The Monster (Troubletwisters)

by Garth Nix

  ‘But I thought . . .’ Susan indicated the giant pot still sitting on the stove.

  ‘Oh, that’s just where I dyed some old jeans.’

  ‘Bright green?’

  ‘For community theatre, dear. This year the Portland Players are putting on Peter Pan. Perhaps we’ll go and see it when it opens next month.’

  ‘Er, yes, perhaps.’ Susan got up to clear away the plates. ‘Well, I’ll just clean up here while you show the kids what you got them today.’

  ‘If you like. Come on, Jackaran and Jaidith, and see what’s in the back of the car.’

  Revived by the reminder of their presents, the twins thundered out of the kitchen and up the hall. Grandma X and Kleo followed at a more sedate pace.

  Outside, the twins fought over who would open the car door. Jaide won, and she swept it open to reveal two metal contraptions that were so entangled she didn’t immediately recognise what they were: black wheels, worn leather saddles, rubber squeeze-bulbs connected to long, horn-like devices and wire shopping baskets fixed to two broad handlebars.

  ‘Bikes!’ said Jack and Jaide at the same time.

  ‘I picked them up this afternoon,’ said Grandma X as they struggled to slide the tangled bicycles out of the car without damaging anything. ‘Careful of your fingers. The green one is for Jackaran, the purple for Jaidith. I hope that’s right. I thought they’d be good for getting to and from school.’

  With a metallic rattle, the bikes touched the ground and untangled into their new owners’ arms. They were larger than they had looked in the car, and heavy too, spotted here and there with bright red rust. Jack couldn’t help but be disappointed by how old they were, although he shouldn’t have expected anything else; everything Grandma X owned was an antique. Jaide was very pleased with her colour, and the old-fashioned horn. Experimentally she squeezed the rubber bulb and jumped at the bright hoh-onk it emitted.

  ‘Thank you, Grandma!’ she said, hopping on to the seat. It was just the right height. ‘Can we go for a ride now?’

  ‘Helmets,’ replied Grandma X, handing over two entirely new bicycle helmets, just out of their plastic wrap. ‘From your mother.’

  Jack and Jaide took the helmets, looked at them, swapped the ones they’d been given and put them on.

  ‘Can we go now ?’ repeated Jaide.

  ‘I suppose so,’ Grandma X said with an amused smile. ‘Remember what I told you before, and make sure you’re back before the sun goes down.’

  ‘OK!’ said Jaide, putting her weight on the pedals and taking the bike once round the car.

  Jack followed more cautiously, half expecting the handlebars to drop off the moment he tried to steer. Fortunately they didn’t, and in fact the bike rode smoothly under him, wheels crunching musically on the gravel.

  ‘Don’t go anywhere you shouldn’t!’ Grandma X called after them as they cycled down the driveway.

  Kleo ran after them to the beginning of the lane. There she stopped and sat, tail twitching. The twins were already disappearing round the corner and on to Parkhill Street, barely wobbling on their new wheels and happily tooting their horns at each other.

  ‘Do you think the bikes will keep them distracted for long enough?’ asked Kleo as the Warden of Portland came up behind her.

  ‘One can only hope,’ said Grandma X, already turning to go back into the Blue Room and the difficult task ahead of her. ‘Herding troubletwisters is a very uncertain craft. I must give them space to grow, and hope they do not break anything important. Least of all themselves.’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Secret Secrets

  Jack and Jaide sped down Dock Road, past the fish market and on to Main Street. Pedalling furiously, they swept over the iron bridge and took a right opposite the Town Hall on to the track that led round the coast to Mermaid Point. Jaide’s hair streamed out behind her, and Jack whooped every time he took a bump. They’d had bikes in the city, but there had been so few places they could ride this fast. There were always cars to worry about, and traffic lights, and it was easy to get lost if they went too far from home. Portland had none of those problems. For the first time, they learned that life in a small town could really suit them – even without the magical elements that Grandma X was so-slowly revealing to them.

  At the turn-off for Mermaid Point, they braked to a crawl.

  ‘Shall we take a look?’ asked Jaide.

  ‘At what?’ Jack replied.

  ‘The Point. Remember it looks like a person. A woman, Grandma X said. Maybe it’s one of the wards.’

  ‘We’re supposed to stay away from them!’

  ‘How can we if Grandma X won’t tell us where or what they are?’

  Jack thought about that.

  ‘I suppose she doesn’t think we can get near them,’ he said. ‘Or else she’s watching us and will step in if we get too close.’

  Both twins looked around. There were no people about, and no cats lurking either. But that didn’t mean Grandma X wasn’t watching by some magical means.

  ‘Let’s keep on riding,’ said Jack. Secretly he was a bit concerned that the rocky shape at the end of the point really might be one of the wards, and he didn’t want to go near it just in case Grandma X wasn’t keeping an eye on them.

  ‘I suppose we did tell her we wouldn’t go near anything that might be a ward,’ said Jaide.

  ‘You did,’ said Jack with a grin, putting on a sudden burst of speed and shooting ahead.

  They followed the track to the Wide Beach car park, where they turned left and headed inland. Here and there they saw evidence of the storms that had gripped the town a week ago, when Grandma X and The Evil had waged battle over the twins. Piles of branches awaited clean-up crews; odd little sand drifts reached long fingers over the path, where the ocean had spilled across the land.

  The small hospital further up looked busy, with lots of cars in the car park and a steady stream of people going in and out. It had looked deserted when the twins had first arrived.

  Behind the hospital was a retirement home and a preschool, neither of which they had noticed before. A cheery old man with one arm and not a single hair on his head waved at them as they went by, and they honked their horns in response.

  Instead of returning by Main Street, they crossed it and cycled through a series of streets named, they guessed, after long-dead dignitaries of the town. Some of the names they recognised from the cemetery, including Govey, Treddinick, Camfferman and, lastly, Rourke. Rourke Road ran along an old estate and a swamp that also bore the same name.

  ‘Whoever he was,’ Jack said, ‘he must’ve been important.’

  ‘Or she,’ said Jaide as they swept back to the iron bridge across the river.

  At the junction of Main Street and River Road, directly in front of the school, Jaide slammed her brakes on and skidded to a halt.

  ‘What’re you doing?’ asked Jack, coming to an abrupt halt beside her.

  She pointed up Main Street to where it turned left and became Dock Road.

  ‘We could go home the way we came,’ she said, ‘or we could go this way.’

  This time she pointed up River Road, past the willows.

  Jack suppressed his automatic shudder. ‘Why that way?’

  ‘Do I need a reason?’

  ‘No . . . wait . . . you want to go past the old sawmill!’

  ‘Maybe.’ She smiled and spun her pedals with the foot that wasn’t holding her bike upright.

  Jack looked up at the horizon.

  ‘It’s almost sunset.’

  ‘Are you game?’

  ‘Grandma said not to go anywhere we shouldn’t.’

  ‘Yeah, but she didn’t tell us anywhere in particular. Besides, if we’re back before the sun really sets, she’ll never know.’

  ‘All right then.’ The shadows were lengthening fast, but Jack figured they had enough time for a quick ride-by. ‘Race you!’

  They waited a moment for a delivery van to pass them, then shot up River Road,
working harder along a slight uphill gradient. Jack had already noted that Jaide was slightly better at riding than he was, so he put extra energy into distracting her, pointing out birds flying to their nests, odd domestic scenes glimpsed through uncurtained windows, even suggesting that she had a better bike because Grandma X liked her more. The distractions and bickering disadvantaged her just enough that they were neck and neck as they turned into Station Street and saw the old sawmill ahead.

  They slowed, taking stock of it from a prudent distance. It had once been an imposing structure – that was clear from the thick exposed beams that showed how high its sloping roof had been and how wide and long it had stood. Now much of its exterior planking had been removed and lay in rough piles dotted around the site. Yellow diggers sat abandoned in an orderly row down one fence line, near a management hut that sat dark and unattended. There were no trees around the site, no vegetation at all beyond the odd blade of grass in the sandy, industrial soil, which had been perfectly levelled in preparation for the next stage of development.

  Behind the site stood the dark peak of Little Rock, with the sun setting fast behind it.

  Jack shivered without knowing why. Then he noticed the banner hung from a shiny new flagpole at the south-east corner of the site. The banner was facing the other way, but with the evening sun shining through it, the twins could easily make out what was on it. There Martin McAndrew’s three-M logo was depicted as a line of peaked rooftops. Below that was the slogan, which was meant to say:

  BUILDINGS TO LIVE IN.

  But from the twins’ perspective, seeing it reversed, even though the E and the L were back to front, it spelled out:

  .NI EVIL OT SGNIDLIUB

  The capital letters were highlighted in a bright green that made the word EVIL almost glow in the twilight.

  ‘Grandma’s wrong about that McAndrew guy,’ whispered Jaide. ‘She has to be.’

  Jack wasn’t so sure. Jaide did have a tendency to leap into things, and surely if McAndrew was an agent of The Evil, he wouldn’t advertise it in this way.

  ‘It could just be a coincidence, couldn’t it? I mean, it’s not really evidence.’

  ‘Let’s find some evidence then!’

  Jaide leaped off her bike, letting it fall on the side of the road.

  ‘Hey! Wait!’ Jack called out. But she was already across the road and slipping through a narrow gap in the fence. Jack hurriedly propped his bike against a street sign and followed.

  It was getting dark fast. Jaide opened her eyes as wide as she could in order to tiptoe safely round planks and trestles, over power cables and bags of nails. A dark, rectangular stack of corrugated iron snagged her hoody as she went by, making her heart leap into her throat. The site was quiet and apparently empty, but she couldn’t be sure of anything where The Evil was concerned. With every moment, the dusk got deeper and deeper . . .

  To Jack, the light was perfectly sufficient. With the sun hidden, he felt at home and confident. He glided silently and swiftly to Jaide’s side, and was gratified by her slight gasp of surprise.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ she hissed, gripping his arm tightly as he led her deeper into the site. ‘See anything suspicious?’

  He shook his head. Together they went round one corner of the sawmill and followed its southern wall to the back of the building, where a cement mixer and a mound of heavy bags loomed out of the shadows. Several deep trenches had been dug behind the sawmill, possibly to extend its foundations and thereby allow it to be expanded. Jack warily skirted the nearest. Even with his excellent night vision, he couldn’t see its bottom. Anything could be hiding there.

  ‘What’s that smell?’ Jaide asked suddenly. ‘Crushed ants?’

  Something squelched underfoot. Jack looked down.

  ‘Yeeuch!’

  He jumped backwards out of a puddle of brackish liquid, dragging Jaide with him. The puddle was several long steps across. Floating in the liquid like tiny, sad icebergs were a dozen half-dissolved rats.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Jaide, struggling to see anything on the ground through the thickening gloom.

  ‘Uh . . . you don’t want to know.’

  ‘I do want to know, Jack. That’s why I asked.’

  He told her and she blanched.

  ‘Oh, that’s . . . gross.’

  Headlights washed over them and they ducked behind a portable toilet. A car had pulled up outside the building site and was sitting there with its engine rumbling.

  ‘We should get out of here,’ said Jack, dazzled by the glare.

  ‘But we can’t go back that way.’ The gap they had squeezed through was close to the main gate, where the car was parked.

  ‘There must be another way out.’ Jack peered about him. ‘There,’ he said, pointing at the fence line on the other side of the site. ‘I think I see something.’

  They scurried from shadow to shadow as they heard the sound of a car door opening and closing behind them. The padlock on the main gate rattled, and then the gate itself was opening, hinges squeaking faintly in the still evening air.

  Jaide tripped over a sudden dip in the ground. ‘Ooof !’

  ‘Shhhh!’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Wait – what is this?’ Jack’s keen night sight had picked up something odd about the dip Jaide had stumbled over. It didn’t look deliberately made. Everywhere else, the ground was perfectly flat, but here the ground was churned up as though by something heavy – something that had been dragged along, creating a trench with piled-up earth on either side.

  ‘Who cares?’ whispered Jaide. ‘Keep moving!’

  ‘No, wait!’ He followed the trench backwards, towards the fence. There were secondary marks on either side, like giant scratches.

  Jack gasped when he saw the fence itself. A giant hole had been ripped through it.

  ‘Jaide – look!’

  Even in the twilight, Jaide could see the hole. ‘Great!’ she said. ‘That’s how we get out.’

  Dragging him after her, she ran through the rent in the fence and off the building site. They had barely reached the road when they were caught in another set of headlights. They froze like rabbits.

  With a loud engine roar, the van behind the lights lunged towards them, wheels spinning. Jack and Jaide split up and went in opposite directions, sprawling desperately out of the way. The van went between them, and Jaide caught a brief glimpse of the logo painted on its side before it sped off down the road, turned right at the next junction and disappeared into the streets of Portland.

  MMM. BUILDINGS TO LIVE IN.

  ‘It was him!’ she gasped, ignoring the sting of her grazed hands and knees. ‘He tried to kill us!’

  ‘Why would he do that?’ asked Jack, scrambling painfully to his feet.

  ‘Because he’s part of The Evil of course!’

  Jack stared back at the giant hole in the fence. He didn’t know what was going on, but he did know they were going to be in trouble when they got home. And the later they were, the bigger the trouble would be.

  ‘We’d better get moving,’ he said.

  Jaide groaned. ‘Our bikes – they’re by the front gate.’

  ‘We’ll have to go quietly then.’

  Taking Jaide’s hand, he led her along the fence line, to the corner bordering River Road. There were street lights there, and they hurried through the pools of relatively bright light until they reached the junction with Station Street. From there they could see their bikes, still where they had left them. Across the road, parked by the site’s main gates, was a car they both instantly recognised.

  A yellow Hillman Minx.

  ‘Uh-oh,’ breathed Jaide.

  ‘‘Uh-oh’ indeed,’ said Grandma X from behind them.

  Jack’s heart practically burst out of his chest, and Jaide jumped so hard her Gift kicked in and started to lift her into the sky, before Grandma X reached up and pulled her down by the ankle and set her firmly on the dirt.

  ‘Grandma!’ she said. �
�You frightened me!’

  ‘Good. What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be home by now.’

  ‘We . . . got lost,’ Jack said, improvising wildly. ‘Then I dropped something. We were looking for it back there, under the lights.’

  ‘I don’t believe you. You came here to snoop on Mr McAndrew, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes!’ said Jaide, made bolder by what she felt was the absolute truth. ‘He’s evil for sure! Why won’t you believe us?’

  The sound of Grandma X’s tapping foot was startlingly loud in the falling night. ‘I’ll believe you when there’s something sensible to believe. I’ll tell you this one more time, and you must accept it. Mr McAndrew is not under the influence of The Evil. You’ve seen his eyes; they’re perfectly clear. Besides, all four wards are intact and working, so The Evil cannot get into Portland without my knowledge. Now I may not agree with Mr McAndrew’s policies on renovations and redevelopments – in fact I have argued against them many times at council meetings – but that does not make him an ally of The Evil. Just human. And that is forgivable, if not very likeable at times.’

  Neither twin could meet her firm, reproving stare. They dropped their gaze, and only then did Jack notice the green-stained apron Grandma X was wearing, and Jaide the large empty soup pot at her feet.

  They glanced at each other, communicating clearly and without words: What?

  ‘Uh, Grandma,’ said Jaide. ‘You’ve got a soup pot . . .’

  Grandma X looked at the pot and picked it back up.

  ‘I came in a hurry,’ she said. ‘Now get your bikes and go home before your mother begins to worry.’

  She ushered them back to their bikes, and then crossed to the parked car. Its engine was idling, the harsh electric glare of its headlights still spilling across the dead soil.

  Grandma X opened the back door and tossed the pot on to the back seat.

  ‘If you only came out here looking for us,’ said Jaide, unable to suppress her curiosity, ‘why did you go through the gate?’

  ‘I didn’t, dear.’

  ‘But we heard you.’