A booming roll of thunder came from the open sea. Grandma X lowered her hand and let go of the rod, then hurried to where Jaide was waiting in the car. With a rumble, the engine started of its own accord again.
‘I hope that works,’ said Grandma X. She slumped back in her seat and shut her eyes for a few seconds.
‘Are you all right?’ asked Jaide.
Grandma X opened her eyes and gave Jaide a rather forced smile.
‘Yes, dear. I’m just a little tired . . . and rather perplexed. The Evil is far stronger than it should be.’
She looked around through the windshield, each side window, and the rear window, before adding, almost under her breath, ‘Yet all four seem to be in place, so far as I can tell. . .’
‘All four what?’ asked Jaide. She was getting a bit concerned about Grandma X. She needed the old lady to focus on helping Jack, not sit here in the car mumbling. ‘What do we do now?’
‘Now we go home,’ said Grandma X, suddenly decisive again. She put the car in gear and reversed with a screech of wet tires suddenly finding their grip. ‘We watch the storm rise, and see what The Evil does in response.’
‘How will it know we had anything to do with this?’ Jaide said. ‘This could just be an ordinary storm.’
‘It would know soon enough in any case. It would feel the difference, as I would feel its interference with any natural force. But it already knows this is no normal storm. It saw us calling it.’
‘How?’ Jaide swivelled in her seat to look back at the receding lighthouse, remembering the feeling that she had been watched the whole time they were on the shore. ‘I didn’t see any bugs or rats or dogs.’
‘You saw the gull, didn’t you?’
‘Yes, but . . .’
‘The Evil works by taking over small things, like midges and ants, then moving up to steadily more complex creatures, like rats, birds, dogs – and people. Then, as it draws upon the power of its collective life forces, it can do other things . . . but it isn’t always obvious and it can disguise itself and its actions. You need training to recognise its presence. That gull was an agent of The Evil, all right, and what one of its creatures sees, it sees.’
‘That’s how you found Jack,’ Jaide said with sudden understanding. ‘You got into the mind of that rat and followed it back to The Evil.’
‘Exactly.’
A violent gust of wind shook the car as they pulled up in front of the house.
‘I’m hoping the storm will distract The Evil sufficiently for us to repeat the trick and find out where Jack will pop up.’
However, the rat was dead, lying on its back in the jar with eyes normal but blank and legs curled tight. Grandma X looked accusingly at Kleo, who shook her head and trotted out the door, presumably to find another rodent hostage.
‘Well, that’s disappointing, but not entirely unexpected. The Evil can will its creatures to death, though it is always loath to lose even one of its conquests, no matter how small it is. Particularly when the battle has barely begun.’
Grandma X scooped up her opera glasses. ‘Let’s go up onto the roof and see what we can see. Not forgetting our coats on the way. I would suggest an umbrella, but with this wind . . .’
They climbed the stairs to the top of the house. Opening the hatch let a great gust of cold air in to howl down the stairs. Jaide tightly gripped the edges of the door as she stepped outside, and she had to jump to the rail, where she hung on for dear life, feeling as though she might fly away at any moment. All around them, treetops swayed and groaned, and the branches of the tall fir leaned over so far, they tapped on the house’s angular eaves. The sky was as dark as dusk, and the world had been leached of colour. To the east, the horizon was ribboned with lightning.
Grandma X swept the town with her opera glasses. Then she put them down and turned the ring on her hand around so that the stone was clearly visible to Jaide for the first time. It was a large oval moonstone.
‘I will be . . . absent . . . for a few minutes,’ said Grandma X.
She closed her eyes, leaned against the rail, and became very still. Slowly, the moonstone ring began to glow with a soft internal light.
Jaide wondered if Grandma X would teach her the trick of it when all this was over. She imagined thousands of uses for leaving her body, such as sneaking into the cinema without paying, spying on her parents, or even visiting her friends back in the city.
A gust of wind broke into these thoughts. The house creaked, and the first heavy drops of rain struck the widow’s walk. Jaide pulled the hood of her coat up over her head and reached out to do the same for Grandma X, but just at that moment an extra-strong blast of wind blew straight in and lifted her right off the ground.
Suddenly Jaide was upside down, clinging with one hand to the rail as she desperately scrabbled for a hold with the other.
‘Grandma! Help!’
Grandma X didn’t move. Jaide whipped back and forth like a flag in the growing storm. If she let go, she’d be blown halfway across the town – maybe further! She closed her eyes tightly, afraid to look at the ground, and called for her grandmother’s help again.
‘Grandmaaaaaa!’
Grandma X didn’t answer, but there was a long, shrieking cry out in the wind, immediately followed by a lone seagull that flew straight at Jaide, smashing into her face. She screamed and almost lost her grip, and tried to butt the seagull away with her head. Somehow she connected and the seagull was thrown against the rail. There was a flash of pale light and the bird tumbled to the ground far below, a lump of dead feathers.
But there were more seagulls swooping in. With a wild lunge, Jaide got a grip on the rail with her other hand as well. Gasping, she pulled herself closer to Grandma X, hoping her touch might bring the old woman back.
She was almost there when three more seagulls crashed into her, this time aiming at her hands. Beaks tore at her skin and knuckles, sending lances of pain up her arms.
‘Leave me alone! Go away!’ Jaide screamed.
Out of nowhere, a violently spinning vortex of air swept sideways across the widow’s walk, against the main body of the wind. It picked up the birds in a tangle of legs, beaks and feathers and hurled them into the trees. Jaide had time only to note that it looked very like the one that had trashed the twins’ room before it spiralled off into the sky and disappeared.
Gasping for breath, Jaide resumed her painful creep along the rail. Every time she slid her hands along, she thought she was going to lose her grip, and the rain was making everything slipperier and slipperier. Finally she got close enough to make a desperate, pinching grab at Grandma X’s elbow with one hand.
The old woman’s grey eyes flickered open at Jaide’s touch.
‘Oh, dear Jaidith – I’m so sorry! Here.’
She reached out to pull Jaide into her embrace – and both got a big surprise. Their minds merged as they had when looking for Jack, only this time it happened in an uncontrolled, wild rush. Jaide’s thoughts collided with Grandma X’s and became hopelessly entangled. For an instant it felt as though she actually was her grandma, with aching joints, a dodgy hip and the weight of the world on her shoulders. Jaide sensed the battle that was taking place between Grandma X’s incorporeal form and The Evil. The two were fighting for control over the storm. The Evil was trying to push back the wind and tide, to redirect the storm surge from its underground tunnels, and Grandma X was trying to keep the storm coming.
Jaide could also feel that The Evil was winning. There were thousands and thousands of minds under its control already, and though most were insects or animals, the collective force of them was like a great, overpowering mass slowly coming down.
But on three sides – north, south and west – those minds were being held back, and not by Grandma X. It was as if there were physical barriers there, preventing
The Evil from attacking from those directions. All that great weight of malignant thought was coming in only from the east.
But it was enough. Grandma X was being slowly overwhelmed.
‘Grandma! I’ll help!’ cried Jaide. She looked up at the clouds scudding past above her, blinked as a raindrop fell straight into her eye, and concentrated her thoughts, trying to imitate what she felt Grandma X was doing.
‘Jaide! No!’
Jaide had made a very bad mistake. She felt the storm swirl wildly at her command, as wily and slippery as ice. It didn’t want to be controlled by anyone, much less her.
Grandma X reeled, struggling to contain the storm, The Evil and Jaide’s Gift all at once. Both of them staggered back across the widow’s walk, lightning playing all around the house as the wind screamed even louder and thunderclaps rattled every window and shook the timbers.
Grandma X did something with her mind. Jaide felt a great outpouring of energy from the old woman, and instinctively pushed away and shut her eyes, just before a figure of searing white light burst out of the old lady and ran up into the clouds, the afterimage of its passage burning through Jaide’s eyelids, accompanied by the loudest, most shattering thunderclap of all.
The next thing Jaide knew, she was lying facedown, stunned and deafened – but separate. Her mind was no longer mixed up with her grandmother’s, although she could still feel strange echoes of it reverberating inside her skull, and she could not feel the terrible, inexorable pressure of The Evil aimed directly at her.
Slowly, Jaide pushed herself up and looked around. Rain was lashing down everywhere, but there was no more lightning, and the wind had dropped.
Grandma X was slumped against the railing. Her moonstone ring was dull, she wasn’t moving, and it looked like she might very well be dead.
THE BOOMING OF SURF PURSUED Jack as he ran through the subterranean tunnels. Occasional gleams of light came from drains and vents far above, but they were too small to crawl through or the grilles at their tops were too heavy to lift. He kept his spirits up by reminding himself that there simply had to be an exit. It was only a matter of finding it. He would worry about what happened next when he got there.
Hurrying under another high drain, he felt fresh, clean rain spattering on his head. He stopped and stood face-up underneath it for as long as he dared, trying in vain to get some water into his mouth. Not for the first time, he regretted leaving his pack behind, with his water bottle inside. He was parched. If Grandma X had appeared at that moment and offered him one of her hot chocolate potions, he would have drunk it without hesitation.
The next intersection was a T junction. He studied the options available to him. The left branch angled upward; the right way was flat. The air to the left smelled fresher, too, so that was the way he went.
When the tunnel suddenly dropped and opened onto a wide reservoir of rippling water, he was sure for a moment that he had chosen incorrectly. A waterfall roared out of a pipe above the centre of the pool. There was another pipe in the water, through which the water was clearly designed to escape, but the flood was coming much faster than it was going. In the seconds he stopped to consider, the water level rose by nearly an inch.
He had almost turned back when he saw another tunnel on the far side, one accessible by a narrow ledge that skirted the reservoir. He could press himself flat and make his way around on the ledge, then pull himself up into the pipe. If he did that, he would be that much closer to ground level.
Everything said that he should take the higher pipe, but he instinctively felt he should go into the water, toward the submerged tunnel, even though he had no idea where it went. It could lead to a grille he couldn’t swim past or to another reservoir that was full to the ceiling, where he would drown.
He looked at the water again, watching the winding current. If the water was flowing, it had to be flowing somewhere, and that somewhere might well be the sea, or the river.
But what if there was a grille or a full reservoir?
A slight wave came in and rippled across the water toward him, and as it did, it flickered ever so slightly with an image of Jaide’s face, as though she was standing over the reservoir and being reflected in the water.
That was enough for Jack. He chose to go downward and jumped in. The chill of the water hit him like an all-over punch, even though he had already been sodden. It felt as though he was swimming at the South Pole. He gasped and splashed and tried hopelessly to get his breathing under control. How could he dive if he couldn’t even hold his breath?
+Jackaran Kresimir Shield! We have found you!++
The voice spoke directly inside his head, but it was followed a second later by a stream of rats and cockroaches that poured out of the higher pipe and threw themselves into the water after him. If Jack had chosen that way, he would have walked right into that horrid mass.
+Wait!++ cried the voice as he gulped a double lungful of air and prepared to dive completely underwater. ++Do not go back to her! She means you ill. She sends storm and tide to flush you out – or drown you.++
‘What?’ Jack’s held breath rushed out of him. ‘She wouldn’t do that.’
+If she cannot have you, she will kill you.++
The stab of ice in Jack’s heart seemed colder than the water around him. He didn’t believe it. His parents would never leave him and his sister in the hands of someone so monstrous . . . But at the same time, he somehow felt that the voice was telling the truth. Grandma X had sent the tide in . . . but why?
Surely she didn’t want him to drown, but there was also a ring of truth to the statement that if she couldn’t have him, she’d kill him . . .
But she’s my grandmother, Jack thought weakly.
He was confused. He didn’t know what to think. But either way, he was sure of one thing: getting out of the tunnels was his first priority. If he didn’t, he would drown, either way.
Rats splashed around him as he refilled his lungs and let himself fall into the water. With two quick kicks he was in the grip of the current. The pipe gulped him down whole, along with several wriggling rats, and sucked him violently through its depths. He tumbled and turned, bouncing heavily off several obstacles in the first dozen yards. He tried to guide himself with the odd kick or outthrust arm, but he was entirely at the mercy of the current. He could only protect his head and hope his breath lasted.
Light flared ahead of him, and suddenly he was flying through the air into muddy water, where he landed with a splash. He coughed and spluttered and went under twice before he was clear of the torrent pouring out of the storm-water outlet. Only then did he manage to right himself and get a decent lungful of air.
When he had got his wind back, he wiped his eyes and looked around. He was outside! There was the river walk and, further along, a squat building that looked like a groundskeeper’s hut. The pipe had brought him out not far from where he had gone in.
Although the sky was grey and the rain growing heavier by the second, daylight and fresh air made him whoop for joy.
On the far bank, near River Road, an orange cat ran backward and forward, yowling and waving his tail in a question mark to attract the boy’s attention. Jack looked at Ari wearily and considered his options. The police station was in the opposite direction. He could go that way and try to get help – but he suspected that the only way to get answers would be to talk to the cat, who had at least tried to warn him. And, as Ari himself had admitted, cats didn’t take sides.
Jack wasn’t a great swimmer, but he could make the short crossing. As he neared the shore, Ari ran up to him with his tail upright and quivering. The waterlogged rats that had accompanied Jack through the pipe went the opposite direction, squeaking piteously, their eyes returned to normal. There was not even a whisper of the voice.
‘Come on. We have to hurry,’ said the cat.
‘W
ait a second,’ said Jack, hauling himself onto the shore. There was no chance of drying out, not with so much rain hammering down on him. ‘Hurry where?’
‘The house, of course! Where it’s safe! Come on, will you? This rain is going to get even heavier soon.’
‘Right. Cats don’t like getting wet. But who says it’s going to get worse?’
‘Your grandmother,’ said Ari through his dripping whiskers. ‘She sent the storm in, after all —’
‘What?! She really did try to kill me?’
‘No! She sent it to flush you out . . . and to stop The Evil.’
‘The what?’
‘The Evil! The thing inside those rats is coming to join us. Do you think we could get a move on now?’
Jack glanced behind him and saw the waters of the river darken as hundreds of rats and insects burst out of the pipe and began to swim toward him.
+Jackaran! Come back to us!++
Their glowing white eyes made Jack shudder. He understood instinctively that those eyes belonged to the voice, not to the creatures. It had taken them over and made them into one thing, the thing that Ari called The Evil.
Ari hadn’t waited for an answer. Jack ran after him and, when he had caught up to the cat, grabbed him by the sodden scruff of his neck and turned his head around.
‘What are you doing?’ hissed Ari, wriggling.
‘Just checking you’re not possessed.’
‘Of course I’m not!’ spat Ari, his eyes perfectly clear. ‘I’m a cat.’
Jack let him go, reassured on that point, at least. Ari shook his shoulders to straighten himself out, and together they raced up the hill.
Kleo ran onto the widow’s walk and came straight over to where Jaide crouched next to Grandma X. The rain didn’t seem to bother her. She moved like a cat on a mission, straight to Grandma X’s side, where she bent her head and spoke into the old lady’s ear.
‘Jack’s safe,’ Kleo said in a distinct, cultured voice. ‘And he’s on his way. Why are you lying down?’