Free Mister Monday by Garth Nix Page B

reason could this Fetcher have to laugh?
    Then he saw what it was holding in its stubby-fingered, long-nailed hand. The Atlas! Arthur’s own hand flashed to his shirt pocket and came away holding a strip of cloth. The pocket had been torn off, back when they’d almost gotten hold of him at the library. His chest was scratched as well, though he hadn’t noticed it at the time. Now it hurt. But not as much as losing the Atlas.
    The Fetchers all started to laugh now, if you could call a rising-falling series of grunts a laugh. Arthur recoiled as their stinking, sickening breath gusted out with each grunt. They obviously thought they’d captured something very important and won a victory.
    Glumly, Arthur had to recognize they had. If he was ever to make any sense of what was going on, he needed the Atlas. So he had to get it back. What had the Atlas said about the Fetchers? They couldn’t cross thresholds and—
    Salt! Arthur turned to the kitchen shelves. There had to be salt here, and probably lots of it. It was a commercial kitchen. He ran along the shelves, the Key held fast in one hand while he turned bags around and shifted containers with the other. Sugar, four different sorts of flour, spices of all kinds, other grains, dried fruit…salt! There it was, a big tub of regular salt and a small sack of rock salt.
    Arthur hesitated, then slipped the Key through his belt like a dagger. As soon as he let go, he felt his asthma returning. The deep breaths of a moment ago were lost to him. But he still felt some ease from the Key. Perhaps having it close was better than nothing.
    He put the rock salt in his backpack, slipped it on again, then picked up the tub of salt and threw away the lid. The tub was two-thirds full of fine white salt. Arthur held the tub by its handle in his left hand and took a fistful of salt in his right.
    Then he marched back to the door, wheezing and panting a little, but prepared for battle. If he could surprise them, he thought, throw the salt across the front rank, he might be able to dash out and grab the Atlas when they…well, when whatever the salt did to them happened.
    At the back of his mind, a doubting question immediately popped up. What if the salt just annoyed them, and as soon as he jumped out they grabbed him and bit him and scratched him to pieces?
    Arthur didn’t answer that question. He forced himself to focus on one thing—getting the Atlas back. Once he had that, he could ask some more questions.
    These thoughts were racing through his mind as he came to the end of the shelves. Arthur gulped, took as deep a breath as he could, and jumped out in front of the door, screaming and throwing salt.
    “Yahhhhh!”

Chapter Seven
    S alt sprayed out of Arthur’s hand and across the front rank of Fetchers. Their laughter instantly stopped, dissolving into startled yelps and cries. As the salt hit, the Fetchers squealed and fell over one another in a panicked attempt to escape, becoming a tangled mess of shrieking arms and legs and ugly faces that made it even easier for Arthur to throw handful after handful of salt over them.
    The salt sizzled on the Fetchers as it struck. Both flesh and the black cloth melted, as if the salt were the most potent acid imaginable. Even a pinchful of salt hitting a Fetcher started a chain reaction that in a matter of seconds reduced the creature to a bubbling pile of nasty-looking scum.
    After Arthur threw his ninth or tenth handful of salt, there weren’t any more Fetchers. There were only fourteen hubcap-sized mounds of evil-smelling glop that looked like a cross between elephant dung and hot tar.
    Arthur stared at the piles, salt still dribbling from his hand. He could feel his lungs tightening even more, so he took the Key from his belt. As soon as he touched it he felt his chest loosen and his breath come back, free and unfettered. He could still feel an asthma attack lurking, but it was held at bay by the strange power of the Key.
    The asthma was a