Lady Friday

PROLOGUE

Leaf woke with a start and sat up in bed. For a moment she was disoriented because she wasn’t in her own bed. No band poster stared back at her from the wall at the foot of the bed because there was no wall. The bedside table was missing too, and on the other side there were no winking red eyes from her four-foot-high troll clock, the one she’d made with her brother Ed several years before for a school science project.

She wasn’t in her normal sleeping clothes either: a band T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms. Instead, she was wearing an ankle-length pale blue nightshirt of soft flannel, something she would never have chosen to put on herself.

The room she was in was much bigger than her bedroom and there were eight other beds. The closer ones definitely had people asleep in them because Leaf could see bodies under the covers and the tops of their heads. The other beds were probably occupied as well.

It looked like a hospital…

Leaf suddenly became a lot more awake. She tried to jump out of the bed, but her legs wouldn’t hold her up and it turned into more of a slither on to the floor. Clawing at the bedclothes, she got herself upright and leaned against the mattress while she tried to work out what was going on.

Slowly it all started to come back. Very slowly, as if her recent memory was broken and her brain was having trouble putting all the pieces back together.

Leaf remembered visiting her friend Arthur in the East Area Hospital. He’d told her about the House that was the epicentre of the Universe and how he had been chosen to become the Rightful Heir to the Architect – not because he was born to be or anything like that, but because he’d been the right person at the right time. (Or the wrong person at the wrong time, depending on how you looked at it.) The Architect was apparently the creator of everything. She’d made not only the House but also the whole Universe beyond it, including the Earth.

Arthur had told Leaf about all this, and about Mister Monday and Grim Tuesday, two of the Trustees who had betrayed the missing Architect and refused to execute her Will. But before he’d finished, a huge wave had come from nowhere, washing them both into an ocean that wasn’t even on Earth. Arthur had been carried away even further out on the strange sea, but Leaf had been picked up by a ship, the Flying Mantis…

“The Mantis,” whispered Leaf. Even a whisper sounded loud in the quiet room. There was no noise at all from the sleeping people in the other beds. Not even a snore. Suddenly Leaf wondered if they were actually dead rather than sleeping, and she stared at the closest bed to check. She could only see the top of the person’s head, just a tuft of hair – not enough to figure out whether it was a man or a woman. But after a few seconds Leaf was relieved to see the blanket rise and fall slightly. Man or woman, the person was breathing very slowly.

“I sailed on the Mantis,” Leaf whispered to herself. It was all coming back. She had sailed the Border Sea in the House for six weeks. She’d become one of the crew… then the pirates had attacked. Her friend Albert had been killed…

Leaf shut her eyes. She didn’t want to have that memory come into her head. But at least she had helped Arthur defeat the pirates, and had kicked their leader Feverfew’s head into a pool of Nothing-infused mud. Then they’d gone back to Port Wednesday and caught an elevator to—

“The Front Door,” said Leaf. “Doorstop Hill. The Lieutenant Keeper…”

She and Arthur had tried to get back home through the Front Door in the Lower House, but there’d been a problem. The Lieutenant Keeper wouldn’t let Arthur through the Door and then there was the meeting with Dame Primus where they’d found out that the Skinless Boy had taken over Arthur’s identity back on Earth, preventing him from going home. But there hadn’t been anything to stop Leaf from going home. She’d wanted to go home, after what had happened, but it wasn’t as easy as that.

“I volunteered to banish the Skinless Boy,” Leaf muttered, in amazement at herself. “I must have been crazy.”

But she had succeeded in finding the source of the Skinless Boy’s power, and she had managed to deliver it to Suzy Turquoise Blue, against all odds. But along the way she had been infected with the mind-control mould that would let the Skinless Boy control her every thought and action.

Memories joined up and stitched themselves together. Leaf frowned in concentration as she tried to work out what must have happened. Suzy had obviously delivered the sorcerous pocket the Skinless Boy had been made with to Arthur, and he must have used the pocket to destroy the dangerous Nithling. If either one had failed, Leaf wouldn’t be conscious now. She’d be a brain-dead slave of the Skinless Boy.

But Leaf didn’t feel particularly victorious because she’d finally remembered that this wasn’t the first time she’d regained consciousness after being affected by the mind-control fungus.

“There was a tent hospital… a temporary one,” Leaf said. Talking to herself helped bring back the details. “I was vomiting up the sludge left from the mould…”

Leaf groaned and pushed her knuckles into her temples as she remembered something else. The nurse had told her she’d been in a coma for a week. From Thursday afternoon to Friday morning.

But how long ago was that? she wondered. I must have gone back into a coma, or…

Leaf stopped knuckling her temples and let her forehead smack into the mattress. She leaned back and did it again. It was a bad habit, but she couldn’t help herself. She always beat her head – with something soft – when things went wrong.

The last thing she remembered was the nurse pointing out an approaching female doctor. And then she’d said the terrible words:

“Doctor Friday, imagine that! We call her Lady Friday on the wards…”

Leaf vaguely recalled feeling an awful sensation of fear swarm up inside her as an incredibly beautiful woman had approached with a whole host of people behind her… but everything after that was blank.

Doctor Friday – who clearly had come from the House and really was the Trustee called Lady Friday – must have done something to her.

Maybe I’ve lost even more time, Leaf thought. Anything could have happened. To Arthur. To my parents. To Ed. Anything.

A noise from the end of the room startled Leaf. She froze for a moment, dropped down behind the bed, then crawled to the end to take a proper look around. Someone was pushing open the double-swing doors at one end of the room. First something slid through the gap. It took Leaf a moment to recognise it as a bucket being pushed along with a mop. The person who was doing the pushing eased through the doors and kicked them shut behind her with a practised heel.

She looked very normal and human: a middle-aged woman with downcast eyes and sensibly tied-back hair, wearing a green smock, green overalls and white rubber boots. Leaf was relieved by that. If the woman were six foot four and strikingly good-looking, then she would probably be a Denizen and that would mean Leaf was back in the House.

After coming through the door, the cleaner stopped for a moment to dip the mop in the bucket and then started mopping a path about six feet wide down the middle of the room. She didn’t look particularly observant, but there was no way she could avoid seeing the empty bed.

Leaf looked around for something she might be able to use as a weapon and tried to gauge whether her legs would support her if she attempted to stand up again. She felt incredibly weak, a result of being in bed for so long, but fear lent her strength. There was something about all the sleeping bodies in the beds in the rest of the ward that really freaked her out. The room just didn’t feel like a normal hospital and Leaf knew it had something to do with Lady Friday.

Her quick scan confirmed that it wasn’t a normal hospital. There was none of the usual equipment on the walls or near the beds – the oxygen outlets, the call buttons and all that kind of stuff. In fact, all there was in the whole room were the simple beds and the people sleeping their strange sleep.

She looked back at the cleaner, who unfortunately chose that exact moment to look up. They both stared for a moment, gazes locked, then the cleaner gave a suppressed shriek and dropped her mop.

Leaf staggered upright and tried to make a dash to grab the mop. Even though she could barely stay upright and didn’t feel like much of a threat, the cleaner shrieked again and backed away. Leaf almost fell over the bucket but did manage to get the mop, stand up and brandish it like a staff.

“Don’t… don’t do anything!” said the woman in a forced whisper. She was clearly afraid – but not of Leaf. She was looking back at the door. “You have to get back into bed. She’s on her way!”

Leaf lowered the mop. “Who’s on her way? What is this place?”

“Her!” said the cleaner. “Quick! Get back in bed. You have to pretend to be like the others. Just copy what they do.”

“Why?”

The cleaner shuddered.

“You have to. If you don’t, she’ll do something to your head. I only saw it once. Someone like you, awake when he shouldn’t have been! She used that mirror of hers and I saw… I saw…”

“What!?”

“I saw the life drained out of him,” whispered the woman. She was pale as cotton wool now, and shaking. “She shone that little mirror and I saw something… come out of his head. Then she tilted the mirror to her mouth and she—”

The woman stopped talking and swallowed convulsively, unable to continue.

“There must be a way out,” said Leaf fiercely. She pointed at the other door, the one opposite where the cleaner had come in. “Where does that go?”

“To the pool,” whispered the woman. “Her pool. You have to get back into bed. Please, please, I don’t want to see it happen again!”

Leaf hesitated, then thrust the mop back at the cleaner, who gripped it like she might grab a lifeline. Then Leaf started to walk down towards the far door.

“No!” shrieked the cleaner. “She’ll see the empty bed! It’s Friday, nothing is the same here on Friday!”

Leaf tried to keep walking, but her legs gave way. She fell down on her hands and knees. Before she could get back up, the cleaner was lifting her up under the armpits and carrying her back to bed. Leaf struggled, but she was just too weak.

“Copy the sleepers,” gasped the cleaner. “It’s your only chance. Follow them.”

“Where?” snapped Leaf. She was furious that her body wouldn’t obey her properly.

“They go into the pool,” said the cleaner. “Only it’s not the pool… I’m not supposed to have seen. I’m only supposed to clean the floor ahead of her. But I watched once, through the louvres in the changing room…”

“Do they come back?”

“I don’t know,” whispered the woman. “Not here. It was only twenty a month, that’s all, from when I first started here. That was thirty years ago. But the whole place was filled up this week. She must be taking thousands of people this time.”

“What people? Who? From the hospitals?”

“Hush!” exclaimed the woman. She dragged the covers up over Leaf and rushed back to her mop, pushing the bucket almost to the next door. As she frantically dabbed at the floor, the cleaner called back over her shoulder, “She’s coming!”

Leaf reluctantly lay flat but she turned her head so she could see the door through her half-closed eyes. After a minute, she heard heavy footsteps and the door was flung open. Two very tall, very handsome men in charcoal-grey business suits and trench coats stormed through. Leaf recognised their type immediately. Superior Denizens, their coats humped at the shoulders, evidence of the wings beneath.

Behind the two Denizens came the beautiful woman Leaf had seen in the tent hospital. Lady Friday was very tall, made taller by her stiletto-heeled boots that were set with rubies. She wore a gold robe that shimmered as she walked, sending bright reflections dancing everywhere, and a hat studded with small pieces of coloured glass, or maybe even small diamonds, which caught the golden light and intensified it, so brightly that it was very difficult to look too long upon Friday’s face.

The Trustee held something small in her right hand that was brighter still, so bright it was impossible to look at. Leaf had to completely shut her eyes, but even so, the light burst through her lids and sent a stab of pain across the bridge of her nose.

With her eyes screwed shut, Leaf couldn’t see what happened next. But she heard it. The soft footfall of many bare feet, strange after the click-clack of the Denizens’ shoes and Friday’s boot heels, but just as loud.

Leaf waited till she was sure Friday had passed, then she looked again.

The whole room was full of sleepwalkers following Friday. A great line of people in blue nightgowns shambled along with their eyes shut, many in the classic pose with their arms outstretched ahead, others looking so relaxed they could barely stay upright and keep moving.

They were all fairly old. Most of the men were bald or had silver or grey hair, and looked to Leaf like they must be on the wrong side of seventy. It was harder to tell with the women, but they were probably on the far side of that age as well. None of them were exactly ancient and they were all walking, but none of them could be described as even middle-aged.

Leaf watched them pass while she tried to work out what to do. Hundreds of people went by and Leaf started to think she could just let them all go, hide under the bed and then sneak out. But then she saw two more Denizens, chivying the sleepers like sheepdogs. Several minutes and a few hundred people later, another two Denizens came by. Given that, there were bound to be even more Denizens guarding the end of the line.

Then Leaf saw something that made up her mind in an instant.

Her Aunt Mango was in the line. Sound asleep and walking with a slight, sleepy smile.

Leaf jerked up, then caught herself doing it and somehow managed to lie back down just before the next two Denizens came into the room.

Aunt Mango was almost like a second mother to her and Ed. She’d lived with Leaf’s family for years, as long as Leaf could remember. She was Leaf’s mother’s older sister, but acted more like her younger, somewhat helpless sibling. Leaf wasn’t sure about her history, but Aunt Mango had either been born with a slight intellectual disability or something had happened to her. She was kind and loving, but completely hopeless with the everyday chores of life and her enthusiastic incompetence needed constant supervision. Sometimes she really irritated Leaf, but Aunt Mango had always been there for her, to tell her stories, to listen to her troubles, to comfort her.

Leaf watched her aunt till she went through the far door.

I have to go with them now, she thought. Aunt Mango isn’t any good with big stuff; she wouldn’t have a hope alone. But I’ve got nothing. No weapon. No way of getting in touch with anyone useful. No House sorcery.

Her hand twitched. She stopped the movement, then stealthily slid her fingers up to her neck, feeling for something that she really, really hoped was still there, because if it was, then she actually did have something sorcerous and potentially useful.

Leaf’s fingers found the braided dental floss necklace and followed it, finally closing on the tiny carved whalebone disc that Arthur had given her. The Mariner’s medallion.

It hadn’t helped Arthur much in the Border Sea because the Mariner had taken so long to come to help. But he had come, in the end. The medallion represented a very slim hope for some outside intervention.

Leaf lay in the bed and watched the sleepers pass. Under the blanket, she tensed and released the muscles in her legs and arms, trying to exercise them back up to speed, to remove the weakness brought on by a week’s bed rest.

Finally, after what seemed like a very long time in which several thousand sleepers had passed, she saw the end of the line. Four Denizens followed the last of the humans. They were not quite as splendid as the two who’d preceded Lady Friday, but they were certainly superior Denizens who were intent on doing their job. They stopped by the door and waited, watching the sleeping patients in the beds around Leaf.

Nothing happened for a moment, then the room was suddenly suffused with a soft, golden light, as if a warm summer’s afternoon sun had been let in. It disappeared almost as quickly as it came, ebbing back through the far door.

With the retreating light came a summons, direct into Leaf’s mind.

“Follow!”

The voice was soft, but it resonated inside Leaf’s head, as if she had spoken the word herself while blocking her ears.

The girl felt that single word pull at her, but she was able to resist it. The sleepers felt it more intensely. All around the room, the old folks suddenly sat up, climbed out of bed and joined the last of the sleepwalkers who were passing through the door.

Leaf got up too and went after them, doing her best impersonation of a sleepwalker, with the final six sleepers and the Denizen rearguard right on her heels. Behind her slack-jawed face, her mind was working furiously, concentrating on repressing the terrible sick feeling of fear and panic that was welling up through her whole body.

Not fear for herself, but for her helpless Aunt Mango.

The doors at the far end were open, but Leaf didn’t dare to look up and ahead until she was shuffling through the doorway and could pretend to stumble a little in her sleep. The stumble almost turned into a real fall, but her legs were getting stronger with every step and she managed to stay upright and take a look.

What she saw almost made her stop and give herself away. The large space ahead housed an Olympic-size swimming pool. The pool, however, didn’t have any water in it. Instead, a ramp had been built down to the bottom and right now the last of the sleepwalkers were shambling down it. Down into a mirrored surface, which at first reflected their approach and then just… swallowed them whole.

Leaf hesitated again at the top of the ramp. There were those four Denizens behind her, but there were also several other doors out of the pool room. If she ran now, she might be able to get through one of the exits. It might be her only chance of escape.

But her aunt had already gone beyond the mirrored bottom of the dry pool.

Leaf took a step forward and then another, looking through slitted eyes. She saw the fear in her face, staring back up as her feet disappeared from view. She could still feel her limbs, the sensation being transmitted up through her legs indicating that she was walking down a gentle slope. Leaf suddenly felt physically ill, just like when she’d been vomiting out the mould. Desperate not to throw up, she shut her eyes and plunged forwards, her arms outstretched in front, as she committed herself to whatever lay beyond the reflection of Lady Friday’s sleepers.

If there was anything beyond…