Mister Monday Read Online Free PDF

do after we…I mean I…saw those two weird guys and the wheelchair thing.”
    “Wheelchair thing? Weird guys?” Arthur repeated. He’d managed to convince himself that he’d flipped out and imagined everything, though he hadn’t wanted to put it to the test by checking his school shirt pocket for the notebook. The shirt was hanging up in the closet.
    “Yeah, really weird,” said Leaf. “I saw them appear in a flash of light and they disappeared the same way, just before we got back to you. It was mighty strange, but nobody else blinked an eye. I reckon it’s because I’ve got second sight from our great-great-grandmother. She was an Irish witch.”
    “She was Irish, anyway,” said Ed. “I didn’t see what Leaf said she saw. But we went back to have a look around later. We’d only been there five minutes when these guys came out of the park and started saying, ‘Go away. Go away.’ They were plenty weird.”
    “Kind of dog-faced, with jowly cheeks and mean-looking little eyes, like bloodhounds,” interrupted Leaf. “And they had really foul breath and all they could say was ‘Go away.’”
    “Yeah, and they kept sniffing. I saw one of them get down on the ground and sniff it as we were walking away. There were lots of them—at least a dozen—wearing kind of…Charlie Chaplin suits and bowler hats. Weird and scary, so we took off and I reported them to the office for trespassing on the school grounds, and the Octopus came out to check. Only he couldn’t see them, though we still could, and I got a week’s detention for ‘wasting valuable time.’”
    “I only got three days detention,” said Leaf.
    “The Octopus?” asked Arthur weakly.
    “Assistant Principal Doyle. ‘The Octopus’ because he likes to confiscate stuff.”
    “So what’s going on, Arthur?” asked Leaf. “Who were those two guys?”
    “I don’t know,” said Arthur, shaking his head in mystification. “I…I thought it was all a hallucination.”
    “Maybe it was,” offered Ed. “Only both of you had it.”
    Leaf punched him hard on the arm. Ed winced. Definitely brother and sister , thought Arthur.
    “Of course, that doesn’t explain why the Octopus couldn’t see the guys with the bowler hats,” Ed added quickly, rubbing his arm. “Unless all three of us were affected by something like a gas or weird pollen.”
    “If it wasn’t a hallucination, then there will be a small notebook in my shirt,” Arthur said. “Hanging up in the closet.”
    Leaf quickly opened the closet, then hesitated.
    “Go on,” said Arthur. “I only wore the shirt for a couple of hours and I hardly ran in it.”
    “I wasn’t worried about the smell,” said Leaf. She reached in and felt the pocket. “It’s just that if there is a notebook, then I did see something, and those dog-faced guys were scary, even in daylight with Ed there—”
    She stopped talking and withdrew her hand. The notebook was in it, held tightly. Arthur noticed she had black nail polish on, with red streaks. Just like his father used to wear years ago in The Ratz.
    “It feels strange,” Leaf whispered as she handed the book to Arthur. “Kind of electric. Tingly.”
    “What does it say on the cover?” asked Ed.
    “I don’t know,” replied Leaf. There were symbols on the cover, but they didn’t make sense. She didn’t seem able to focus on them somehow. At the same time, she felt a strong urge to give the notebook to Arthur. “Here, it’s yours.”
    “Actually, it fell out of the sky,” said Arthur as he took it. “Or kind of out of a whirlwind made out of lines of letters…type…swirling in the air.”
    He looked at the notebook. It had hard covers, bound in green cloth that reminded him of old library books. There was some type embossed on the cover. Golden letters that slowly swam into focus and rearranged themselves. Arthur blinked a couple of times as the letters climbed over one another and shoved others out of the way to make room so the