Grim Tuesday by Garth Nix

Key still in his fist. A shining Key.
    “Take me to the Front Door!” he shouted, the words strangely dull and flat. There was no echo in this weird space, no resonance of any kind.
    Nothing happened for a few seconds. Then Arthur saw a very pale glow form around his knuckles. It was so dark it took him a little while to work out what it was. The light comforted him, and he tried to concentrate on it, willing it to grow stronger. At the same time, under his breath, he kept repeating his instruction.
    “Take me to the Front Door. Take me to the Front Door…”
    His wrist clicked as his hand moved away, tugged by an unseen force. He felt the direction of his fall change from straight down into a shallower dive.
    “Take me to the Front Door. Take me to the Front Door. Take me to…”
    Far off, a tiny light caught Arthur’s eye. It was too far away to be more than a luminous blob, but Arthur felt sure he was headed towards it, that it would grow and grow until it became a huge rectangular shape of blinding light.
    It had to be the Front Door of the House.

Chapter Five
    T o Arthur’s considerable relief, the light did grow and it did look exactly like the Front Door. Only this time he was approaching very slowly, so he had enough time to prepare himself for the shock of falling through to the other side—to the green lawn of Doorstop Hill, in the Atrium of the Lower House.
    Once he was there, he figured it would be relatively easy to get to Monday’s Dayroom. Arthur wondered if it was called Arthur’s Dayroom now, or the Will’s Dayroom, or something else completely different. In any case, he would find the Will and Suzy there, and together they would work out what to do about Grim Tuesday and his minions.
    Arthur was still thinking about that as he drifted gently towards the Door, when he was unexpectedly thrust forward by a tremendous force. Completely unprepared for what felt like a giant whack in the back, he tumbled end over end and crashed headfirst into the bright rectangle of light.
    For an instant Arthur felt like he was being turnedinside out, everything twisted in impossible and painful directions. Then he bounced on his feet on the other side and crashed down onto his hands and knees. Jarring pain in both told him he had not landed on soft grass. It was also completely dark, without even the soft glow of the distant ceiling of the Atrium, and certainly no elevator shafts illuminating the scene. Even worse, there was smoke everywhere—thick, cloying smoke that instantly made Arthur’s lungs tighten and constrict.
    Before he could begin to feel around or even cough, someone grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled him up and back. Arthur swallowed his cough and instinctively screamed, a scream that was cut off as some kind of fluid enveloped him. He started to choke, thinking that he was in water, but a solid clap on the back stopped that and he realized that whatever the fluid was, it wasn’t water and it wasn’t getting into his throat and nose. A moment later he was out of it and could feel air again. He had passed through some kind of membrane or fluid barrier.
    Wherever he was, everything looked extremely blurry and there was too much color, like he was standing with his nose pressed to a stained-glass window where the colors kept mixing up.
    “Relax and blink a lot,” instructed whoever wasgripping his shoulders—a calm, deep male voice that sounded vaguely familiar. It only took Arthur a second to remember whose it was.
    The Lieutenant Keeper of the Front Door.
    Arthur blinked madly and tried to relax. As he blinked, the colors settled down and the blurriness eased, at least when he was looking straight ahead. It was still very blurry to either side.
    “Are we inside some sort of multicolored glass ball?” Arthur asked after a moment. They certainly were inside something spherical and there was light shining into it, light that kept shifting around and was diffracted into many different