‘Stones!’ said Arthur, pointing to a stack piled up under the trees back along the road. ‘We can make steps out of them.’
He pulled Suzy across the road and they ran towards the pile of stones. They had almost reached it when Arthur saw a man running along the road towards them. He was running fast, but with a steady rhythm that proclaimed he would keep up the speed for a long time. The man was thin and sinewy and wore only a loincloth and sandals, the sweat shining on his bare smooth chest.
The runner checked for a moment as he first saw them, then checked again as Suzy absently flapped her wings. He stared at her and made a formal gesture, as if to shield his eyes from the sun and salute at the same time.
‘Victory at Marathon!’ he shouted. ‘The Persians are defeated! We thank Nike for the victory!’
He didn’t stop, but averted his eyes as he passed, almost stumbling over a flagstone. Arthur and Suzy didn’t stop either. They kept on to the pile of stones, then Suzy helped Arthur stack them up into steps and he brandished the Key and imagined the Stair and stepped up on the rocking stones and for once it was easy, and they were immediately on the marble steps and the white light shone all around them.
‘I think I know where that was,’ said Arthur. ‘I mean, when that was. In our world. In history. I did a project on where some famous trademark names came from. He thought you were Nike, the winged goddess of victory.’
‘Me!’ snorted Suzy. ‘If I could get these stupid wings off there’d be no confusion, I reckon.’
‘I wonder if it’s possible not to stop at the Landings,’ mused Arthur. ‘I bet the Architect never stopped off all over the place without wanting to. Come on!’
They did.
Twenty
ARTHUR STARTED TO climb at a punishing pace, jumping up several steps at a time.
‘Why . . . why so fast?’ asked Suzy.
‘Maybe if we go faster then there will be fewer Landings! I don’t know! It feels like the right thing to do!’
‘But if it isn’t, we’ll just run into the Landings even faster,’ said Suzy.
Arthur didn’t answer. He did feel that by going faster, they would get where he wanted to go quicker, and that it might somehow cut out some of the Landings. But it was only a feeling. He never managed to find out enough about anything, from the Atlas, from the Will, from the Old One . . .
‘Something up ahead!’ shouted Suzy.
Arthur blinked, saw something solid, and then the Key struck it and he and Suzy tumbled through a light wooden door and out onto a narrow cobbled street. For a brief moment, Arthur thought he was back in the Atrium of the House.
Then a terrible stench hit his nose and he knew that he wasn’t.
There were bodies piled all along the street. Lots and lots of corpses that had been quickly covered with lime, the white powder obscuring faces and features so that they might almost be statues or dummies laid out in rows. Save for the smell, and the flies that buzzed around in spirals above the bodies, and the rats that skittered around them and in and out of the open sewer that ran along the far side of the street.
There was no sign of anybody living.
Arthur held his breath and tried not to throw up as he looked around. All the houses were narrow, three-storey buildings that leaned into the street, so it was heavily shadowed despite the bright sun overhead. The houses were built of stone up to about six feet, but wood took over from there, with exposed beams and painted panels. Most of the houses had thatched roofs, though some were shingled in wood or slate. They all had bright painted doors and shutters. In Arthur’s time, they would be very old houses, too old to be found outside England or Europe. Here they were, if not new, not that old.
This would have been quite a cheerful street, for its time, Arthur thought. Not now.
Every house had a whitewashed cross crudely painted on its front door and walls. Arthur knew what that meant and what had killed all the people.
‘Bubonic plague,’ he whispered. They were probably in England, sometime in the seventeenth century. There had been a terrible outbreak of the plague there in the 1660s. Or they had come out in an equivalent time in some other world. Once again, Arthur didn’t know enough about the House, the Improbable Stair, or the Secondary Realms to be sure.
Suzy’s grip on his hand suddenly loosened. Too late, Arthur tightened his own hand. For a moment he held her fingers, then she pulled them free and walked away.
‘Suzy! We have to keep going!’
She didn’t come back. Arthur hurried after her as the girl crossed the street and pushed against a pale blue door. It scraped open a few inches, then thudded against a body that blocked the doorway. She pushed at the door again, then kicked it and started to cry. Tears fell down her cheeks and made dark splashes on her necktie, and her wings hung drab and woebegone upon her back.
‘What is it?’ asked Arthur. Suzy had always seemed so happy-go-lucky, even when confronted by dinosaurs or sword-waving barbarians. What had happened to her?
‘This was my house!’ she sobbed. ‘It’s all coming back to me. This was where we lived!’
She turned to the closest pile of bodies and would have rolled the topmost one over to look at it, but Arthur grabbed her wrist and pulled her away.
‘You can’t do anything!’ he said urgently. ‘And you can’t stay here! We have to find some steps!’
‘Why, it’s Jack Dyer’s daughter, Suzy, come back as the Angel of Death,’ mumbled a voice.
For a terrible instant both Arthur and Suzy froze, thinking one of the corpses had spoken. Then they saw what looked like a bundle of rags rise up from the shadowed doorway of the house next door. It was an old woman wrapped in a fur-lined robe, though the day was warm. She held a wet handkerchief to her face. Arthur smelled the cloves and rose oil mixture it was dampened with, strong even with the stench from the dead bodies.
‘So you died anyway,’ mumbled the old woman. ‘I told your mother it was stupid to take you out of here. Death knows no parish boundary, I said. Death walks where it will, city or country.’
‘Is she dead?’ asked Suzy quietly.
‘Everyone’s dead!’ The old woman laughed. ‘Everyone’s dead! I’m dead too, only I don’t know it yet!’
She started to cackle madly. Arthur pulled at Suzy’s hand again. This time she didn’t resist. But she didn’t help either as he dragged her away.
‘Come on!’ Arthur insisted. There was a wide-open door in the next house, and there had to be a staircase beyond it. But even with that so near, he worried that they’d stayed here longer than anywhere else, and Suzy had let go of his hand.
‘Think of Mister Monday’s Antechamber!’ shouted Arthur as he dragged Suzy through the open doorway, along a short and very narrow hall and onto a winding stair so tight he banged his head on the steps above. Suzy started to climb without being dragged. ‘Concentrate on getting back to the House!’
Arthur called that out as he tried to concentrate himself. But he couldn’t help thinking about all the dead bodies. He’d never seen a dead person before and he’d always imagined that if he did, it would be in a hospital bed. He couldn’t stop thinking about those terrible, haphazard piles of corpses, just covered quickly with lime by the few survivors too frightened to do anything else.
The Sleepy Plague was a modern equivalent of the bubonic plague. The doctors and healers back then hadn’t had a clue how it spread or where it came from, and modern doctors were in the same position with the Sleepy Plague. Arthur was the only hope. If he failed, then the Fetchers’ disease might kill almost everybody in his city, including everybody he loved and cared about. Just like the last epidemic had killed his parents.
And then it would spread and there would be piles of bodies in the streets like here . . .
I have to get to Monday’s Antechamber, Arthur thought fiercely. Monday’s Antechamber. Monday’s Antechamber.
The last wooden and plaster step vanished beneath his feet and was replaced by marble. P
early-white light washed out dingy seventeenth-century walls.
Arthur was back on the Improbable Stair. His left hand was closed, closed so tight he couldn’t tell for a moment whether he still had hold of Suzy. Had she made it through, or was she trapped back in her own original time and place, where she would almost certainly have died . . . would die . . . of the Black Death?
Arthur looked back – and met Suzy’s gaze.
‘Guess you’re stuck with me,’ sniffed Suzy. She tried to smile, but it wavered away. ‘No point in me going home now.’
Arthur started up the steps, talking as he kept up a steady pace.
‘We could find the records for your family, change them so they lived through the plague,’ he said.
‘No,’ said Suzy slowly. ‘I told you. Hundreds of years looking, and I never found my own record. None of us ever found a record for even someone we’d heard of. I guess that’s it. I’ll go back to ink-filling forever after.’
‘No you won’t,’ declared Arthur. He tried to inject more confidence and hope in his voice than he could actually feel. ‘We’re going to beat Mister Monday and get everything sorted out in the Lower House. You’ll see.’
Suzy answered with something that sounded like a snort, but perhaps she was just blowing her nose. Like she usually did, rather unhygienically across her sleeve.
‘I’m going to really concentrate on Monday’s Antechamber now,’ said Arthur. ‘I think if I focus on it hard enough, we’ll get straight there, without another stop.’
‘Like the one up ahead?’ asked Suzy.
Arthur swore and tried to run faster up the steps, as if somehow they could break through the swirling mass of colour that marked another Landing. But they couldn’t. Once again, Arthur found himself on the steps one second and somewhere completely different the next.
Only it wasn’t the sort of different they’d experienced before. This wasn’t the age of dinosaurs, or a cave, or ancient Greece, or plague-ridden Europe. Arthur goggled at the new-model widescreen TV with the sound turned low, which was showing a newsreader going on about something, the leather lounge, the coffee table laden with copies of Rolling Stone and Fortune and an empty bottle of Coke. This was a typical living room from his own time.
Then he goggled even more as Leaf sat up from where she’d been lying facedown on the sofa. Her eyes were red and there were tears on her scrunched-up face. She stared openmouthed, then screamed.
‘Arthur! And . . . uh . . . are you an angel?’
‘Leaf!’
‘No, I’m not a angel,’ said Suzy. She wiped her eyes and took a deep breath, then added, ‘I just can’t get my wings off. Name’s Suzy Turquoise Blue.’
Leaf nodded cautiously and backed up to the other end of the couch, where she stood warily.
‘That is you, Arthur? Isn’t it?’
‘Yes, it’s me! We can’t stop,’ gabbled Arthur. ‘Is there another floor here? Some steps, a staircase?’
‘Yes, up . . . up there,’ said Leaf slowly. She was in shock, Arthur saw. Behind her, on the television, a news-reader was suddenly replaced by a shot of a burning building. His school. ‘What –’
‘We can’t wait!’ exclaimed Arthur. He headed for the door Leaf had indicated, yanking Suzy away from staring at the television. Leaf hesitated, then rushed after them.
‘When is it?’ asked Arthur as they ran down a hall. ‘I mean, when was the school on fire? Yesterday?’
‘What? It came on the news fifteen minutes ago,’ said Leaf. ‘The whole town’s cut off! Quarantine. But what are you doing? Is that the clock hand the dog-faces were looking for?’
‘Is Ed okay? Your family?’ asked Arthur.
‘They’re sick,’ sobbed Leaf. ‘Really sick. In weird comas. They’re calling it the Sleepy Plague. Arthur, you have to do –’
Her voice disappeared as Arthur jumped on the first step and jumped again, fiercely visualizing the white marble and the light of the Improbable Stair.
‘Was that your sister?’ asked Suzy. ‘Or your betrothed?’
‘Just a friend,’ puffed Arthur. ‘Leaf, her name is. Please . . . quiet. I have to concentrate. We’re coming up to something.’
He recognised the weird feeling under his feet, the sensation of an escalator accelerating towards a higher point. There was colour swirling into the white light too, another giveaway.
‘Hang on!’ Arthur cried.
Twenty-one
THE NEXT SECOND Arthur and Suzy fell sprawling across a pile of cushions. They came to rest looking at a small green frog that was seated opposite them, on top of a silver cake stand that had several chocolate eclairs and four macaroons on the other levels.
‘An opportune arrival!’ boomed the Will, its voice far too loud to come out of the small frog’s mouth. ‘Welcome to Mister Monday’s Antechamber.’
Arthur looked around. They were inside a silken tent, a round one with a central wooden pole. It couldn’t be more than fifteen feet in diameter.
‘This is Monday’s Antechamber?’
The frog followed Arthur’s gaze with one eye while the other eye looked at Suzy.
‘No. This is a tent, one of the thousands encamped in Monday’s Antechamber, so it is an excellent place of concealment. Now, I have procured several choices for disguising you and Suzy. Please look in that chest, quickly select some clothes and hair, and put them on. I believe the hair is self-adhesive.’
The Will indicated with his tongue a bronze-bound chest in the corner of the tent. Arthur and Suzy went over to it and pulled out at least a dozen different coats, shirts, hats, and wigs, including beard-wigs.
‘This self-adhesive hair will come off again, won’t it?’ asked Arthur several minutes later, as he began to gingerly lower a long-haired white wig onto his head. ‘What are we disguising ourselves for, anyway?’
‘Yes, yes, simply say, “Hair today, gone tomorrow” three times and it will fall off,’ remarked the Will. It seemed more impatient than usual. ‘You need to be disguised, as we have to get across a large part of the Antechamber. As your escape from the Coal Cellar has already been reported, there will be many watchers and searchers looking for all of us.’
‘Okay,’ replied Arthur. He shrugged on a tattered coat that appeared to be made out of three-inch-thick felt. But it was the best fit of the three that he’d swiftly tried on, and it had a thin pocket in the inner sleeve suitable for the Key, so he kept it. There was some sort of label hanging from the sleeve. Arthur grabbed it and was about to cut it off with the Key when the Will cried out. ‘Don’t! Leave the label on. It’s your waiting ticket.’
Arthur looked at the ticket. It was plain paper with the number 98,564 written in bright blue ink upon it. The ink flashed and changed colour as he twisted the label, moving between red and orange and then back to blue. Suzy looked at the ticket on her coat, which had a similar number.
‘Everyone in the Antechamber is waiting for an appointment with Mister Monday in his Dayroom,’ explained the Will. ‘To wait, you must have a ticket, or you will be thrown out. When your number is called, you can go in and discuss whatever business you have with Monday.’
‘Big number,’ said Arthur. ‘Is it just the last two digits that count? How many people does he see in a day?’
‘All the digits count. Mister Monday completes perhaps two appointments with Denizens of the House each year,’ said the Will. ‘I got those tickets yesterday, in another guise, of course.’
‘You mean there are almost a hundred thousand people . . . Denizens . . . waiting to see Mister Monday?’ asked Arthur.
‘Yes,’ said the Will. ‘Sloth! I’ve spoken of it before. That is why there are at least a hundred thousand things wrong with the operations of the Lower House! Nothing can be done without Monday’s approval, and Monday does not see the officials who seek approval.’
‘We can’t waste any time in a queue. I have to get a cure!’ exclaimed Arthur impatiently.
‘We won’t be in the queue at
all. Now that you are disguised, we can venture forth out to the Antechamber proper,’ said the Will. ‘Some distance from here, an ally will meet us, one who claims to know a weirdway into Mister Monday’s Dayroom. We will take that weirdway, you will obtain the Greater Key, and all will be well.’
Suzy made a snorting noise.
‘Who is this ally?’ asked Arthur suspiciously.
‘Mmmm, not to put too fine a point on it, it is Monday’s Dusk,’ replied the Will. ‘After Suzy’s departure with my message, he found me. After some minor contretemps, I discovered he was a loyal servant of the Architect.’
‘Or a particularly clever enemy,’ said Arthur. ‘Have you thought about that?’
‘He sees the true way,’ said the Will. ‘Stand still and I will jump to your shoulder.’
Arthur hesitated, then stood still as the frog jumped to his shoulder and settled down by his neck.
‘You won’t try to get down my throat, will you?’
‘It will not be necessary for me to inhabit anyone, thank you,’ said the Will. ‘However, please fold up your collar so that I am concealed.’
Arthur complied. The frog felt strange against his skin. Cool but not clammy, like a cold glass straight out of the fridge.
‘Everyone ready?’ Arthur asked, looking back at Suzy. He never would have recognised her or thought she was a child. She looked rather like a dwarf from a fantasy book. She’d kept her usual clothes, but changed her hat to a weird-looking pointy cloth cap with earflaps, and had stuck on a bristling moustache and sideburns that came down to the corners of her mouth.
‘Your wings are still on,’ said Arthur.
‘I dunno how to get ’em off,’ said Suzy. ‘I’ve tried everything.’
Except soap and water, thought Arthur. Then he felt bad for having mean thoughts. Besides, Suzy looked dirty but she didn’t smell at all. And, Arthur suddenly realised, he was pretty filthy himself, from the various Landings of the Improbable Stair.
‘Leave them,’ said the Will. ‘Up here, it is not uncommon to wear wings. Many petitioners fly from the lesser waiting rooms below up to the Antechamber. Let us go, Arthur. Turn to the right when you leave the tent.’