‘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.