Keys To The Kingdom_ Sir Thursday Part 5

" Are the clothes satisfactory, Miss Leaf?" Sneezer asked M VLeaf as she ca me out from getting changed behind the central bookshelf in the middle of t he library.

"I guess so," she answered. She looked down at the band T-s.h.i.+rt that featur ed a group she'd never heard of. From the tie-dyed swirl of mythological cr eatures, she guessed it was from about 1970. She had jeans on below that, b ut they were not exactly denim, though they looked like it, and the patch o n the back pocket was a very sharply focused and impressive hologram featur ing 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 bookshelve s and pulled on the hanging rope at the end. A bell rang somewhere above Le af's head and the entire wall of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves rolled back a nd then slid away to show a seven-sided room of dark walnut paneling. In th e center of the room, seven tall grandfather clocks were arranged in a circ le, facing one another.

"What's that noise?" asked Leaf. She could feel as much as hear a weird lo w 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 no se and smiled. In Monday's service that would have been a ghastly gesture m ade 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 hooke d, was healthy. Even the long white hair that grew from the back of his hea d was neat and tied back with a dark blue velvet bow, matching his long, ta iled coat. "Please stay out of the circle of clocks until I tell you otherw ise, 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 nex t, adjusting the time on each face. After changing the seventh clock, he quic kly left the circle.

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

A slowly spinning tornado of white fog began to swirl up out of the floor, g etting slower and spreading wider as it rose. In a few seconds, it had compl etely filled the circle between the grandfather clocks. As Leaf watched, a s ilver sheen spread through the cloud, becoming so bright that she had to squ int.

Then the silver paled and the cloud became transparent. Leaf found herself l ooking 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 s.h.i.+vered, 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 expe cted to hear anything. But the sound of the door opening and the doctor's f ootsteps were as clear as if she really were looking down from the ceiling.

"h.e.l.lo, 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 s.h.i.+vered 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 th e throat so hard that the man was propelled against the oxygen outlets on th e 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 wit h something else, something inhuman. It bent down and laid one finger agai nst 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.

Then 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 realized 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 th e wooden paneling of the walls and floor, and the humming clocks.

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

"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 s.h.i.+mmered around Leaf. She felt dizzy as everything went hazy and indistinct, and then a wave of naus ea hit her as a white glow began to spread across the walls, floor, and cei ling. Soon she could see nothing but white around her.

She was just about to scream or vomit or both when the light receded o n 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 tota lly disoriented, with the white light pressing behind her and close to the sid es. 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 e ars, which quickly faded and was gone. A moment later, the white light vanis hed. 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 realize that the lights she was now staring at, though white, were simply fl uorescent panels in a pale blue ceiling.

She sat up and looked around. She was in a hospital corridor. East Area Hos pital. She recognized the pale blue and ghastly brown color scheme. There w as 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. Acco rding to it, the time was ten past twelve, which made her worry, because whe n 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 h our and a half lost, but still She got up, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and checked the near est 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 f irst priority had to be to get out before she was picked up by hospital sec urity and had to explain what she was doing there or how she'd gotten in.

A few minutes later, leaving a shrieking exit door alarm behind her, Leaf ste pped out of an elevator onto the quarantine reception floor. But it wasn't li ke when she'd left it. Then, the waiting area had been full of people who'd c ome to see their relatives in quarantine, who were still being kept in case t he Sleepy Plague wasn't really gone. Now the waiting room was empty, and ther e were huge sheets of plastic draped all over the chairs, and there was the t elltale smell of recently sprayed disinfectant. Worse, from Leaf's point of v iew, instead of just the two usual security guards by the secure reception ar ea, there were four hospital security guards, half a dozen police in full bio hazard 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 b.u.t.ton. Clearly something had change d 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 gon e The elevator doors opened on the ground floor. Leaf stepped out, into pandem onium. There were people everywhere, filling the lobby, the corridors, and t he waiting areas. Most of the people sitting looked like hospital workers, n ot 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 wh at to do. The first thing would be to establish exactly what day it was an d what was going on. Then she'd have to work out how to get to the linen s toreroom where the Skinless Boy had supposedly hidden Arthur's pocket. The n get that out of the hospital and find the manifestation of the House, wh ich Arthur had told her ages ago had appeared near his house, taking up se veral blocks Getting there was going to be very difficult, Leaf realized as she looked o ut 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 tha t allowed the government to establish a quarantine area and use lethal forc e to make sure everyone stayed in it.

Beyond the windows, out in the hospital parking lot, there were four or five armored vehicles and lots and lots of soldiers in biohazard suits. Mixing w ith 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 w as sitting with his back to the wall, wearily sipping a cup of coffee, whil e two other nurses dozed to either side of him, heads slumped forward, aban doned 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 sh irt 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 Pla gue 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, b ut 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 rumor 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. Penhalig on herself, which kind of makes sense. I mean, if you're going to take out so meone, you take out the best, right?"

"But who would do that?" asked Leaf, immediately worried for Arthur's mo ther. "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. S he'll be in total exclusion on Level Twenty now."

"I sure hope she beats whatever it is," said Jamale. "You know, she inven ted half the stuff we use to pinpoint viruses? Way back, from the Rapid-L yse 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 mom had noticed had to be th e gray spores of the mold from the Skinless Boy. Since it was sorcerously created from some alien thing, it was extremely unlikely that human medica l 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 furious ly. 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 t o infect people with the mind-reading mold, but it was still a Nithling. Th ere was nothing and no one on Earth who could stop it from doing whatever i t 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 wou ld be some way of getting towels and tablecloths and so on from the linen s toreroom to the cafeteria and back again. Maybe a laundry chute or somethin g. 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 ent rance, 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 sin gle crutch. As it pa.s.sed through the crowd, it accepted hands to help it, and often almost slipped, grabbing the nearest shoulder or elbow to steady itsel f. It smiled and whispered "thank you" with each touch and helping hand.

Chapter Seven

Lieutenant Crosshaw didn't talk to Arthur in the elevator, at least not after issuing instructions on how Arthur was to stand at attention. They were in a very narrow, military-issue elevator not much larger than a phone box. There was a red line painted on the floor about two feet back from the doors. Arth ur had to stand at attention with the toes of his new boots on the line.

Arthur had been only mildly surprised to find the elevator was behind one of the doors in the corridor outside the big meeting room. He knew there were elevators all over the place, belonging to different demesnes of the House o r designated for particular uses or pa.s.sengers. He imagined it was a bit lik e all the tunnels and conduits for water, power, and transport under a moder n city, crisscrossing all over one another, cl.u.s.tering close together in par ts and very spread out in others. Somewhere there must be a map or a guide t o all the House's elevator networks. The Atlas would have such a thing, of c ourse Arthur's musings on elevators were interrupted as he and Crosshaw arrived at their destination. Unlike the other elevators Arthur had been in, this one had neither operator nor bell. It had a horn, which blew a single sharp note as the doors sprang open.

Beyond the doors was a windswept plain of very short, very brown gra.s.s. The wind was hot, and Arthur saw a sun, or at least the kind of artificial sun t hat parts of the House had, high in the sky. Perhaps half a mile away, acros s the plain, he could see a very planned, orderly-looking town of twenty to thirty houses and other larger buildings. Beyond the town, looking to what w as notionally west, he was rather surprised to see a tropical jungle. To the north there was an area of sharp granite hills, stark and yellow, and to th e east there was a high ridge, covered in a forest of cold-climate firs and pines, complete with scatterings of snow.

"Ten paces forward, quick march!" shouted Lieutenant Crosshaw.

Surprised by the command, Arthur stepped forward and was immediately uns ure of how many steps he'd taken. Was it one or two? Anxiety rose as he counted out the remaining steps. What would happen if he got it wrong?

"That's ten paces! Can't you count, Recruit?" bellowed a new and highly un pleasant voice behind him. Even though he'd only counted nine, Arthur stop ped and started to turn around.

"Face front!" screamed the voice, from what felt like two inches behind Arth ur's left ear. "Don't move!"

"Ah, Sergeant Helve, if I may have a word," interrupted Crosshaw tentatively , as Arthur felt an intake of breath behind his neck, indicating another voc al explosion was about to take place.

"Yes, sir!" bellowed the voice, which Arthur presumed belonged to Sergeant Helve. He didn't dare look around or move, though he badly needed to scratc h his nose, as the heat had already sent a bead of perspiration sliding dow n towards his left nostril.

Lieutenant Crosshaw and Sergeant Helve spoke quietly behind Arthur for abo ut thirty seconds. He couldn't hear what Crosshaw said, but even Helve's w hisper was louder than a normal voice, so he caught the sergeant's half of the conversation.

"Who?"

"I don't give a raised rat's whisker who he is."

"Bad for morale, sir. Can't be done. Is that all, sir?"

"I accept delivery of one Recruit Penhaligon, sir. With medical advice."

Arthur heard footsteps, then the sound of the elevator doors closing. But he still didn't dare to move, though now the itching sensation on the bridge o f his nose was almost unbearable.

"Stand at ease, Recruit!" barked Helve.

Arthur relaxed, but he still didn't scratch his nose. He had a vague memor y of his much older brother Erazmuz who was a major in the Army talkin g about the things that movies always got wrong about military service. On e of them was the difference between "stand at ease" and "stand easy." Unf ortunately Arthur couldn't remember exactly what the difference was. Stayi ng still seemed to be the best option.

"Feet this far apart, hands behind your back, thumbs crossed, head straight, eyes straight ahead!" shouted Helve. He suddenly marched in front of Arthur and stood at ease himself. "Say, 'Yes, Sergeant!'"

"Yes, Sergeant!" shouted Arthur, putting all his strength into his voice. He knew about the need to yell ridiculously loudly from Erazmuz as well.

"Good!" shouted Helve. He stood at attention and leaned in towards Arthur. He wasn't the tallest Denizen Arthur had seen no more than six and a half feet high but he had the broadest shoulders the boy had seen outside of one of Grim Tuesday's Grotesques. His face was not handsome, as was usual f or Denizens, but it might once have been. Now it was marred by a Nothing-bu rn that stretched from his left ear to his chin. If he had ever had any hai r, it had been shaved off.

Like the lieutenant, Helve was wearing a scarlet tunic, but his had three bro ad gold stripes on each sleeve. He also had three medals pinned on his left b reast, all of dull gun-metal, with multicolored ribbons attached. One of the medals had five small clasps attached to the ribbon, and another had a score of tiny silver star pins on its ribbon arranged in a pattern that left s.p.a.ce for several more.

"Lieutenant Crosshaw says you are a special case!" bellowed Helve. "I do no t like special cases! Special cases do not make good soldiers! Special case s do not help other recruits become good soldiers! Therefore, you will not be a special case! You understand me!"

"I think so "

"Shut up! That was not a question!"

Sergeant Helve suddenly leaned back, then scratched the back of his head an d looked around. Arthur didn't dare follow his gaze, but whatever he saw or didn't see rea.s.sured the sergeant.

"Stand easy, Recruit. For the next two minutes I'm going to talk to you Deni zen to Piper's child, not sergeant to recruit. But you will never mention it to me and you will not ever speak of it to anyone else. Do you understand?"

"Yes, Sergeant," said Arthur cautiously.

Sergeant Helve reached into his belt pouch and pulled out a flat tin, from wh ich he took a cigarillo, which he didn't light. Instead he bit the end off an d started chewing. He held out the soggy end to Arthur, who shook his head an d then took the opportunity to rapidly scratch his nose.

"It's like this, Penhaligon. You shouldn't be here. There's something political going on, isn't there?"

Arthur nodded.

"I hate politics!" said Helve. He spat out a disgusting gob of chewed tobacco for emphasis. "So here's what I want to do. It's not strictly legal, so you' ll have to agree. I want to change your name. Just while you're here. That wa y, you can get on with the course, the other recruits won't be distracted, an d we won't have any trouble. It'll only be on the local record here, nothing permanent. You'll graduate under your own name. If you make it."

"Okay," said Arthur. If he had to be here, it would make sense to hide unde r another name. "I mean, yes, Sergeant."