‘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.
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.’
Three
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, 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 farther 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 emails 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.