Mister Monday: Chapter Ten (Part II)

[pangolin20]

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

Corneille Blanche: A good day, everyone, and welcome back to Mister Monday! Last time, we met one of the protagonists of this book, the editor seemed to be gone for a while, and Arthur and Suzy hid in a broom closet. Let us see what happens now!

 

Arthur asks Suzy what they are doing there. Suzy answers that they are hiding, as the Commissionaires will search “every house in Lost Street” for the Nithlings, and they can wait it out there. As far as I know, this is the only time we will hear of a street name in the House…

Arthur protests that it is a “pathetic” hiding place and they will be certainly found. Suzy then says that Arthur has half of Monday’s Key, or so she has been told. Arthur confirms that and Suzy tells him to use it. He asks how. Suzy says she does not know, but it is a Key, “so why not lock the door?”

Arthur takes out the Key, which glows in the dark, “this time with a faintly green phosphorescence”. He says he used it to lock the library doors against the Fetchers and to release his straps in the ambulance, “but he [doesn’t] really know what else he [is] supposed to do with it.” Mmmm. This comes across as a little… not unrealistic, but… weird for the genre to me. I would expect Arthur to have found out how to use the Key by now. It is certainly not bad, it is just something that I find hard to believe.

He asks again how he can use it and Suzy shushes him, then, “in that weird deep voice”, tells him to touch the door handle and tell it to lock. Arthur does so. Just then, he hears “the crash of boots” in the corridor outside. That was just in time! Arthur stands there, his heart hammering loudly. The person tries to open the door once… twice… but it remains shut.

They say to a “Sergeant” that the door is locked. Arthur notes the voice is somewhat weird, as it sounds “tinny”. The footsteps retreat, and soon Arthur hears several people go up the stairs. He goes to say something to Suzy, but she holds up her hand, which we are told is “covered by a moth-eaten woolen glove” and shakes her head.

They wait for a few more minutes, hearing footsteps and “occasional shouts”. Then someone comes running down the stairs and tries the door again. They again say that the door is locked. Then the footsteps leave and the front door slams.

Suzy explains that they do “near everything twice”, or at least the ordinary Commissionaires, the “metal ones”, do, as they are “pretty stupid”. The Sergeants give other problems, because they are not “Made” (which means…?), and most of them have been given this position as a punishment. She says they should be able to sneak out now and she tells Arthur to open the door. He touches the door with the Key and tells it to open.

The door does so and slams against the wall with “sudden violence”. Alright then… Suzy steps out first, so when Arthur hears “her surprised cry” he can just hide the Key behind his back. It turns out there was a Sergeant waiting in the corridor!

We get a description of him. He is “eight feet” tall, though on further inspection his top hat turns out to be a foot of that. He has a “waxed mustache” and a “very sharp, long nose under piercing blue eyes”. The gold stripes on his sleeves gleam in the “gaslight”.

The man goes “well, well”, and we get a note that his voice is deep, but not tinny. He pulls out a notebook and pencil and prepares to write. He says he wondered why the closet would be locked and asks Arthur and Suzy for their “names, numbers, rank, and business”.

Suzy gives her name. She says she is “182367542 and a half in precedence”. (A half? That seems off to me. It is also nice to see a rough population figure for the House!) She say further that she is “Ink-Filler Sixth Class” and that she is on ink-filling business.

Halfway through answering, her voice changes into the deep tone she has assumed before. The Sergeant notices and asks her what has happened to her voice. Suzy says in the same voice that she has “a bit of a frog in her throat”. The Sergeant gets envious and asks where she got it from.

In her usual voice, she says it was a present, and it was “‘ardly damaged” when she got it, so it might even “last a year” if she is lucky. The Sergeant says “sadly” that he never had a frog in the throat. He did have a “small nose tickle” once, which he confiscated from a “Porter who had it from a Flotsam Raker”. It went “for a twelvemonth” before giving out, and he found it “[v]ery distinctive”. It was not “as flamboyant as a sneeze”, but still very nice. He catches himself and asks who Arthur is.

This does have some nice implied worldbuilding, but I think Drowned Wednesday does this a lot better.

Arthur begins to answer, but Suzy talks over him, saying he is “one of our lot” and introducing him as “Arthur Night Black”. She says he was “dropped on his head in a pool of Nothing” some hundreds of years ago and since, he has never been right. (If this had actually happened, I would expect him to be missing a part of his head, but whatever.) He always gets lost, and they were in the closer because Suzy was looking for him.

The Sergeant now demands Arthur’s papers. Suzy quickly says he lost them, because he was frightened by the Nithlings, wriggled out of his coat and went into hiding. Only the Nithlings “et ‘em right up”. The Sergeant corrects her by saying “Ate them up”. He says he has nothing against Ink-Fillers, but he has his orders and he needs to take Arthur to the “Inquiry Clerk”.

Suzy snorts at this and says he could be there “for years”. They will dock his pay and he will also have to get a new coat. She asks if they cannot sort it out “gentlemanly-like”, as the Sergeants has not written anything yet.

The Sergeant frowns, but he does put away his notebook and pencil. He asks what the bribe will be. Suzy offers her frog. The Sergeant hesitates. She says it is a “[f]ree gift” and it is not like he will get in trouble for it. She asks when the last “General Inspection” was.

The Sergeant says it was over ten thousand years. He still hesitates, however, since he made mistakes earlier and he was not always a Commissionaire. Suzy, “her voice even deeper and more authoritative”, urges him to take a look. She holds her hand in front of her mouth and spits in it. Arthur says “Gross!” because it is not spit that comes out, “but a small and very beautiful emerald-green frog”.

So the frog in her throat was literal, it seems. I also would consider the frog to be less gross than spit, but whatever. The frog sits in her hand and “emit[s] a deep, poignant call”. So… it croaks? I do not know what to imagine with this description.

Suzy tells him to give it a try. She pulls out a handkerchief and gives the frog “a quick polish”, which it does not seem to mind. The Sergeant is “quite mesmerized” by it. He looks around and then picks it up. He looks at it for a bit, “then gulp[s] it down as if he were eating a mint”. He closes his mouth and then freezes in place.

Suzy says that this is “him sorted” and her free. She says that she was “impressed on this duty” and she has “a very urgent ointment”, so it is time to go. As soon as she is finished speaking, she dashes away, but the Sergeant suddenly grabs her coattails. Yes, Suzy, it is a little late for leaving. She tries to get out of her coat, but before she can, the Sergeant grabs her by the neck.

She tells him to leave off and the Sergeant says that the Will “has need of [her]”. Only the voice is the deep voice that Arthur has heard earlier. The speaker says there “may be rewards”. Suzy stops struggling, as she likes the mention of rewards, but she does not like the “maybe”.

At this point, Arthur steps forward. He says he does not know what is going on or what the Will wants with him, but it is “very important” that he understands what is going on. If he does not, he thinks that many people might die. So he needs Suzy’s help. This might have been nice to see earlier, I think.

We are told he “[speaks] with passion”. He can feel the “fear and tension” inside him, and he thinks back to Earth and his town, where the quarantine zone must be expanding. He thinks that the hospitals must be “crowded, possibly overflowing, already unable to cope”. He envisions his mother and her team in the lab, “working feverishly”, possible already coping with the colds of the New Sleepy Plague…

Back in the present, Suzy asks if he means that he really is from outside the House, from the Secondary Realms. Arthur says he is from outside the House, but he does not know what she means by “Secondary Realms”. Suzy asks if he is a “real live mortal”. Arthur supposes so. Suzy says she is, or at least, she used to be.

She hesitates a bit, and then asks if he will help her get back, or rather, help “all of us” back. Arthur asks if it is everyone in the city. (sighs) Guess this was not drawn out long enough… Suzy “scornfully” says no, because the adults belong there, and they are called “Denizens of the House”. She means the children, those that “followed the Piper all those years ago”.

The Sergeant, or whoever is controlling him, says that it is “a trivial matter”. Arthur must “bring back the Will”, and all else will follow. But the Will is already here. What is this?

Suzy says she will not help unless Arthur helps and she asks if it is a deal. Arthur supposes so and he says he will help if he can. He shakes hands with Suzy.

The Sergeant speaks up, saying there is danger and Commissionaires approach. There is a “great likelihood” that Noon or “Dusk” know that Arthur has come through the Front Door and has begun a search. They must leave immediately. Suzy says he had better “leave this great lunk behind”, as they cannot take the Sergeant with them.

The Sergeant’s mouth opens and the frog climbs out, “leaving the man frozen like a statue”. I do not think we will ever find out what happens to him… The frog jumps to Suzy’s shoulder and starts to climb to her mouth, but she catches it and puts it in an “inside pocket [that] she button[s] shut”. She says she will not let it happen to her anymore. “Once caught, twice careful”. She tells Arthur to come on.

He asks where they are going. Then we get this:

He felt quite confused. So much had happened so quickly he wondered if he was ever going to get a chance to sit down and ask questions. Or mor importantly, get them answered.

Yes, Nix, it would indeed be fine to get some answers. Almost done with the chapter…

Suzy says it is the “Office of the Efficiencer General of the Lower Atrium”. Arthur does not get it, so Suzy explains that the “Efficiencer General” in in charge of making the Lower Atrium work efficiently. Only, when the last one was promoted, no one was ever appointed to the spot again, and there is no staff in the office either. So that is where she lives, “off shift, of course”.

As she says this, they go through a back door and into a lane. Arthur asks if it is far away, and Suzy points straight up and says it is “[t]hirty-nine hundred floors”. And the chapter ends.

Well, that is over at least. Let me see if I can formulate what I dislike about the story so far…

It is mostly the lack of context. We have had all kinds of things happening so far, but there still has not been an explanation of even basic things, like what the House is, what the Key is, who the Will is, and who Mister Monday is. I simply have a hard time caring about what is going on if I have no explanation.

Another thing is that I get the feeling Nix was still figuring out the series at this point, which leads to quite a lot of inconsistencies which makes it feel like it does not exactly belong with the rest of the series.

Further… Arthur was quite passive in these past few chapters, to the point that he mostly just stood by during this conversation, so I do not like that, either.

Also, it feels like Monday has been completely forgotten about. True, we just had a mention of Noon and Dusk possibly beginning a search, but it does not feel urgent to me. It just feels like the plot has stranded, when there is every reason for it not to.

Well, at least this will improve in the next chapter, as we will finally get some information! See you in chapter 13!