‘Where’s Jack?’ Tara asked, firmly putting a blue peg into her car.
‘Talking to Grandma, I think. How are things coming at the old sawmill?’
‘Great. Dad seems pretty excited everyone’s back at work on it.’
‘No more blood . . . or other weird stuff ?’
Tara shook her head. ‘It’s all been very boring. Much more fun being here. Thanks for inviting me.’
They had come home from school to find that Susan had made them another cake, this one a lemon cake with chocolate icing. It was a significant improvement, but a bit rubbery, and stuck to their teeth for an unsettlingly long time.
The girls had gone straight for the games, but Jack hadn’t been in the mood for playing. All the way home, he had been buzzed by a pair of dragonflies, and even though they had normal eyes, he couldn’t shake the thought that they were somehow sent by The Evil. Then, to make matters worse, he’d swatted one and it had dropped dead as a stone, even though he’d barely touched it. Then the other one had done a kamikaze into his chest and it had died as well, making Jack wonder if he was developing a new and deeply unwanted Gift – attracting insects and killing them.
He wanted to talk to Grandma X about it, and finally found her in the Blue Room, hand-washing a tub full of what looked like cream-coloured clothes. This struck Jack as odd, but he was becoming used to her doing stuff like that.
‘What if The Evil has found a way to hide the white-eye thing?’ he asked her. ‘That way, it could be anything or anyone and we would never know.’
‘Are you talking about Martin McAndrew again?’
He explained about the ladybirds and the dragonflies.
‘The eyes are the window of the soul,’ said Grandma X, standing up and wiping her hands on a now very stained apron. ‘The Evil doesn’t have one, so that’s why we see what we see. There’s no hiding that white radiance, that absence, except behind glasses or a mask. Otherwise, yes, The Evil could be in anything or anyone, and we would lose the fight for certain. Be thankful it’ll never happen.’
‘Yes, but what if . . .?’
‘It’s not The Evil, Jackaran,’ said Grandma X. ‘It is possible that it is some side-effect of your Gift, one that will doubtless settle down when your Gift does.’
Jack looked at his shoes and sighed.
‘Well, as I can see it’s really bothering you . . . ‘ She went to a cupboard, rummaged about for a moment, then returned with a small ceramic jar. She screwed off the top, releasing a powerful but not unpleasant aroma that made the back of Jack’s nose sit up and pay close attention.
‘Here.’ With one finger, she removed a tiny dose of ointment and applied it to the inside of Jack’s wrists.
‘What is it?’ he asked, feeling a tingling sensation rush across his skin.
‘Insect repellent,’ she said, closing the lid of the jar and giving it back to him. ‘I could say it was something more to make you feel better, but that would not be true.’
Jack felt faintly cheated. ‘Have you ever lied to us, Grandma?’
Grandma X gave Jack a hug around the shoulders.
‘You know I have to avoid telling you things, Jackaran. But I do not speak untruths. Not without a very good reason.’
That was no more reassuring than the repellent. Jack looked at the door and sighed. He wasn’t ready to go back out into the real world, where his Gift was unreliable, unknown threats waited to hassle him and the girls would gang up on him.
‘Do you mind if I stay with you and read the Compendium ?’
‘Of course you may. But when your mother returns from the shops, we’d both better put in an appearance or she’ll begin to wonder where we’ve got to.’
Jack sat himself at her desk and pulled out the fat, fact-filled folder and put the image of Amadeus firmly at the front of his mind. Maybe he could find something that would help repel the invasion that Kleo thought was coming.
Despite Ari’s confident assertion that cats were too sure of themselves ever to be controlled by The Evil, the Compendium reported otherwise. There were numerous instances in which cats had been taken over, and numerous case studies of how they had been dealt with. The examples ranged from Wardens summoning waterspouts to drench the cats, magically growing catnip to distract them, whipping up sheets of static electricity to rub their hair the wrong way and even scaring them off with illusions of giant birds or rabid dogs. None of which Jack could do, but he read on anyway, hoping to find a solution to Kleo’s problem.
They had homemade hamburgers for dinner, followed by more rubbery cake and strawberry ice cream. Jack, Jaide and Tara played hide-and-seek on the two lower floors, and Tara was surprisingly good at it. Jack couldn’t think of anywhere to hide that she couldn’t immediately find him in, and she even found Jaide under her own bed, despite Jaide using Jack’s Gift to blend into the shadows.
When Jack was It, Jaide hid behind a curtain in the study, and was concentrating on trying to breathe very shallowly when she saw Tara’s father’s van sitting on Watchward Lane. She was about to call for Tara when she hesitated. Something about the van didn’t look right. It wasn’t moving and its lights were off. It was just waiting there.
Puzzled, she pressed her face against the glass in order to see better. The driver’s seat was in shadow; she couldn’t even tell if there was someone behind the wheel. She had just come to the conclusion that it was parked there while Tara’s dad looked over the house next door, when suddenly it started up and backed down the lane, out of sight, all without turning its lights on.
Five minutes later the van returned, headlights blazing, driving up the lane and straight into the drive to honk for Tara to come out. The game of hide-and-seek was abandoned as Susan called them down, and the twins accompanied Tara outside.
Her dad didn’t get out of the car. He just waved with one hand, while holding his phone and typing with the thumb of the other. He didn’t even say anything more than a glancing ‘Hi’ to Tara as she got in, though Jaide half-expected him to say something about waiting in the lane.
‘Do you want to come over Friday night after school?’ Tara asked after she wound down the window of the van.
‘Mum?’ Jack asked Susan.
‘If it’s OK with your grandmother, it’s OK with me. I’ll be back at work then.’
‘Sure!’ Jack told Tara.
She beamed. ‘See you tomorrow!’
The van reversed out, McAndrew still trying to text or email and drive at the same time. The twins saw Tara scolding him, and were surprised that he smiled and tucked the phone in his pocket and put both hands on the wheel.
As they went back inside, Jaide gave Jack a puzzled look.
‘You’re weirdly keen to go back to Tara’s,’ she said.
Jack drew her into the den and explained that if the train cat invasion hadn’t happened by then, it would be the perfect opportunity to do something about it.
‘Do what?’ Jaide asked.
‘Something,’ Jack replied weakly. Then, a little more strongly, ‘We’re bound to have thought of something by Friday.’
That night the twins were woken again, though it took several cat-licks on Jack’s face to bring him to consciousness.
‘What!’ he exploded, wiping his face with his pillow.
‘I’m sorry to wake you,’ said Ari. ‘But we need your Gift.’
‘What for?’
‘To see something that eludes our sight.’
Jack blinked, sighed and put on his reading light.
‘Then you need Jaide. Our Gifts are still the wrong way round.’
Together they shook Jaide into something resembling alertness. She barely grunted when Ari explained the situation, and stumbled all the way up the stairs before she really woke up.
There was a strange haze at the top of the stairs, as well as the smell of incense. It wasn’t until the sleepy twins staggered out on to the widow’s walk that they realised this was caused by the Resonator, which was not only p
uffing out a dense stream of bright blue smoke, but two hitherto unseen eyes had lit up in the snout part and were flashing red and orange. The snout itself was swinging back and forth across a short arc rather than scanning the entire horizon, and it was clicking away like a Geiger counter scanning something horribly radioactive.
‘Where’s Grandma?’ Jaide asked immediately as she peered out into the night.
‘She is on her way,’ said Kleo.
The blue smoke intensified and the clicking of the Resonator became almost a continuous drone. Jack brushed the smoke away and coughed.
‘Does this mean it’s getting closer?’
‘Maybe,’ said Kleo, her ears twitching. Ari too was looking out into the night, watching and listening, all senses alert. ‘What you can see, Jaide?’
‘Just Portland,’ replied the girl, squinting. ‘Nothing out of the ordinary . . .’
The Resonator puffed out a particularly thick cloud of smoke and swung a few degrees to point due north. Jaide scoured the dark expanse of the bay for any sign of sea monsters or some other evidence of a major attack.
‘I still can’t see anything,’ she reported.
Jack looked up at the weathervane, which creaked and slowly swung round in a complete circle.
‘The weathervane doesn’t agree with the Resonator,’ said Jack. ‘It’s just going in circles.’
‘It must be close,’ said Kleo urgently. ‘Everyone, be ready!’
‘I can’t see anything,’ protested Jaide. ‘Are you sure?’
She stopped as the Resonator emitted a series of sharp clicks, then abruptly turned to point south, sending its smoke eddying in spirals up to the sky.
Everyone ran to the southern railing of the widow’s walk, to look out past the shoulder of the Rock to South Beach.
‘There’s nothing here either!’
The Resonator clacked again, and this time swung to point north-east.
‘It must be something flying,’ said Jack. ‘Flying around us. Like a bat?’
‘We would hear bats,’ said Kleo. ‘They squeak.’
‘Like mice,’ said Ari, licking his lips.
Jaide looked up into the sky. She looked everywhere, not just in the direction the Resonator was pointing. If the device was slow to react to something fast-moving, it might be pointing in the direction something had been rather than where it was now.
A dark shape slid across the moon, closely followed by another.
‘You’re right, Jack,’ she said. ‘There are at least two bats out there.’
‘Flying silently,’ said Kleo. ‘That is most unnatural.’
‘It has to be the excision,’ said Jack.
‘But what does it mean?’ Jaide asked, thinking of the van parked outside the house earlier that day. ‘Is The Evil spying on us?’
‘We’re not doing anything.’
‘Trying to draw us out then?’ suggested Ari.
‘That is precisely what we’re not going to let it do,’ said Kleo. ‘I think it’s lost, and trying in vain to find the rest of itself.’
‘We’ll never know without asking it,’ said Grandma X from behind them, making them jump. ‘And I for one would never trust a word it said. Now back to bed, troubletwisters. My Companions and I will handle the excision from here.’
They said goodnight and did as they were told. They were too exhausted to argue.
‘What do you think the excision is doing, Jack?’ Jaide asked as they drowsed in the dark, thinking about the bats circling endlessly around them. ‘You didn’t say, but it looked like you were thinking something.’
‘I think it’s trying to frighten us,’ said Jack.
‘Is that all?’
‘Yes,’ lied Jack. He didn’t want to admit that he was well on the way to being terrified. The Evil had got to him once before. What if it happened again?
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The Gathering of the Glass
The twins nodded off several times during school the next day. As a result, Mr Carver gave the class a long lecture about the importance of diet and spiritual well-being in maintaining healthy energy levels, but it wasn’t either troubletwister’s fault they kept being woken up at night, or that they couldn’t tell anyone about the excision without revealing the existence of The Evil. If they so much as hinted at the existence of talking cats, they’d be laughed out of town.
The bats had gone by morning, but they hadn’t forgotten that weird midnight performance, the second confirmed sighting of the excision in Portland. During the day, Jack was plagued by a swarm of mosquitoes that flew round him, but never landed. They only dissipated when he remembered Grandma X’s repellent and put it on, and even then they still hung about, just further away.
Twice Jaide saw the MMM Holdings van go by, moving slowly and deliberately, then suddenly speeding off when the person behind the wheel saw her looking at it. She presumed it was Martin McAndrew, but there was something not right about it, and she couldn’t see clearly through the windows. The interior of the car seem oddly shadowy, as though full of smoke – or thousands of bugs, she thought with a shiver.
Tara left them alone, sensing their foul moods and exploring other options in the classroom, now that she had some. Jaide felt bad about that, and sought out Tara to say goodbye when the going-home tune sounded.
‘I’m looking forward to coming over tomorrow,’ Jaide said, not adding that for the troubletwisters it wasn’t entirely a social trip.
‘Me too,’ said Tara brightly. Their surliness was clearly forgotten. ‘Shall we catch the train together?’
‘Sure, why not?’ It wasn’t until they were on their bikes and riding home that Jaide stopped to think about how this might interfere with any plans they had about the train cats, if they ever came up with one. They had twenty-four hours to scour the Compendium and see what they could find.
When they reached Watchward Lane, there was a police car outside the house next door. Martin McAndrew was talking to the officer, who was taking notes down in a tiny black book.
The twins stopped to hear what was going on. Maybe the missing body had been found!
‘ . . . when I passed this afternoon, I saw the damage and called the station immediately. I’ve been waiting here ever since.’
‘I see, sir,’ the officer said, making no apology for what Mr McAndrew clearly thought was a significant slight. ‘And what damage is there, sir?’
The police officer was a surprisingly young woman, with an untidy blonde ponytail. The back of her shirt was hanging out under the straps of her equipment vest, which was absolutely loaded with equipment: pistol, taser, mobile phone, walkie-talkie, pepper spray, handcuffs, baton . . . all the stuff that Jack and Jaide couldn’t imagine being needed in Portland.
‘I’ve already told the station, Constable . . . um . . . Haigh. And this is the second time I’ve made such a complaint. Why don’t you just come and see it for yourself ?’
‘Very well, sir. I will.’
Constable Haigh and Tara’s dad went up the driveway and into the house. Jack and Jaide hesitated only for a moment, then sneaked over. The MMM Holdings van was outside. Jaide peered into it as she went by, but there was no sign of bugs.
Voices came from inside the house.
‘ . . . scratches and scrapes, and, see here – they go out of the back door and into the garden, where the back fence, too, has come down. And I only just repaired it!’
The twins resisted the urge to interject that the bulldozer had damaged the side fence, not the back, and it still wasn’t secure. While the police officer and Tara’s dad were busy in the back garden, the twins darted across the hall and into the front rooms, one by one. They were empty, and looked like they had been for decades. There was nothing but dust and lots of cobwebs.
‘There’s nothing weird here,’ whispered Jack.
The sound of voices grew louder, so they made a hasty escape.
‘Shouldn’t we tell Constable Haigh?’ Jack asked. ‘Maybe the
re’s some test they can do to prove that Tara’s dad is up to something.’
‘Who says he is? I don’t think he’d call the police if he was guilty of anything that happened in the house.’
Jack was nearly too tired to think at all. ‘Couldn’t he be double-bluffing?’
They put their bikes in the laundry room, where their mother insisted they keep them so they wouldn’t rust any further. Susan was out somewhere, so they dumped their bags in their bedroom and then went to find Grandma X. She was in the Blue Room, looking into a long, framed mirror that normally stood upright in one corner of the crowded space, but was now lying on its side, resting against the backs of two sturdy chairs so she, sitting in a chair opposite, could look into it. The twins could see only the back of the mirror, where various letters and numbers had been drawn in white chalk.
‘The troubletwisters are here,’ Grandma X said, glancing at Jack and Jaide and then back into the mirror.
‘Yes, sorry we’re late,’ said Jack. ‘There was a pol–’
He was interrupted by a deep, masculine voice.
‘I understand. We will be circumspect.’
The twins looked round, but saw no one else in the room. Grandma X waved them over.
‘These are my grandchildren,’ she said, pulling them in to stand next to her, one on each side. ‘Jaidith and Jackaran, say hello to some of my colleagues: Phanindranath Puthenveetil of Bombay, Roberta Gendry in Montreal, Andreas Barlund from Stockholm, currently stationed in Hobart . . .’
The twins weren’t listening to the names. They were staring in amazement into the mirror, from which the faces of no less than a dozen people stared back out at them, as though the mirror was a window into another, very crowded room. Most of the people smiled and waved, but some just nodded seriously, almost impatiently, as though keen to get back to what they had been discussing.
‘This is how Wardens talk to each other, rather than using the telephone or the Internet,’ said Grandma X. ‘We call it a Gathering of the Glass. One day you will learn how to do this, in times of need.’
‘We have been discussing the matter of the excision,’ said a round-faced woman with tightly curled black hair. She was one of those who hadn’t smiled. ‘Such things are rare, and they are rarely a problem. Usually they fade to nothing within hours, days at the most, or pop like a soap bubble. That this one has lasted this long marks it as extraordinary.’