Гарт Никс – Lady Friday (страница 1)
LADY FRIDAY
GARTH NIX
ILLUSTRATED BY TIM STEVENS
HarperCollins
First published in the USA by Scholastic Inc 2007
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins
Copyright © Garth Nix 2007
Illustrations by Tim Stevens 2007
Garth Nix asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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HarperCollins
Source ISBN: 9780007175093
Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2008 ISBN: 9780007279159
Version: 2016-11-17
Contents
Title Page Copyright Dedication Prologue Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty-One Chapter Twenty-Two Chapter Twenty-Three Chapter Twenty-Four Chapter Twenty-Five Chapter Twenty-Six Keep Reading About the Author Also By About the Publisher
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
“The
“I sailed on the
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
“I volunteered to banish the Skinless Boy,” Leaf muttered, in amazement at herself. “I must have been crazy.”
But she
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.
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.
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.