Garth Nix - Grim Tuesday

“It’s OK. There’s a first-aid kit in the kitchen, under the sink. Bring me that and the phone. What was that thing?”

“A Scoucher,” shouted Arthur over his shoulder as he ran inside. He found the first-aid kit and the phone and ran back, desperately afraid that he’d find Leaf dead on the ground. Strangely, the cut on his hand had completely closed up. Though it had bled profusely for a few minutes, he could hardly see where it was now. Arthur immediately forgot about it as he crashed through the remnants of the door.

Leaf’s eyes were shut but she opened them as Arthur knelt by her side.

“A Scoucher? What’s that?”

“I’m not really sure,” said Arthur. He opened the first-aid kit and prepared a wound dressing and a bandage, suddenly very glad he’d taken the course last year and knew what to do. “Keep the pressure on until I’m ready… OK… let go.”

Rapidly he got the dressing on to the deep cuts and bandaged Leaf’s arm firmly from the elbow to the wrist. There was a lot of blood, but it wasn’t arterial bleeding as he’d feared. Leaf would be all right, though she still needed an ambulance and professional help.

He picked up the phone and dialed 999, but before he could speak, Leaf snatched it away from him. She spoke quickly to the operator, shaking her head when Arthur tried to take the phone back.

“You can’t call,” she said after hanging up. “I’ll tell them some story. You have to go over to…”

She closed her eyes, and her mouth and forehead creased in concentration. “Go to the old Yeats Paper Mill on the river. Go under it to come to the House.”

It sounded like something Leaf had memorised from someone else.

“What?” asked Arthur. The Atlas had led him to Leaf, but – “How come… how…”

“The girl with the wings, the one who was with you yesterday,” Leaf said slowly. Shock was clearly taking hold. Arthur got a coat out of one of the fallen boxes and draped it over her as she kept talking. “Just then I kind of blacked out and it was like she was sitting next to me. She told me what I just told you. There was more, but you woke me up just when she was getting into it.”

“The Yeats Paper Mill?” asked Arthur. “Go under it?”

“That’s it,” confirmed Leaf. She had shut her eyes again. “It’s not the first true dream I’ve had. My great-grandmother was a witch, remember.”

Arthur looked at his watch. 11.32. He had less than half an hour and the paper mill was at least a mile away. He wasn’t even sure where his bicycle was. He could never make it into the House before the Grotesques unleashed their full plan.

“I can’t make it in time,” he said to himself.

“Take Ed’s bike,” whispered Leaf, pointing to the black and red racing bicycle racked up between three sturdy green mountain bikes. “He won’t be back from the hospital for a few days.”

Arthur stood up but hesitated. He felt he should wait for the paramedics to arrive.

“Go,” said Leaf. She tapped her forehead weakly. “They’ll be here in a few minutes. I can tell.”

Arthur hesitated until he heard the faint call of a siren. It got a little louder.

Leaf smiled. “Not second sight. Just good hearing.”

“Thanks,” said Arthur. He ran and wheeled the bike over to the garage door. The lack of an automatic opener puzzled him for a second, till he worked out he had to push the door up himself.

“Hey, Arthur!” Leaf called out as he got on the bike. Her voice was so weak that it came out a little louder than a whisper. “Promise you’ll tell me what this is all about.”

“I will,” replied Arthur. If I get the chance .

CHAPTER FOUR

Arthur pedalled furiously, coasted till he got his breath back, then pedalled furiously again. He wasn’t sure that he actually would get his breath back, as that familiar catch came and his lungs wouldn’t take in any air. But each time he felt his chest stop and bind, there was a breakthrough a moment later and in came the breath. His lungs, particularly the right one, felt like they were made of Velcro, resisting his efforts to expand them until they suddenly came unstuck.

He tried not to look at his watch as he cycled. But Arthur couldn’t help catching glimpses of its shining face as the minute hand moved so quickly towards the twelve. By the time he got to the high chain-link fence around the old Yeats Paper Mill, it was 11.50. Arthur only had ten minutes, and he didn’t know how to get through the fence, let alone get under the old mill – whatever that meant.

There were no obvious holes in the fence and the gate was chained and padlocked, so Arthur didn’t waste any more time looking. He leaned Ed’s bicycle against the fence, stood on the seat and pulled himself up on one of the posts. Despite being scratched by the top strands of old, rusty barbed wire, he managed to swing himself over and drop to the other side. At the bottom he checked his shirt pocket, to make sure it hadn’t been torn off with the Atlas inside. He’d lost it that way before and he was not going to lose it again.

“ Underneath… underneath ,” Arthur muttered to himself as he ran across the cracked concrete of the old parking lot towards the massive brick building and its six enormous chimneys. No paper had been made at the Yeats Paper Mill for at least a decade, and the whole place had been set aside for some sort of development that had never happened. Probably a shopping mall , Arthur thought sourly.

There had to be underground storage or something here, but how could he find a way down?

Wheezing, Arthur ran to the first door he could see. It was chained and padlocked. He kicked it, but the wood held firm. Arthur ran along the wall to the next door. This one looked like it had been opened recently, and the chain was loose. Arthur pushed it open just wide enough to squeeze himself through.

He hadn’t known what to expect inside, but he hadn’t thought it would be a huge open space. All the old machinery and huge piles of debris from former internal walls had been pushed to the sides, leaving an area about the size of a football field. Light streamed down in shafts from the huge skylights and many holes in the tin roof.

In the cleared area, a strange machine squatted. Arthur knew instantly it came from the House and was not a relic of past papermaking. It was the size of a bus and looked like a cross between a steam-engine and a mechanical spider, with eight forty-foot-long jointed limbs that sprouted from a bulbous cylindrical body – a boiler – with a thin smokestack at one end.

The limbs were made of a red metal that shone dully even where the sun did not fall, but the boiler was a deep black that sucked up the sunlight and did not reflect it.

There were several huge bottles of the same black metal near the spider-machine. Each one was taller than Arthur and easily three or four feet in diameter.

Arthur sneaked across to a pile of debris and took another look. He couldn’t see anyone, so he slinked along to the next pile and then the next. When he was level with the machine, he was surprised to see a very normal-looking office desk next to it. There was a giant plasma screen on the desk, and a PC beneath it. Arthur could see a green activity light flashing on the PC, despite the fact its electric lead was coiled up on the concrete floor, not plugged into anything. He could also see something on the screen. Graphs and rows of figures.

Arthur was just about to creep forward for a better look when a Grotesque walked around from the other side of the boiler. Arthur wasn’t sure if it was one of the two he’d seen before. Whoever it was, it was no longer disguised in a modern suit. Its leather apron had what looked like scorch marks all over it, and numerous tools were sticking out of the pockets on the front.