Grim Tuesday by Garth Nix Read Free Book Online

whisper. “Promise you’ll tell me what this is all about.”
    “I will,” replied Arthur. If I get the chance.

Chapter Four
    A rthur pedaled furiously, coasted till he got his breath back, then pedaled furiously again. He wasn’t sure that he actually would get his breath back, as that familiar catch came and his lungs wouldn’t take in any air. But each time he felt his chest stop and bind, there was a breakthrough a moment later and in came the breath. His lungs, particularly the right one, felt like they were made of Velcro, resisting his efforts to expand them until they suddenly came unstuck.
    He tried not to look at his watch as he cycled. But Arthur couldn’t help catching glimpses of its shining face as the minute hand moved so quickly towards the twelve. By the time he got to the high chain-link fence around the old Yeats Paper Mill, it was 11:50. Arthur only had ten minutes, and he didn’t know how to get through the fence, let alone get under the old mill —whatever that meant.
    There were no obvious holes in the fence and the gate was chained and padlocked, so Arthur didn’t waste any more time looking. He leaned Ed’s bicycle againstthe fence, stood on the seat, and pulled himself up on one of the posts. Despite being scratched by the top strands of old, rusty barbed wire, he managed to swing himself over and drop to the other side. At the bottom he checked his shirt pocket, to make sure it hadn’t been torn off with the Atlas inside. He’d lost it that way before and he was not going to lose it again.
    “Underneath…underneath,” Arthur muttered to himself as he ran across the cracked concrete of the old parking lot towards the massive brick building and its six enormous chimneys. No paper had been made at the Yeats Paper Mill for at least a decade, and the whole place had been set aside for some sort of development that had never happened. Probably a shopping mall, Arthur thought sourly.
    There had to be underground storage or something here, but how could he find a way down?
    Wheezing, Arthur ran to the first door he could see. It was chained and padlocked. He kicked it, but the wood held firm. Arthur ran along the wall to the next door. This one looked like it had been opened recently, and the chain was loose. Arthur pushed it open just wide enough to squeeze himself through.
    He hadn’t known what to expect inside, but he hadn’t thought it would be a huge open space. All theold machinery and huge piles of debris from former internal walls had been pushed to the sides, leaving an area about the size of a football field. Light streamed down in shafts from the huge skylights and many holes in the tin roof.
    In the cleared area, a strange machine squatted. Arthur knew instantly it came from the House and was not a relic of past papermaking. It was the size of a bus and looked like a cross between a steam engine and a mechanical spider, with eight forty-foot-long, jointed limbs that sprouted from a bulbous cylindrical body—a boiler—with a thin smokestack at one end.
    The limbs were made of a red metal that shone dully even where the sun did not fall, but the boiler was a deep black that sucked up the sunlight and did not reflect it.
    There were several huge bottles of the same black metal near the spider-machine. Each one was taller than Arthur and easily three or four feet in diameter.
    Arthur sneaked across to a pile of debris and took another look. He couldn’t see anyone, so he slinked along to the next pile and then the next. When he was level with the machine, he was surprised to see a very normal-looking office desk next to it. There was a giant plasma screen on the desk, and a PC beneath it. Arthur could see a green activity light flashing on the PC, despitethe fact its electric lead was coiled up on the concrete floor, not plugged into anything. He could also see something on the screen. Graphs and rows of figures.
    Arthur was just about to creep forward for a better look when a