by Garth Nix
Jack shifted uneasily on his feet. ‘Looking at you what way?’
Grandma X straightened from her inspection of an apparently normal souvenir ashtray. Her smile was part sympathetic, part amused at their expense.
‘Don’t feel bad,’ she said. ‘When I was your age, I detected The Evil in every dark space and every foul temper. There’s no shame in it. After all you’ve been through, it’s no wonder. You just have to learn that there’s a fine line between vigilance and paranoia.’
‘So there isn’t an excision?’ said Jaide, sitting down on the nearest horizontal surface, a crate stamped ARTISANS OF AFRICA. ‘Did Custer tell you we think there’s one out there?’
‘Yes, he did,’ replied Grandma X. ‘And . . . you’re right. There might well be an excision in Portland. In fact I’m looking for it as we speak.’ She glanced at the ashtray in her hand. ‘Not literally, but that is one of the things on my mind at present.’
‘Will you tell us what else you’ve been doing? Because we know something is going on.’
‘Not yet, but it will be resolved soon, I hope, and then I will be able to tell you.’
‘Why do you have to keep it a secret from us now?’
‘Because you are troubletwisters. And with Custer’s help, I think you are at last coming to understand what that means.’
‘That you can’t trust us?’
‘I can’t trust your Gifts,’ Grandma X corrected her. ‘The difference between the two is significant.’
‘Will I ever get mine back?’ Jack asked in a mournful voice.
Grandma X put down the ashtray and came over to him, resting her hand on his shoulder.
‘I’m sure you will, Jackaran. Just give it time. Don’t force it. Troubletwisters have been known to explode from trying too hard.’
Jack managed half a laugh, thinking she was trying to cheer him up.
‘I’m being perfectly serious,’ she said. ‘Now perhaps you two could give me a hand. I’m looking for a sewing needle that I know is here somewhere. It’s two inches long and made of silver with a golden eye. It must have rolled away and slipped under something, rather inconveniently.’
Jaide got up and joined Jack in looking under random things.
‘If there is an excision in Portland,’ said Jaide, ‘why don’t you just find it the normal way you’d look for The Evil? The Oracular Crocodile told us to use the weathervane, and that seemed to work at first, but later it didn’t.’
‘As ever, it’s not that simple.’ Grandma X waved them over and together they inched an upright piano they had never seen before out from the wall in order to look behind it. ‘Were The Evil at its full strength, the weathervane would indeed track it. But an excision is much smaller, and it will be correspondingly weaker. It may also be . . . hiding in something, or even someone. If it is desperate enough, the excision can leave a false trail, by splitting off an even smaller piece and using that to distract us.’
‘The excision can have an excision?’ said Jack in alarm. ‘How small can a piece of The Evil be and still be The Evil?’
‘Very small indeed,’ said Grandma X. ‘But don’t believe that it’s harmless or can accomplish little. Small can sometimes do what big cannot. You must promise me that if you discover its whereabouts, you will immediately report to me and not try to tackle it by yourselves.’
‘Yes, Grandma,’ said Jaide. ‘We’ll try.’
‘But what if it attacks us and you’re not around?’ asked Jack, peering under a claw-footed chest of drawers. Without his Gift, he didn’t want to meet any amount of The Evil at all.
‘Retreat to this house, as quickly as you can. Now,’ she said, standing with her hands on her hips, ‘where could this wretched thing be ?’
‘Hang on,’ grunted Jaide from deep in a wooden chest. ‘I think I . . . maybe . . . uh – yes!’
She emerged, dusty and wreathed in cobwebs, clutching a gleaming needle. ‘I saw it right down at the bottom. Jack, your night-sight really comes in handy.’
Jack grunted sourly in response. It wasn’t fair. He hadn’t even got Jaide’s Gift to make up for losing his own.
‘Well done, Jaidith.’ Grandma X took the pin from her and tucked it into her sleeve. ‘Now I want you to look in the Compendium and find the instruction manual for Cutshaw’s Remarkable Resonator, then go up to the widow’s walk, where you will find the device itself. I want you to tend it until I come back. Call me if you discover anything untoward. I will be within earshot. Ari, you go with them.’
She hurried up the steps to the elephant mural and the door leading back into the house. Ari stirred from the ball he’d curled up in and stretch-yawned so vigorously it looked like he was going to separate limbs from body.
‘We’re going where?’ he asked.
‘Upstairs,’ Jack said, ‘once we figure out this Cuthbert’s Magical Regurgitator, or whatever it is.’
He crossed to the Compendium and began flicking through pages.
‘I still don’t know how she knew Tara’s dad was innocent,’ said Jaide, leaning against the hatstand with her arms folded. ‘I mean, everything pointed to him – literally, in the case of the weathervane. And who tried to run us over, if it wasn’t him?’
‘I can’t answer the last one,’ Ari said, ‘but I know she checked him out when he first came to town. Your grandmother distrusts developers as a matter of principle. They knock down beautiful old things and build ugly new things in their place. And what’s worse, they can interfere with the wards.’
‘That’s what I said,’ Jack told the cat.
Ari nodded. ‘And that’s why she makes such a nuisance of herself in council meetings.’
This definitely pricked Jaide’s interest. ‘So one of the wards might be near the old sawmill?’
Ari ducked his head down so far it almost disappeared into his fur. ‘I didn’t say that. I didn’t say that at all.’
‘Here it is,’ said Jack. For once, the Compendium had opened immediately to the right place.
‘“Asta J Cutshaw’s Remarkable Etheric Resonator,”’ he read, ‘“for the detection of Evil Corpuscles and Remnant Influences.” I guess that means excisions and stuff like that.’
He skimmed the page. ‘OK. It emits a puff of coloured smoke if it detects something, and the colour indicates whatever it is. Blue smoke is for a “dangerous excision or relict of the first order” and then there’s green and yellow for ones that aren’t so bad. So all we have to do is watch for it to send out a smoke signal.’
They trooped up to the widow’s walk, where the Etheric Resonator rested on three wide-spread legs, taking up most of the space. It was a machine of brass tubes, glass bulbs and snaking copper cables. A snout-like protrusion at the top rotated once every minute, like a very slow radar crossed with a telescope. Every now and then, something clicked loudly inside it, as though a mousetrap had gone off. The snout protrusion had a small chimney or funnel, but there wasn’t any smoke coming out of it.
On the house’s highest turret, the weathervane turned easily with the wind.
‘So we just sit here and wait?’ Jaide asked.
‘Yes,’ said Ari. ‘She was very clear about that.’
The twins sat in silence for about five minutes, watching the Resonator turn and snap. Ari yawned and settled down near Jaide’s foot to have a nap.
‘What if that was blood on the road by the old sawmill?’ asked Jack, kicking the toes of his right foot against the walk’s wooden rail.
‘I told you it was oil,’ said Ari, raising his head, his ears pricking in annoyance.
‘You might have thought it smelled like oil because it was monster blood. Isn’t that possible?’
‘Ridiculous,’ huffed Ari. ‘I could not be mistaken in such a matter. Not unless –’
‘Unless what?’ asked Jack.
‘I suppose if The Evil is involved, there could be some doubt about even common olfactory experiences,’ replied Ari.
‘You mean things
might not smell like they usually do,’ said Jaide.
Ari nodded.
‘If the monster is the excision,’ said Jaide, picking up the thought, ‘then it could be made up of all sorts of weird creatures, and The Evil might have changed its blood as well.’
‘But why would it be bleeding on the road? Could Grandma X have done that?’
‘That makes perfect sense.’ Jack brightened at the thought. ‘She’s been fighting it. That’s what she’s been busy with. She’s been hunting the monster and trying to kill it!’
‘And that’s not all. It must have been nosing around the old sawmill because that’s where the West Ward is! Right, Ari?’
‘I have no idea where the wards are,’ Ari said. ‘As for what your grandmother has been up to . . . well, she’ll tell you when she’s ready, and not before. But let me just say you would be wise to wait and get more information –’
‘I wish she’d let us help her,’ interrupted Jack, hopping with frustration.
‘You are helping her,’ said Ari firmly.
‘Staring at this old thing isn’t doing any good,’ said Jack in exasperation. He waved his arms in the air, towards the Little Rock. ‘We could be watching the sawmill instead. We should be over there right now and . . .’
A weird feeling rose up in his stomach as he gestured wildly, and the wind rose with it. Suddenly his feet were off the wooden deck and he was flying up into the sky.
‘Jaide!’ He clutched wildly for the rail and caught it barely in time. His legs lifted up above his head. The world turned giddily around him.
‘I’ve got you!’ Jaide caught his shirt and pulled him back down. He was as light a feather. ‘Jack, how did you do that?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said, putting both hands round a wooden post and holding on for grim life.
‘I must . . . I must have your Gift now.’
Jaide stared at him in surprise and dismay. Was that even possible? She supposed it was, since for a while there she’d had both their Gifts and he’d had none.
‘This is why you can’t help,’ said Ari, not without sympathy. ‘Until you have yourselves under control, you will do much more harm than good.’
Jack closed his eyes and sighed. It was exhausting, not knowing what his Gift was going to do next.
‘How am I going to get downstairs?’ he asked. ‘I’ll blow away if I let go of the railing!’
‘Think heavy thoughts,’ Jaide suggested.
Jack thought heavy thoughts. The heaviest thing he could think of was the huge rusted red ship anchor that was down at the fish market, as a kind of public sculpture. It was a hundred and twenty years old, weighed two and a half tons, and had been retrieved from the wreck of a whaling ship that had been lost in a storm just off Portland. He imagined himself being as heavy as that anchor, secure on its concrete plinth.
Rather surprisingly, it worked. A bit too well, as Jack’s legs suddenly gave way and he collapsed on to the roof, feeling his normal weight once more, with some extra on top.
‘Sorry, Jaide,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to have your Gift.’
‘I don’t want yours either,’ his sister replied. She sat down glumly next to Jack and added quietly, ‘But I do want mine.’
Jack nodded in agreement, and they sat together in silence for a minute. The Etheric Resonator kept revolving across from them, issuing its now annoying snap every thirty seconds or so. No smoke issued from the funnel. For all it told them, Portland was as peaceful and placid as any small town.
‘I thought Grandma might have been making poison to kill the monster,’ Jaide mused, ‘but that would mean that she was the one responsible for Kleo’s troubles. I can’t seeing her doing that.’
‘And we still don’t know who tried to run us over,’ Jack said.
‘At least your mother’s coming back tomorrow,’ said Ari. His ears fell back flat when the twins both looked sharply at him. ‘What? That’s a good thing, isn’t it?’
‘I suppose so,’ Jaide said. ‘That means four days of pretending to be normal though.’
‘If there’s one thing I know about troubletwisters,’ said Ari, rubbing the side of his head against her arm, ‘it’s that you’ll never be normal.’
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Jack and the Ladybirds
The twins didn’t spend all of that day watching the Resonator, but it felt like it. When Grandma X returned from wherever she’d been – with the needle bent and corroded, as though it had been dipped in acid – she took out the gold cards again to test their Gifts. The results clearly demonstrated that Jaide now had Jack’s Gift and Jack in turn had Jaide’s, but the ability to control the Gifts hadn’t transferred with them, so both troubletwisters were back to square one, with Gifts they couldn’t command.
After dinner, Jack and Jaide were sent to work on finishing their first entry in the Compendium, concerning their own experiences with The Evil. It was something they were simultaneously proud and resentful of. They had to get it right, but it felt far too much like homework. It was also something they were loath to revisit, except for the ending, where everything had worked out for the best.
‘What’s another word for horrible ?’ asked Jack, stuck on his description of the sewer, as he had been all week.
‘Awful ?’ said Jaide without looking up from the screen. She was typing her own version of events straight into their mother’s laptop, while Jack wrote his out by hand first. ‘Hideous? Revolting? Terrible?’
It had been all of those things, but something more as well. Jack realised that overriding all these emotions was the sheer terror he had felt at the sight of the waterfall of possessed rats pouring out of a pipe, all wanting to smother him.
‘Terrifying,’ he said quietly, and wrote that down.
There was no way, though, that he could capture the dreadful voice he had heard, and the way it still seemed to whisper to him even now, when everything else was quiet.
‘Let me read it,’ said Jaide, peering over his shoulder.
‘No!’ He clutched it to his chest. ‘It’s not finished.’
‘You’ll never be finished at this rate.’
‘You can read it after I type it in.’
‘Of course I will. So can anybody. Well, any Warden anyway. It’ll be in the Compendium forever.’
That thought made Jack want to crumple up the pages he had already written and throw them away, but Grandma X would only make him start again, and he couldn’t bear that thought either.
Slowly he went back to work. Perhaps by writing down his experiences, he thought, he might be able to start forgetting them.
At school the next morning, Tara came running up to them from where she had been quietly drawing by herself. She was always the first there, it seemed, dropped off by her father while he went about his work in Portland.
‘Have you heard?’ she said. ‘Work’s resuming on the sawmill site. Dad got the word yesterday. The council passed a motion overruling community objections, so he can get started straight away.’
‘I wonder if “community objections” means our grandma?’ said Jaide.
‘Probably. Dad said she didn’t turn up to the last meeting. That’s probably what did it.’ Tara lowered her voice. ‘And that’s not all. Dad and I looked at the site this morning. You’ll never guess what we found.’
Jack wanted to say A giant snake skin? but managed to keep it in. ‘Tell us.’
Tara drew them into a huddle so she could whisper.
‘One of the circular saws had been taken out of the tool shed overnight. The blade was covered in blood.’
Jaide’s eyes narrowed. ‘Blood?’
‘It looked like blood. I only got a glimpse though. It was all over the ground. Dad took me away and called the police. Did you know Portland actually has a police station?’
‘Yes,’ said Jaide. ‘It’s next to the hospital. Tell us more about the blood. What happened then?’
‘Well, it was gross, what I saw of it, but
I had to wait in the van until the police arrived, and then Dad took me to school. You know everything I do now.’
‘Police?’ said Miralda, who had seen the huddle and come up behind Tara. ‘What about the police?’
Tara told the story again, and the whole class gathered around to listen. Even Kyle paid attention. When Tara had finished, she was grilled for more information, which she couldn’t provide, and the class dissolved into wild speculation that Mr Carver found very difficult to stop, no matter how much he turned his back and counted to ten in some obscure language.
After that, Miralda asked Tara to sit with her during break, but Tara chose to stay with Jack and Jaide.
‘Dad’s going to be busy after school,’ she said as they exited the classroom. ‘Want to hang out this afternoon?’
‘We can’t,’ Jaide said. ‘Mum’s back today and she’ll want to spend quality time with us.’
‘Yeah,’ Jack echoed, ‘by making us do homework and baking another cake probably.’
‘What about tomorrow?’ Jaide suggested.
‘Can’t,’ Tara said. ‘Guitar lessons. Wednesday?’
‘Done!’
They shook hands and laughed when they saw Miralda scowling at them.
‘Hey, there’s a ladybird!’ said Jack on their way home. ‘And another one . . . two . . . there’s loads of them!’
‘So?’
‘Isn’t that, like, good luck or something?’
‘Only if they land on you and then fly off your thumb or something like that.’
Jack held up his hand. Half a dozen ladybirds immediately landed on his outstretched fingers and he rotated his hand to try to make them crawl on to his thumb. But they barely crawled an inch before they fell off, one by one, straight down to the ground, where they lay still.
Jack knelt down and poked them with his finger, but they didn’t move.
‘They’re dead,’ he said wonderingly. ‘They were fine, flying . . . now they’re dead.’
‘Maybe they were old,’ said Jaide. ‘Or maybe your bad breath killed them.’
‘I don’t have bad breath! Do I?’
He huffed into his palm, but could only smell his hand.
