At least she’s got her mouth shut, thought Arthur. She was close enough for him to see one of her huge eyes now, a thing the size of a racetrack. There were oily tears the size of buses rolling across the face of the eye, each one leaving a rainbow trace behind.
The pupil in the eye suddenly moved up and down a few times, then left and right. It looked like a weird code.
Instantly Dawn’s wings pumped the air and she veered away from the onrushing whale, circling to gain height. Arthur, taken by surprise, rotated in Dawn’s grip and found himself staring at her sharkskin belly. He urgently pushed and pulled himself around, desperate to see what was happening.
It took him a minute or more, a very long minute, with the expectation that when he next looked he would see the giant mouth open and them going straight into it, no matter how hard Dawn tried to fly away.
But he didn’t. He saw the top of Drowned Wednesday’s head, only a hundred feet or so below. A huge expanse of white whale blubber and, a few seconds later, a blowhole that looked like a billionaire’s sauna.
Which was not that big, Arthur thought. The Leviathan had shrunk considerably. She was now no more than a mile long and he could actually see the shrinking taking place. It was like watching a balloon slowly losing its air, while it still kept its basic shape.
‘A minor miscalculation,’ said Dawn as they began to glide around and down again. There was something in her tone that suggested to Arthur that she’d done it on purpose to scare him, perhaps on Wednesday’s orders.
Whether it was intentional or not, Dawn made no mistake with the landing on the ship. She circled a few times, watching the approaching white whale get smaller and smaller. Then, when Drowned Wednesday was no more than fifty feet long, Dawn swooped down onto the poop deck, dropped Arthur, and transformed herself back into human shape.
‘Go down to the main deck,’ said Dawn. ‘Milady will meet you there.’
Arthur unpegged his nose and slowly climbed down the companionway to the quarterdeck and then to the waist of the ship. Tables had been laid end to end on both the port and starboard sides, from the forecastle back to the mainmast. They were covered in fine white tablecloths and loaded with many different kinds of food on fancy silver platters and trays and china plates and bowls.
This, Arthur guessed, was the luncheon of seventeen removes, though all seventeen courses were already laid out and, as far as he could see, there were no places set, or chairs.
The slap of water on deck made him look to the side ladder. A pulpy-fingered, dripping hand gripped the top rung, followed by another.
Drowned Wednesday was coming aboard.
She did not look good. Her skin was pallid and strangely lumpy, and her arms and legs were of different sizes, the left much puffier than the right. She was wearing a one-piece garment that looked like a huge flour sack with holes cut for her head and arms. Her hair hung limp and wet like a bunch of brown seaweed on her head, obscuring much of her face. Arthur could see that once she must have been beautiful, as were all the superior Denizens, but the fine bones of her face were lost in fat.
She had a rope tied around her waist in place of a belt, and thrust through the rope was a long silver fork — perhaps a short trident. Arthur’s eye was drawn to it at once, and he knew without being told that this was the Third Key. Right in front of him! He could run forward and snatch it out — ‘
Greetings, Lord Arthur,’ muttered Lady Wednesday as she staggered past him to the table and picked up a huge, meaty bone. She immediately began to gnaw at it, tearing off huge chunks of meat, which she swallowed down with barely a chew. ‘Wouldn’t believe how tired . . . I am of krill and . . . microscopic shrimps!’
Arthur tried to keep the look of disgust off his face as she threw the bone away and picked up an enormous cake and forced it into her face.
‘Repulsive, aren’t I?’ mumbled Wednesday. ‘Not my choice, you understand. Can’t stop eating.’
‘Why?’ asked Arthur. ‘I don’t understand. What’s wrong with you? What do you want with me?’
‘Cursed,’ came the indistinct reply, as Wednesday moved to a huge silver tureen of soup and started to drink it down. ‘Or something similar. Never should have gone in with the other Trustees. Started getting hungry back then, almost as soon as I took my part of the Will. But held it in check with the Key. Pass me that turkey.’
Arthur looked at the table. It took him a moment to locate a huge roast bird that had to be the turkey, though it was twice the size of any he’d ever seen. He lifted it up with some effort and handed it to Wednesday, who grabbed it one-handed and managed to get her jaws around two-thirds of the huge bird in one go.