.

“If I bore a hole in your skull just here,” said Scamandros, tapping the side of his forehead, “it will relieve the pressure. I expect it is a side effect of your transformation into a higher Denizen—”

“I didn’t mean my head was actually going to explode,” said Arthur. “So you can put that drill away. I meant that I have too much to do, too much information to deal with. Too many problems!”

“Perhaps I can assist in some other fashion?” asked Scamandros as he stowed his tools away.

“No,” sighed Arthur. “Wait here. I’m going to talk to the Old One.”

“Um, Lord Arthur, I trust that I can move a little in that direction?” Scamandros pointed at a pile of coal a few yards away and added, “As I observe that the front half of yonder pyramid has ceased to exist…”

“Of course you can move!” snapped Arthur. He felt a peculiar rage rising in him, something he’d never felt before, an irritation at having to deal with lesser Denizens and inferior beings. For a moment he even felt like striking Scamandros, or forcing the Denizen to prostrate himself and beg forgiveness.

Then the feeling was past, replaced by a deep sense of mortification and shame. Arthur liked Scamandros and he did not like the way he had just felt towards the sorcerer, the proud anger that had fizzed up inside him, like a shaken bottle of pop ready to explode. He stopped and took a deep breath and reminded himself that he was just a boy who had a very tough job to do, and that he would need all the help he could get, from willing friends, not fearful servants.

I’m not going to become like one of the Trustees, thought Arthur firmly. At the back of his head, another little thought lay under that. Or like Dame Primus…

“Sorry, I’m sorry, Dr Scamandros. I didn’t mean to shout. I just…I’m a bit…um…anyway, do whatever you need to do to keep away from the Nothing. We’ll get out of here soon.”

Dr Scamandros bowed low as Arthur walked away, and another baseball-sized grenade fell out of an inner pocket and immediately began to smoke. The Denizen tut-tutted, pinched the burning fuse out and slipped it up his sleeve, which did not look like a secure place for it go. However, it did not immediately fall out.

Arthur walked on, weaving between the pyramids of coal and splashing through the puddles of dirty coal-dust-tainted water. He remembered that he had been very cold when he’d last visited the Deep Coal Cellar, but it felt quite pleasant now to him, almost warm. Perhaps a side effect of the Nothing that now surrounded the place, he thought.

There were other changes too. As he drew closer to the blue illumination spread by the clock, Arthur noticed that many of the pyramids now sprouted flowers. Climbing roses twined up through the coal, and between the puddles there were clumps of bluebells.

The bluebells spread as the ground climbed a little higher and got drier, the flowers now growing out of stone slates rather than a bed of coal dust, which was equally impossible, but did not bother Arthur. He was fairly used to the House. Flowers growing out of coal and stone were far from the strangest things he had seen.

At the last pyramid he stopped, as he had done all that time ago, when he had first cautiously approached the Old One’s prison. The shimmering blue light was less annoying that it had been then and he could see more clearly this time, even without calling on the Fifth Key to shed some kinder illumination.

Arthur saw a markedly different landscape from what it had been. Between him and the clock-prison was a solid carpet of bluebells, interspersed with clumps of tall yellow-green stalks that burst out at the top in profuse, pale white flowers that were shaped a little like very elongated daffodils, but at the same time looked too alien to have come from the Earth he knew.

The raised circular platform of stone, the clock face, was significantly smaller, as if it had been shrunk. It had been at least sixty feet in diameter, the length of the drive at Arthur’s own home. Now it was half that, and the Roman numerals that had stood upright around the rim were smaller and tarnished, much of their blue glow gone. Some of them were bent over at forty-five degrees or more, and the numbers and most of the rim were wreathed in climbing red and pink roses.

The metal hands had shrunk with the clock face, to remain in proportion. Long, shining blue-steel chains still ran from the ends of the hands back through the central pivot, fastened at the other end to the manacles locked on the wrists of the Old One.

The Old One himself was not as Arthur had last seen him. He still looked like a giant barbarian hero, eight feet tall and heavily-muscled, but his formerly old, almost-translucent skin was now sun-dark and supple. His once-stubbled head now sported a fine crop of clean white hair that was tied back behind his neck. He no longer wore just a loincloth, but had on a sleeveless leather jerkin and a pair of scarlet leggings that came down to just below his knees.

Where he once looked like a fallen, fading ancient of eighty or ninety, the Old One now looked like a super-fit sixty-year-old hero who could easily take on and defeat any number of lesser, younger foes.

The giant was sitting on the rim of the clock between the numbers three and four, slowly plucking the petals from a rose. He was half-turned away from Arthur, so the boy couldn’t see the Old One’s eyes—or, if it was soon after they had been torn from their sockets by the puppets within the clock, the empty, oozing sockets.

Thinking that was something he definitely did not want to see, Arthur craned his neck to check the position of the clock hands. The hour hand was at nine and the minute hand at five, which relieved him on three counts. The Old One’s eyes would have had plenty of time to grow back and his chains would be fairly tight, keeping him close to the clock. Perhaps most importantly, it also meant the torturer puppets would not be emerging for several hours.

Arthur stepped out and crossed the field of bluebells. Chains rattled as he approached and the Old One stood to watch him. Arthur stopped thirty or forty feet from the clock. While the face had shrunk, he couldn’t be sure the chains had as well, so he erred on the side of caution.

“Greetings, Old One!” he called.