a weird strip of metal, sharp-pointed on one end with a circular loop on the other. It was heavy and was made of silver with fancy gold inlay, all swirls and curlicues.
Arthur stared at it for a second before he realised what it was. It was the minute hand of some sort of antique clock. It was real and so was the notebook in his pocket. Mister Monday and Sneezer had been there. It wasn’t all an oxygen-deprivation dream.
Weightman and the nurse would be on him in a minute. Arthur looked around wildly, trying to think of somewhere he could hide the clock hand. It would be taken away from him for sure.
There was a patch of discoloured grass a few paces away. Arthur crawled over to it and plunged the minute hand into the earth, until only the hollow circle remained, hidden by some tufts of yellow grass.
As soon as he let the hand go, he felt his chest tighten. That catch had snapped shut again and there was no more air. Arthur rolled over, trying to put some distance between himself and the minute hand. He didn’t want anyone else to find it.
He’d come back to get it as soon as he could, he thought.
If he lived.
Arthur was still in the hospital twenty-four hours after the strange events of Monday morning. He had spent most of that time unconscious and still felt dazed and confused. Though he was breathing reasonably well again, the doctors wanted to keep him in for a few more days because of his history.
Fortunately Arthur’s mother was a very important medical researcher who worked for the government, so not only did the whole family have the best medical insurance, doctors all around the country knew Dr Emily Penhaligon and her work. Arthur always got good treatment and was kept in the hospital even when they made other sicker people leave. He usually felt bad about that later, but when he was actually in the hospital he was too ill to think about it.
Arthur’s father was a musician. He was a very good musician, but not always a very commercially minded one. He wrote brilliant songs and then forgot to do anything with them. He’d been the guitar player in a famous band called The Ratz thirty-five years ago, and sometimes people still recognised him. He’d been called Plague Rat then, but had long since gone back to his original name, Robert “Bob” Penhaligon. He still got a lot of money from his time in The Ratz since he’d written most of the songs, some of which were multiplatinum sellers. They still got played on some radio stations quite a lot and new bands used samples from them, particularly Bob’s guitar parts.
These days, Bob Penhaligon looked after the family and noodled away on one of his three pianos or one of his twelve guitars, while Emily Penhaligon spent more time than she wanted to in her laboratory doing things with DNA and computers that benefited the whole human race but took her away from her own family.
Arthur had six brothers and sisters. The eldest three, two boys and a girl, were from Bob’s liaisons with three different women when he was on tour with The Ratz. The fourth was from Emily’s first marriage. The next two were both Bob and Emily’s.
Then there was Arthur. He was adopted. His birth parents had both been doctors who worked with Emily. They’d died in the last really big influenza epidemic, the one that had finally been controlled by a new anti-flu drug they’d helped to discover – as part of Emily’s team. Arthur had only been a week old when they died. He’d lived through the flu, but he was probably an asthmatic because of it. Besides his parents he had no immediate family, so Emily and Bob had been successful in their application to adopt.
It didn’t worry Arthur that he was adopted. But every now and then he would leaf through the photo album that was almost all he had to remember his birth parents. The other thing was a short video from their wedding, which he found almost unbearable to watch. The influenza plague had killed them only eighteen months later, and even to Arthur they looked ridiculously young. He liked that as he got older he looked more like both his birth parents, in different ways. So they lived on in him.
Arthur had known he was adopted since he was little. Bob and Emily treated all the children the same way, and the children considered themselves all brothers and sisters. They never introduced one another as “half-brother” or “half-sister” and never explained the fact that there were twenty years between the eldest, Erazmuz (born in Bob’s rock music heyday), and the youngest, Arthur. They also didn’t explain the difference in looks, skin colour, or anything else. They were simply all part of the family, even if only the youngest three were still at home.
The four eldest were Erazmuz, who was a major in the army and had children of his own; Staria, a serious theatre actress; Eminor, a musician, who’d changed his name to Patrick; and Suzanne, who was at college. The three at home were Michaeli, who was at a local college; Eric, who was in his last year of high school; and Arthur.
Arthur’s father, Michaeli and Eric had already been to see him the night before, and his mother had popped in early in the morning to check that he was OK. Once she was sure of that, she lectured him about it being better to look like a total loser in everyone’s eyes than to be dead.
Arthur always knew when his mother was approaching because doctors and nurses would appear from all over the place, and by the time she arrived, Emily would be trailing eight or nine white-coated people behind her. Arthur was used to her being a Medical Legend, just as he was used to his father being a Former Musical Legend.
Since all of his family in town had already visited once, Arthur was surprised when two more people came to see him early on Tuesday afternoon. Children his own age. He didn’t recognise them for a second, since they weren’t wearing black. Then he realised who they were. Ed and the girl who had helped him use the inhaler. This time they were in regular school uniform, white shirts, grey trousers, blue ties.
“Hi,” said the girl from the door. “Can we come in?”
“Uh, sure,” mumbled Arthur. What could these two want?
“We didn’t meet properly yesterday,” said the girl. “I’m Leaf.”
“Leith?” asked Arthur. She’d pronounced it strangely.
“No, Leaf, as in from a tree,” said Leaf reluctantly. “Our parents changed their names to reflect their commitment to the environment.”
“Dad calls himself Tree,” said the boy. “I’m supposed to be Branch but I don’t use it. Call me Ed.”
“Right,” said Arthur. “Leaf and Ed. My dad used to be called Plague Rat.”
“No!” exclaimed Leaf and Ed. “You mean from The Ratz?”
“Yeah.” Arthur was surprised. Normally only old people knew the names of the individual members of The Ratz.
“We’re into music,” said Leaf, seeing his surprise. She looked down at her school uniform. “That’s why we were wearing real clothes yesterday. There was a lunch time appearance by Zeus Suit at the mall and we didn’t want to look stupid.”
“But we missed it anyway,” said Ed. “Because of you.”
“Uh, what do you mean?” asked Arthur warily. “I’m really grateful to you guys—”
“It’s OK,” said Leaf. “What Ed means is we missed Zeus Suit because we had something more important to do after we… I mean I… saw those two weird guys and the wheelchair thing.”
“Wheelchair thing? Weird guys?” Arthur repeated. He’d managed to convince himself that he’d flipped out and imagined everything, though he hadn’t wanted to put it to the test by checking his school shirt pocket for the notebook. The shirt was hanging up in the closet.
“Yeah, really weird,” said Leaf. “I saw them appear in a flash of light and they disappeared the same way, just before we got back to you. It was mighty strange, but nobody else blinked an eye. I reckon it’s because I’ve got second sight from our great-great-grandmother.