Mister Monday: Chapter Nine (Part II)

[teres]

Chapter Nine (Part I) | Table of Contents | Chapter Ten (Part I)

Vermaanti: A good day, everyone, and welcome back to Mister Monday! Last time, Arthur managed to get inside the House, and he talked with the Lieutenant Keeper of the Front Door. We left off on Arthur discovering that he doesn’t have any trouble from his asthma inside the House.

 

Arthur has just hidden the Key beneath the shirt the Keeper gave him. Now he looks down at the city at the base of the hill. He can see people walking all over the streets and “hear the hustle and bustle” (that must certainly be loud, then!), though he doesn’t notice any cars or “any of the noises of a modern city”. The only vehicles he can see, which aren’t many, seem to be “drawn by horses”, or at least, beings that look like horses. He can’t tell because of how far away he is, but he doesn’t think they seem entirely right.

Arthur says to himself that he thinks his first step would be to go into the town and find someone who “can tell [him] something about… about everything.” Yes, that would be nice indeed. He notes the place looks “safe enough”. The beams of light continue to shoot up and down, but he notes they only emerge from “the top of buildings”, so even if they’re “huge laser beams or death rays” he can avoid them. And the city looks very ordinary, “if extremely old-fashioned, without cars or traffic lights or power lines.” Pfff. That’s what I’m used to in my daily life, Arthur, so I don’t think it’s all that old-fashioned!

He thinks that he just needs to be very wary for Fetchers and Noon and Monday or “anyone who show[s] too much interest in him or look[s] dangerous.” It’s a pity he last his backpack and the salt in it, he says, though he thinks it might not work here anyway. He looks around the hill once more, “but it [is] only a delaying tactic.”

Hmmm… If I were ungenerous, I might say the same of this whole section. We’ve been waiting for a quite a while to get some information, after all, and this only makes it take longer.

Well, he goes on, saying that there is no choice, and he has to get to the city to get a cure for the Sleepy Plague. He thinks back to Leaf and Ed, saying they’re “the best prospects for friends he’[s] met in the new school”, at least if they survive the plague. He then thinks back to the virus that killed his birth parents. Well, see this and judge for yourself:

It had exploded through the population, spreading from a single known carrier to infect more than five thousand people in the first twenty-four hours. By the second day, almost fifty thousand people were sick. When Emily’s team found a vaccine only eighteen days after the initial report, and with extreme quarantine in place, almost a million people were dead.

I… don’t think a regular virus could cause this. Seriously, almost a million deaths in 18 days?! I think it’s quite more likely that it got imported from the House, too. (Not that we find out definitively, but it’s still the most likely.) And this does sound like an absolute nightmare to go through (so of course we get something like this again in a later book.)

Arthur then wishes that he hadn’t remembered that number. Then he says there’s no point in standing around, and he has to do something. He then thinks of Bob and mutters “Rock and roll”, and punches his fist in his air. Then he goes down the hill towards “the closest row of buildings and the cobbled lane that [runs] behind them at the foot of the hill”. Finally!

Scene break, and we pick up half an hour later, as Arthur is walking deep in the city and he is “extremely confused”. He can see people anywhere, “at least they look[] like people”. I think the word you’re looking for there is “humans”, Arthur. Why would they look like they are not a person, after all? Well, all of these people are dressed in the style of “more than a hundred and fifty years ago”. How… curious.

Then we get some description of the clothing. All the adults are wearing hats of some kind (fashionable!), though the women mostly go for “bonnets and caps”. The children, who are not very numerous, are wearing “flat caps or obvious hand-me-downs that [are] too big for them”. There is also quite some variation in the quality of the clothing. Some people are only wearing “the ragged remnants” of what seem like several very different wardrobes. Others are “immaculate”, with “spotless coats, stiff white shirt-points, flowing cravats, shining waistcoats and gleaming boots.” A class difference, I would presume. None of the children belong to the latter category, as they’re all dirty “and dressed in incredible hodgepodges of second-hand clothing”.

Well, that is a good sign that something here is not as it seems; it’s quite unlikely that he wouldn’t be seeing a single higher-class child on the streets.

Arthur goes on to say that, even weirder than the clothing of people, what they are doing is strange. He expected to find “usual city activities”, with “shops and restaurants and bars and business” and people buying and selling, or talking to each other and walking around.

But there is none of that. There is “tremendous hustle and bustle” as people are moving in and out of buildings and trading and carrying all kinds of things. There are also carts “drawn by horselike animals” (which Arthur just noted. Can we get on with this, please?). Up close, he can see they have “three distinct toes” in place of hooves, “no manes, glittering ruby eyes”, and their skin looks like metal. Hmmm, I see that three toes occur in rhinoceroses… These certainly are weird creatures. We will eventually find out what they are, exactly, though that won’t happen until Sir Thursday.

Well, even the “horses” aren’t the weirdest thing. That is that everything that is happening has to do with “paper, something like paper, or related to writing in some way.” That is indeed odd. So we get a list of what people are doing.

-Men are carrying piles of paper with their chin on the top so nothing blows away.

-Men have coat pockets stuffed “with rolls of parchment”, with seals hanging off.

-People are pushing carts loaded with “stone tablets” with writing on them.

-Women are exchanging “leather document cases”.

-Girls are running with “string bags full of envelopes and loose papers”.

-Boys are struggling with barrels labelled “second-best azure-blue ink”.

But what are these people doing this for? From what I can see, they’re just being busy for the sake of being busy.

Arthur now goes through a market full of stalls, where every stall is the same. They’re all selling quills and cutting feathers into quills, “with partially plucked geese running around everyone’s feet”. First, ouch for the geese. Second… what are these geese doing here? How long have they been here? Who even brought them here? I want to know more about them! This just seems like such a fascinating thing to look into…

Well, a “line of men in leather aprons” come by, carrying bundles of papyrus reeds (which I guess came from Earth? Would be nice to get more into how this stuff came here), which Arthur says he recognises because of a project on ancient Egypt he did “last semester”. Four women come by, struggling with “a huge sheet of beaten gold that ha[s] strange symbols hammered into it”. That seems a little inconvenient to me, as I’d think the symbols would be as likely to go through the leaf as stay in it.

What with all the “hustle and bustle” and transportation, there’s also very much “disorganisation”. Arthur gets the idea that many people don’t know what they’re doing and are simply doing things because they’re afraid not to. Everyone is always busy with things, and he doesn’t see anyone just “standing around, or sitting, or chatting without an armful of papers”.

He also notes this disorganisation in “many of the discussions” he overhears, which are “often arguments”. So we get some examples.

One woman refuses to sign for “forty-six assorted descriptions on calfskin”, while someone else disputes that she’s responsible for “the Aaah! to Aaar volume of the Loose-leaf Registry of Lesser Creations.” (That seems like a fascinating thing to look into!)

At the front of a building, a crowd of people are arguing with “a very tall man in a blue uniform” (police?) who stands in the doorway and reads from a scroll that they can’t come in as some sort of licence hasn’t been renewed.

Another crowd is busy picking up pieces of “a huge stone tablet” that has apparently fallen from a high window, “which [is] itself crumbling away.” Two men walk around “a pile of dropped papers”, loudly disclaiming any responsibility as the papers blow away. Arthur notes “some of the more ragged children” pick them up, but when he tries to track them, he loses them in the crowd.

We’re then informed that every building seems to be “an office of some kind”. At least, all those that Arthur takes a close look at are. He does that in the hope of finding something like “a café, a restaurant or a supermarket”. And that’s not because he’s hungry, but because he wants to see something normal.

All the buildings have “bronze plates or small signs” by the doors, but almost all of them are “so covered in verdigris” that he can’t read them. The few that he can read don’t make much sense to him. Then we get a few of the signs:

“sub-branch second directorate of third department of interior ratiocination and cross-checking”: Pfoo, that’s a lot of subdivisions. And this is apparently for “interior” thinking and cross-checking? Of what?

“lower atrium office and what goes up need not come down initiative office”: Okay, this is probably the main office of this place, so it makes sense that it would be nicer. The other office… Well, it’s good to think outside of established rules, though I wonder what this is supposed to do.

“lower atrium annex and inquisitor general’s eleventh deputy associate assistant in charge of wings”: So… the extension to the Lower Atrium? Also, I can’t help but find the “deputy associate assistant” bit funny.

“lower atrium inspection office”: No problems here, though I do wonder what this “inspection” is supposed to be.

Well, then we go on to talk about how everyone is ignoring Arthur. He does look quite a lot like the children, but they keep their distance from him “and he [knows] it is on purpose”. Well, of course. They have never seen him before, after all.

Now he goes to talk to a woman who looks “less busy than most”, but as soon as he goes up to her and draws her attention, she jumps into the air, pulls “a sheaf of papers from her sleeve”, and holds them before her face, reading aloud so fast that Arthur can’t understand a word.

Arthur then goes up to someone else (why are you expecting anything else?), “a very old man” who is walking up the street and holding a “basket full of tiny gold tablets”. Arthur walks next to him and draws his attention. The old man immediately says it is not his fault, and the “Lower Supernumary Third Archive deposit hatch” is closed and no “Archivist” has been on duty for at least a thousand years. Arthur is to tell that to his superior.

He says that he “just wanted to ask”, and then the old man sprints away and bursts through the crowd. That, of course, causes all kinds of “minor accidents and complaints”, and soon, the entire street is filled with dropped papers, people butting heads while trying to pick them up, and others falling over “at least a thousand lead pencils” that have rolled out of “an overturned tub”.

Arthur stares at this and thinks he should think about his “next approach”. No, you think? He climbs up the stairs of the nearest office and leans back on yet another plate. As he has done “every few minutes”, he feels through his shirt for the Key.

And here I’d like to take a moment to complain about what is happening now. The first part of this chapter was quite nice, but now… well, what does any of this have to do with the plot so far? Arthur’s supposed to find a cure, right? So why was he stalling back on Doorstop Hill, and why do we spend so much time on descriptions of the city? There’s supposed to be urgency, right?

Also… I get the feeling that the plot about Monday and Noon kind of… dropped out somewhere in chapter 7? Because it doesn’t feel like Arthur exactly cared about them in the past few chapters.

Finally, I wish this bit of the chapter was more cohesive, instead of being all kinds of loose stuff about what Arthur’s seeing. This is supposed to be an interesting story, and not a travel guide, right?

It’s just… the later books will be quite a bit better about this (not all of them, but still), and it will be very nice to get to the point where more things will be happening.

Well, just as Arthur’s touched the Key, he can hear more noise coming from the street, and in a different tone, too. Now there are “cries of alarm and genuine fear”. Oh my, genuine fear! The crowd now runs away and flees in “opposite directions”, and many of them shout “help” and “Nithlings”. Oh, Nithlings! That can’t be very good!

Arthur now stands up straight to see what’s happening (I might think getting out of there would be a better reaction, but what do I know?). In a couple of seconds, the entire street has cleared out. A few “sheet of paper” drift across the cobbles and fall into the cracks, and “a large ox-hide parchment with red ochre pictograms” flaps where it’s been abandoned. I have to say that this… well, it feels a bit “cartoonish”, and it isn’t doing it for me.

Well, Arthur can’t see any reason for the panic, but he can smell one: the “rotten-meat smell of the Fetchers’ breath”. He sees that the cracks in the street are spreading and widening, and “a thin mist of dark vapour” sprays up, which he compares to oil being struck under the cobbles. Then, a whistle sounds in the distance, “sharp and shrill”. More whistles sound in response from every direction. The cracks open even wider and more vapour comes out.

And what does Arthur do? Does he run down and try to escape? Does he try to open the door of the office with the Key? No, he just keeps standing and watching! Yes, I know why Nix did this, but it’s very silly to see this, and it undercuts a bit of the tension. That said, the image does come across as it should to me.

The plumes keep growing until they’re “six or seven feet high”, and then they begin solidifying into “semi-human shapes”. They have the form of “[m]isshapen men and women”, with “faces on backwards”, “double-jointed arms and patches of scales upon their skin”. They also have imperfect clothing on: coats with sleeves missing, hats without tops, and trousers with overlong legs.

The plume that Arthur’s spotted first is also the first to be fully formed. It has become “a sticklike sort of man-thing with rubbery arms that [hang] down past its knees”. It has a single “red-rimmed” eye in the middle of its forehead, and it’s wearing a blue straitjacket-like garment that’s tied at the back, a “crushed top hat with a gaping hole in the crown”, and “spurred boots of different sizes”.

Arthur just looks at it in horror and the being stares back, “one transparent eyelid” moving across its eye. Then it opens its mouth to “reveal yellowed canine fangs” and a forked tongue. Well, that might be a problem. Arthur then realises that he should have run when everyone else did (you don’t say!). He begins to go down the steps, but the creature already is at the bottom, and “its six brethren” are assuming solid form further back. Well, that’s a dead end. And there the chapter ends.

Quite strange way to cut it off. I’d have left the last sentence for next chapter.

Anyway, that was that! Far from the best introduction to the house, though the next chapters ought to make up for that.

As for when I’ll see you again… Let me just say that the planning will be Kerlois-me-Corneille Blanche from here on out, so you’ll see me in chapter 12, and CB will do the next one.

Until then!