Mystery of the Golden Card

by Garth Nix

  ‘But everything went wrong,’ he said with a hangdog look. ‘I forgot too much. I even lost the bookmark – I guess it went with a book I gave to George. And Harold must have watched me for years, noticing how much time I spent on the estate with my old friend, and guessed that was where my Gift was hidden. When George died, I knew I had to recover the card before it fell into the wrong person’s hands – I remembered that much – but I couldn’t remember where I had hidden it, of course. I couldn’t go back to your grandmother to ask for my memories back, because that memory was hidden with the card. I didn’t even remember asking her to take the memories out of my head, along with most of my memories of being a Warden. It was too hard, you see, to live life as an ordinary man, knowing what I had lost.’

  Jaide couldn’t imagine what it would be like to voluntarily give up her Gift, or come to hate it as much as he had. But she had never once thought of Rodeo Dave as ordinary.

  ‘We thought the card would just move you somewhere else,’ she said. ‘That’s why we used it. I’m really sorry about that, too.’

  He smiled. ‘No need to apologise. I would have done the same, in your shoes. And you’ve learned to your cost what it really does, haven’t you?’

  She nodded gravely, thinking of what had been done to her uncle.

  ‘Somewhere deep inside,’ Rodeo Dave said, as though reading her mind, ‘I believe that Harold is still fighting. He has not, and perhaps never will be, totally subsumed by The Evil.’

  At the head of the group, Hector was answering some of Jack’s questions, with Susan listening in, not saying anything for now. Harold had betrayed the Wardens a year before Susan had met Hector. His betrayal had taken place in the Pacific, during a mighty battle Custer had mentioned briefly once before. He had returned several times since then, during the twins’ childhood, but Hector had always managed to keep him at bay.

  ‘The Evil is cunning,’ he said, ‘but not as cunning as a person. And Harold was always the smarter of the two of us. I don’t know exactly what he was doing, but it is clear he can operate independently of The Evil, at least for a time. He had his own agenda. When Harold fought off The Evil when you left the wards, he was acting to prevent The Evil from jumping the gun, not out of any kindness for your sakes.’

  But Jack remembered Harold saying that he had wanted to see them. He was sure that part of his uncle had wanted to meet his niece and nephew, even as another part planned to betray them in the near future.

  ‘What happens to him now?’ asked Jack. ‘Are you just going to let him go? He could still be dangerous, even without his Gift.’

  ‘We’ll take his memories,’ said Hector. ‘He’ll forget being a Warden, like Rodeo Dave did. He’ll forget his Gift, The Evil . . . all of us.’

  ‘I don’t know if that’s a mercy,’ said Susan, ‘or the cruellest thing of all.’

  Hector reached around behind Jack’s head and took her hand. ‘You and me both.’

  Jack looked up at his parents, together again for the first time in months.

  ‘Is Mum going to forget this, too?’ he asked.

  ‘Not unless she wants to,’ said Hector, glancing back at Grandma X. ‘As events proved, she needs to know what’s happening at all times, just in case anything ever happens to your grandmother again.’

  Susan sighed. ‘I think you’re right. If I had known what was going on . . . if you and Jaide had been able to talk to me about it . . . none of this would have happened. So, yes, I think it’s for the best I stay in the loop. For good.’

  Jack smiled with relief. Keeping secrets was hard. He didn’t know how Grandma X did it.

  They came up the main drive. The wreckage of the golf buggy and Zebediah were to their left, across the sodden lawn. Jack pointed, and they set off through the mud.

  They had barely gone five paces when Jack saw a dark figure rise up out of the car and turn to stare at them.

  ‘Hey, look,’ he said. ‘There’s someone there.’

  ‘Who?’ said Grandma X. ‘Tell me what you see, Jack.’

  ‘It’s not Tara or Kyle, or Custer, or Thomas Solomon . . .’ He squinted, straining his Gift to the utmost. Zebediah was still some distance off and it was very dark. But the figure was faintly familiar. It was small . . . a woman, perhaps . . . with tightly pulled-back hair . . .

  ‘It’s that new doctor,’ he said.

  ‘Doctor Witworth?’ said Susan. ‘What’s she doing here?’

  ‘Don’t let her get away!’ shouted Grandma X.

  Witworth had seen them and was already moving, running around Zebediah and across the lawn with something tucked under her arm. Custer snarled and leaped after her. In tiger form he easily outpaced Hector, who had started running the moment Grandma X had shouted. Jack wanted to follow them, but Susan held him back, and his Gift was still too weak to do anything. The twins could only watch as Doctor Witworth fled across the estate with the Wardens on her heels.

  At first, he thought she was running for the castle, and Custer clearly thought so too, for he ran at an angle to cut her off. But then she suddenly changed direction, and put on an extra burst of speed. She didn’t seem to be running anywhere in particular at all. Just running at random, Jack thought.

  ‘The edge of the estate,’ said Jaide coming up alongside him, breathing heavily. ‘She’s making for the boundary!’

  ‘It’s not where it used to be,’ said Grandma X, raising the gold card. ‘But not much further and it’s stretched as far as it can go. There must be something I can use in here . . .’

  ‘Sandler’s Quake?’ suggested Rodeo Dave.

  ‘Too dangerous.’

  ‘What about the Noose of Ceylon?’

  ‘We don’t want to kill her, David.’

  ‘What about the one I had for a while?’ suggested Jack.

  ‘Running’s impossible when your feet are sinking into the ground.’

  ‘Or you could put her to sleep with my other one,’ said Jaide, wishing her normal Gift wasn’t so exhausted. ‘Quickly! She’s almost at the trees!’

  Witworth looked behind her, and on seeing Custer closing the gap in a long powerful lope and lightning gathering around Hector Shield’s upraised hand, she put her head down and took the final yards in a desperate lunge.

  Grandma X pointed the card and the trees ahead of the escaping woman shook and rustled. Their branches came alive and laced together, forming an impenetrable net.

  Custer leaped, and so did Witworth, right into the arms of the trees.

  ‘Why’d she do that?’ asked Jack. ‘She can’t possibly escape now.’

  But then, unbelievably, one of the trees changed. Its knots glowed white, and its branches untangled themselves from its neighbours. With a weird, grinding cry, it pulled Witworth up above its crown, so that its branches pointed straight up along its trunk. Then suddenly it dropped down into the earth, pulled by its roots into the safety of the soil.

  It all happened too quickly for Grandma X, Hector or Custer to respond. One second Witworth was there; the next she was gone, rescued by The Evil.

  Grandma X muttered something about ‘that wretched woman’ under her breath and put the card back into her pocket. The trees returned to normal, while Custer and Hector peered warily over the edge of the hole that was all that remained of the tree. The sides were already falling in, softened by the downpour.

  ‘You need a Warden who can turn into a mole,’ said Susan.

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ said Grandma X, putting a hand on her daughter-in-law’s shoulder and sharing some of the weight of her suddenly weary body. ‘But unfortunately she’s in Angola.’

  EPILOGUE

  The Legacy of the Dead

  ‘SO DOCTOR WITWORTH WORKED FOR The Evil,’ said Jaide as they waited by the drawbridge for the police to arrive. Thomas Solomon, currently standing guard by the gates, had called Officer Haigh about a natural disaster at the estate once he had finally woken up, shortly after The Evil was defeated. His memories had needed to be r
earranged only slightly to erase the walking armour from them. It was the same with the helicopter pilot – luckily both he and Thomas Solomon had needed only a small amount of Grandma X’s influence to incorporate what they had seen into a freakish weather event in their minds, different only in scale to the one that had destroyed the bridge three days earlier.

  ‘So it seems,’ said Grandma X.

  ‘But she couldn’t have been the sleeper agent,’ said Jack. ‘She only just arrived in Portland.’

  ‘What makes you think there was a sleeper agent?’

  ‘Well, someone drove you off the road . . .’

  ‘I got a look at his face,’ Grandma X said. ‘He wasn’t from Portland.’

  Jaide knew better than to ask if Grandma X was certain she knew everyone in Portland. She probably knew what they’d had for dinner every night, too.

  Hector Shield and Custer returned from a thorough inspection of Zebediah.

  ‘No booby traps,’ Hector announced. ‘And no Professor Olafsson, either.’

  Cornelia flew down out of the sky and landed on Jack’s shoulder.

  ‘Man overboard,’ she said.

  ‘Doctor Witworth took him?’ Jack said. ‘Why?’

  ‘Will he be okay?’ Jaide asked.

  ‘That depends on what The Evil wants him for,’ said Grandma X. ‘He has no Gift, being an echo of himself rather than his true self. He can’t be consumed like living things. There seems no obvious reason to kidnap him, apart from his knowledge.’ She looked around, taking in the night sky, the castle, and the Wardens patrolling the estate looking for any remaining sign of The Evil. ‘I wonder if he was what The Evil wanted all along, and everything else was a ruse?’

  This was just one more mystery to add to a night full of them.

  ‘Time for some quick final words,’ Hector Shield said, squatting down to look both his children in the eye. ‘I know you thought Harold was me, and he told you to keep secrets from your mother and your grandmother, and I think we’d all agree that this put everyone in very grave danger. Never again listen to anyone who tries to drive a wedge between you and your family, no matter how trustworthy he or she might seem.’

  They nodded very seriously, wishing they could take back everything that had happened since Tuesday, when they had first come to the castle . . . except for seeing their real father for the first time in weeks.

  He opened his arms and embraced them tightly.

  ‘Do you have to go?’ Jack asked, muffled by his shoulder.

  ‘I do,’ he said, ‘and you know I do. Your Gifts won’t stay still much longer. But you also know that I love you and miss you every second of every day. Maybe your mother will let you buy a new SIM card for that phone Harold gave you, so I can tell you so more often.’

  Susan looked down at them, and after a moment she nodded.

  ‘This time the communication breakdown was not just at the troubletwister end,’ Hector said, standing and turning to Grandma X. ‘Harold was always angry at you for keeping secrets. That’s a mistake best not repeated, by all of us.’

  Grandma X’s expression became very hard when her second son’s name was mentioned.

  ‘That, too,’ she said, ‘is a discussion that can wait.’

  Mother and son embraced briefly in the rain. They separated with shining eyes.

  Hector shook hands with Rodeo Dave.

  ‘Thanks for trying to keep the twins out of trouble,’ he said.

  ‘Ever a challenge, ever a reward.’ Rodeo Dave winked, stepping back.

  Hector turned to Susan. ‘Are you sure you’re okay with this?’

  ‘Nothing you can say will make me feel any better about it,’ she said, kissing him firmly on the lips. ‘Just stay alive.’

  ‘I will,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a lot to live for.’

  Susan let Hector go.

  ‘All right,’ he said, patting his pockets as though looking for his car keys, ‘yes, now it’s definitely time to go. Goodbye, goodbye! Wipe that beer from your eye!’

  The twins smiled at the latest of their dad’s weird sayings as he walked a safe distance from them and slipped the iron rod out of his coat pocket. He waved it in front of him, and the rain took on an electric smell. Jaide put her fingers in her ears. Last time she had seen Hector do this, her ears had rung for an hour.

  Lightning stabbed out of the sky, striking the ground exactly where he was standing. The thunderclap felt like the world ending.

  When light and sound had passed, Hector Shield was gone.

  ‘Whoa,’ said a voice from behind them. ‘Did you see that?’

  ‘I told you, Kyle. These guys are incredible.’

  Tara ran to examine the smoking ground where the twins’ father had stood, then she looked straight up.

  ‘Gone, just like that! Amazing.’

  ‘Are the animals back in their pens?’ Grandma X asked in a calming voice.

  ‘All accounted for,’ said Kyle, ‘except for Nellie, here.’

  Cornelia did her best to hide behind Jack’s head, but her tail feathers gave her away.

  ‘I don’t think she wants to stay here,’ Jack said. ‘Can she come home with us, Grandma?’

  ‘If that’s what she wants, I don’t know how we could stop her. Susan?’

  ‘Sure, but Jack has to feed her, and clean her cage whenever he’s told to.’

  ‘Easy!’

  Cornelia bobbed up and down. ‘Nellie wants a nut.’

  Pleased, Jack reached into his pockets to see if he had anything edible in there to give her, but found only a scrap of paper and something round and metallic.

  Grandma X waved Tara and Kyle to her. ‘You two, I want to have a private chat with you about what you saw tonight.’

  ‘No way,’ Tara said. ‘This happened last time. I don’t want to forget. I want to tell everyone how incredible Jack and Jaide are!’

  ‘That’s exactly what we can’t have you doing.’

  Grandma X raised the moonstone ring she wore on her right hand and held it before Tara’s eyes.

  ‘Oooh, pretty,’ Tara said in distant voice. ‘So . . . pretty . . .’

  Kyle’s eyes crossed and his mouth drooped open.

  ‘Very good,’ said Grandma X. ‘Now, I can’t go erasing your memories every time you see something you shouldn’t. It’s bad for a young mind to be tampered with too often. Instead, I will silence you. Not completely; on every other subject you can speak as freely as you ever did. But on anything to do with The Evil and the Wardens and my two troubletwisters here, you can say nothing at all – unless it is to one of us. Do you understand?’

  The pair nodded with solemnity beyond their years. Then Kyle sneezed with such explosive force that Cornelia took off with a squawk, dispelling the seriousness of the moment.

  ‘Let’s head back to the lodge,’ said Susan. ‘Much better than standing here, catching colds.’

  She took Kyle and Tara in her arms and guided them down the hill, tailed closely by Grandma X. The twins and Rodeo Dave lingered a moment, looking up at the castle wall.

  ‘George wanted all this to go to the town, you know,’ said Rodeo Dave, ‘to be turned into a whaling museum. A memorial to the whales themselves, too.’

  ‘Do you think that’ll happen?’

  ‘Oh, the mayor will fight the idea of a memorial, and we both know that developers are already itching to get their hands on it, but I figure it will work out how George wanted. He had a stubborn streak, expensive lawyers, and a good heart. That’s a rare combination.’

  He glanced at Jack, who was examining the two things he had found in his pockets. The paper was the scrap of dictionary Cornelia had given him in school earlier that day, with the word twister on it. Looking at it again, he saw another word, one that had a whole new significance after the night’s revelations.

  ‘Look.’ He showed Jaide. ‘Cornelia wasn’t telling us that she knew we were troubletwisters at all.’

  She looked at the word he was indicating
. ‘Twin. She was telling us Harold was Dad’s brother, and we never realised!’

  ‘Rourke,’ said the macaw smugly, although now it sounded more like an ordinary squawk than anyone’s name.

  ‘Cornelia’s been in Portland a long time, and . . . and she belonged to someone else before Rourke,’ said Rodeo Dave, peering down at Jack’s left hand. ‘She would have met your dad and his brother when they were young, and parrots, like elephants, never forget. What’s the other thing in your hand?’

  Jack held up the locket he had taken from the painting. He opened it, and the three of them looked inside.

  ‘I thought so,’ said Rodeo Dave. ‘Dear me, that takes me back.’

  ‘Is that . . . you?’ asked Jaide, recognising in the picture the phantom of a young man that had chased them across the estate. ‘With Grandma?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘That’s your grandmother’s sister.’

  ‘Her twin?’ asked Jaide.

  ‘Of course,’ said Rodeo Dave. ‘I didn’t even recognise the painting of her until my memories returned.’

  ‘Was her name Lottie?’ Jack asked.

  ‘How did you . . . ? Ah, the inscription. Yes, that’s what we called her.’

  ‘That wasn’t her real name?’

  ‘No. It was—’ He stopped himself. ‘I know where this is headed. If I tell you, you’ll only try to find her in the Portland records, and then you’ll be one step closer to finding out the name your grandmother was born with.’ He shook his head. ‘Well, that’s none of my business. If she wants to tell you about that, she can do it herself. So you can forget about me giving you any help on that front. All right?’

  The twins nodded. They hadn’t been thinking anything of the sort, but they were now. How many Lotties could there be in one small town?