T
he Upper Coal Cellar Entry was a rickety wooden platform on the edge of a blasted plain. A vast panorama of open space, dimly lit by the beams of only three or four elevators. As in the Lower Atrium, there was a ceiling above the platform, but unlike the Atrium the ceiling here was flat, not domed, and it was much higher up.
Arthur was marched out onto the platform within his box of Commissionaires. As his eyes adjusted to the dim light, he saw that the plain beyond the platform was not a totally featureless expanse as he’d thought. There was something in the middle.
A circular patch of total darkness.
A huge hole, at least half a mile in diameter and of a depth unseen and unknowable.
“Yes,” said Noon, who had been watching Arthur. “That pit is the Deep Coal Cellar. Sergeant! March the prisoner to the edge.”
There was a pathway from the elevator platform to the pit. It was paved with white stone that repelled the black dust that lay everywhere else, dust that billowed up as they passed. Coal dust, Arthur guessed it was. He hoped he wasn’t breathing it in and that it wouldn’t still be in his lungs when…if…he ever got back home. He’d really need the Key then, to keep on breathing. There was no way his poor lungs could survive coal dust along with everything else.
As the Commissionaires marched, their legs occasionally squeaking for want of oil, Arthur tried to stay calm. Suzy had retrieved the Will, and surely it would come looking for him. Though Dusk had said that this was one place the Will wouldn’t dare go, because it feared the Old One.
That doesn’t sound good,
whispered the defeatist part of Arthur’s mind.
Stuck in a prison pit with some creature called the Old One.
“You will not be alone down there,” said Noon. He looked at Arthur knowingly, as if he had just read his mind. “There are some House Denizens down there, demoted to the most menial of tasks, chipping coal to size and so forth. They will not dare bother you. But there is one other, who you should stay away from, if you value your life and sanity. He is called the Old One, and he is not to be trifled with. Keep away from him, and you will merely suffer from the cold, the damp, and the coal dust.”
“How will I know the Old One if I see him?” asked Arthur. He tried to sound defiant but it didn’t come out that way. His voice sounded squeaky and small. He cleared his throat and tried again, “And how am I supposed to get out of here, if I do want to give Mister Monday the Key?”
“You’ll know the Old One,” said Noon. He smiled his cold smile, white teeth gleaming. “He’s hard to miss. As I said, avoid him, if you can. As for getting out, just say my name three times. Monday’s Noon. I’ll come and fetch you. Or I’ll send someone to take care of the matter.”
They arrived at the edge of the pit as Noon finished speaking. The Commissionaires stopped right at the lip, with only inches separating their toes from the void. Arthur peered past them, down into darkness. He could not see how deep the pit was, or any lights below.
Noon took out his notebook and tore out a page. He quickly folded this page into the shape of two wings, serrating the edges with a small knife to give the impression of feathers. Then he wrote a word on each small paper wing and shook them slowly. With each shake, they grew bigger, until Noon was holding a pair of feathery wings as tall as Arthur. They were pure white and glowing, but where Noon held them, black ink trickled down from his fingers like blood.
“Let me through,” Noon instructed the Commissionaires. They stepped aside to let him pass, but the one closest to the pit thoughtlessly stepped out into nothing. He made no effort to save himself or grab the edge. He just fell into the void, without making a sound, save the sigh of the air parting. Arthur didn’t hear him hit the bottom.
Noon frowned, shook his head, and muttered something about “inferior merchandise.” Then he suddenly slapped the wings onto Arthur’s back and pushed the boy extremely hard—into the pit!
Arthur felt the wings attach themselves to his shoulder blades. It was a weird sensation. Not exactly painful, but not pleasant. Rather like having a tooth filled at the dentist, with an injection removing the pain but not the vibration. The shock of this sudden attachment and then the next shock as his wings spread and slowed his fall took Arthur’s mind off the fact that he had just been pushed into an apparently bottomless pit. By the time this had registered, his wings were beating hard, and he was falling very slowly, no faster than a spider leisurely descending on her web.
Up above, and far behind him now, Arthur heard Noon laughing, and then the tromp of the metal Commissionaires’ boots upon the white pavestones as they marched away.
“I’ll never call you,” whispered Arthur. He clutched the Key tightly in his hand. His voice came back, strong, angry, and loud. “I’ll find a way out. I’ll sort you out and Mister Monday and the whole lot of you!”
“That’s the spirit!” said a soft voice near him in the darkness. Surprised, Arthur lashed out with the Key, but the metal met no resistance. He was still falling slowly, and there was nothing around him but air and darkness.
Or was there? Arthur raised the Key and said, “Light! Shed light!”
The Key shone with sudden bright light, casting a globe of illumination around Arthur and his beating wings. In the light Arthur saw another winged figure, matching the speed of his fall. A man, all in black, his black wings as glossy and dark as a raven’s, with not a touch of white.
“Monday’s Dusk,” spat Arthur. “What do you want?”
“It seems the Key’s powers are not all unknown to you, as Noon would have it,” whispered Dusk. Arthur could hardly hear him over the beating of both their wings. “As to what I want, I want to help you, Arthur. You have been chosen by the Will. You hold the Minute Key of the Lower House.”
“What?” asked Arthur. Surely this was some sort of trick. “Aren’t you like Monday’s right-hand man or something?”
“Noon sits at the Master’s right hand, Dawn at his left. Dusk stands behind, in the shadows. Yet sometimes it is easier to see the light when you stand partly in the darkness. Monday was not always as he is now. Nor were Noon and Dawn. The Lower House was not the shambles it has become. All of this has led me slowly…oh so slowly…to come to the conclusion that something must be done. I helped the Will free itself, by giving an Inspector a box of snuff. Now I will help you by giving you some advice.”
Arthur snorted in disbelief. This was so obvious. He’d seen it a million times on television. Good cop, bad cop. Noon had done the bad cop act, now it was Dusk’s turn. He was pretty convincing at it, though.
“You should talk to the Old One. The others forget that while he opposed the Architect, he does not hate Her work. You are one small part of that, and so he will be interested and will not harm you. Ask him about the Improbable Stair. Use the knowledge he gives you.”
“Why should I trust you?” asked Arthur.
“Why trust anyone?” Dusk replied, so quietly that Arthur could not hear him and had to repeat his question. Dusk flew closer, until his face was close enough to touch, the tips of his ebony wings almost brushing Arthur’s snowy ones with every forward beat.
“Why trust anyone?” he said again. “The Will wants its way. Monday wants his way, as do the Morrow Days. But who can say what those ways will lead to? Be cautious, Arthur!”
On the last word, Dusk’s wings beat more strongly and he rose, while Arthur continued to fall. Arthur had no control over the wings Noon had made for him. They merely slowed his fall, like a parachute, only better.
Arthur had a long time to think about what Dusk had said. His wings kept beating and he kept falling, until he grew used to the motion and it even made him sleepy. The Deep Coal Cellar was deep indeed, deeper than any pit or mine Arthur had ever heard of in his own world, save the ocean trenches where strange life-forms dwelled.
Finally there was an end to the interminable falling. Arthur had a brief warning as his wings suddenly doubled their efforts, beating furiously so he came to a complete stop. Then they detached themselves, dumping Arthur the last three or four feet onto hard, wet ground. He landed with a splash and fell over, soaking himself and almost losing the Key. A second later, two shredded pieces of paper fell next to him, to become lumps of wet pulp.
The water was only a few inches deep. Little more than a puddle, though it was not an isolated one. Arthur held up the Key so its light shed farther and saw that there were puddles of water everywhere. Black water, lying stagnant in pools between stretches of marginally drier ground that were a foul, muddy mixture of coal dust and water.
There were also piles of coal. Lots and lots of small pyramids five or six feet high had been laboriously piled up every five yards or so. Arthur took a look at the closest pile. Unlike the perfectly even pieces that he’d seen Suzy use, the coal here was all misshapen lumps of very different sizes. As he walked around, Arthur saw that the pyramids were also of different sizes, and some were much better ordered than others. A few times he saw collapsed pyramids that were just dumps of loose coal.
As Noon had promised, it was cold as well as damp.
At least the water keeps the coal dust down,
Arthur thought, though it billowed up as he moved around. But he had to keep moving because it was too cold to stay still. If Suzy was right and he didn’t need to eat, then he supposed he could keep moving all the time.
Except that she hadn’t said anything about not needing to sleep and Arthur
was
tired. They had shifts here, he knew, so presumably that meant the people—or Denizens, as they seemed to be called—did sleep.
Hopefully the Key would protect him from getting pneumonia or a cold, if it was possible to catch such things here, despite Suzy’s opinion. But it would be a miserable experience trying to sleep on a pile of coal in the cold and wet.
Arthur kept weaving between the piles of coal as he thought about what he was going to do. Should he trust Dusk? One of the last things the Will had mentioned was the Improbable Stair, as a possible means of getting to Mister Monday’s Dayroom. Dusk had talked about the Improbable Stair too. Perhaps it was a way out of here as well as a way into Monday’s rooms.
But to find out he would need to find the Old One and risk talking to him. Arthur had noted the shiver that had gone through Dawn and the Commissionaire Sergeants when the Old One had been mentioned. They were afraid of him, that was for sure. And the Will must also fear the Old One, Arthur concluded, or Noon and Monday would never have left him down here with the Key.
He couldn’t think of an alternative. Which meant that he had to get methodical about finding the Old One. The pit was only a half mile in diameter, though many miles deep. If Arthur kept track of where he’d been, he should be able to search the whole pit in a grid pattern, though it would not be quick work.
The obvious way would be to take a few coals off each pyramid and set them down in a pattern. So whenever he came to a pyramid he would know if he’d been that way before.
Arthur sighed and went to the closest pyramid. He had just reached over to lift off a big chunk of coal from the top when someone sprang up from the other side, brandishing a weapon and squealing.
“Ho! Stop! Unhand my coal, you ruffian!”
“T
hose are my coals, villain!” continued the man. Then he saw the Key in Arthur’s hand and in midbreath changed his tone, immediately lowering the strange metal implement he was brandishing. “Oh, not you, sir, whoever you may be. I am referring to someone else. There he goes!”
Puzzled, Arthur looked where the man pointed. But there was no one there.
“I’ll just get back to work then, sir,” added the man. He was dressed in the same basic toga-like robe that the elevator operator had been reduced to, though this one was black as the coal and very tattered. He was also short, a head shorter than Arthur, though he otherwise had the physique of a grown man.
“Who are you?” asked Arthur.
“Coal-Collator Very Ordinary Tenth Grade,” reported the man. “Number 9665785553 in precedence.”
“I mean what’s your name?”
“Oh, I haven’t got a name, not anymore. Very few of us down here have names, Your Excellency. Not what you would call names, no, sir. May I go now?”
“Well, what
was
your name?” asked Arthur. “And what were you before you were down here?”
“That’s a cruel question, and no mistake,” said the man. He wiped a tear from his eye. “But there’s the Key in your hand, so I must answer. I was called Pravuil, sir, Tenth Assistant Deputy Clerk of Stars. I counted suns in the Secondary Realms, I did, sir, and kept their records. Till I was asked to amend the paperwork pertaining to a certain sun. I…ah…refused and was cast from on high.”
“I don’t want to…I don’t want to upset you,” said Arthur. “But what do you do down here?”
“I collate the coal into piles,” explained Pravuil. He indicated the pyramids. “Then one of the Coal-Chippers comes and cuts the coals to size and puts them in a request basket, which takes them up to whoever ordered coal, probably so long ago they’ve forgotten what a fire is and become used to shivering.”
“Baskets?” asked Arthur. “What kind of baskets? How do they get taken up?”
“I see your thinking, sir,” replied Pravuil. “Escape, that’s what you’re thinking. Lax procedures. Someone you’ll want to punish. But it’s not so. The baskets are small and they come with active labels. The labels take them where they’re supposed to go. And if you’re thinking that a label might be detached and used to transport someone, you’d be wrong, as Bareneck would tell you if he can ever find his head down here.”
“Bareneck?”
“That’s what we call him. He took a label off a basket and tied it around his neck,” said Pravuil with a sniff. “I told him it was stupid, but he wouldn’t listen. The label went up, but it didn’t take any of Bareneck with it. Cut clean through his neck it did, and the head rolled off somewhere and his body blundered around knocking coal all over the place. I expect he’ll find it eventually. His head, I mean. Or someone else will.”
Arthur shuddered and looked around, half expecting to see a headless man groping around in the darkness, forever searching for his head. Or even worse, the head lying buried somewhere here, with senses intact, but no way to communicate, immured under the coal.
“I’m not investigating anything,” said Arthur. “I have the Key, but I’m not an official of the House. Or a friend of Mister Monday. I’m a mortal, from outside.”
“Whatever you say, sir,” Pravuil said, with unveiled suspicion. Clearly he thought Arthur was trying to trick him into something. “I’ll be getting on with my work.”
“Before you go, can you tell me…or show me…where the Old One is down here?”
Pravuil shivered and made a gesture with his hand.
“Don’t go near him!” he warned. “The Old One can finish you off permanent-like. Reduce you to Nothing, less than a Nithling, with no chance of coming back!”
“I have to,” said Arthur slowly. At least, he thought he had to. There didn’t seem to be any other way out of here.
“That way,” whispered Pravuil. He pointed. “The coal will not be ordered there. No one dare sweep around the Old One.”
“Thank you,” said Arthur. “I hope you are restored to your old position one day.”
Pravuil shrugged and resumed work. The strange implement he held, Arthur finally saw, was a kind of weird broom-and-pan combination that formed swept-up coal dust back into irregular pieces of coal, which Pravuil then stacked.
Arthur started in the direction that Pravuil had indicated. A few seconds after the light from the Key had left the Coal-Collator behind, his voice echoed out of the darkness.
“Don’t stay past twelve!”
“What does that mean?”
There was no answer. Arthur stopped to listen, but there was only silence. When he retraced his steps to ask again, there was no sign of Pravuil. There was only the pyramid of coal he’d been working on, with a few new pieces on top.
“Excellent,” muttered Arthur to himself. “More advice. Don’t go near the Old One. Do go near the Old One. Don’t stay past twelve. Trust the Will. Don’t trust the Will. I wish someone would tell me something straightforward for once.”
He paused as if there might be an answer, but of course there wasn’t. Arthur shook his head and started off again. To make sure that he could find his way back if he needed to, he took off ten pieces of coal from the first pyramid and stacked it in a pattern at the base. At the next pyramid, he took nine pieces, eight from the next, and so on, till he was down to one, when he started again but also used a separate piece of coal to indicate it was the second progression.
By the time he’d repeated this procedure across one hundred and twenty-six pyramids of coal, Arthur was doubting several things. First, that he would ever find the Old One, second, that Pravuil had shown him the right direction, and third, that the pit he was in was only the size it appeared to be from its aboveground opening.
He was also getting very cold, despite the constant walking. He didn’t feel hungry, but he still wished for something to eat, because it would warm him up. At least he thought it would. Certainly it would relieve the boredom of trekking through this freezing, wet, dark dump of a place with nothing but coal everywhere.
Because he was tired, Arthur had been holding the Key lower and lower by his side, so the circle of light it shed around him had grown smaller and smaller, until it was only illuminating the ground around his feet. Beyond that light lay only darkness, until Arthur suddenly caught a glimpse of something that was not illuminated by the Key or a reflection. It was another light. A blue, shimmering light, as if there was a gas fire somewhere ahead.
Arthur raised the Key higher and walked faster. Surely this must be where the Old One lurked. He felt nervous and excited at the same time. Nervous because Dawn and the Commissionaire Sergeants had been genuinely afraid of the Old One, as had Pravuil. Excited, because it was something different from cold puddles and coal. He might be able to get food or, even better, find a way out.
As he got closer to the light, Arthur slowed down and held the Key still higher. He didn’t want to be surprised by anything. Every shadow behind a pyramid of coal promised some sort of ambush, but the pyramids were getting fewer, as were the puddles. He was coming to open ground. Drier, higher ground. There was even less of the muddy coal dust beneath his feet and more patches of dry stone.
At the last pyramid of coals, Arthur crouched down to look at what lay ahead. He had to blink a lot, since it was hard to see in the strange combination of light from the Key and the shimmering blue radiance that bathed the area ahead.
He saw a raised circular platform, rather like a low stage made of stone, about sixty feet in diameter. There were Roman numerals set upright around the edge of the platform, and two long pieces of metal issued out from a central pivot, one piece shorter than the other. As Arthur watched, the longer piece of metal moved a little, progressing along the rim.
It was a minute hand, Arthur suddenly realized. The circular platform was a clock face. A giant clock face laid flat. But that wasn’t the strangest thing. There were chains leading from the ends of the clock hands that ran through some mechanism of gears and pulleys near the central pivot that he couldn’t quite work out. The chains then connected to manacles on the wrists of a man who was sitting near the numeral six. It was the chains that shed the glimmering light. They looked like steel but could not be. No steel shone with such a vivid spectral blue.
Nor was the man precisely a man, Arthur thought, taking in the size of him. He was a giant, easily eight feet tall. He looked like some sort of aged barbarian hero, with overdeveloped muscles along his arms and legs, though his skin was old, wrinkled, and partially translucent so you could see the veins. He wore only a loincloth, and his head was shaved to a stubble. He seemed to be asleep, though his closed eyes looked kind of strange. The eyelids were raw and red, as if he’d been sunburned. Which was impossible down here. Or anywhere in the House, for all Arthur knew.
This, Arthur figured, must be the Old One, and he was chained to the clock’s hands. Arthur gingerly sneaked closer to study the gears and wheels of the chain mechanism. It wasn’t easy to work them out, but after watching for a few minutes, Arthur thought that the chains would be quite loose around half-past six, but would be very tight at twelve. In fact, they must drag the giant back almost to the center of the clock at noon and midnight.
At the moment, the hands were on twenty-five to seven, so the Old One had enough slack to sit next to the numeral six. Judging from the length of the chains at that moment, Arthur guessed the prisoner would not be able to move past the border of the clock face.
There were two trapdoors on either side of the central pivot. Both were the size of regular doors, with arched peaks. Like the doors of a cuckoo clock. Somehow Arthur suspected it would not be cuckoos that came out of these doors.
“Beware!” shouted the Old One suddenly.
Arthur leaped back and tripped over some loose bits of coal. As he scrabbled to get up again, he heard the rattle of chains. Panic rose as he scrabbled on the ground.
But he was too slow. The giant had been holding the chains close against his body, to disguise how much slack he really had, and in an instant the Old One was standing over Arthur. He looked even taller and meaner close up. His open eyes weren’t much better than his closed ones. They were red-rimmed and bloodshot. One pupil was gold and the other black.
“Have you seen enough, Key-bearer?” asked the Old One as he casually looped a piece of his chain over Arthur’s head and pulled it tight around Arthur’s neck. Arthur struck at him with the Key, but it didn’t even scratch the giant’s flesh. There was no burst of molten fluid, or electric sparks, or anything. Arthur might as well have hit him with a plastic clock hand.
“Did your masters not tell you that nothing of the House can harm me?” growled the giant. “And nothing of Nothing, save the creatures of this clock, who nightly gnaw and gouge my eyes? But I give you my thanks for the moment of entertainment you shall give me as I rend you limb from limb and consign your essence to the void!”