by Garth Nix
‘She’s not there,’ Jaide said, removing her ear from the wood. ‘That’s good.’
‘Why is that good?’ asked Jack. He was thinking only of getting back into bed.
‘I want another look in the Compendium.’
‘What for? We already asked it about the monster and it couldn’t tell us anything.’
‘I think we were asking the wrong question. Come on.’
Instead of manipulating the blue door’s trick lock, which could only be opened by someone on the other side or by using their Gifts, Jaide hurried through the front door and back up the stairs. Susan was still miraculously asleep, snoring softly. Grandma X’s bed remained empty, the covers made up.
‘Can’t we do this tomorrow? I’m tired,’ Jack whispered as Jaide opened the next door along and stepped through it. Instead of revealing another empty bedroom, it somehow warped space to lead directly to the basement Blue Room, where their grandmother conducted her secret activities. The room’s two chandeliers flickered into life – illuminated not by electric bulbs, but by actual candles that lit themselves and never burned down.
‘If we don’t do it now, Jack, I’ll never get to sleep.’
The Compendium stood on Grandma X’s desk next to two similar files that were labelled Correspondence and Receipts. Jaide picked up the thick folder and held it in both hands, closing her eyes briefly.
‘What are you asking it?’ Jack said, staring at her in puzzlement.
Jaide was concentrating too fiercely to speak. Kleo’s anger – combined with something Ari had said – had fueled her determination to get something right that night.
Can The Evil survive the re-establishment of all four wards?
The Compendium opened, revealing a page of words in fine print under the heading, ‘Extraordinarily Unusual Side Effects of Decerebration: a paper by Professor Saxon J Chiruta III’.
‘What does it mean?’ asked Jack, peering mystified over his sister’s shoulder.
‘I’m not sure.’ She liked to read and was proud of her vocabulary, but half of what she saw before her she didn’t understand, and the rest didn’t make any discernible sense. That every sentence ran for ten lines on average didn’t help.
Jack read out loud: ‘ . . . ad hoc termination of bellicose effluxion has been observed to incur a paroxysmal truncation of the resulting extrusions (Type IIIa) . . . Is this even English?’
Jaide leaned back and rubbed her eyes. ‘I asked the Compendium what happens when the wards came back on. I mean, everyone says that The Evil can’t get back in afterwards, but what if they’re wrong? What if there’s some sneaky way it can get back in and open the door again?’
‘And this is the answer?’
Jaide stared at the dense page, wishing the Compendium had been more obliging. ‘Maybe it is.’
‘Well, we’re no wiser, that’s for sure.’
‘No,’ she said, staring in annoyance at the cryptic text. ‘Not yet.’
Jaide hesitated for a moment, then gripped the corner of the page with her right hand as if she was going to rip it out of the Compendium.
Jack gasped. ‘Jaide! Don’t!’
‘I need it,’ Jaide said urgently. ‘And I can’t work out how to open the ring binding –’
She stopped in mid-sentence, the paper in her hand suddenly free of the ancient bronze rings that held all the different pages of the Compendium together. They had not opened, but the paper was released.
‘Uh . . . thanks,’ she said to the Compendium, folding the paper up and slipping it into her pyjama pocket.
‘What if Grandma notices it’s missing – ?’
‘Why would she notice?’ Jaide tapped the paper. ‘Anyway, if this page can tell me how The Evil is working through McAndrew despite the wards, Grandma will be pleased.’
Then all I’ll have to do, she thought to herself, is make things up to Kleo . . . somehow.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Weasel Words
Susan woke the twins from deep, exhausted sleep to say good morning and goodbye. This was the third time she had left for her three-day shift at her new job and, while it hadn’t become routine, it wasn’t so much of a wrench any more. Jack and Jaide hugged her and followed her downstairs to wave her off. Then they walked wearily into the kitchen to make breakfast.
The soup pot was back on the stove again, only this time the stains were blue-grey. Jack opened the lid and took a whiff. He was immensely relieved to smell something sweet and sickly, nothing at all like crushed ants. If Grandma X had been planting poisoned rats to make the cats of Portland sick . . . well, tired or otherwise, he didn’t think he could ever make sense of it.
Even to Jaide, the events of the previous night felt dreamlike and confusing. Only the hard reality of the page she had taken from the Compendium, now folded up in the pocket of her pyjamas, reassured her that it was truly all real.
Grandma X was in a blustery and distracted mood, still in her own dressing gown, with hair wild and crazy about her head. She started talking to the twins long before she had even arrived in the kitchen.
‘I’m awfully busy this morning, so you’ll have to make your own break– oh, you already have. Well done, troubletwisters. Perhaps you could pop a bit of bread in for me too?’
She stirred the pot and bustled out again, returning only when Jack had taken her toast out of the toaster, buttered it and lathered it thickly with jam, just how she liked it.
‘Thank you, Jackaran,’ she said, stuffing an entire slice into her mouth. From one pocket of her dressing gown she produced a handful of herbs and seeds, which she tossed into the pot. From the other came a salt shaker that sprinkled black dust. A powerful metallic smell filled the room as she stirred the pot again.
‘What is that, Grandma?’ asked Jack, wrinkling his nose.
‘Oh, just a herbal concoction, nothing important,’ she said, devouring another whole piece of toast. ‘It revitalises things. Like my garden, for example.’
‘Can we help?’ Jaide asked, thinking that not once in their days in Portland so far had they seen Grandma X show any interest in the garden.
‘I’ll manage, thank you, Jaidith. Besides, you have to go to school. I’m positive they’ll teach you something useful there one day, if only by accident . . .’
‘Are you sure, Grandma?’ pressed Jack. ‘You look tired.’
‘Me? Nonsense. I always sleep well.’
‘You didn’t hear anything . . . unusual?’
‘Like what?’ Grandma X’s sharp grey eyes were suddenly on Jaide, and the girl felt herself fall back into her seat as though physically pushed.
‘Um, cats?’
Grandma X looked around, as though only realising then that Ari and Kleo were absent. Normally the cats were buzzing around at breakfast, looking for early morning treats, particularly Ari, who had an appetite as voracious as Jack’s.
‘Did you hear fighting?’ she asked the twins.
‘Yes,’ said Jaide. ‘We thought it was the monster.’
Grandma X smiled.
‘You see how these things begin? If you hear it again, just ignore it. Kleo is being challenged, and we must let her sort it out.’
‘Isn’t there something we can do without her knowing?’ asked Jack, wishing she had told them that long before now.
‘No, because she would know,’ said Grandma X, turning back to the pot and giving it a vigorous stir. ‘Unless you were considerably more cunning than I would like you to be. Now, upstairs at once, troubletwisters, or you’ll be late!’
Rebuffed, the twins went to get dressed. When they returned downstairs only minutes later, they found the pot gone, and Grandma X with it.
‘I guess we’ll let ourselves out,’ said Jaide, hefting her bag higher on her shoulder.
‘She’s definitely up to something,’ said Jack. ‘I’m on to her tricks now. Like she never really said that the potion was for her garden, only kind of suggested it was.’
‘And she said she a
lways sleeps well, but that doesn’t mean she slept well last night, or even went to bed at all,’ said Jaide.
‘There’s something she’s not telling us.’
‘Secret secrets,’ muttered Jaide as they wheeled their bikes out of the laundry and set off to school. Her tone made it sound like the worst curse imaginable.
Mr Carver was in a subdued mood when they arrived at school that morning, which was unusual. Normally he greeted them individually with syrupy cheer and started the day with a singalong, accompanied by one of his strange instrumental performances. That day, he asked all his students to take a seat and sit quietly. Tara came in from the playground after Jack and Jaide arrived, and looked at them questioningly. They could only shrug in reply.
When everyone was present, he explained what was going on.
‘Today is the memorial service for a valued member of our community,’ he said. ‘I’m talking about Renita Daniels of course. Just last week she was here in this very school, making important repairs, and she will be greatly missed by all of us. Because it’s a school day, we cannot attend the service, unless you have a note from your parents, but I thought we would honour her in our own way, by sharing our memories of her and creating a mosaic. Would anyone like to start?’
There was an awkward silence. Jack and Jaide looked at each other and said nothing. They couldn’t very well explain that the last time they had seen Rennie, she had been possessed by The Evil and trying to kill them.
‘Who was she?’ asked Kyle with a perplexed frown.
‘You know – Rennie,’ said Miralda. ‘Always wore overalls, carried a wrench . . .’
‘Oh, her. Why’s she important?’
‘We are the sum of the people around us,’ Mr Carver said. ‘They shape us and make us who we are. And Rennie, poor Rennie – she did her best to carry on, but it was hard, and we all felt it.’
‘Why “poor” Rennie?’ asked Tara.
‘Such a tragic story,’ said Mr Carver, wiping a tear from his eye. ‘She had two young children – too young for school, I never met them. They drowned in a terrible accident, and now she has drowned too.’
‘Does that mean they found her body?’ asked Jack.
‘Poor Rennie nothing,’ said Miralda. ‘My dad said she was obviously negligent.’
‘What does that mean?’ asked Kyle.
‘You know, it was entirely her fault, what happened. She shouldn’t have been on that old jetty when it was clearly marked as dangerous. And it wasn’t the council’s fault the sign had fallen off or that the light had stopped working –’
‘Did they find her body?’ repeated Jaide.
‘Let’s not dwell on the negatives,’ said Mr Carver, putting his index fingers to his temples and breathing deeply through his nose. ‘Let us remember her as the vibrant, living soul she once was and find some fitting way to preserve our memories of her. Miralda, perhaps you could draw her wrench. Kyle, you could draw her van. Jack, Jaide and Tara – you are probably too new to have known her well, but I’d still like you to participate, if you don’t mind. Perhaps you could partner up and come up with something between you. Remember, this is a sensitive time, and we want to be respectful.’
He handed out paper to everyone and put on a particularly mournful tune over the school’s PA system, which he accompanied on a round-bodied guitar that sounded like a depressed banjo.
Tara joined Jack and Jaide at their table and leaned in to whisper, ‘I suppose this beats actually going to the service. Funerals are so boring. Did you ever meet this Jenny or Benny or whoever she was?’
‘Uh, yes,’ said Jaide. ‘We saw her when she was working here, fixing the equipment.’
‘What did she look like?’
‘She was tall.’ Jaide repressed her memories of Rennie with wild, white eyes and rats growing out of her, climbing on spider-web ropes with a cockroach cloak across her shoulders. That image had haunted her dreams for a week.
‘And she was sad,’ said Jack, understanding only now about her kids and why she had seemed so anxious about the twins not hurting themselves when they had first met. He still remembered the look in her eyes. She had seemed both wounded and very alone.
‘I don’t know how to draw sad,’ said Tara, ‘but tall I can do. I’m actually quite good at drawing. Can you tell me anything else about her?’
While Jack searched his memory for something that didn’t involve The Evil, Jaide pulled the page she had stolen from the Compendium from her pocket and went looking for a dictionary. There was just one, and it had been well-thumbed by several generations of children. She brought it back to the table, laid the page out flat and began to translate.
‘Amidst the matrix of contingencies upon which every Warden is beholden to focalise . . .’
‘So,’ Tara said, ‘brown hair, long face, big nose . . . anything else?’
Jack shook his head. He wasn’t sure how much he actually remembered and how much he had made up, but he supposed it didn’t matter. Rennie had fallen from the lighthouse and drowned. She wasn’t going to complain if he got it wrong.
‘Your dad,’ he asked as she got to work drawing. ‘Is his name Martin?’
‘Yes. Oh yeah, that’s right – he said he met you yesterday, at the house. You’ll be seeing a lot more of him there. He’s going to work on renovating that old place while construction is suspended on Riverview House. He said there have been vandals in there so he needs to board up the windows himself, at least until he can find another contractor.’
‘Uh, great,’ Jack said, glancing nervously at Jaide. She hadn’t heard. Her nose was buried in an old book and her face wore a look of furious concentration. ‘Was he at the sawmill building site last night?’
Tara nodded. ‘I think so. He didn’t come home until late. I had to take the train home.’
So it could easily have been Martin McAndrew behind the wheel of the van that had tried to run them down. Jack filed that away for future reference.
‘Has he seemed . . . different . . . lately?’
Tara shrugged. ‘It’s hard to tell with Dad. He’s always so busy. I only really get to talk to him when we’re in the car together. That’s the main reason I wanted to come to this school – apart from the fact that it annoys Mum. She wants me to go to a real school, you know, where they make you actually work rather than draw pictures of someone you never met.’
Jack could feel the conversation being dragged away from what he wanted to know. He wished Jaide would pay attention and help him. She was better at talking to people they didn’t know well.
‘Does your dad ever wear dark glasses?’
‘All the time. He works outside, remember?’ Tara looked up from her half-finished drawing. ‘You’re an odd boy, Jack Shield. Why do you want to know so much about my dad?’
‘I’m, uh, interested in building,’ he stammered. ‘I guess that’s it.’
‘Well, he’d be happy to talk to you about it, I’m sure. It’s all he ever talks about at home. Why don’t you come over one day and meet him properly?’
Jaide saved Jack by suddenly slamming the book closed and putting her head in her hands. ‘It’s no use. The words are too hard and this dictionary is hopeless! It’s for little kids, not –’
She almost said Wardens, but then she noticed Tara staring at her.
‘ . . . not older kids like us,’ she finished rather lamely.
‘You’re not actually working, are you?’ Tara asked her with a playful look in her eye.
‘Mum gives us homework,’ Jaide improvised as she folded up the page. ‘I’m running behind. Is your full name Tara McAndrew?’
‘No,’ said Tara. ‘It’s Tara Lin. I have my mother’s name.’
‘But your father is Martin McAndrew?’
‘Yes. Jack just asked me that. What’s with you two?’
‘Maybe Jaide’s interested in buildings too,’ said Jack, staring at her with a hopeless look.
‘I . . . suppose that’s it,’ J
aide said, although nothing could have been further from the truth. Before she’d discovered about Wardens, she had wanted to be a photographer. Her camera being blown up with her house by The Evil had ended that dream, at least until the insurance money came through. ‘You know, I think your dad knew Rennie. He said she had something of his.’
‘Really?’ Tara looked genuinely mystified. ‘I wonder what it was.’
‘He didn’t tell us.’
‘Well, he’ll be annoyed about it, whatever it is, since she’s dead now and he has no chance of getting it back.’
Mr Carver chose that moment to lean over Jack’s shoulder to see what they had done, and to praise their efforts.
‘I like her hair, although I don’t believe she ever wore it curled like that. It’s quite a good likeness.’
Tara beamed. ‘What colour were her eyes, Mr Carver?’
‘Call me Heath, please. I’m not sure, Tara. Perhaps you could just leave them as they are for now.’
‘They were blue,’ said Jaide, more firmly than she’d intended. She hoped her face wasn’t betraying the sudden, terrible memory of the last time she’d seen Rennie’s eyes, all white and luminous.
Everyone looked at her.
‘That is, I think they were,’ she said. It was a guess, but anything was better than leaving Rennie’s picture the way it was.
‘That will do for now,’ said Mr Carver, patting Jaide on the shoulder. ‘Well done, well done.’
He wandered off as Tara leaned over the portrait to colour the portrait’s blank white orbs a significantly more reassuring sky blue.
The lunchtime tune took forever to come, but finally Mr Carver played it and they were free to stop drawing.
‘Come on,’ said Jaide to Jack, as Tara went to get her lunch box from her bag. ‘We’re going home to eat. We have bikes now. We can do that.’
‘Why? We already have a packed lunch.’
