Troubletwisters

by Garth Nix

  ‘Young troubletwisters, come closer.’

  ‘Who’s there?’ Jaide called out. She and Jack edged nearer to each other, both of them peering around in all directions.

  ‘Look under the trees. Come to us and we will help you. We are your friends.’

  Jaide and Jack took a step back, paused, and looked across at the school. The rats’ heads tracked their every movement.

  ‘Let’s look,’ Jaide whispered. ‘But be ready to run.’

  The twins warily crossed the road and looked down the slope, through the gnarled branches and misshapen trunks to the river. But they couldn’t see anyone – or any rats – which was a relief.

  ‘Where are you?’ called Jaide. ‘I can’t see you.’

  ‘There,’ said Jack, pointing.

  As if he had made the person appear, Jaide now saw a solitary human figure standing under one of the twisted trees, wrapped in shadow.

  ‘We are your friends,’ the whispering voice repeated. ‘Only we can save you from the witch. Come.’

  There was something fascinating about the voice. The twins took a step closer without even thinking, and would have taken another step, but the voice was interrupted by a car that drove across the bridge to their right. The iron bridge hummed with its passage, and strange, rhythmic echoes spread across the water.

  ‘Who . . . who are you?’ Jaide called.

  ‘You do not know us yet, but you will. It is time. We will tell you everything,’ the figure said. It thrust out an arm in a jerky, peculiar wave. ‘Come with us. Hurry.’

  Jack started to head down the slope, moving like a sleepwalker. Jaide made a grab for him but missed.

  ‘Jack, wait!’

  ‘We will tell you the truth,’ said the voice. The figure stepped partly out of the shadow of the tree, legs jerking like a puppet’s. Jaide hesitated, then jumped down the slope after Jack.

  ‘Jack! Come back!’ she shouted. ‘Something’s wrong!’

  ‘We want only to help,’ said the figure soothingly. ‘Come to us, troubletwisters. Quickly!’

  Jack moved faster. Jaide slipped in the mud and fell on one knee.

  ‘Jack! Stop!’

  The figure under the tree reached out, as if in welcome, but its arms were too long. A cat yowled somewhere in the distance behind them.

  Jack started to run toward that strange embrace.

  ‘Yessss,’ said the voice. ‘Welcome!’

  With that last word, the figure fell apart, white-eyed rats cascading off a decaying, scarecrow framework of sticks and black cloth, the illusion of a person completely gone.

  In that same moment, the ground in front of Jack collapsed. His balance went, and he fell backward, twisting around as the earth carried him down into a sudden sinkhole.

  Jack slid down, down, down, the loose soil carrying him deep underground. Desperately he tried to scrabble and claw his way to the surface, but there was nothing to hold on to, and nothing solid under his feet.

  He sank deeper, gulping one desperate breath before the earth closed over above his head.

  UNLIKE HER BROTHER, JAIDE DID scream as she tried to stop herself from being swallowed up by the hole as well. She was already sliding in the mud, slipping inexorably toward the patch of turbulent earth, which was moving as if in answer to strong currents below the surface. But at the last second she managed to grab a tree trunk, forcing her fingernails into the bark so hard they broke. She came to rest with her feet in loose earth up to her ankles.

  ‘Jack!’

  There was no answer.

  ‘Jack!’

  Again Jack did not answer, but something else did. There was a flicker of movement in the hole. Jaide pulled herself back with a shriek as thousands of red ants boiled up out of the earth.

  But the ants didn’t attack. They were busy filling in the hole, burying her brother. Jaide scrambled upright and put her back to the tree, just as a dozen milky-eyed rats poked their heads out of the roiling mix of dirt and ants. The rats turned as one and opened their mouths, speaking together.

  ‘Come! Come to us, troubletwister!’

  Jaide screamed again and went up the tree faster than she had ever climbed before. The rats watched her, their horrible eyes moving in unison, and then a great column of white-eyed red ants swarmed out of the dirt and came straight to the tree, climbing in an incredibly fast swathe of red and black and white.

  Twenty feet up, Jaide looked down, just for a moment. The tide of ants was almost upon her, and the rats had disappeared back under the loose earth. There was no sign of Jack at all.

  The vanguard of the ants reached her foot. Jaide shut her eyes and jumped toward the river, her arms outstretched in the approved safety-jump style.

  The wind shrieked across her face. Light spun around her. River, sky and sun dazzled her as she braced herself for the sudden impact of the water.

  But there was no impact. Jaide felt something cold under her hands and she instinctively gripped an iron rail. She opened her eyes, utterly disoriented as, far too close, a car honked its horn.

  She wasn’t in the river. For a moment Jaide feared that she might faint, but she couldn’t do that. Jack needed her, and the rats and ants might be coming for her at that very moment. She needed to do something!

  Jaide’s vision cleared, and she looked in wonderment around her. She was on the bridge.

  Below her, the trees whipped and swayed. She was high above the bank, at least momentarily safe from what she knew lay in the shadows.

  I flew, Jaide thought. The wind took me here!

  ‘Are you all right?’

  Jaide felt a hand on her shoulder and gasped with fright. She pushed herself away, but it was only a portly man in a baseball cap, who had just got out of the car that was stopped close by in the middle of the bridge.

  ‘I didn’t see you at first,’ said the man. He held up his hands to show that he meant no harm. ‘I didn’t . . . I didn’t hit you, did I?’

  ‘My brother,’ said Jaide, pointing frantically over the safety rail. ‘My brother!’

  ‘It’s all right, Alf,’ said a familiar voice. ‘She’s with me.’

  All the blood drained to Jaide’s toes. She didn’t need to turn to know that Grandma X was on the bridge, too – with her hair wild and her slippers showing from under her hastily donned coat. Her expression was furious and her eyes bored into Jaide’s.

  ‘I’ll take care of her.’

  Jack’s chest was burning and he was desperate to breathe, but he didn’t dare open his mouth. Then he felt himself fall again, the earth giving way completely, and he landed heavily on his backside.

  He instinctively took a breath, a breath that turned into a series of sobs and coughs. But at least he could breathe. More dirt rained down on him and he quickly scrabbled backward to avoid being buried under a miniature landslide.

  The shower of earth stopped. Jack brushed himself off and looked around, his eyes slowly adapting to the darkness. He was relieved to find that he could see as well as breathe, even though there was no visible source of illumination. He guessed there must be daylight leaking in somewhere.

  He was in a dimly lit tunnel that might once have been some kind of sewer. It was circular, wide enough to stand up in, and made out of concrete. A jagged hole had been smashed in the ceiling, through which he and a small mountain of dirt had just fallen. Dozens of tiny red ants crawled across the ground, waving their angry feelers at him.

  Thin, white tree roots stretched like harp strings across one end of the tunnel, to his right. He couldn’t see what was at the other end, but for the moment his thoughts were directed above the ground.

  What was happening to Jaide?

  Jack picked himself up and started to dig at the ceiling with his bare hands, but as fast as he tried, more earth fell down on him. Ants followed, scrambling into his clothes and biting him. Then a big lump of concrete missed him by an inch, forcing him to stop.

  He told himself to stay calm. He was scared,
he was covered in matted earth, there were ants crawling all over him, but at least he was alive. And he could see, too, which was a great relief – although he still couldn’t work out where the light was coming from.

  Then he heard the voice. A soft, slurring voice that did not sound at all human.

  ‘Troubletwister . . . Troubletwister . . .’

  Jack looked up. Directly above him, a great mass of white-eyed ants was hanging down like a swarm of bees migrating from a hive. The ants moved as one, tens of thousands of them working together. As Jack watched, a large and very dead rat was pushed to the front of the mass, and then the ants pulled and pushed the mouth and inflated the dead rat’s chest.

  The voice came out of this dead rat’s mouth.

  ‘So good you have come at last, troubletwister!’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t see you there . . . Good morning.’

  ‘Not to worry, Alf. I appreciate your stopping. There’s some traffic building up now. Best you be moving on.’

  ‘Right you are.’

  Alf nodded to Grandma X, almost bowing, and hurried back to his car. A truck and two other cars were queued up behind him, as close to a traffic jam as Portland ever saw. Their drivers watched curiously, wondering what an old lady and a young girl were doing in the middle of the iron bridge.

  Jaide opened her mouth to call for help, but at that moment Grandma X’s ringed hand came down on her shoulder and the girl could neither move nor speak. Jaide was locked into her body as though it were a coffin.

  Grandma X waved with her other hand as Alf drove away and the backed-up traffic began to flow again. Jaide found that she could move her eyes, but looking at Grandma X didn’t help. The old woman had the air of someone dragged backward out of bed, and she wasn’t happy about it at all.

  ‘When I take my hand off you, I want you to tell me where Jackaran is,’ said Grandma X calmly. ‘It’s vital you do so without delay.’

  Jaide couldn’t nod or shake her head. All she could do was stare in frustrated silence and wait for her chance.

  ‘Don’t run, Jaidith,’ said Grandma X, as though she could read her mind. ‘I don’t know what on earth you think is going on, but I am not your enemy. Your brother needs help, and only we can give it to him.’

  The spell came off. Jaide pushed herself away and immediately tripped over Kleo, who yowled and retreated behind Grandma X. Jaide landed on her elbow. The pain was sharp and startling. Tears sprang to her eyes.

  Grandma X showed little sympathy as she hauled Jaide to her feet.

  ‘Every second counts, Jaide. Tell me what happened to Jackaran.’

  Jaide clambered to her feet, very confused. She’d thought the rats and ants and everything else worked for Grandma X. Surely the woman already knew what had happened to Jack?

  ‘We were going to school, but the rats were there . . . your rats . . . then someone called to us from the trees and it was . . . it was like we couldn’t resist . . . or Jack couldn’t. He went first and . . . he fell into a hole that swallowed him up and there were ants and I climbed a tree and jumped and . . . then I was here, I don’t know how.’

  ‘Show me where it happened,’ said Grandma X urgently. She pushed Jaide into movement and followed closely behind. ‘There were rats, you say? White-eyed rats?’

  ‘Yes, at the school and then . . . the person, the one calling, he . . . it . . . was just all rats as well,’ Jaide said. ‘Look, under that willow with the two branches in an F, the clear patch of dirt. That was a hole and Jack went in it! Your rats and ants have probably got him right now!’

  ‘They’re not my rats and ants,’ said Grandma X. She was peering at the bare patch of ground and fumbling with something in her bag.

  ‘Who do they belong to, then?’ Jaide asked weakly. She recognised the feeling that was starting to spread through her, underneath her fear for Jack. She didn’t want to acknowledge it, but she recognised that Grandma X was speaking the honest truth – and that was accompanied by the dawning, awful realisation that she had made a bad mistake.

  ‘I will explain everything as soon as I can. Right now we need to rescue Jack.’

  Grandma X strode down the slope to the bare patch where Jack had disappeared. The live ants were gone, but when Jaide got closer she could see quite a number of dead ones sprinkled around.

  ‘Be careful,’ said Grandma X, waving her back. ‘That’s how he was taken, through unsound soil.’

  ‘Taken where?’ Jaide still wasn’t sure about Grandma X, but she didn’t know who else she could turn to, to get help for Jack. The police or the fire department certainly wouldn’t listen if she showed them apparently solid ground and said that Jack had been taken down into the earth.

  ‘Probably into an old drain. The town is crisscrossed with them. We had a very energetic engineer for several decades back in the nineteen hundreds.’ Grandma X looked up from her examination of the soil. ‘Did you see any other creatures apart from the rats and the ants?’

  Jaide shook her head. ‘No. Does that matter?’

  ‘It gives us . . . and Jack . . . a little more time. Let’s go!’

  Grandma X started up the hill.

  ‘But shouldn’t we stay here . . . and dig or something?’

  ‘No. Jack won’t be directly underneath anymore. Come on!’

  Grandma X was already halfway back up to the bridge. Jaide hesitated, then hurried after her grandmother.

  ‘Where are we going?’ she gasped. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘The first step is to find out exactly where Jackaran is, and to do that I must get inside, out of the daylight.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because my Gift is tied to the moon, and the sun interferes with it,’ said Grandma X.

  ‘What Gift? What are you talking about?’

  ‘This is part of a greater explanation, which I have been waiting to give you. Suffice it to say that each of our kind is different in his or her own way. Your Gifts appear to be of the sun and air. I think your brother’s are of night and darkness. I have learned that much about the two of you in the short time you have been with me.’

  They turned onto Parkhill Street and hurried toward Watchward Lane. Grandma X was moving very fast for an old lady, and Jaide had to jog to keep up.

  ‘My Gifts? Our kind?’ asked Jaide. ‘What do you —’

  She was interrupted by Kleo, who ran up from behind them carrying a long-tailed rat that, while still alive, hung limply in the cat’s mouth, Kleo’s teeth firmly fastened in a fold of fur behind the rat’s head. The rat’s eyes were only partly milky, the white cloud swirling around like milk going down a drain.

  ‘Good work, Kleo!’ exclaimed Grandma X. ‘Very good work indeed! That’s exactly what we need.’

  As they hurried up the drive to Grandma X’s house, Jaide saw that the blue door was completely visible now, as was the sign. Now it simply said: Keep Out!

  High above, the moon-and-star weathervane was pointing fixedly to the northwest – toward the iron bridge. Jaide hesitated on the steps, remembering the efforts she and Jack had made to escape, and the certainty with which she had decided that Grandma X was a witch who was out to get them. But that certainty was completely gone now, and in its place was the knowledge that Jack was in terrible danger . . . and Jaide felt that it was all her fault.

  They ran straight into the drawing room. Grandma X took down a bell jar and held it upside down so Kleo could deposit the rat inside. Then she slapped on the lid before the rodent could escape.

  ‘Now. Let’s find out what this thing knows. Jaide, give me your hand.’

  Jaide let herself be gripped tightly by her grandma’s strong fingers. She could feel the impression of the stone set in the ring. It was smooth and oval, and weirdly cold.

  Grandma X placed her left palm against the bell jar. Instantly the cloudiness in the rat’s eyes stopped swirling and settled into a band across the middle. The rat thrashed around, as if it had been struck, then its head went up as if
caught in an invisible noose. It squeaked piteously, and slowly and reluctantly turned to press one pink ear against the side of the glass, against Grandma X’s hand.

  As it did so, something very strange shot into Jaide’s arm, into her mind. It was the rat’s thoughts, tiny and petty and focused on smells and tastes and food and its kind.

  Jaide gasped.

  ++Don’t distract me,++ said Grandma X. Her mouth didn’t move – the words came directly into Jaide’s mind. ++I need some of your strength to do this in daylight, and you need to see what we’re dealing with. Be calm and let me do the work for you.++

  Jaide nodded through her disorientation. The rat’s thoughts rose up to overwhelm her; within them, she was surprised to find the thoughts of other creatures, too, tinier appetites that tasted of dirt and decay and family. She squirmed, thinking of insects. Was this what it was like to be a cockroach or a fly? And if so, what were such experiences doing in the mind of a rat?

  Grandma X probed deeper. Something dark lurked in the rat’s thoughts. She seized upon it and pursued it deeper still. Jaide felt as though they were following a lightless tunnel down into the heart of the earth, where creatures lived that had never seen the light of the sun, or the moon, or the stars. It was like being at the bottom of the ocean. And still they went deeper, following a tendril of darkness that never seemed to end.

  Down, down, they went, silently, stealthily, hands clasped tightly as they searched for Jack.

  ++Help me,++ Grandma X said into Jaide’s mind. ++You’re his twin. You know him best of all. Conjure him in your thoughts so we can find him, together.++

  Jaide struggled to comply with the request. She felt as though the blackness was sucking out her very life, like an oil slick creeping across a shore. Jack was a fading memory that took some reviving. He was four minutes younger than her, and looked more like their father than like their mother, with brown eyes, darker skin and black hair. And although he could be annoying sometimes, Jaide didn’t know what she would do if he never came back.