Grim Tuesday Read Free Page B

the Hour Key in his life-or-death battle with Mister Monday.
    Three hundred and sixty-three tons of gold.
    Arthur lay down while he thought about that. How would Grim Tuesday try to get him to pay? Would he send Fetchers again, or other creatures of Nothing? If he did, would they bring a new plague?
    He was so tired he couldn’t think of any answers. Only questions. They raced around and around inside his head.
    I have to get up and do something, Arthur thought. I should look in the Compleat Atlas of the House or write down some kind of action plan. It’s Tuesday already, so there’s no time to waste. Grim Tuesday will only be able to do things here in my world on Tuesday, so he won’t waste any time…I mustn’t waste any time…waste any…
    Arthur woke up with a start. The sun was streaming in through his window. For a moment he couldn’t work out what had happened or where he was. Then the fog of sleep began to clear. He’d flaked out completely and now it was after ten a.m.
    On Tuesday morning.
    Arthur jumped out of bed. After the fire and the plague of the day before, there was no chance of having to go to school. But that wasn’t what worried him. Grim Tuesday could have been doing something for hours while Arthur slept. He had to find out what was going on.
    When he got downstairs, everyone else was either out or still asleep. There was the very faint echo of music from the studio, which meant his adoptive father, Bob, was playing with the door open. Arthur checked the screen on the fridge and saw that his mom was still at the hospital lab. His brother Eric was practicing basketball out in back of the house and didn’t want to be disturbed by anyone. There was no message from his sister Michaeli, so he figured she was still asleep.
    Arthur turned on the television and found the news channel. It was still full of the “miraculous” escape from the Sleepy Plague, with the genetic structure of the virus sequenced overnight and so many sufferers coming out of their comas without going into the final, lethal stage.The fire at his school got some coverage too. Apparently it had been a very strange blaze, destroying every book in the library—even melting the metal shelves with its intensity—but the building itself had been hardly damaged and the fire had spontaneously extinguished itself. About the same time Arthur had entered the House, he figured.
    The quarantine was still in place around the city, but within the city people were allowed to move about during daylight hours if they had “urgent business that could not be delayed.” There were checkpoints maintained by police and Federal Biocontrol authorities, who would test anyone passing through. Arthur could still hear the constant dull chatter of quarantine helicopters flying a cordon around the city.
    There was no new news, at least none that Arthur could identify as the work of Grim Tuesday. He shut the television off and looked outside. Everything appeared normal. The only people in the street were across the road, putting a SOLD sign in the front yard of the house there.
    Which, Arthur thought, was more than a bit weird on the morning after a citywide biohazard emergency.
    Arthur looked again. There was an expensive, clean new car, the kind real estate agents always used. There were two men in dark suits, with the usual kind of SOLD sign. But as Arthur looked, his eyes teared up and his vision blurred. When he rubbed his eyes and looked again, the men were much shorter, wider, and misshapen than they had been. In fact, one looked like he had a hunchback as well, and both had arms that reached down almost to their knees.
    Arthur kept staring. The two men looked a bit blurry, but as he focused on them, he saw their suits fade. Those clothes were an illusion—the two were actually wearing old-fashioned coats with huge cuffs, odd breeches, wooden clogs, and leather aprons.
    Arthur felt a chill run through his whole body. They weren’t real estate