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on the bottom of the box was a very small piece of thick cardboard. Arthur picked it up. As he touched it, words appeared, scribed in the same sort of invisible hand that wrote in the Atlas.
    This telephone has been disconnected. Please call Upper House 23489-8729-13783 for reconnection.
    “How?” asked Arthur. He didn’t expect an answer,but the message wrote itself out again on the card. Arthur threw it back in the box and went down the stairs again.
    On the way back down, the question came up again in his head. Just one simple word that covered a lot of problems.
    How?
    How am I going to get into the House? It doesn’t exist in my world anymore.
    Arthur groaned and pulled at his hair, just as Michaeli came rushing back up the stairs.
    “You think you’ve got problems?!” she snapped as she went past. “It looks like Dad is going to have to go back on tour, like, forever and I’m going to have to get a job. All you have to do is go to school!”
    Arthur didn’t get a chance to reply before she was gone.
    “Yeah, that’s all I have to worry about!” he shouted after her. He slowly continued down the stairs, thinking hard. The House had physically manifested itself before, taking over several city blocks. That manifestation had disappeared when Arthur came back after defeating Mister Monday. But maybe the House had returned with the Grotesques?
    There was only one way to find out. After a quicklook to check that no one—particularly a Grotesque or two—was watching, Arthur went out the back door and got on his bike.
    Provided he wasn’t held up at a quarantine checkpoint, it would only take ten minutes to ride over to where the House had been. If it had reappeared, he would try to get in, through Monday’s Postern or maybe even the Front Door, if he could find it.
    If it wasn’t there, he would have to think of something else. Each minute gave the Grotesques more time to do something financially horrible to his family, or his neighbors, or…
    Arthur pushed off hard and accelerated out the drive, pedaling furiously for a minute, until his wheezing warned him to ease off.
    Behind him, the SOLD sign on his front lawn shivered and dug itself a little further in.

Chapter Three
    T he House was gone. At least, its manifestation in Arthur’s world had not returned. Instead of a vast edifice of mixed-up architecture, there were only the usual suburban houses, with their lawns and garages and basketball hoops over their garage doors.
    Arthur rode his bike around several blocks, hoping some trace of the House remained. If there was just one of its strange outbuildings or even a stretch of the white marble wall that surrounded the House, he felt he could somehow get inside. But there was nothing, no sign at all that the House had ever been there.
    He felt strange riding around, looking for something that wasn’t there, a feeling made stronger because the streets were deserted. Though the quarantine had been slightly relaxed inside the city, most people were sensibly staying at home with their doors and windows shut. Arthur was passed by only one car on the road, and that was an ambulance. Arthur looked the other way, in case it was the same ambulance he’d escaped from the day before. He was thankful it didn’t slow down or stop.
    As he finished his circumnavigation of the last block, Arthur began to feel panicky. Time was slipping away. It was already 11:15. He only had forty-five minutes to find some way to enter the House, but he had no idea how he was going to do that.
    The sight of several moss-covered garden steps reminded him of the Improbable Stair. That bizarre stairway went from everywhere and everywhen, through the House and the Secondary Realms. But the Stair was dangerous and there was a good chance of ending up somewhere he really didn’t want to be. It wasn’t worth trying the Stair unless he must. Even then, he probably wouldn’t be able to enter it without the Key.
    There had to be another way.