Sir Thursday

Six

"ARE THE CLOTHES satisfactory, Miss Leaf?" Sneezer asked Leaf as she came out from getting changed behind the central bookshelf in the middle of the library.

"I guess so," she answered. She looked down at the band T-shirt that featured a group she'd never heard of. From the tie-dyed swirl of mythological creatures, she guessed it was from about 1970. She had jeans on below that, but they were not exactly denim, though they looked like it, and the patch on the back pocket was a very sharply focused and impressive hologram featuring an animal that she was sure did not exist on Earth.

"If you would like to do so, we can try to take a look at your destination before you go through," said Sneezer. He walked over to a row of bookshelves and pulled on the hanging rope at the end. A bell rang somewhere above Leaf's head and the entire wall of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves rolled back and then slid away to show a seven-sided room of dark walnut paneling. In the centre of the room, seven tall grandfather clocks were arranged in a circle, facing one another.

"What's that noise?" asked Leaf. She could feel as much as hear a weird low humming noise, but there was no ticking sound coming from the clocks.

"The pendulums of the clocks," said Sneezer. "The heartbeat of Time. These are the Seven Dials, miss."

"I would like to have a look first," said Leaf. "Can you show me where the Skinless Boy is?"

"We can but try," Sneezer replied. He tapped one long finger against his nose and smiled. In Monday's service that would have been a ghastly gesture made with a dirty, long-nailed hand against a nose covered in boils, but now Sneezer's hand was clean and manicured and his nose, though long and hooked, was healthy. Even the long white hair that grew from the back of his head was neat and tied back with a dark-blue velvet bow, matching his long, tailed coat. "Please stay out of the circle of clocks until I tell you otherwise, Miss Leaf."

The butler took a deep breath, then quickly strode in and started moving the hands of the nearest clock. That done, he raced to the next, and then the next, adjusting the time on each face. After changing the seventh clock, he quickly left the circle.

"We should see something in a moment," Sneezer explained. "Then I shall tweak the setting a little and send you back. I'm afraid it is clear that I am unable to return you any earlier than twenty-one minutes past ten on the Thursday after the Wednesday you left. Ah – it is beginning."

A slowly spinning tornado of white fog began to swirl up out of the floor, getting slower and spreading wider as it rose. In a few seconds, it had completely filled the circle between the grandfather clocks. As Leaf watched, a silver sheen spread through the cloud, becoming so bright that she had to squint.

Then the silver paled and the cloud became transparent. Leaf found herself looking down on a hospital room, as if she were a fly on the ceiling. It was a typical hospital room with a single bed. Arthur was in the bed – or rather, Leaf reminded herself hastily, the Skinless Boy was in the bed. It looked exactly like Arthur, and she shivered, thinking that if she hadn't been told, she would never have known it wasn't her friend.

The next thing she saw was the clock on the wall. It read 10:25, which was comforting. If it was still only Thursday … The door opened and a doctor came in. Leaf started, because she hadn't expected to hear anything. But the sound of the door opening and the doctor's footsteps were as clear as if she really were looking down from the ceiling.

"Hello, Arthur," said the doctor. "Remember me? Doctor Naihan. I just need to take a look at your cast."

"Help yourself," said the Skinless Boy. Leaf shivered again, for the Nithling's voice was exactly the same as Arthur's.

The doctor smiled and folded back the bedclothes to take a look at the high-tech cast on the Skinless Boy's leg. He had hardly looked for more than a few seconds when he straightened up and scratched his head in surprise.

"This is … I don't understand … the cast appears to have merged with your leg … but that's impossible. I'd better call Professor Arden."

"What's wrong with the cast?" asked the Skinless Boy. It sat up and slid off the bed as Dr Naihan picked up the bedside phone.

"No, you mustn't get up, Arthur," exclaimed Naihan. "I'll just call –"

Before the doctor could say anything else, the Skinless Boy struck him in the throat so hard that the man was propelled against the oxygen outlets on the wall. He slid down the wall and lay on the floor, not moving.

The Skinless Boy laughed, a strange mixture of Arthur's laugh overlaid with something else, something inhuman. It bent down and laid one finger against Naihan's neck, clearly checking to see if he was dead. Then it picked up the body with one hand, something Arthur could never have managed, and casually slung the dead doctor in the closet.

Next it went to the door, opened it, and looked out for a second, before it went through. The door slowly swung shut behind the Nithling, closing with a final click that made Leaf shudder.

She had not realised just how awful it would be to see a monster that looked and sounded exactly like Arthur. A monster that killed people with careless ease.

"Now, Miss Leaf, it is time for you to return," said Sneezer, making Leaf jump. As he spoke, the hospital scene vanished, and Leaf saw again only the wooden panelling of the walls and floor, and the humming clocks.

The butler stepped in and quickly changed the hands of just three of the clocks.

"Stand in the circle, quickly, before the clocks strike!"

He jumped out and Leaf stepped in. A second later, the clocks all began to strike at the same time, ringing out as the room shimmered around Leaf. She felt dizzy as everything went hazy and indistinct, and then a wave of nausea hit her as a white glow began to spread across the walls, floor, and ceiling. Soon she could see nothing but white around her.

She was just about to scream or vomit – or both – when the light receded on one side, and she could see a kind of corridor, bordered by white light but more comfortably dim in the middle.

Leaf staggered out and along this corridor, holding her stomach. She felt totally disoriented, with the white light pressing behind her and close to the sides. She couldn't hear her own footsteps, or her breath, or anything else.

Then, without warning, sound came back, a kind of roaring like wind in her ears, which quickly faded and was gone. A moment later, the white light vanished. Leaf, her eyes still screwed up, took a few loud steps on a hard floor and fell over, rolling onto her back. It took her disturbed mind a while to realise that the lights she was now staring at, though white, were simply fluorescent panels in a pale-blue ceiling.

She sat up and looked around. She was in a hospital corridor. East Area Hospital. She recognised the pale-blue and ghastly brown colour scheme. There was no one in the corridor, but there were lots of doors all the way along.

And there was a clock above the swing doors at the end of the corridor. According to it, the time was ten past twelve, which made her worry, because when she'd been a fly on the wall looking down at the Skinless Boy it had only been 10:25. If it remained Thursday then it was only a little more than an hour and a half lost, but still …

She got up, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and checked the nearest doors. They were all storerooms of some kind, which indicated that she was on one of the lower, nonpublic areas of the hospital. Which meant her first priority had to be to get out before she was picked up by hospital security and had to explain what she was doing there or how she'd got in.

A few minutes later, leaving a shrieking exit door alarm behind her, Leaf stepped out of an elevator onto the quarantine reception floor. But it wasn't like when she'd left it. Then, the waiting area had been full of people who'd come to see their relatives in quarantine, who were still being kept in case the Sleepy Plague wasn't really gone. Now the waiting room was empty, and there were huge sheets of plastic draped all over the chairs, and the telltale smell of recently sprayed disinfectant. Worse, from Leaf's point of view, instead of just the two usual security guards by the secure reception area, there were four hospital security guards, half-a-dozen police in full biohazard gear, and a couple of soldiers in camouflage biosuits.

Before she could get back in the elevator, they all noticed her.

"Don't step forward!" boomed one of the hospital guards. "This whole level is Q-zoned. How did you get here?"

"I just got in the elevator," said Leaf, acting younger than she was and much more stupid.

"It's supposed to be locked off from the ground," grumbled the guard. "Just get back in and go down to Level One."

"I won't catch anything, will I?" asked Leaf.

"Go back down!" ordered the guard.

Leaf stepped back in and pressed the button. Clearly something had changed in the time she'd been away. The fact that this whole quarantine level had now been locked off did not sound good. But the Sleepy Plague had gone …

The elevator doors opened on the ground floor. Leaf stepped out, into pandemonium. There were people everywhere, filling the lobby, the corridors, and the waiting areas. Most of the people sitting looked like hospital workers, not visitors, and as far as Leaf could tell from a quick scan, there were no patients.

She started walking through the crowd, her mind busy trying to work out what to do. The first thing would be to establish exactly what day it was and what was going on. Then she'd have to work out how to get to the linen storeroom where the Skinless Boy had supposedly hidden Arthur's pocket. Then get that out of the hospital and find the manifestation of the House, which Arthur had told her ages ago had appeared near his house, taking up several blocks …

Getting there was going to be very difficult, Leaf realised as she looked out the main doors. They were shut and taped with black-and-yellow biohazard tape. The windows were pasted with posters that even from a distance Leaf could see were headed with the words Creighton Act, the legal authority that allowed the government to establish a quarantine area and use lethal force to make sure everyone stayed in it.

Beyond the windows, out in the hospital parking lot, there were four or five armoured vehicles and lots and lots of soldiers in biohazard suits. Mixing with them were orange-suited figures with three bright fluoro-yellow letters on their backs: FBA, which stood for the Federal Biocontrol Authority.

Leaf looked around to see if she could see anyone she knew. But there were no familiar faces, until she finally spotted one of the male nurses who she'd talked to when Ed and the rest of her family were first taken away. He was sitting with his back to the wall, wearily sipping a cup of coffee, while two other nurses dozed on either side of him, heads slumped forward, abandoned coffee cups and half-eaten sandwiches on the floor.

Leaf threaded her way through the crowd and stood in front of the nurse.

"Hi," she said. She couldn't remember his name, and the nameplate on his shirt was tilted down.

The nurse looked up. His eyes didn't focus for a second. He shook his head, wiped a palm across his face, and smiled.

"Oh, hi. You get caught here when we got Q-zoned?"

"Yeah," said Leaf. "Only I was asleep in the waiting room … uh … over there, and I just woke up and I don't know what's happened. Is it the Sleepy Plague back again?"

"No, it's something else," said the nurse. He straightened up a little and Leaf saw his nameplate. Senior Nurse Adam Jamale. "Maybe nothing, even, but you know, no one wants to take a chance."

"So what happened?"

"Beats me." Jamale shook his head. "It all came down an hour ago. I heard a rumour that they found signs of a bioweapon attack on one of the staff."

"Yeah, that's right," said one of the other nurses with a yawn. "Dr Penhaligon herself, which kind of makes sense. I mean, if you're going to take out someone, you take out the best, right?"

"But who would do that?" asked Leaf, immediately worried for Arthur's mother. "And what kind of bioweapon?"

"Maybe terrorists," said the other nurse. "We didn't get any details. Just that Dr Penhaligon noticed some symptom and reported herself right away. She'll be in total exclusion on Level Twenty now."

"I sure hope she beats whatever it is," said Jamale. "You know, she invented half the stuff we use to pinpoint viruses? Way back, from the Rapid-Lyse I to the new DNA deep-scanning PAG we got last month."

"Yeah? I didn't know she was behind the Rapid-Lyse. She never mentioned it in that course we did on antiviral –"

Leaf tuned out. The bioweapon attack Arthur's mum had noticed had to be the grey spores of the mould from the Skinless Boy. Since it was sorcerously created from some alien thing, it was extremely unlikely that human medical science would be able to do anything about it. But perhaps they might be able to slow it down.

"Oh, yeah, I forgot," Leaf said, interrupting the two nurses. "What day is it?"

"Thursday," said Jamale. "Maybe you should get some more sleep."

"Not after seeing my family with the Sleepy Plague," said Leaf. "Sleep isn't so attractive now. But I have to go. Thanks!"

"No problem," said Jamale. "Take care now."

"I'll try." Leaf waved and headed back through the crowds, thinking furiously. What would the Skinless Boy be doing? Did it have some objective other than to simply replace Arthur? The quarantine would make it harder for it to infect people with the mind-reading mould, but it was still a Nithling. There was nothing and no one on Earth who could stop it from doing whatever it wanted.

No one except her. She had to find Arthur's pocket fast, somehow break out of the quarantine around the hospital, and find the House.

She changed direction and headed to the cafeteria. According to the Atlas, the Skinless Boy had made a lair in a linen storeroom. Presumably there would be some way of getting towels and tablecloths and so on from the linen storeroom to the cafeteria and back again. Maybe a laundry chute or something. All Leaf had to do was find it and trace it backwards.

Leaf was weaving her way through the crowd, and nearly at the cafeteria entrance, when she caught a glimpse of a familiar face.

Arthur's face.

The Skinless Boy was just ahead of her, hobbling along with the help of a single crutch. As it passed through the crowd, it accepted hands to help it, and often almost slipped, grabbing the nearest shoulder or elbow to steady itself.

It smiled and whispered 'thank you" with each touch and helping hand.