Drowned Wednesday Read Online Free PDF

whalebone.
    No land came in sight. Though he still couldn’t see any sun, it got warmer, and then positively hot. Even the seawater now constantly washing over Arthur didn’t cool him down. It was tepid and very salty, as he found when he tasted some on the end of his finger. He was getting very thirsty, and had started to remember all kinds of terrible stories about people dying of thirst at sea. Or going crazy from thirst first and hurling themselves into the water or attacking their friends and trying to drink their blood. . .
    Arthur shook his head several times. It looked like he was already starting to go crazy, thinking of stuff like that. Particularly since he knew he couldn’t die of thirst in the House. He might feel like he was, and of course he could still go crazy. . .
    Better to think of something positive to do. Like send a signal, or catch a fish. If there were any fish in this strange sea within the House. Of course, if there were fish, there might also be sharks. A shark would have no trouble pulling him off the bed. It hardly qualified as a raft anymore, it had sunk down so far.
    Arthur shook his head again to try and clear away the negative thoughts.
    Stop thinking about sharks! he told himself.
    Just at that moment, he saw something in the water not far away. A dark, mostly submerged shape. A shadow largely under the surface.
    Arthur yelped and tried to stand up against the headboard, hopping as his immobilised leg got caught under a fold of sheet. This violent action changed the balance of the bed, and one corner went down several feet, releasing a huge air bubble.
    This downward progress halted for a few seconds as air bubbles continued to pop to the surface, then the bed sank like the Titanic, one end briefly sticking straight up before it subsided beneath the waves. Arthur let go of it just in time and pushed himself away. He thrashed out a rough backstroke for a few yards to make sure he wouldn’t be sucked down, then trod water with one leg and his arms circling, as he frantically looked around for the dark shadow again.
    There it was, only a few yards away! Arthur braced himself for the shock of a shark’s attack, his body rigid. His head sank under the water as he stopped moving, then broke free again as he instinctively struggled to swim again.
    The dark shape didn’t attack. It didn’t even move. Arthur stared at it and saw that it wasn’t a shark. He swam closer to confirm that it was, in fact, a dark green ball about six feet in diameter. It had an irregular surface rather like matted weeds and was floating quite deep, so that only a curve fourteen inches or so high rode above the sea.
    Arthur splashed over to it. On closer inspection, it was clearly a buoy or some floating marker, totally covered in green weeds. Arthur reached out to touch it. A huge strand of green weeds came away in his hand, revealing a bright red surface beneath.
    Arthur touched that. It felt slightly sticky, and some of the red stuff came away on his hand. It was like chewing gum, impossible to get off. Arthur crossly wiped his hands but that only smeared it across his fingers, and his head dipped under. His broken leg wasn’t weighed down that much by the cast, but he couldn’t bend his knee and he couldn’t tread water well enough just with one leg to really try and clean his hands, since he had to make swimming motions as well.
    Arthur started to clear the weeds away with one hand. While doing that, he noticed that the buoy didn’t move far with the swell. Each time one of the bigger waves came past, it swept Arthur five or six yards away and he had to swim back. The buoy didn’t move anywhere near as much.
    It had to be fixed to something. Arthur duck-dived down and, sure enough, a barnacle-encrusted chain led down from the buoy, down through the sunlit water and into the dark depths.
    He resumed cleaning the weeds away with new enthusiasm and so got a lot more of the sticky stuff on his hands. It was