by Garth Nix
Its red eyes flashed. ‘Num-num !’
‘No. You can just sit there and starve for all I care. Maybe we’ll put you in a box and lock it in a drawer!’
Jack folded his arms and turned away.
‘Mmmmmmmm.’ The skull sounded as though it was full of wasps. ‘Mmmmmmmm.’ Then it stopped and said, ‘Cast-iron wind-detection instrument incorporating astronomical details above the cardinal points.’
‘What?’ said Jaide.
With a slightly malicious tone, the skull repeated what it had told them. ‘Cast-iron wind-detection instrument incorporating astronomical details above the cardinal points.’
‘It sounds as bad as Professor Saxon J Chiruta III,’ Jaide commented, scratching her head.
‘What’s a cardinal point?’ asked Jack.
‘They’re what a compass points to,’ said Ari. ‘East, west, north, south.’
‘And what does it mean by astronomical details?’
‘I don’t know. The sun? A comet?’
Jaide clicked her fingers. ‘Moon and stars – it’s talking about the weathervane!’
They ran outside and stared up at the night sky. The weathervane’s trusty arrow was barely visible; only Jack could make out which way it was facing, and even with his night vision he had to stare at it for quite a while.
‘We should have thought of this earlier,’ said Jaide. ‘Or you should have told us,’ she added to Ari.
‘Don’t look at me,’ he said innocently. ‘I’m a cat.’
‘Exactly.’
‘It’s pointing west,’ declared Jack finally.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Positive. And the wind is from the south.’
‘So the excision is to the west.’
Jaide shivered, thinking of the monster and all the white-eyed creatures the last time The Evil had directly attacked them.
‘You mustn’t do anything about this,’ said Ari. ‘You know what Kleo would say. You know what your grandmother would say.’
‘They’re not here,’ said Jack. ‘We are.’
‘And here’s where you should stay. You can’t get yourselves overexcited or you never know what might happen.’
‘But what will happen if we don’t do something?’ Jaide was staring out into the night, following with her mind the direction the arrow was indicating.
‘You know where it’s pointing, don’t you?’ she asked Jack.
He nodded. ‘The old sawmill. The building site.’
‘Let’s go.’
Ari protested as they went to get a flashlight and then their bikes, but once they were under way, they left him far behind.
There was nothing he could do to stop them.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Night of the Moths
The building site was as dark and gloomy as it had been the previous night. The only difference was a white van parked out the front, with the MMM Holdings logo on it.
BUILDINGS TO LIVE IN.
Someone was there.
Jack and Jaide cycled to the back of the site and tiptoed through the hastily and rather poorly repaired hole in the fence.
‘Do you feel that?’ Jaide whispered to Jack. She couldn’t explain it exactly, because it wasn’t anything she could hear or see. But the hair on the back of her neck was prickling, and she was acutely aware of the way the wind was nervously circling about her. Not like a twister. Just not at all normal.
Jack nodded. The feeling was the same as it had been earlier that day, from the house next door. He felt like something was watching them, and watching them closely. The moon hadn’t risen yet, so the shadows were dark even to his night-sensitive eyes. There were dozens of hiding spots.
‘Careful,’ he said, warning Jaide away from the trench they had skirted the night before. The squelchy patch of poisoned rats had been cleaned up, and the smell of crushed ants was gone.
‘How about a little light?’ she whispered.
‘All right.’ He flicked on the flashlight and swept it around them.
That only made it worse. Now the shadows were moving.
‘Look!’ said Jaide, grabbing his arm and pointing down into the trench.
There was something odd lying on the bottom.
Jack edged closer, playing the light across it. It looked like a long tube of plastic wrapping, until he got even closer and saw the texture was more like paper. It was kind of olive-grey and there were odd ridges and scaly patches. It was at least five yards long and perhaps six feet in diameter.
‘Is that . . . a snake skin ?’ he said, remembering Rodeo Dave’s account of the escaped boa constrictor. ‘It’s huge!’
Jaide was thinking exactly the same thing. She looked around them, imagining a giant serpent about to strike at any moment.
‘You know,’ she said slowly, ‘maybe we should go home . . .’
‘In a minute,’ said Jack, sweeping the flashlight around them again. ‘The answers are here. When we find them, we can tell Grandma and –’
He froze. The light had picked out a figure peering at them from behind a stack of corrugated iron. Definitely a person, with a head and shoulders and some kind of hood obscuring his or her face.
As soon as the light struck their dark observer, the hood boiled into a cloud of grey, heavy moths that swarmed straight for them, their eyes gleaming pure white.
The twins acted instinctively, the lessons they had learned that afternoon fresh in their minds. Jaide called her Gift up and out in a series of tiny twisters, while Jack reached for the shadows in order to draw them about him and his sister, obscuring them from view.
But something went wrong. The twisters roared away from Jaide and whistled off into the distance. Instead of shadow, Jack found he had wrapped Jaide and himself in an intense white light that, rather than shielding them, attracted even more moths, some of them not even the white-eyed ones under the control of The Evil.
The moths swarmed in on them, their fat bodies and scratchy antennae crawling over every part of their bodies, more and more flying in as the first wave tried to get under their clothes, into their ears and noses and eyes.
With the physical assault of the moths came a terrible, silent wave of pressure on their minds. This time, The Evil said nothing to them – but somehow this was almost worse than if it had. There was just a blind, groping thing reaching into their heads, trying to swallow up their minds and take them out of themselves forever.
‘Who’s there?’ called a girl’s voice. ‘What’s going on?’
Jaide recognised Tara’s voice.
‘Keep back!’ Jaide shouted, but further words were smothered by an avalanche of moths that filled her mouth. Jaide spat them out and bent over double, slapping herself in a desperate attempt to escape the smothering insects.
‘Jaide? Is that – ahhh!’
Tara disappeared under another vast wave of moths. Shrieking, she turned to run, tripped over a piece of timber and fell to the ground under a ten-inch-deep blanket of insects.
Jack ran in a circle, windmilling his arms across his face to keep it clear enough to see through slitted eyes. He was still trying to shield himself with shadow, but his Gift just kept fuelling the intense light – doing the exact opposite of what he was asking it to do.
The exact opposite, thought Jack.
‘Opposite!’ he shouted to Jaide, spitting out a moth. ‘Tell your twisters to go away!’
Jaide’s whole head was covered in moths, and they’d got into her ears as well. She heard Jack’s voice as if it came from very far away. Too afraid to open her eyes, she concentrated on the whirlwinds, imagining them leaving the sawmill, flying out across the town and then over the sea, going far, far, far away . . .
A fierce, cold breeze hit the side of her head, followed by another wind that picked her up and spun her round. Jaide opened her eyes, moths peeling off her in all directions as two small twisters spun in an eccentric dance round her and Jack.
‘Light!’ said Jack, holding up
his hands. ‘Give me light!’
The brilliant white light around him faded, till there was only the familiar yellow beam of the torch.
‘Come to me, twisters,’ said Jaide quietly, reaching out for the whirlwinds. They spun away instead, carrying off a great cargo of moths.
The twins ran over to Tara, who now only had a light coverlet of insects. Brushing them aside, they helped her up.
Distantly, on the street outside the building site, they heard the screech of tyres and pulling away.
‘Oh,’ said Tara, uncovering her head and blinking up at them. ‘Oh! What was that all about?’
‘I guess they were attracted by the light,’ said Jack, turning off the flashlight. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I . . . I was at the cinema,’ said Tara shakily. ‘I’m supposed to meet my father here. Have you seen him?’
Jaide thought of the silhouette they had spotted just before the moths had attacked them. She hadn’t got a look at its face at all.
‘We saw someone . . .’
‘I’m sure . . . at least I think I saw his van out the front,’ Tara said, still looking a little dazed. ‘He must be here somewhere.’
She headed off to the gate, confidently avoiding the perils of the unlit building site. Jack and Jaide exchanged a look, then followed. While they didn’t want to bump into Martin McAndrew in the dark, they didn’t want to leave Tara alone either, not when The Evil was about.
They came around the sawmill and saw Tara’s father getting out of the MMM Holdings van – the same van that had almost run them over two nights ago.
‘There he is,’ Tara said, hurrying to meet him.
Pretending to arrive, Jack thought as they trailed her.
‘Sorry, darling,’ Mr McAndrew said as he and his daughter embraced. ‘The council meeting is running much later than I expected. You’ll have to come back with me and –’ He spotted the twins and smiled broadly. ‘Oh, hello . . . Jack and Jaide, isn’t it? This is a surprise. Is Tara giving you a tour of the site?’
‘Not exactly,’ Jaide said, trying to get a good look at his eyes. By the streetlights, they looked normal, with no sign of luminous white. ‘We were just riding past and saw Tara here.’
‘There were these moths!’ exclaimed Tara. ‘Thousands of them! They swarmed all over us from out of nowhere, and then they disappeared. It was amazing! Actually it was more creepy than amazing, but –’
‘Moths did you say?’
Grandma X’s voice came out of the gloom behind them and the twins turned to face her with relief.
‘Finally!’ Jack cried out.
‘Where have you been ?’ Jaide asked.
‘I have been out looking for you two of course.’ She took in Tara and her father in a glance, shooting the latter a particularly sharp glance. ‘This is an odd place for an evening rendezvous.’
Jaide stood on tiptoes in order to whisper into her ear, ‘We’ve got so much to tell you.’
Grandma X shook her head imperceptibly. Not now.
‘Yes, it is a bit extraordinary,’ said Mr McAndrew, looking uneasy. ‘But I’m learning fast that nothing in Portland is ever merely ordinary. Well, come on, Tara. The meeting is waiting for me, and I’d better not keep them waiting if I expect to get this approval through.’
‘Do I have to go?’ she asked in tortured tones. ‘It’s so boring . . . just a bunch of old people sitting around arguing in circles all night.’
‘Now, now, dear. I’m afraid we don’t have any choice.’ Mr McAndrew patted his daughter on the head, or tried to. She squirmed out of his way and folded her arms. ‘Believe me, I’ll be just as happy as you when it’s over.’
‘But Dad –’
‘She could come with us,’ Grandma X unexpectedly volunteered. ‘Until your meeting is over. We’re about to have dinner, and she would be very welcome.’
The twins stared at her in surprise. What was she thinking? With Tara around, there was no way they could talk about the monster or the excision.
Tara practically bounced in delight. ‘Please, Dad, can I?’
‘Well, if you’re sure it’s no trouble.’
‘No trouble at all, Martin. I find these two a handful at the quietest of times. It’ll be good for them to have someone to play with before bed.’
‘Well, great!’ He clapped his hands together. ‘That’s settled then. I’d best be off. As soon as the meeting is over, I’ll come by and pick Tara up. I know where the house is of course.’
His eagerness to get away was obvious to the twins as he hurried across the site, through the open gate and into the van. It started with a roar and accelerated off into the night.
‘You’ve got a moth caught in your hair,’ Tara told Jaide.
‘Yuck. Where?’
‘Here.’ Tara plucked the insect from her and held it up between thumb and forefinger. It looked quite dead. ‘Hey, let’s see if we can find out what species it is!’
‘How?’
‘On the Web. Do you have the Internet?’ Tara asked Grandma X.
‘I can let you use my computer,’ she said, ‘so long as you only download information on moths, not viruses.’
‘Excellent! Maybe we’ll find out what made them swarm like that.’
Her excitement was contagious, but neither twin had forgotten the real reason for the swarming. Jack peered closely at the dead bug, looking for any sign of whiteness in its eyes.
‘Are you sure it’s dead?’ he asked.
‘I’m pretty sure there’s no such thing as a zombie moth, Jackaran,’ said Grandma X. ‘This way, children. I’m parked at the back, where I saw your bikes.’
She led the way back round the sawmill while Jaide explained to Tara that Jackaran was Jack’s full name, and Jaidith was Jaide’s. Jack took the opportunity to walk close to Grandma X.
‘There’s something you have to see,’ he whispered.
‘What kind of something?’
‘I don’t know. It’s over here.’
He guided her past the trench where they’d seen the giant snake skin, but when he shone the torch beam down into the trench, it was gone.
‘Where did it go?’ he asked, sweeping the light from one end of the trench to the other. There was definitely nothing there.
‘Where did what go?’ asked Tara, coming to look too.
‘Uh, I thought I saw a frog,’ said Jack, the first thing that came into his mind. ‘But it must have hopped out.’
‘I suppose it must have,’ said Grandma X, heading on to the fence and ushering the two puzzled troubletwisters and one oblivious Tara through the hole. ‘Now, Jackaran and Jaidith, you ride your bikes straight home. Tara, you come with me.’
‘OK,’ she said. ‘Hey, cool car! How old is it?’
‘Old enough to have a personality,’ Grandma X said, getting inside, ‘and an intense dislike of waking up on cold mornings.’
‘Sounds like my mum.’
The car doors slammed, and Jack and Jaide rode off through the beam of its headlights.
‘How did he do that?’ asked Jaide, pedalling harder to take out her frustration.
‘Who? Do what?’
‘Tara’s dad of course. He must have hidden the skin while we were distracted.’
‘Could the moths have carried it away?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Or maybe it was more than empty skin after all?’
‘I don’t know, Jack. If it was the monster, what was it doing pretending to be dead? Or deflated? Why didn’t it just eat us there and then?’
Jack had no good answer for that, and he doubted they were going to get any closer to an answer that night.
When they got home, the weathervane was pointing out the wind direction, and Ari was waiting impatiently on the verandah. He glared at them, then ran off into the garden, so the twins could tell that he was both relieved and annoyed. They wondered if he was going to get into trouble from both Kleo and Grandma X for letting them out of his sight.
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They researched moths and other Lepidoptera while Grandma X prepared dinner. They could tell she was distracted by something because that night they had one of her busy meals, where she rummaged through the fridge and the pantry and put together whatever she could find in odd combinations. So they had baked beans, rice and steamed vegetables, followed by raspberry jelly with chocolate on the side. Tara didn’t seem to mind, not even when Grandma X got out the mysterious soup pot again and began cooking up a particularly noxious brew.
‘My mother only cooks healthy stuff,’ she said, ‘and the same things, over and over again. Dad only ever gets takeaways, from the same place, which I don’t like. We never have anything different. Sometimes my grandpa comes and stays with us, and we have fantastic stir-frys, but he only visits when my grandmother is mad at him and kicks him out for a while.’
The moth was proving tough to identify, and even the twins were distracted by the search. They’d never realised just how many moths and butterflies existed in the world, or how hideous they were when magnified. Weirdly, butterflies, which looked so pretty from afar, were much uglier up close than moths. Moths looked practically beautiful in comparison.
In the end, they decided that it was probably an Imperial Silk Moth, and found a jar to seal its remains in, so Tara could take it home. Jack wanted to sticky-tape it shut, but even Jaide thought that was going too far. They had been alone with it for an hour and it hadn’t even twitched.
They’d only just got out a board game when a horn’s sharp tooting came from outside the house.
‘That’ll be Dad,’ said Tara, jumping up. ‘He’ll be in a hurry. He always is.’
They rushed to the door, and sure enough, there was the MMM Holdings van parked on the driveway, with Martin McAndrew tapping his fingers at the wheel.
‘Come along, Tara!’ he called. ‘Did you have a good time?’
‘Excellent, Dad,’ she said, only reluctantly walking out to meet him. ‘Do I have to go home now?’
‘Well, it’s been a long day, and you have to feed Fi-Fi . . .’
‘I’m sure the kids would love to see each other another time,’ said Grandma X, appearing suddenly behind them with a pink-tinged wooden spoon in one hand.
