by Ali Sparkes
“Why a sand lizard?” Danny wondered. “I’m not sandy-colored. Should be an emerald lizard.”
“Sand lizards leave their eggs in sand to get warmed up by the sun,” Josh said. “That’s why.”
“Eggs,” Danny said, pausing in the middle of inspecting his long green fingers. “Josh . . . please tell me I’m not a girl again. If I have to lay eggs in our sandbox, I will be mentally scarred for life.”
Josh chortled. He and Danny had been S.W.I.T.C.H.ed into females twice before, once when they were ants and once when they were great diving beetles. “No—you’re a guy, no question!” he assured his brother. “The females are much duller-looking. Brown—no shimmery green at all.”
“Yesss!” Danny lifted his green fingers and did a high five with Josh’s brown ones. “Hey—but how about you? Are you a girl?”
Josh had a good look at himself in the mirror. “Nah . . . pretty sure I’m a guy. Girl common lizards are a bit more rounded in the middle—and more yellowy.”
Josh stood next to Danny, and they both peered in the mirror so intently they didn’t notice a little light mist fall. “This is going to be SO cool!” grinned Danny. “And this is only the start! What about the BIG reptiles, eh?”
Josh opened his mouth to reply.
Then Danny suddenly head-butted him so hard he was nearly knocked out.
“A BIT of WARNING would be good!” Danny squawked as he tried to stop his nosebleed. Josh just lay on the floor, groaning and rubbing his forehead. The S.W.I.T.C.H. back had happened so fast that he and his twin had had no chance to back away from each other. They’d been smacked together at high velocity. It was like being in a minor car crash.
“SHUT UP! SHUT UP!” Petty hissed, and then Danny realized he could hear something unusual. Along with all the beeps, gurgles, and whirrs he could normally hear in Petty’s lab, there was a strident beeping going on—and, somewhere outside, the shrill, nonstop clanging of a bell.
“Someone’s trying to break in!” Petty said. “They’ve come into the house through the kitchen window.” She was in her metal control booth in the corner of the lab, and as Danny and Josh staggered out of the plastic tent they could see her worried face, lit by the green glow of several computer monitors, as she hit assorted buttons and stared into various small screens.
“Should we call the police?” Josh asked. “Or . . .” He looked around him. “Maybe not . . .”
“In eight-year-old speak,” Petty snapped, “well . . . duh! No need, anyway. The tripwires have been triggered. Whoever’s gotten in is not going anywhere.”
“Tripwires? Petty—what have you done? What have you set up with tripwires?” Josh asked, feeling very uneasy.
“Gas,” Petty said with a breezy punch of a few more buttons. “Fast-acting sedative delivered at high velocity in the event of a tripwire being triggered. I have explosive canisters set up in the walls and ceilings all around the house. Unless they thought to wear a gas mask, they’ll be facedown on the floor by now . . . or in the kitchen sink. Hmmm . . .” She looked slightly concerned. “Hope they haven’t drowned in the dishes. I will need to tortu—I mean, talk to them. Find out who sent them . . .”
“Come on!” Danny said, looking as freaked out as Josh felt. They raced back up the lab steps, through the wooden shed that disguised the lab entrance, and across to the house.
“Wait!” called Petty, lumbering after them like a small rhino in a skirt. “You’ll need these!” She was carrying three things on elastic straps that looked very much like World War II gas masks.
Danny and Josh pulled them on. They fitted snugly across their faces, sealing around their noses and mouths, with dusty glass ovals across their eyes. Petty put hers on too and unlocked the back door to the house. As they stepped inside, Petty made straight for the kitchen. Danny and Josh crowded in behind her. “Aha!” they heard her cry. But then, “Aaah . . . What?”
The kitchen window was smashed. But nobody was on the floor or facedown in the kitchen sink. Petty pulled off her mask. “It’s all right,” she said. “The gas didn’t go off.”
Josh took his mask off and Danny followed, slightly fearfully in case Petty had gotten it wrong. But the kitchen smelled normal enough. Of French toast, which Petty had cooked for breakfast on her old-fashioned gas stove.
“Must’ve run away after smashing the window,” Petty muttered. “Didn’t try to get in.” She looked rather disappointed, as if finding an unconscious intruder would have been the highlight of her day. “Right—off home now, boys. Before you contaminate this room. I need to run some forensic tests on the glass . . . see if I can find out who tried to get in. If he wasn’t very probably dead, I would think this was the work of Victor Crouch.”
Josh and Danny looked at each other. They had met Victor Crouch only once and still weren’t completely sure he was the evil, backstabbing foe that Petty seemed to think he was. She was convinced that he’d tried to steal her S.W.I.T.C.H. Project work and had burnt out bits of her memory when they’d worked together in secret government laboratories.
Trouble was, Petty was so crazy about so many things it was hard to take her seriously. The Victor Crouch they had met briefly a few weeks ago had seemed pretty sinister and slightly mad . . . but then, so did Petty.
“Well,” Josh said. “He would definitely be dead if we hadn’t stopped you from stamping on him.”
“A bad day’s work!” Petty grumbled. “I wish you hadn’t! He is—was—possibly still is—incredibly dangerous. To all of us! But then, if he did survive and S.W.I.T.C.H. back from being a cockroach, how come I’ve not heard from him again? Or maybe I just have . . .” She squinted suspiciously into the sink.
“Petty!” Danny interrupted her squinting, bouncing up and down with impatience. “Can’t we have another go at LizardSWITCH?”
“Yeah!” Josh said. “We’d hardly gotten going!”
“Tomorrow,” grunted Petty, peering at the broken glass now. “Go home.”
“Are we safe to go through the front door?” sighed Josh. “No tripwires?”
“Plenty,” Petty said. “But”—she pulled a small silvery gadget out of her pocket and waved it at them—“I’ve switched the lasers off. Go home.”
Grumpily, Danny and Josh let themselves out of the house and wandered back around to their own.
“She’s never going to let up about Victor Crouch and all that guff,” sighed Danny. “I think they’re both as crazy as each other. I bet neither of them ever worked for the government at all. They probably met at bingo or something.”
“Mom’s going to go nuts when she sees us,” Josh said. Danny’s nose was still dripping blood, and Josh had a big bruise swelling up on his forehead. Mom would think they’d been in a fight.
As they reached the front gate and walked up the path, Josh got an eerie feeling—as if he and Danny were being watched. He spun around, expecting to see somebody approaching them, but nobody was there. The wind shook the leaves of the wild hedgerow across the road, but nothing seemed to be hiding in it.
“What’s that?” Danny said. He was picking something up off the path. It was a small crumpled paper package. Written on it in black marker was “J & D Phillips.”
“That’s us.” Josh peered at the package. “What’s in it?”
Danny turned the small package over, just about to rip it open, when he noticed the words NOT HERE also scribbled in black on the underside. The brothers glanced about.
“End of the garden,” Josh said. “In the rhododendron bush.”
They ran down the side passage and through the back garden to the old sprawly rhododendron bush at the end, which had been a kind of den for them for many years. Its strong trunk and branches wiggled out in a way which created a kind of cave beneath all the waxy leaves. The earth was usually quite dry, and Mom and Dad hardly ever looked inside the cave.
In the dim light inside their hiding place, Josh and Danny unraveled the package to reveal its prize.
It
was a marble.
Danny snorted. “It’s some kind of joke!”
“A marble?” Josh peered at the small glass orb in Danny’s palm. It had a little ribbon of yellow color twisting through the middle and a small chip on one side. It was a perfectly ordinary marble. Not even new. They had lots like it upstairs.
“Some kid messing about,” shrugged Danny.
“Wait!” Josh said, as Danny prepared to screw up the packaging the marble had arrived in. “There’s a bit of paper.”
There was. Words were written on it, in spidery black ink:
THIS ONE IS EMPTY. SIX OTHERS ARE NOT. WITH EACH YOU FIND, YOU MOVE CLOSER TO YOUR DESTINY. DARE YOU SEEK?
“What?” Josh screwed up his face. “Sounds like one of your lame dragony questy thingy games!”
“They are NOT lame!” Danny argued. “Hang on—there’s more.” He flipped over another fold in the paper and read:
CLUE 1 : WHERE THE SILENT WISE ONE SLUMBERS.
“Where the silent wise one slumbers?” echoed Josh. He thought for a while. “Oh, come on, Danny. It’s got to be Scott or Zac, hasn’t it? Wow! Can it be true? They’ve actually come out of their bedrooms and decided to set you a task in the REAL WORLD?! What will the sunlight do to their see-through skin?”
“Shut up,” snapped Danny. He liked his role-play stuff as much as his skateboarding and biking. “I’m thinking . . . Silent wise one?”
“Oh, you’re not taking this seriously, are you?” scoffed Josh.
Danny scrunched up his eyes and pursed his lips and nodded a few times. “Got it!” he said. “Come on! I’ve solved the first clue. Destiny, here we come!”
“Easy!” Danny said, getting to his feet and pushing out of the bush. “‘Wise one’ has got to be an owl, right?”
Josh perked up a bit. “Well—yeah, maybe. Although in reality owls aren’t that clever. Of all the birds of prey they’re actually the least intelli—”
“Oh, will you shut up with the nature nerding?!” Danny strode back up the garden. “Everyone calls owls wise, don’t they? So it’s got to be an owl. And I know where they are!”
Josh followed him down the side passage. “All right, Sherlock—where?”
“In the woods over the road, of course!” Danny said, pointing across as they arrived in the front garden. “We always hear them at night, don’t we?”
“Right,” Josh said. “So your destiny awaits you in the woods. Sure. Why not?” He shrugged and shook his head.
Danny didn’t answer. He just shoved the note and the marble in his jeans pocket and ran out of the gate and across the quiet street. The wild hedgerow opposite had a few gaps in it and, if you pushed through, on the other side was a tangled woodland at the edge of some farmland. Danny wasn’t normally keen on pushing through because of the likelihood of a spider or poisonous caterpillar falling down his neck. But today he was excited and didn’t think about it. He just ran for the hedgerow and disappeared inside it.
Josh shook his head again and then followed Danny into the cool green shade on the other side. He didn’t mind at all; he loved the woods. Persuading his twin to come with him was usually the problem. Danny normally preferred the pavement for his skateboard or the house for his computer games.
Some way into the wood, Danny was standing by a tall oak tree and staring up. “Look.” He pointed high. “You’ve always said that’s got to be an owl’s nest, haven’t you?”
“Yeah—well—probably,” Josh said. The large oval hole had formed naturally in the ancient wound of a broken off branch. It was the perfect size for a tawny owl. “But I can’t imagine Zac or Scott climbing up there, can you? They get nosebleeds if they go too high on our jungle gym!”
“What if it’s not Zac or Scott?” Danny said, his eyes shining. “What if it’s not a game? It could be for real!”
“What . . . hunt the marble and find your destiny?” Josh was unimpressed. With all the amazing S.W.I.T.C.H. adventures they’d had over the past few weeks, “hunt the marble” was a bit of a comedown.
“We just have to get up there,” Danny said. He was convinced he’d solved the clue and certain that something had been put up in the nest. “Give me a leg up!”
Josh frowned. “If this was earlier in the year, I wouldn’t help you. She could have owlets up there—but by now they should all be fledged.” He sighed, shook his head, and stooped over, leaning one shoulder against the trunk of the tree and knitting his fingers tightly into a foot sling to give his brother a boost. “You’ll never do it,” he warned. “It’s too high and there aren’t any branches.”
Danny tried anyway. He was pretty fit and sporty and actually got halfway up the trunk toward the owl hole before he had to give up. There just wasn’t enough to grab hold of. He slid back down, grazing his arms on the rough bark.
“There must be a way!” he puffed as he landed with a thump on the soft woodland floor. He leaned against the trunk and peered at it. The bark ran like a frozen river of green and brown with a grooved pattern of deep ridges. Ants were trolling up and down it with no problem. If you were little it was a breeze!
“Waaaaiit!” breathed Danny, his eyes widening in excitement. “A lizard could get up there in seconds!”
Josh narrowed his eyes. “You’re not thinking . . . ?”
“Yes! Yes, I am!” Danny bounced up and down. “We could borrow some Lizard S.W.I.T.C.H. spray, and I could get up there easily. Lizards are good at climbing, aren’t they?”
“Well, yeah . . .” Josh said. “Usually . . . but . . .”
“Ah, come on! Don’t be a wuss!” Danny was already running back toward the hedgerow.
“No—that’s normally your job!” puffed Josh as he caught up and then shoved back through the prickly hedge. “What happened?”
“REPTOSWITCH happened!” chuckled Danny as they crossed the street and ran down the side passage to the back garden. “I was a DRAGON! Nothing eats a dragon!”
“Well, technically, you were a sand lizard,” argued Josh as Danny worked the loose plank by the compost heap away from the fence post. It opened up a gap they could go through into Petty’s garden. “And as for what eats them—cats, dogs, foxes . . .”
But Danny was already through the gap and running for Petty’s shed. Josh paused outside. He felt uneasy again. Not just because he knew Danny was doing something he shouldn’t—Petty would be furious if she found out—but because he was getting that eerie feeling again. As if they were being watched. Was the person who had left them the marble hidden away nearby, peering at them? He glanced around the garden and across to Petty’s rather scruffy old house. He couldn’t see any sign of anyone watching. Although Petty often warned them that government spies had her under surveillance and were keeping a top secret file on her, she was a bit bonkers and they didn’t really take her seriously . . . but now . . .”No! You’re turning into crazy Petty Potts! Stop it!” Josh told himself.
“Got ’em!” hissed Danny, leaping back out of the shed, patting his bulging jeans pockets. “She must be in the house, still investigating the broken window. Come on! Let’s go!”
He was back through the fence, along the side passage, across the street, and back inside the wood in under a minute. Josh caught up with him as he jogged back to the oak tree.
“Look—er—Danny,” he puffed, trying to keep up. “Don’t you think it’s a bit funny . . . Petty’s window getting broken and then us finding the mystery marble? Don’t you think they might be connected?”
“Nah—that’s just kids messing about, breaking Petty’s window,” Danny said. “There were two window breaks in Florence Road last week. The Neighborhood Watch guy came around to talk to Mom about it, remember?”
“But—what if it’s not kids . . . ?” Josh persisted as he and Danny arrived back at the foot of the oak. “What if Petty’s been telling the truth about the government spies? I mean, we thought she’d made up Victor Crouch, but he did show up in the end, didn’t he?”
�
�Yeah, I guess,” Danny said, pulling the spray bottles out of his pockets. “But we don’t know that he was a government spy, do we? Anyone can buy a walkie-talkie and act tough. How can we be sure that he wasn’t just some old boyfriend from bingo who fell out with her? How can she be sure, with her messed up memory?”
Josh shuddered. Victor Crouch was tall and bony and had no eyebrows. He couldn’t imagine Victor Crouch, with his oddly bald brow and extra long pointy nail on one little finger, being anyone’s boyfriend!
“And anyway, whether he was a spy or not, she S.W.I.T.C.H.ed him into a cockroach, so that was probably the end of him,” Danny said.
“Yeah, but . . . we always managed to survive. And if he did too and S.W.I.T.C.H.ed back . . .” insisted Josh.
“JOSH! You’re turning into Petty!” Danny plonked the spray bottles in his twin’s hand. “Now shut up and S.W.I.T.C.H. me! Use the one with S on it. That must be for sand lizard.”
The other bottle had a C on it, presumably for common lizard. Petty’s labeling was a bit unreliable, but this time it was correct. Three seconds later a brilliant green sand lizard shot up the oak tree. Josh marveled at the way Danny climbed the slightly slanted trunk, like shiny liquid flowing upstream. He would be sensible and wait for Danny to come back—probably with nothing—after investigating the owl hole.
Hmmm. Something about that last thought prickled at him. Owl hole. Lizard . . .
“AAAAAARGH! DANNY!!!” Josh shrieked. “DON’T GO IN THERE!”
With a bolt of horror, Josh had come to his senses. There was very possibly going to be an OWL in that hole! Very likely a hungry owl. And Danny had just S.W.I.T.C.H.ed himself into a sparkly green Meals On Heels delivery!
But Danny didn’t seem to have heard him. He was wriggling up the trunk at great speed, his strong lizard fingers and toes hooking effortlessly into the groovy bark, licking up a few ants as he went.