‘You mean if someone changed my record to show that I died, then I would die?’ asked Arthur.
‘They’d have to find your record first,’ interrupted Suzy. ‘Fat chance of that. I’ve been looking for mine for centuries. When I remember. So have all the others – the children – and not a one has ever shown up.’
‘The records are in a sorry state, it’s true. But very few inhabitants of the House have the power to change the records anyway,’ said the Will. ‘The Keys, of course, can be used to alter almost any records. Some other officeholders have lesser powers. Though it goes against the Original Law and the purpose of the House, which is to observe and record the Secondary Realms, and NOT INTERFERE!’
‘Ow!’ exclaimed Arthur and Suzy together, clapping their hands to their ears.
‘Your folk are at least partly to blame,’ said the Will sadly, pointing one green sticky finger at Arthur. ‘No one was tempted to interfere when it was just biological soup. But let a few million years go by and those single cells got very interesting. And your people are so creative. If only the Architect hadn’t chosen to go away . . .’
‘What would have happened to me if I had died?’ asked Arthur.
‘You’d be dead,’ said the Will. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean . . .’ Arthur’s voice trailed off. He didn’t know what he meant. ‘Where am I now? Is there some sort of life after death? If the Architect created everything . . .’
‘There is no afterlife that I know of,’ said the Will. ‘There is Nothing, from which all things once came. There is the House, which is constant. There are the Secondary Realms, which are ephemeral. When you are gone from the Secondary Realms that’s it, though some say that everything returns to Nothing in the end. The record marks your passing and is dead too, though it is stored for archival purposes.’
‘Lost and forgotten, you mean,’ said Suzy with a snort. ‘You wouldn’t believe how hopeless they are. Hang on – we’re slowing down. Almost there. Hold tight!’
Twelve
ARTHUR GRABBED THE handrail as the elevator slowed suddenly and went through a series of juddering halts that threatened to throw everyone against the ceiling and then the floor. It ran smoothly for a few seconds after that, long enough for him to relax, then it came to a sudden stop, this time successfully sending Arthur and Suzy against the walls and floor. The Will, courtesy of its sucker-toed frog shape, stayed stuck to the handrail.
Arthur picked himself up a little slower than Suzy, who was already sliding the elevator door open. He expected to see an office like the one they’d run through down in the Atrium, all dark wood, green baize, and gaslights. His mouth hung open at what he saw instead.
The elevator door opened out onto a shaded grove of very tall, very thick-trunked trees. They formed a circle around a roughly trimmed lawn, which had the remains of a campfire sitting in a burnt patch at its centre. A narrow but beautifully clear stream cut through one corner, burbling gently along. A wooden footbridge crossed the stream, with a paved path leading across to an open summerhouse that was like an old-fashioned bandstand. In the summerhouse were a desk, a lounge chair, and some bookcases.
‘Here we are,’ said Suzy. ‘The Office of the Efficiencer General.’
Arthur followed her out, with the Will jumping ahead. The elevator door rolled shut of its own accord behind him and an electric-sounding bell rattled, making him jump. When he looked back he saw the elevator door was in the trunk of one of the vast trees. With the door closed, he could barely see its outline in the bark or the call button that was concealed in a knotted whorl.
‘There’s sunshine here,’ Arthur said, pointing to the rays that came through the foliage. He peered between two trunks and saw a distant vista of grasslands beyond, with blue sky above. ‘And I can see a normal sky and everything. Where are we?’
‘We’re still in the House,’ said Suzy. ‘All that stuff is like a picture. You can’t go out past the trees. I’ve tried. You’ll just smack into something. It’s kind of an all-round window.’
Arthur kept staring. He could see shapes moving in the grass. Huge, reptilian animals. Prehistoric creatures that he had seen in books and museums. Except these ones weren’t grey like in all the pictures, but a pale yellow with faint blue stripes.
‘There are dinosaurs out there!’
‘They cannot get in,’ said the Will. ‘Suzy is correct.
There is a panoramic window around this office, which looks out into a particular place in the Secondary Realms. It is unusual that it looks out upon a distant past, as that is most difficult. The greater the distance back from House Time, the more unstable the window.’
‘Can one of these look into the future too?’ asked Arthur. ‘Can you change where it looks into?’
‘It depends what you mean by the future,’ said the Will. ‘There are many different relationships between House Time and time in the Secondary Realms. If you mean the future of your world, no. That is closely in step with House Time, so the future is not accessible. But we could look at any time before you came here, if we had the document that describes the window. You see, as it looks out on the Secondary Realms, it is part of them and will have a record somewhere in the House. Perhaps in that desk.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Arthur. ‘I just wanted to see . . . to check what was happening back home. But not if I can’t see after I left.’
It’s probably better not to see, Arthur thought despondently. All it would do was feed the fear and the tension inside him.
‘I’ll start a fire,’ said Suzy. ‘We’ll have tea.’
We haven’t got time for tea! Arthur thought. But he managed not to say it. He had to wait and listen to what the Will had to say in any case. They might as well drink tea while they were listening.
Suzy went over to the burnt patch and started assembling a small pyramid of black stones. Arthur followed her. It took him a second to realise that the stones were pieces of coal. He’d never seen any before. Not real coal, so shiny and black. All the pieces of coal were exactly the same shape and size, which he thought couldn’t be normal.
‘I don’t get this place at all,’ he said. ‘Why have gaslights and coal fires and the old-fashioned clothes and everything? If this is the epicentre of the universe, couldn’t it be all done by magic or whatever? And you could have better clothes.’
‘It’s fashion,’ said Suzy. ‘It changes every now and then, dunno why. When it does, everything’s different, but there’s always the records and rotten jobs and things you want and can’t get, like decent clothes. I don’t really remember the last fashion. It was more than a hundred years ago. Too much washing between my ears. I do vaguely remember having to wear a pointy hat.’
‘Robes and cow dung campfires and donkey carts up endless mountains instead of elevators,’ said the Will. ‘That was the fashion before I was locked away. I think the Architect liked to take on ideas from the Secondary Realms, at least cosmetically. Doubtless the current fashion is the work of the Trustees.’
‘Whatever the fashion, it’s impossible to get clothes from the official supplies, so you have to get ’em from the smugglers,’ complained Suzy. ‘But you’ve got to have House gold, and that’s almost impossible to come by, or something to barter. Course the big nobs always have a supply of coats and shirts and tea and buttered scones and such-like. Mind you, every now and then they mislays a bag of coal or a tea caddy.’
Suzy winked and went to the summerhouse and retrieved a battered, blackened teapot that she filled with water from the stream and hung over the coal fire on a tripod made from three bent pokers and some wire.
‘So, froggy, tell us what Arthur is supposed to do,’ said Suzy. She sat down cross-legged on the lawn and stared at the pop-eyed amphibian. Arthur lay down on his stomach and rested his chin on his hands.
‘Arthur. You have the Minute Hand, which is half of the Key that governs the Lower House,’ said the Will. ‘It is not as powerful as the Hour Hand that Mister Monday retains, but it is faster to use, and can be used more often. You are aware that it can lock and open doors, but it has many other powers that I will explain in due course. Now, as the First Part of the Will, I have chosen you as the Rightful Heir to the House. The Minute Hand is only the very beginning of your inheritance. Your immediate goal is to get the Hour Hand and complete the Key. With it, you will easily be able to defeat Mister Monday and claim the Mastery of the Lower House. The Morrow Days will protest, of course, but under the agreement they themselves forged with Monday, they will not be able to interfere.
‘As soon as Monday is defeated and you have become Master, then we will need to put in train significant changes to the Lower House, in order to have a solid base from which to free the remaining parts of the Will. There is clearly tremendous slackness and stupidity here now and, worst of all, I believe, even interference with the Secondary Realms. You will need to select a cabinet, your own Dawn, Noon, and Dusk, of course –’ ‘Hold it!’ exclaimed Arthur. ‘I don’t want to be the Master or whatever. I have to get a cure for the plague and take it back home! I just want to know how to do that.’
‘I was discussing grand strategy,’ sniffed the Will. ‘Not tactics. However, I shall endeavor to answer your questions.’
It folded its webbed hands together and leaned forward.
‘Imprimis, you must defeat Mister Monday in order to have any chance of doing anything, including getting a cure for this plague of yours. Secundus, you will sneak into Mister Monday’s aptly named Dayroom and retrieve the Hour Hand, which is your own lawful property. In fact, once you get in there and call it, using the spell I shall teach you, it will simply fly to your hand, unless Monday is holding it at the time, which is unlikely.
‘So there’s no way to get a cure for the plague without defeating Monday?’ asked Arthur.
‘Once you are Master, all manner of things will be possible,’ said the Will. ‘You will have full access to the Atlas, for example, a repository of considerable knowledge. I expect there would be a cure for this plague in there.’
‘I haven’t got the Atlas! The Fetchers took it. Wherever they went.’
‘The Fetchers were banished back to the Nothing from whence they came,’ said the Will. ‘The Atlas, however, will be back where it came from, which is the ivory-faced bookshelf behind the tree fern in Monday’s Dayroom.’
‘So there is no other way I can get a cure for the plague and get home?’
‘No,’ said the Will firmly.
‘Okay, if I have to do this, I have to do it,’ said Arthur.
‘How do I sneak into Monday’s Dayroom?’
‘That is a detail that I have not yet grappled with,’ said the Will. ‘Suffice to say there are a number of possibilities, including the use of the Improbable Stair, though that is a last –’
He stopped in midsentence, tilted his small green head, and said, ‘What was that?’
Arthur had heard it too. A distant roaring. He looked questioningly at Suzy.
‘I dunno,’ she said. ‘I’ve never heard anything here but the stream and the elevator bell.’
The roaring came again, much louder and closer. In the gap through the trees, Arthur saw a yellow-and-blue-striped monster that, apart from its colour, was very reminiscent of every Tyrannosaurus Rex picture he’d ever seen. The creature had to weigh several tons, was forty feet from head to tail, and had teeth as long as his arm. It was coming directly at the office, roaring as it loped forward.
‘Uh, are you absolutely sure that can’t get in?’ asked Arthur. ‘How come we can hear it now?’
‘Monday,’ said the Will hurriedly. ‘He’s used the Hour Key and Seven Dials to connect that reality and this room. So it can get in, and so can Monday! We must flee to fight another day! Do not freely give up the Key, Arthur!’
The little frog immediately jumped in the stream. Suzy almost jumped too, but hesitated, then ran to the elevator and pressed the button. Arthur followed her, drawing the Key from under his shirt.
A few seconds after he’d crossed the footbridge, the huge yellow dinosaur crashed through the trees, sending splinters flying. Its beady eyes focused on the smoke from the fire and it plunged forward, roaring and biting. Red-hot coals scattered under its feet and it roared again, this time with pain, and went into a frenzy, biting and smashing at the smoke and the summerhouse with its bony head.
Arthur and Suzy crouched by the elevator door, close to the tree trunk. Suzy started to reach up to press the call button again, but Arthur held her back.
‘Don’t move,’ he whispered. ‘It thought the smoke was alive, so it must have rotten eyes and can’t smell. If we stay still it might go away.’
They watched in silent horror as the dinosaur demolished the summerhouse completely, leaving only the foundations. Everything else was smashed and bitten into pieces. Furious at not finding anything edible, and burnt by the fire, the dinosaur gave out its loudest roar yet, then crashed its way through the trees and disappeared.
‘I ain’t never coming back here,’ whispered Suzy. ‘Reckon it’s all right to move?’
‘No,’ said Arthur grimly. He had just spotted other movement where the dinosaur had first crashed through. A line of men had emerged from the trees. They reminded him a bit of the Fetchers, though these were tall and skinny and somewhat more human-looking, though their eyes were red and sunken, and their faces thin and pallid. They wore black too, all black, with tailcoats, and had long black ribbons around their top hats. They all carried long-handled whips, held tightly in their black-gloved hands.