Superior Saturday(10)

‘I didn’t mean my head was actually going to explode,’ said Arthur. ‘So you can put that drill away. I meant that I have too much to do, too much information to deal with. Too many problems!’

‘Perhaps I can assist in some other fashion?’ asked Scamandros as he stowed his tools away.

‘No,’ sighed Arthur. ‘Wait here. I’m going to talk to the Old One.’

‘Um, Lord Arthur, I trust that I can move a little in that direction?’ Scamandros pointed at a pile of coal a few yards away and added, ‘As I observe that the front half of yonder pyramid has ceased to exist . . .’

‘Of course you can move!’ snapped Arthur. He felt a peculiar rage rising in him, something he’d never felt before, an irritation at having to deal with lesser Denizens and inferior beings. For a moment he even felt like striking Scamandros, or forcing the Denizen to prostrate himself and beg forgiveness.

Then the feeling was past, replaced by a deep sense of mortification and shame. Arthur liked Scamandros and he did not like the way he had just felt toward the sorcerer, the proud anger that had fizzed up inside him, like a shaken bottle of soda ready to explode. He stopped and took a deep breath and reminded himself that he was just a boy who had a very tough job to do, and that he would need all the help he could get, from willing friends, not fearful servants.

I’m not going to become like one of the Trustees, thought Arthur firmly. At the back of his head, another little thought lay under that. Or like Dame Primus . . .

‘Sorry, I’m sorry, Doctor Scamandros. I didn’t mean to shout. I just . . . I’m a bit . . . um . . . anyway, do whatever you need to do to keep away from the Nothing. We’ll get out of here soon.’

Dr Scamandros bowed low as Arthur walked away, and another baseball-sized grenade fell out of an inner pocket and immediately began to smoke. The Denizen tut-tutted, pinched the burning fuse out, and slipped it up his sleeve, which did not look like a secure place for it to go. However, it did not immediately fall out.

Arthur walked on, weaving between the pyramids of coal and splashing through the puddles of dirty coaldust-tainted water. He remembered that he had been very cold when he’d last visited the Deep Coal Cellar, but it felt quite pleasant now to him, almost warm. Perhaps a side effect of the Nothing that now surrounded the place, he thought.

There were other changes too. As he drew closer to the blue illumination spread by the clock, Arthur noticed that many of the pyramids now sprouted flowers. Climbing roses twined up through the coal, and, between the puddles, there were clumps of bluebells.

The bluebells spread as the ground climbed a little higher and got drier, the flowers now growing out of stone slates rather than a bed of coaldust, which was equally impossible but did not bother Arthur. He was fairly used to the House. Flowers growing out of coal and stone were far from the strangest things he had seen.

At the last pyramid, he stopped, as he had done all that time ago, when he had first cautiously approached the Old One’s prison. The shimmering blue light was less annoying than it had been then, and he could see more clearly this time, even without calling on the Fifth Key to shed some kinder illumination.

Arthur saw a markedly different landscape from what it had been. Between him and the clock-prison was a solid carpet of bluebells, interspersed with clumps of tall yellow-green stalks that burst out at the top in profuse pale white flowers that were shaped a little like very elongated daffodils, but at the same time looked too alien to have come from the earth he knew.

The raised circular platform of stone, the clock face, was significantly smaller, as if it had been shrunk. It had been at least sixty feet in diameter, the length of the driveway at Arthur’s own home. Now it was half that, and the Roman numerals that had stood upright around the rim were smaller and tarnished, much of their blue glow gone. Some of them were bent over at forty-five degrees or more, and the numbers and most of the rim were wreathed in climbing red and pink roses.

The metal hands had shrunk with the clock face, to remain in proportion. Long, shining blue-steel chains still ran from the ends of the hands back through the central pivot, fastened at the other end to the manacles locked on the wrists of the Old One.

The Old One himself was not as Arthur had last seen him. He still looked like a giant barbarian hero, eight feet tall and heavily muscled, but his formerly old, almost-translucent skin was now sun-dark and supple. His once-stubbled head now sported a fine crop of clean white hair that was tied back behind his neck. He no longer wore just a loincloth, but had on a sleeveless leather jerkin and a pair of scarlet leggings that came down to just below his knees.