“I wish I had adventures like you do,” Leaf said as she traced her finger over the writing on the invitation.
“They didn’t feel like adventures,” said Arthur. “I was too scared most of the time to actually enjoy anything or get excited about it. Weren’t you scared by the Scoucher?”
“Sure,” Leaf said, with a glance at her bandaged arm. “But we survived, didn’t we? That makes it an adventure. If you get killed it’s a tragedy.”
“I could do without any more adventures for a while.” Arthur thought Leaf would agree with him if she’d had the same experiences. They sounded much more exciting and safer just as stories. “I really just want to be left alone!”
“They’re not going to leave you alone, though.” Leaf held up Wednesday’s invitation, then flipped it over to Arthur, who put it back in his pocket. “Are they?”
“No,” Arthur agreed, resignation all through his voice. “The Morrow Days aren’t going to leave me alone.”
“So what are you going to do to them?” said Leaf.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, since they won’t leave you alone, you’d better get in first. You know, attack is the best form of defence.”
“I suppose…” said Arthur. “You mean I shouldn’t wait for whatever Wednesday is going to do, but go back into the House now?”
“Yeah, why not? Get together with your friend Suzy, and the Will, and work out some plan to deal with Wednesday before she deals with you.”
“It’s a good idea,” admitted Arthur. “The only thing is, I don’t know how to get back into the House. I can’t open the Atlas because I’ve used up all the power I had from holding on to the Keys. And in case you haven’t noticed, I do have a broken leg. Though I suppose…”
“What?”
“I could phone Dame Primus if I had my phone box, because it’ll probably be reconnected now that Grim Tuesday’s bills have been paid.”
“Where’s the phone box? What’s it look like?”
“It’s at home,” said Arthur. “In my bedroom. It’s just a velvet-lined wooden box about this big.” He held his hands apart.
“Maybe I could get it for you,” said Leaf. “If they ever let me out of this hospital. If it isn’t one thing, it’s another. Quarantine this, quarantine that…”
“Maybe,” said Arthur. “Or maybe I could … what’s that smell?”
Leaf sniffed the air and looked around. As she looked, the pages of the calendar on the wall started to flutter.
“I don’t know. I think the air-conditioning just came on. Feel the breeze.”
Arthur held up his hands to feel the air. There was a definite rush of cold coming from somewhere, and a kind of salty odour, like when they stayed at the beach and the surf was big…
“It smells kind of damp,” said Leaf.
Arthur struggled up to a sitting position, reached over and grabbed his slippers and dressing gown, and hurriedly put them on.
“Leaf!” he cried. “Get out! That’s not the air-conditioning!”
“Sure isn’t,” Leaf agreed. The wind was getting stronger every second. “Something weird’s going on.”
“Yes, it is … get out while you can!”
“I want to see what happens.” Leaf backed up to the bed and leaned against it. “Hey! There’s water coming in under the wall!”
Sure enough, a thin film of frothy water was slowly spreading across the floor, like the leading wash of a wave across the sand. It ran almost to the bed, then ebbed back.
“I can hear something,” said Leaf. “Kind of like a train.”
Arthur heard it too. A distant thunder that got louder and louder.
“That’s not a train! Grab hold of the bed!”
Leaf grabbed the rail at the end of the bed as Arthur gripped the headboard. Both turned to look at the far wall just as it disappeared, replaced by a thundering grey-blue wave that crashed down upon them. Tons of sea water smashed everything else in the room to bits, but the bed itself was carried away by the wave.
Dazed, drenched and desperate, Arthur and Leaf hung on.
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_72051ed4-4a56-5061-a7ab-94f3d650fcdb)
The hospital room vanished in an instant, replaced by the savage fury of a storm at sea. The bed, submerged to within an inch of the mattress-top, had become a makeshift raft. Picked up by the first great wave, the raft rode the crest for a few seconds, then fell off the back, sliding down and down into the trough behind.
Leaf cried out something, two words lost in the thunder of the waves and the howl of the wind. Arthur couldn’t hear her, and he could barely see her through the spray that made it difficult to tell where the sea ended and the air began.
He felt her grip, though, as she clawed herself fully on to the bed and grabbed his foot. Both of them would have been washed off then, if Arthur hadn’t managed to get his arms wedged through the bars of the headboard.
Fear lent her strength, and Leaf managed to crawl up to the headboard railings. She leaned over Arthur and screamed, “What do we do now?”
She didn’t sound like she was enjoying this adventure.
“Hold on!” Arthur shouted, looking past her at the towering, office-block-high wall of water that was falling towards them. If it broke over the bed, they would be smashed down and pushed deep into the sea, never to surface.
The crest of the wave curled high above them, blotting out the dim, grey light of the sky. Arthur and Leaf stared up, not breathing, eyes fixed on the curving water.
The wave didn’t break. The bed rode up the face of the wave like a fisherman’s float. As it neared the top, it tipped up almost vertically and started to roll over, until Arthur and Leaf threw their weight against the curl.
They were just in time. The bed didn’t roll. It levelled out as they made it to the crest of the second wave. They balanced there for a few seconds, then the bed started its downward slide once more. Down into another sickeningly deep trough in front of another giant, blue-black, white-topped cliff of moving water.
But the third wave was different.
There was a ship surfing down it. A hundred-and-sixty-foot-long, three-masted sailing ship with sails that glowed a spectral green.
“A ship!” yelled Leaf, hope in her voice. That hope rapidly fled as the bed continued to run down into the trough at alarming speed, and the ship surfed down the opposite side even faster still.
“It’s going to hit us! We have to jump!”
“No!” shouted Arthur. If they left their makeshift raft he felt sure they’d drown. “Wait!”
A few seconds later, waiting seemed like a very bad decision. The ship didn’t waver in its course, a great wooden missile coming at them so fast that it would run right over them and the crew probably wouldn’t even notice.
Arthur shut his eyes when it got within the last twenty yards. The last thing he saw was the ship’s bow plunging down into the sea, then rising up again in a great spray of froth and spray, the bowsprit like a spear rising from the water.
