Troubletwisters

by Garth Nix

  While the music box played, the world seemed to stop. Jack and Jaide didn’t notice that the clank of tracks had ceased, or the frozen rats, or the cats stalking back toward them.

  Jaide and Jack were lost in the music. The tune played over and over, drawing them deeper and deeper into its spell. The outside world had become irrelevant. Only the music mattered.

  Something sharp dug into the back of Jaide’s right hand, as something equally sharp stabbed Jack behind the knee. Both gasped and, looking down, saw the cats retracting claws into padded paws.

  ‘Step away from the music box!’ commanded Kleo. ‘Put your fingers in your ears and try not to listen.’

  Jaide felt as though she’d been wrenched out of a nice warm bath and dumped into icy snow.

  ‘What did you do that for?’ she asked petulantly.

  ‘Put your fingers in your ears!’ repeated Kleo sharply.

  Jaide and Jack did as they were told. Though they could still hear and feel the music, its grip on them was lessened.

  ‘Another minute and you might never have come back,’ said Kleo.

  Jaide looked down at the music box and across to the immobile rats. Several frozen cockroaches and spiders had dropped to the ground nearby. The bulldozer was silent.

  ‘This solves all our problems, doesn’t it? We keep this playing and The Evil can’t get in.’

  ‘Things like this can only be wound once,’ said Kleo. ‘And it won’t play for long. It’s old. Springs can break or cogs jam. It could end at any moment.’

  As if it heard Kleo’s words, the music faltered for a second. The twins’ hearts almost stopped in that moment of silence, as the rats and insects rustled forward, just a fraction of an inch. Then the music started again, and the figures continued to revolve.

  ‘Go!’ said Ari. ‘We’ll guard here as best we can! Go!’

  THE TWINS HURRIED INTO THE storm-addled night, the two of them alone against The Evil. Rain dashed down against them, and the wind blew it into their faces. It was cold, and even the exertion of their fast walk could not warm them. The moon and stars were completely hidden by the dense clouds, and it was very dark, as if a thick, heavy blanket had been thrown over the town.

  Jack, who could see perfectly well, took Jaide’s hand as she stumbled for the seventh time.

  ‘Stay behind me,’ he said. ‘I’ll guide you.’

  With Jack leading, they broke into more of a run. They knew time was short, even though they could still hear the gentle tune of the music box. Somehow it followed them, cutting cleanly through the sounds of rain and wind.

  The tune had a familiar air, like ‘Greensleeves’, but there was something modern about it, too. The rhythm was both jaunty and solemn, and its constant presence reassured them that The Evil was contained behind them, at least for now.

  This reassurance did not last long. As they skirted around the base of the Rock, the rain suddenly stopped.

  For a moment this was a relief, until something flew into Jack’s face. He brushed it away, feeling the hard carapace and wings of a beetle.

  ‘Uh-oh,’ he said. Then he closed his mouth just in time, as many more beetles followed the first. It was like being hit by spiky hailstones. The twins struggled on against this assault until a beetle struck Jack’s eye and he had to stop to wipe it away. So many more beetles smashed against them that the twins had to crouch down, facing each other, and shield their faces with their arms.

  ‘Jaide! Blow them away!’ Jack coughed. A beetle had crawled into his mouth as he spoke, its burred legs gripping his tongue.

  Jaide reached out to the wind around them. She could feel it like it was part of herself, like an extra arm. She focused her mind on it, and then swung, making a mental swishing motion against herself.

  She’d expected a sudden gust of wind, but got a miniature whirlwind instead. It lifted the twins off the ground and carried them forward a dozen yards, dropping them unceremoniously at the cemetery gate. But it kept going with the beetles, sweeping them far out to sea.

  ‘Can you still hear the music?’ Jack asked anxiously. The storm had lashed up the sea, and though the rain had stopped, the deep boom of the swell smashing into the rocks below the lighthouse was much louder now.

  ‘Yes,’ said Jaide. ‘Only just, though. Come on!’

  Hand in hand they raced to the lighthouse. Jaide smacked into Jack’s back as he stopped before the door, sending them both stumbling against it.

  ‘It’s still locked,’ said Jack. The three big bolts were all padlocked. He tugged at the padlocks, but they didn’t move.

  ‘The music’s stopped,’ said Jaide. She couldn’t see a thing and was already imagining The Evil’s creatures swarming toward her in the darkness. ‘Can you . . . can you see anything coming?’

  Jack turned around. There was something moving between the headstones of the cemetery – a huge, dark mass that looked like a single, undulating thing, till he saw the dotted flecks of white that could only be thousands of tiny Evil-infested eyes.

  ‘Mice,’ he croaked. ‘Uh, probably nothing to worry about, but maybe if you could use the wind to lift us up to the top of the lighthouse, that would be good.’

  ‘Mice?’ Jaide didn’t feel as confident as her brother after her airborne battle with the seagulls. ‘If it’s only mice, what else is out there?’

  At that moment, the mice all squeaked as one, with the voice of The Evil.

  ++Troubletwisters!++

  The high-pitched squeal was like the amplified scream of an enraged crone.

  ‘Hold both my hands!’ shouted Jaide, reaching out to grab her brother.

  Jack gripped her as if she were a life buoy and he was going under for the third and final time. Jaide felt the wind again, and visualised it as a cupping, gentle hand, coming up underneath them to carefully carry them just high enough to reach the walkway around the light, some one hundred and fifty feet above.

  The wind answered, howling down. As the tide of mice poured around, between and over the closest headstones, Jack and Jaide were lifted up and away.

  But not toward the light. Instead, the wind swept them right off the headland and shot up above the sea, before dropping them with alarming suddenness toward the spray of the great, curling waves that were pounding the rocks below.

  ‘No!’ shrieked Jaide. ‘Up to the top of the lighthouse! Up!’

  The wind dropped them another half-dozen feet, into the crest of an enormous grey-green wave. Jack was almost torn from Jaide’s grasp by the force of the water, even though he was only caught by the very tip of the wave.

  ‘Up!’ Jaide commanded desperately. She put all the force of her will into that one word.

  The wind responded. The twins shot straight up into the sky, far higher than the dark lighthouse below.

  ‘To the lighthouse walkway!’ shouted Jaide furiously. She pointed down, initially in the wrong direction, until Jack hastily wrenched her hand around.

  The wind spun them about and then left them entirely. The twins fell screaming, until the wind came back and snatched them up again, taking their breath away. A moment later, they flew wildly around the lighthouse below the rail, circling it several times as Jack desperately tried to reach out and grab hold.

  Then, almost with a chuckle, the wind lifted them a fraction, just over the railing, and dumped them on the walkway, a twelve-sided mesh platform that entirely circled the tall, glass lamp enclosure.

  Jack staggered to his feet and tried the door that led inside. For a second he thought it was locked, but the handle was just stuck. He forced it down, and the metal-framed glass door opened with the screech of long disuse.

  ‘See if you can find a light,’ Jaide called out urgently. She was lying on the walkway, holding on to the railing. She hated not being able to see anything, particularly as her lack of sight made her more aware of the grasping wind. Even now it wanted her to join it again, to take off and fly far and free.

  Jack was examining an electrical b
ox on the low wall under the glass, which extended up another dozen feet. The box had several huge circuit breaker levers, all of which were down.

  ‘Here goes nothing,’ he said, and pushed one up. Exactly nothing happened. He pushed the next one up, with the same effect. Then he pushed the last one, and this time there was a blinding flash. Jack reeled back into the main lantern apparatus in the centre of the room. A second later he was thrown off as it started to revolve. Lying on the floor, he blinked rapidly, liquid black blotches dancing around in his vision.

  ‘Thanks,’ Jaide said from the walkway. ‘I meant, like, the inside lights, not the lighthouse light.’

  Jack sat up. The huge reflector, twice his height and four feet across, was rotating slowly, sending its dazzling light out over the sea, the beam slowly circling the bay.

  ‘The mice are all around the base,’ Jaide said urgently. ‘They might already be inside.’

  Jack rushed to the rail and looked over. There was a surging mass of rodents completely encircling the base of the lighthouse. They were bound to find a way in, and would only take a few minutes to swarm to the top.

  But that wasn’t all. Jack spotted something else.

  ‘There’s something coming up out of the sea,’ he warned his sister. ‘Something really big.’

  Jaide looked out. She couldn’t see anything at first, until the beam from the lighthouse swept across, briefly illuminating a huge, bestial shape that was pulling itself out of the raging sea and coming up the cliff. Hundred-foot-long tentacles preceded a vast oval-shaped body the size of a fishing trawler.

  ‘It’s made of seaweed and jellyfish,’ Jack said slowly. ‘Hundreds . . . thousands of them . . . Oh, it’s falling back!’

  A particularly big wave had smashed into the giant creature’s back, loosening its hold on the rocks, and then the undertow had undermined its footing. But it was only a temporary reprieve. The creature sucked in more and more seaweed, jellyfish and anything else that swam nearby, and grew even larger and stronger.

  ‘We need to find the plate!’ Jaide shouted. She ran inside and started searching around the low wall under the windows. She saw no brass plaques, but she did see numerous examples of graffiti etched into the stone. Lighthouse-keepers and visitors to the lighthouse had been memorialising it for decades, it seemed, including the occasional dating couple. At the base of a narrow iron ladder leading up to the very peak of the lighthouse, where a tall lightning rod invited the heavens to do their worst, she saw SAH ♥ HJS, and realised with a jolt that they were her parents’ initials, before they were married. She couldn’t imagine them ever being so young, or so delinquent as to graffiti a public monument!

  Jack didn’t notice the initials. His eye had caught something even further up the lighthouse, something that had flashed brightly as the beam of light passed underneath.

  It was a small brass plate above the twelve-foot glass window of the lantern room, next to the narrow iron ladder.

  ‘It’s here!’ he shouted, pointing. The ladder was wet, and the rungs were thin and slippery, but he was up it in an instant. The brass plate was screwed into a wooden beam that was part of the window frame, but it was two feet from the ladder. Jack had to hang on with one hand and reach across.

  Once, the old plaque might have been identical to the one Jaide had below. It had the same words, but they were faded, and the brass itself was riddled with tiny black cracks, like veins.

  Jack leaned out and touched it, and the plate flaked away beneath his fingers, leaving only remnant corners around the silver screws.

  ‘Quick!’ he shouted. ‘Give me the replacement and a screwdriver!’

  Jaide came up halfway, gripping the ladder with all her strength. When she had to pass the plate and the screwdriver with her right hand, she looped her whole left arm through a rung and locked her elbow. Even so, her feet were lifted off, and the wind almost had her before she could get a grip with her other hand again.

  Heavy, thought Jaide. I’m heavy, heavy, heavy.

  She managed to get back down to the walkway and hold on there, the wind howling around her, encouraging her to let go. But even over the wind, she could hear a frenzied scrabbling and squeaking at the hatch in the lantern room as the mouse horde tried to get through.

  On the headland, the giant creature finally managed to get out of the sea. It half-crawled, half-flowed toward the lighthouse and, as it did so, it began to elongate. Its existing tentacles split into several thinner, longer ones. Jellyfish, seaweed, crabs, squid and hundreds of different types of fish dripped from the creature’s composite form as it oozed forward, and it left a glistening, flopping trail fifty feet wide.

  It took Jaide only a few seconds to recognise that its leading tentacles had reached the base of the lighthouse and were feeling their way upward.

  She was so intent on the squid-monster that the appearance of a woman’s face at the edge of the walkway came as an incredibly awful surprise. She was milky-eyed, and her face was bruised and battered, with dried blood caked under her nose and mouth. Rat heads now grew out of her shoulders, bursting through a cloak of cockroaches shielding her from the rain. But far, far worse than that were the spiders that supported her, hundreds of fat, hairy spiders that had encased her in a coat of webs, the webs they had used to carry her up the side of the lighthouse.

  ++We have been looking for you,++ said Rennie. ++And now we have found you.++

  The woman grasped the rail, and the spiders peeled off her, swarming up the railing, trailing their webs behind them. The wind blew some away, but there were many, many more spiders to take their place. They quickly wove a rope that Rennie used to swing herself up and over the rail.

  ++Now we have found you.++

  Rennie was shouting aloud, her impassioned cry echoed by rats and cockroaches and the towering sea creature, but the sound was a mere whisper compared to the mental scream of The Evil inside Jaide’s and Jack’s minds.

  ++We will never let you go!++

  Jaide did let go, and let the wind take her – driving her body straight at Rennie like a missile, her clenched hands thrust out ahead of her.

  She struck Rennie in the chest and felt The Evil reach out from Rennie, but the contact was too fleeting. Rennie flipped backward over the railing in a shower of dislodged cockroaches and was gone.

  Jaide spun over, too, but she did a somersault in the air, a violent fishtail, and then a kind of strange thrashing butterfly swimming stroke that somehow delivered her back to the walkway, where she landed on spiders and did a screeching dance across to, and up, the ladder.

  ‘Rennie . . . she . . . uh . . . it is still there,’ said Jack, who was looking down through the diamond-shaped mesh of the steel walkway. Jack had instantly recognised her, even though she was now a hideous recombination of human, rat and insect. ‘Hanging on a web, twenty feet under. The spiders are going to help her, that squid thing is getting closer, and I can’t get the last stupid screw out!’

  Jack could see the huge tentacles reaching out toward them, and the main body of the creature pulling itself along behind. He could smell it, too, an incredibly powerful, rancid fish smell stronger than anything any fish market had ever managed, even on a hot day.

  ‘Let me try,’ said Jaide, tugging on his leg.

  Jack climbed down the ladder and Jaide shimmied up past him.

  ‘Hang on to my legs,’ she told him as she leaned over again and put all the strength of her shoulder, arm and hand into the screwdriver. It was very stiff, and for a long, horrible moment, she thought she, too, might not be strong enough. She gritted her teeth and strained until her fingers burned.

  Slowly, the last of the old silver screws began to turn.

  ‘Yes!’ Jaide shouted in triumph.

  But as the last screw teetered out and fell, the fading powers of the East Ward of Portland finally died.

  Now there was nothing in the east to stand between The Evil and the town.

  Jack and Jaide felt the ward g
o, and the sudden surge in The Evil’s power that came with it. Both of them almost fell off the ladder from the mental shock as they were struck with a thousand super-fast, flickering images of The Evil’s triumph. They saw that horrible milky-white glow spread across the eyes of everyone they’d met in town, from Rodeo Dave to the schoolteacher, Mr Carver. They saw the doors of Grandma X’s house bursting under the weight of rats and other vermin, and Ari and Kleo being ripped apart. They saw the mice pouring into the lantern room of the lighthouse. They saw themselves holding out welcoming arms to the tentacle of the giant squid-thing —

  ‘No!’ screamed the twins together.

  The vision disappeared, blown away by their scream.

  The Evil had not triumphed – not yet.

  ‘Give me the plate!’ shouted Jaide. ‘Keep holding my legs!’

  Jack handed her the leather case that held the plate and screws, then wrapped his arms around his sister’s legs and the ladder, his hands in a monkey grip on the far side. Every time the bright light of the lamp swept over him, he felt his strength waver. Only in the dark did he feel strong.

  Help me, he thought to the night. But it was as if there was a barrier now between him and his Gift. A thick, threatening barrier, which had to be a manifestation of The Evil’s growing power. Help me!

  ++There is no help for you here,++ said The Evil’s voice out of the storm. ++Except from us.++

  ‘Why would you help us?’ said Jack.

  ++We will help you because only we do not want you to die. Where is the witch when you need her? Where are the Wardens? They do not care as we care. They are not your true family.++

  Jack shook his head. He didn’t want to believe the voice, but his determination was flagging. Everything it said was true. Grandma X hadn’t helped him when he was in the tunnels – all she had done was send a storm, which might have drowned him had he not got himself out. She hadn’t helped Jaide when the birds had attacked her. And she wasn’t helping now, when all of Portland was in danger. Even the cats were at best reluctant allies. They didn’t take sides, Ari said, which meant they weren’t on Jack and Jaide’s. No one was.