Mystery of the Golden Card

by Garth Nix

  ‘That’s right,’ said Jack, picking up on Jaide’s quick thinking. They had to stop Tara from remembering The Evil and the old Living Ward, everything she had seen in the cave under Little Rock. ‘There was no one to give the pictures to, and you didn’t want them to be thrown out. You had them in your backpack during the train crash. I guess you took them home afterwards. That must be where you’ve seen her face before.’

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ said Tara, some of her confusion slipping away. ‘That’s it. The pictures. I don’t know why I’ve been keeping them. It’s like I dreamt her . . . dreamt you . . .’

  ‘I would like to see those pictures,’ said Rennie.

  ‘I’ll bring them in,’ said Tara. ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Tara blinked and looked away. Whether the explanation made sense or not, it seemed to have helped. Rodeo Dave pulled up another chair and she sat down with the others to eat her lunch: a cold noodle salad, and a chocolate bar that she broke into five pieces and shared with everyone.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Treasure Hunt

  IT WAS JACK’S TURN TO hold the phone that afternoon, and although he waited anxiously for it to buzz, it stayed resolutely silent. Jack couldn’t help but wish their father would check in again. He could, at least, have sent them a text . . .

  The last hour of school dragged horribly, but finally it was over, and Jack, Jaide, and Tara hurried off, hoping that they would be given permission to go with Rodeo Dave to the Rourke Estate.

  Outside the Book Herd, the twins were surprised to see their mother’s car. They hadn’t expected to see her there. She tooted her horn as they approached, and a few moments later Rodeo Dave appeared from the shop, waving at them.

  ‘Hop in,’ he called out. ‘We’re getting a lift.’

  ‘So it’s okay for us to go, Mum?’ Jack asked as the three kids piled into the back seat.

  ‘Of course, Jack, as long as you’re home in time for dinner. I said I’d drop you there and pick you up afterwards to make sure. Tara, your dad will collect you from our place later.’

  ‘Great!’ Tara said brightly. ‘Thanks!’

  On the way through town, Susan drove over the old iron bridge. There was no sign of the rescue crew that had been there yesterday, just a couple of skid marks on the road leading up to the bridge and some broken glass on the verge.

  ‘Can we see Grandma?’ asked Jaide. ‘The hospital’s kind of on the way to the estate.’ Actually, it was in a completely different direction, but everywhere was close in Portland.

  ‘I’m really sorry, we can’t today,’ Susan said. ‘She’s undergoing more tests. I spoke to the new specialist not long ago. Doctor Witworth says she needs to double-check a couple of things showing on the first scan.’

  ‘What kind of things?’ asked Jack, feeling his heart begin to race.

  ‘She didn’t say . . . “Abnormalities” was the exact word she used, but I wouldn’t read too much into that. It’s just something doctors say when they don’t know what’s going on.’

  Neither Jack nor Jaide was terribly reassured by the suggestion that something was going on that doctors didn’t understand. Especially if it meant Grandma X staying in the hospital and them not visiting her.

  ‘Your mother’s right,’ said Rodeo Dave, turning around in the front seat to beam at them. ‘If they’d looked into your grandmother’s head and not seen something out of the ordinary, it would’ve been cause for serious concern.’

  ‘True enough,’ said Tara. ‘There’s no one in the world like her.’

  ‘And I did speak to her on the phone this morning,’ Susan added. ‘She sends her love and reminds you to do as you’re told and keep up with your homework. That sounds like her, doesn’t it?’

  It did, and the twins were willing to let their worries on that front ebb slightly. Until they saw her with their own eyes, though, they wouldn’t be completely reassured. With her suddenly absent, there was an enormous void in their lives. Jack had dreamt the previous night that he had woken to a world where no one had ever heard of Grandma X or the Wardens, and his Gift had vanished. Jaide occasionally found herself daydreaming about moving back to the city – and not in the excited way she once had. Their life was with Grandma X now. Without her, everything was at risk of turning upside down again.

  The sky above was grey, mirroring their moods, but there was no sign of the rain that had saturated them the previous day, not even as they approached the high hedges and elaborate gates of the estate. Wide enough for two carriages to pass side by side, the gates rose up in a high arch over the drive, wrought-iron curlicues swirling and tangling in a pattern that Jaide hadn’t been able to make out the previous day.

  The right-hand gate was closed. This time, without the rain to obscure her vision, she discerned a fish’s tail in its elaborate design.

  Then, as the car passed onto a thickly gravelled drive, Jaide noticed that the open left-hand gate wasn’t a mirror image of the right. Instead of a fish-like tail, there was a great, rounded head with a single metal eye. Putting the two halves together in her mind, Jaide realised that the gate, when closed, depicted not a fish but a whale.

  That wasn’t all. High on the corner of each gate was a ship braving the turbulent seas, crewed with men waving harpoons, hemming the whale in.

  The drive curved to the left, and a stand of trees blocked her view of the gates. Rodeo Dave guided Susan along a path forking away from the smaller building in which Young Master Rourke had been found. This stretch of drive wound around the lake and up towards the castle. The creek was now running clear, and there was no sign of council workers, just one large man in overalls tending a rose garden – Kyle’s father, Jack presumed – and a young, round-faced security guard sitting half on, half off the seat of a golf buggy. He stood up as the car approached and crunched to a halt in front of him.

  Rodeo Dave stepped out of the car, wiped his palms on his jeans, and cleared his throat.

  ‘David Smeaton,’ he said. ‘And these are my three helpers.’

  ‘I don’t have any helpers on my list,’ said the guard, glancing at a clipboard.

  Jaide’s stomach sank. If the guard wouldn’t let them in, how were they supposed to find the card? She bet that wouldn’t have been a problem had Grandma X been there. She would have just bossed him into it. Jaide couldn’t imagine Rodeo Dave bossing anyone around. He was already turning to them with a look of apology.

  ‘Thomas Solomon, isn’t it?’ said Susan, getting out of the car with a sunny smile. ‘I used to know your mother, years ago. We bumped into each other again today, in the bakery, and she said you were working up here. It’s nice to meet you.’

  ‘Ah, and very nice to . . . um, who did you say you were?’

  ‘Susan Shield. These are my children, Jack and Jaide, and their friend Tara. I’ll be back in two hours to pick them up.’

  ‘Well . . .’ Thomas Solomon looked as though he might argue the point, but then he smiled and said, ‘What’s the harm? Just don’t tell anyone else, or we’ll have all the kids up here.’ He put the clipboard facedown on the seat of the golf buggy. ‘Two hours it is.’

  The twins and Tara climbed eagerly out of the car and waved as Susan drove off. Jack was impressed. He’d thought they were going to be turned back for sure, and he was amazed at how well his mother was fitting in to Portland, having never wanted to come here at all.

  As Jack turned to follow Dave across the drawbridge over the moat, he caught a glimpse of a huge, muscular animal running through the grounds. He immediately thought of the escaped menagerie animals. No one had mentioned a tiger! But then it raised its head to look at him, and he saw the enormous teeth.

  There was only one sabre-toothed tiger in the world that he knew of. It was the animal form of Custer, the Warden whose job it was to look after the wards while Grandma X was in the hospital.

  Jack automatically went to wave, then turned it into a tug at his hair in case anyone had noticed. Cu
ster winked and kept running, vanishing behind some bushes an instant later.

  ‘You saw him, too?’ Jaide whispered.

  ‘Yes.’ Jack wished they could talk to him about their father. If Custer had been able to stop, he could have helped them look for the Card of Translocation. But he supposed it was hard work, minding four wards single-handedly. Grandma X made it look easy, but that, Jack was sure, only came from years of practice.

  ‘Come on,’ called Tara. ‘Dave’s almost inside!’

  They hurried after her, their feet making hollow wooden sounds on the drawbridge. The moat surrounding the castle was deep and dark, with smooth, steep sides. Jaide didn’t want to imagine what it would be like to fall in. Luckily, despite the hollow sound, the planks of the drawbridge were as unmoving as solid stone.

  Two high towers loomed over them. Thick chains connected the drawbridge to the castle walls. On the other side of the moat was an open gateway, where Rodeo Dave was waiting.

  ‘This way!’ he said. ‘There are a lot of books a-waiting!’

  The gateway led into a small courtyard. There were archers’ notches high in the walls around them, and one solid door ahead. If it was a real castle, Jaide thought, this was where friends would be welcomed and foes stopped in their tracks.

  ‘This is the inner passage,’ said Rodeo Dave, fumbling in his pocket for a ring of keys. They jingled and clinked with deep voices of antiquity. ‘The inner door is always locked.’

  ‘I didn’t see the guard give you those keys,’ said Tara.

  Dave didn’t quite look at her as he mumbled, ‘Oh, George . . . Young Master Rourke gave me a set so I could deliver books straight to the library.’

  He selected the largest key, and slid it into the lock. It turned with a series of heavy clunks.

  He pushed the door, and it swung open with a groan. A wave of cold air rushed out over the twins. Tara went brrr, which startled Jack. He didn’t think anyone actually made that sound in real life.

  ‘So you’ve been here bef—’ Jaide started to say to Rodeo Dave, but stopped at the flurry of echoes that bounced back at her from within the castle. What lay on the other side of the door was hidden in shadow.

  She tried again more quietly. ‘So you’ve been here before?’

  ‘Not for a few years,’ said Rodeo Dave. He took three steps inside and fumbled along the wall to the right of the door. ‘It’s here somewhere – I’m certain of it.’

  There was a click, followed by a series of smaller clicks deeper within the castle. Fluorescent lights pinged on overhead, one at a time. Section by section, the covered courtyard within was revealed – dusty portraits on the walls, sheet-covered furniture on the floors, actual suits of armour guarding the corners, a tall grandfather clock on the opposite wall, and high, wooden beams above. Two particular paintings had pride of place, one of a forbidding man with receding black hair and long fingers, the other of a small, oval-faced woman with startlingly green eyes. They faced each other, unsmiling, from different sides of the hall.

  Jack followed Rodeo Dave inside, struck by the thought that, although it looked like a museum, this room had once been part of someone’s home. Jaide and Tara followed him, looking around in awe.

  ‘Welcome to Rourke Castle,’ said Rodeo Dave, his cowboy boots sparking off the cobblestoned floor. ‘George’s father, Mister Rourke, had this built out of real stone from the country his family came from. Some said it came from an actual castle, but that isn’t true. Just the ruins of one. But the plan was based on a real castle, so there are towers, halls and cellars, just like they would have had centuries ago. There’s even a chapel and an armoury, and a solar on the top floor.’

  ‘A solarium?’ asked Tara.

  ‘No, a solar. It’s where the lord of the castle and his family could spend time alone, away from the staff and the soldiers. “Solar” here comes from “sole”, meaning alone, nothing to do with the sun.’

  Rodeo Dave was talking more quickly than normal. He seemed nervous, Jaide thought.

  ‘Is the castle haunted?’ she whispered, suddenly afraid to raise her voice too much.

  He smiled at her, but there was no humour in it. ‘Only by memories. See that clock? Your grandfather Giles had terrible trouble with it. It kept losing time and made Mister Rourke terribly impatient.’

  Both twins admired its carved wooden panels and painted face, impressed by the fact that this was something Grandma X’s husband had once touched.

  ‘Now, come this way and I’ll show you the library.’

  Rodeo Dave led them from the entrance hall into a wide corridor lined on one side with tapestries depicting hunts, dances and feasts. One showed a whale being speared from two sides at once. Heavy wooden doors, all of them shut, lined the other side of the corridor. Cobwebs stirred above them, swaying in air that might not have moved for years. The castle was tomblike around them.

  They reached a fork in the corridor.

  ‘This way,’ said Rodeo Dave, turning left. Then he stopped, facing a dead end. ‘No, the other way. I’m sure of it.’

  They took the other leg of the corridor, stopping at a double door opposite a flight of spiral stone stairs. Rodeo Dave fished out another key and opened the doors. With a flourish, he opened both doors at once, and waved the twins and Tara ahead of him.

  They entered a huge room with a ceiling forty feet above them and an internal balcony running all the way around, halfway up. Electric lights in shell-like shades sent overlapping pools of illumination all across the library, banishing shadows to the furthest corners. Every vertical surface was lined with shelves, some of them protected by glass doors, all of them holding books. Big books, small books, books with gold writing on the spine, books in different languages – there were so many books that Jaide could only gasp in amazement. How did Rodeo Dave ever imagine that he might catalogue them all in just a few days!

  ‘You sold him all these books?’ gasped Tara.

  ‘Good grief, no,’ replied Rodeo Dave. ‘Most of these were George’s father’s. That’s the father there, as a young man.’

  He indicated a marble bust sitting on a plinth. It showed a more youthful version of the man in the portrait they had seen earlier. His nose was pointed and his lips thin, with a faint hint of sneer. The eyes of the bust seemed to follow Jack as he walked around it, judging him and finding him wanting.

  ‘He looks horrible,’ said Tara, folding her arms and turning her attention to the ceiling.

  ‘I’ve seen him before,’ said Jaide.

  ‘When?’ asked Jack in surprise.

  ‘I don’t know.’ The memory was frustratingly incomplete. She definitely knew that cruel face from somewhere. But no matter how she scratched her head, the details weren’t coming out.

  Above the room’s enormous inglenook fireplace was a tall painting of a smiling blonde woman in a primrose gown sitting at a table under a tree bedecked with autumnal leaves. She was playing solitaire with a deck of old-fashioned cards, their faces yellow and white, diagonally striped. A pale clay-brick path snaked behind her, between fields of ripened wheat on one side, buttercups on the other. The overall impression was one of intense gold.

  That, and the deck of cards the woman was holding, reminded Jaide of what they were supposed to be doing in the castle. The Card of Translocation lay hidden somewhere in its walls. Standing between them and finding it was only one obstacle: the hundreds and hundreds of books they had said they would help Rodeo Dave catalogue.

  ‘Do you mind . . . ?’ she said. ‘I mean . . . do you think it’d be all right if . . . ?’

  ‘Of course, Jaide,’ said Rodeo Dave with a smile. ‘I know why you’re really here.’

  She blinked in surprise. ‘You do?’

  ‘Yes. You want to explore the castle. And that’s fine with me. Everywhere you shouldn’t go will be locked, and I’ll be busy for at least an hour or so, just checking the general condition of the books. The actual cataloguing will start once I’ve done that. Unt
il then, you are free to wander. Just don’t touch anything. There are a lot of fragile, precious things in here, including yourselves. Don’t get lost!’

  ‘We won’t. Thanks!’

  ‘I’ll ring that when I’m ready for you,’ he said, pointing at an elaborate gong as big as a bass drum, suspended in a black wooden frame opposite the fireplace.

  Tara and the twins ran out of the library before he could change his mind.

  ‘Which way?’ asked Jack.

  ‘Up the stairs, of course,’ said Tara. ‘Last one to the top is a rotten egg!’

  The twins raced after her, the sound of their footfalls echoing brightly off the walls and filling every corner of the castle with life. The next floor up contained a series of locked rooms with brass plaques on the doors: the Right Room, the White Room, the Pygmy Bryde Room, the Bowhead Room. Not until they came across the Humpback Room did Jack guess that they were all named after species of whales. They stopped to peer through a keyhole. Jaide and Tara could see nothing, but Jack’s dark-sensitive eyesight made out a four-poster bed, a cupboard and a tightly shuttered window.

  They went back down briefly and explored several other labelled rooms: the Bakehouse, the Pantry, the Garrison, the Granary, the Blacksmith and the Prison. Their doors were open, but they contained little of interest. The door to the Cellar was locked, so they went back upstairs and searched until they found a stairwell that led to a guardhouse in one of the corner towers. The view from the top was spectacular, right out over the lake and surrounding trees. Portland was also visible; Jaide easily found the Rock, and from that landmark she easily worked out where their house was located. She could just make out the weathervane, pointing resolutely south.

  ‘This would be the perfect place to play hide-and-seek,’ said Tara.

  ‘You think everywhere’s a good place for hide-and-seek,’ said Jaide. Tara was particularly good at that game.