Then there was a sudden noise on the roof of the ambulance and it slowed dramatically.
‘What in the world!’ exclaimed the driver. Except that through his mask it came out as, ‘Werrin der wold!’
The other paramedic climbed past Arthur to stare out through the front to the windshield. Arthur took the opportunity to draw the Key from his pocket. As he gripped it firmly, all traces of his asthma vanished.
The ambulance came to a complete stop, the drumming sound of rain now a constant roar on the roof, as if they were parked next to the ocean and the waves were crashing very close.
‘Local cloudburst!’ shouted Arthur’s paramedic to the driver. He kept leaning through to the front, only his waist and legs still in the back part of the ambulance. ‘We’ll just wait it out. The boy’s doing fine.’
Arthur took a deep breath and touched the Key to the strap at his side.
‘Release! Undo! Unlatch!’ he whispered. He hoped that would work.
The strap fell away, the click swallowed up by the sound of the beating rain. Arthur quickly whispered the words again and touched the other strap. Then he sat up, and repeated the process with the strap over his legs.
Then he threw himself forward, pulled the hatch handle, pushed the door open, and half-jumped, half-fell out into the heaviest rain he had ever experienced. Rain that actually hurt, the drops as big as his fist, so big that when they broke over his face he thought he might drown.
It was so heavy that Arthur couldn’t see a thing. Blindly, he waded around the back of the ambulance and struck out in what he hoped was the right direction. The road was already knee-deep in rushing water, the drains totally overwhelmed by the downpour.
Arthur clutched the key and pushed on, his chin tucked in to his chest to try to keep the rain out of his eyes, nose, and mouth. Water rushed past him, roaring and gurgling. He dimly heard a shout from the ambulance.
Then, all of a sudden, the rain stopped. Arthur lifted his head and looked around, only to see that the rain had not stopped everywhere. He’d walked out of it. Only a few steps behind him, it was coming down as hard as ever. But the rain was only falling on the road, and the dark cloud above wasn’t much bigger than the ambulance.
It was hard to see into this weird, incredibly localised cloudburst, but Arthur saw a blurry shape leap from the back of the ambulance. The paramedic had come after him!
Arthur tensed to run, but the paramedic didn’t get very far. The rain intensified even more, so that it was no longer individual drops but more like a solid ocean wave being dumped horizontally from the sky. The paramedic was bowled over and swept away, bobbing like a cork as he was washed down the road. Fortunately, thought Arthur, he couldn’t drown in his biosuit, with its independent supply of oxygen.
A moment later the ambulance slid sideways, accompanied by the great groan of rubber letting go, and it followed the paramedic down the road, much more slowly. Arthur watched ambulance and man wash down the street in the strangest flash flood that anybody had ever seen. It wouldn’t take them far, but far enough for Arthur to get away. Already the rain was lessening and the cloud was shrinking.
Arthur turned away from the road. As he had hoped and half-expected, he saw the cool marble of the wall and looming up above it, the crazy architecture of the House.
