Troubletwisters

by Garth Nix

  To Jack it felt as though he were being skewered by the multiplying eyes. Each new pair pinned him more tightly to the spot. If he met their gaze, he knew he would be lost. He kept moving his head, shifting his line of sight, blinking, but he knew there were just too many awful white eyes . . .

  ‘Kids!’

  A flash of purple-blue light cut through the mangled angles, dazzlingly bright and refreshingly straight. It struck the metal rod square in the middle. The twins were flung apart by a soundless explosion, even as another bright ribbon lashed out like a whip, gathering up Jaide and Jack and then looping back to the hands that had cast it. Through their shock, the twins recognised their father, but he looked like nothing they had ever seen before. Light rippled up and down his body like a gas flame, concentrating in his open hands. His hair waved like a nest of electric snakes.

  Hector Shield grabbed the lightning as if it were a rope and hauled on it as hard as he could, pulling the twins to him. They reeled into his arms, and he took the iron rod from their frozen hands without difficulty.

  The white eyes flared brighter.

  ++No!++ the voice cried. ++They belong to us! They want to be with us!++

  ‘Never!’ shouted Hector.

  He raised the iron rod. Lightning burst from its tip, chain lightning that crackled across a dozen white eyes, bursting them like trodden-on grapes. But more and more eyes kept appearing, and they grew closer and closer despite everything Hector did. The twins clung to him, not understanding what was going on but in no doubt at all that they were in mortal danger.

  ‘Get behind me!’ Hector croaked to the children. He held up the rod again, but only a flickering spark jumped out. The eyes were everywhere, drawing nearer and nearer, as if a vast creature with ten thousand eyeballs was peering down at the small, helpless group of humans. The floor beneath their feet was tilting and rising at the sides, turning into a funnel, making them slide forward, and they all had the growing sensation that hidden behind or below the multitude of eyes, there might also be a mouth.

  ‘Get . . . get behind me!’ the twins’ father called out again. ‘Then run for the stairs!’

  ++Come to us!++ countered the voice. It sounded very self-satisfied now, as if Hector’s words were a concession of weakness.

  The twins disobeyed both instructions. Jack stayed absolutely still, transfixed and paralysed. Jaide actually took a step forward.

  ‘No!’ she shouted back at the great cloud of eyes. ‘Go away!’

  ‘Jaide! Don’t —’ Hector yelled, dropping the iron rod and gathering the children in.

  A tide of darkness swept over the room, snuffing out the glowing eyes. At the same time, the air became hot and gusted furiously through the room. The wind tugged at Jaide, lifting her off her feet till Jack and Hector pulled her back down.

  ‘I can’t see!’ Jaide screamed as the wind tore at her again. The darkness was almost worse than the staring eyes, and the wind kept getting stronger, accompanied by terrible crashing noises all around.

  ‘Down!’ shouted Hector. He pushed them flat on the floor as something – possibly the bed – flew over their heads and smashed into the wall. Clothes whipped from the wardrobe with a sound like giant birds flapping, and then the wardrobe itself blew into matchwood. Hector started to drag the twins back through the doorway.

  The walls screamed as the roof came off and spun away. The twins screamed, too, not knowing what was making the noise.

  Then they felt their father’s hands on them, pressing them to him, holding them down.

  ‘Calm down, kids. We’ll be all right. Take slow breaths. In for five seconds . . . one . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . five – and now out for five seconds . . .’

  As he counted, the darkness lifted. Jack found himself following his father’s instructions even as his heart pounded in terror. Sunshine slowly filtered in from above, through the gaping absence where the roof had been. Jaide felt her brother grow calm, and that helped her relax, too. The wind slowed to a gentle breeze, and then stopped altogether, to be replaced by an eerie silence, as if they were in the eye of a storm.

  Behind the silence, as though behind a pane of glass that could shatter at any moment, the eyes were waiting.

  ‘That’s it,’ said Hector. ‘Nice, slow breaths . . .’

  Jack’s eyes shut for a moment. He twitched and raised his head. Suddenly he felt incredibly sleepy, as if he’d been woken in the middle of the night. He looked at Jaide, who was also nodding off.

  Both of them slumped in Hector’s arms, and he walked them quickly down the stairs, looking anxiously behind him several times. Halfway down, he met Susan.

  ‘Get them outside,’ Hector said urgently. ‘Away from the house.’

  Susan grabbed them, the intense energy of her grasp keeping them just on the right side of awake. They were moving fast, running down the stairs, into the garden, out through the back gate, into the lane, and then several houses down, where Susan propped them against a fence and checked them over.

  She had just taken their pulses when an incredibly loud thunderclap made them all flinch. Looking back, they saw a black column, dotted with tiny bright lights, rising up above the house. Lightning stabbed at the house out of a clear sky, and then all that was left of the building was suddenly sucked up into the column, broken into pieces, and spat back down again in a shower of debris.

  ‘Hector . . .’ whispered Susan.

  The black column disappeared in a plume hundreds of feet high. Dust rolled out in a cloud down the lane, making Susan and the twins cough and wipe their eyes.

  But there, emerging from the dust, was the twins’ father. He had blood streaming from a cut above his left eye and his corduroy jacket was ripped to shreds, but he was alive. In his right hand, he held the iron rod.

  Jack and Jaide felt an incredible surge of relief. They smiled up at their father, but their eyes were dazed, and their exhausted minds stunned with shock and incomprehension.

  ‘What have you done?’ asked Susan.

  ‘Susan, it’s not —’

  ‘Not your fault?’ She pointed angrily at the metal rod in his hand. ‘I knew you didn’t go by plane. I looked up the arrivals, but I thought maybe – just maybe – I missed one and you had kept your promise.’

  ‘I was going to say it’s not that simple.’ Hector knelt by the children and laid the rod down on the road.

  Jack blinked up at his father, slowly regaining his senses. Next to him, he felt Jaide shift, and Jack knew that he should say something, but he didn’t have the strength to speak.

  ‘Dad,’ Jaide whispered. It took a great deal of effort to get the words out, so much that she hardly knew if she was saying them right or getting them in order. ‘We touched the . . . we saw the . . .’

  ‘I know, sweetie,’ said Hector. ‘It’ll be okay, I swear.’

  ‘How will it be okay?’ asked Susan. ‘How will it be okay, Hector? Our house has just been destroyed. You and the kids almost died.’

  ‘We knew this might happen one day,’ Hector said quietly. ‘The potential is there, and one way or another, it will be realised.’

  ‘She made it happen!’ Susan tugged the letter out of her back pocket and flung it at him. ‘She did this.’

  Hector scanned the five short lines and sagged back on his heels.

  Jack didn’t know what was stranger – what had happened, or the fact that his parents didn’t seem to be as surprised as he was. Jaide, meanwhile, wondered what on earth the card from the mysterious Grandma X had to do with it all.

  ‘There must be a way to make it stop,’ Susan said, clutching the twins tightly. ‘There has to be.’

  ‘She didn’t make it happen,’ said Hector. ‘The children have to go to her now.’

  Go to her? Jaide thought. This was all happening too fast.

  Susan could barely put her fears into words. ‘No! She’ll want to take them . . . she’ll want to use them . . . I won’t let them go!’

  J
ack had so many questions. But he was so tired and shocked, he couldn’t even begin to ask them. For now, he just listened. Questions would come later. Plenty of questions.

  ‘She won’t use them,’ said Hector firmly. ‘The choice will be their own. As it was for me, when I chose you.’

  ‘But you didn’t stick with that choice,’ said Susan, her words as sharp as a knife. ‘Did you?’

  In the distance, they heard the sound of sirens cutting through the howling of dogs and the shrill repetition of car alarms.

  Hector looked behind him, and both Jaide and Jack followed his glance. Smoke was beginning to curl and twine out of the shattered walls and rooftop, and little flames were jumping in the shadows.

  ‘They have to go,’ said Hector. ‘The twins . . . we might not be so lucky next time. I need you to take them to Mother before their Gifts fully awaken.’

  ‘What gifts?’ Jaide finally found the strength to speak up. ‘What’s happening?’

  Hector looked at both of the twins. ‘I can’t tell you now. But you’ll find out soon. All you need to know is that it’s very important that you go with your mother. Now.’

  ‘You’re not giving us any choice?’ Jack asked.

  ‘There is no choice.’

  Jaide still didn’t understand. ‘What about you? Aren’t you going to come with us?’

  ‘Yes, Hector,’ Susan said. ‘Aren’t you going to come with us?’

  A flicker of intense pain passed across Hector’s features. ‘You know I can’t go with you, Susan. Me being there would . . . interfere . . . as I interfered today.’

  Susan looked away, back toward the burning house.

  ‘You might as well go now, then,’ she said.

  Hector nodded sadly. He bent down and kissed both the twins on their foreheads, picked up the iron rod, and stood, his glasses askew and misted over.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘One day, troubletwisters, I hope you’ll understand.’

  Hector turned to Susan, but she would not look at him, not even as his footsteps slowly receded down the lane. Jack couldn’t watch him, either – he felt like something inalterable was happening, and their family was never going to be the same again. Only Jaide managed a small wave as their father left. She had no idea whether or not he saw it.

  A minute later, a clap of thunder echoed across the ordinary suburb and a single black cloud slunk off toward the horizon, marking the end of the ordinary life of Jaide and Jack Shield.

  EVERYONE KEPT TELLING JACK, JAIDE and Susan how lucky they’d been to survive the explosion that destroyed their home.

  ‘I’d buy a lottery ticket, if I were you,’ the insurance assessor had said. The fire department investigator had agreed, adding, ‘A gas main normally goes up all at once, not in stages. You’re the luckiest family alive.’

  But the twins didn’t feel lucky. As far as they were concerned, they just got unluckier and unluckier. First their home was blown up, and then they were told they had to move to their unknown grandmother’s house, miles and miles and miles away. And yet, every time someone heard their story – like that morning in the latest and hopefully last slimy motel off the freeway – out came that annoying sentence: ‘You were lucky!’

  ‘Everyone keeps saying we were so lucky,’ said Jaide as they got back into the car. ‘So how come we’ve had to drive for three whole days to some hick town we’ve never heard of, to see a woman you clearly don’t like? Dad is who-knows-where —’

  ‘That’s enough,’ snapped Susan. ‘It’s been a long drive, and I need you both to be cooperative. We’re almost there. Don’t ruin it now.’

  They drove in silence for a while, Susan fuming to herself and the twins in no better mood. Then Susan quietly added, ‘Your father will come when he can. He has urgent business. And we are very lucky that we’re alive and that your grandmother is so keen to have us come to live with her.’

  Grandma X lived by the sea in a town called Portland – but not one of the Portlands that anyone had heard of. In fact, as Jaide quickly learned on the internet, this Portland didn’t even make the top ten of cities or towns with the name. It was small and old and sounded generally unexciting. There was only one small school, two parks, one part-time cinema (without a 3-D screen), and a main street with a half-dozen shops. The nearest shopping centre was a minimum of forty minutes’ drive away. To the twins, it might as well have been on the moon, but without the fun of riding in a spaceship to get there.

  ‘Are we going to be stuck here for good?’ Jack asked as their mother drove slowly down the main street of Portland, peering at the street signs. Some of them were so faded, they were completely illegible. ‘I mean, like, for always?’

  ‘No,’ said their mother. ‘It’s only till the insurance money comes in and our old house is rebuilt.’

  ‘Why couldn’t we stay in the hotel until then? Or with Aunt Marie?’

  ‘I told you. Aunt Marie has her hands full with Mamma Jane. It’s going to take months to rebuild and . . . and I thought we needed a change of scene anyway.’

  Jaide knew it was pointless to try to pin her mother down any further than this. Clearly, something strange had happened the hour their house had been destroyed. And there was a link between the freaky things the twins had seen, their father’s quick disappearance, and the relocation to Grandma X’s house. But Susan wouldn’t talk about it. Once Hector had gone, it was like the words they’d exchanged had never happened.

  There was one question Jaide figured was safe. ‘Do we have to call her Grandma X?’ she asked.

  ‘Just call her Grandma.’

  ‘What does the X stand for?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You don’t know Dad’s mother’s name?’

  ‘No,’ their mother answered with a distracted sigh. She was looking back and forth between the hand-drawn map Grandma X had sent and the GPS screen. With an irritated snort, she pulled over to the side of the road. ‘I don’t understand this. We’ve just passed Crescent Street and Dock Road. There’s no Watchward Lane between them, and it isn’t in the navigator database.’

  ‘She said to come in from the east.’ Jaide held up the map, which had some carefully lettered instructions on the side.

  ‘It can’t make any difference which way we come from,’ said Susan. But her voice trailed off, and she made a U-turn. ‘I must have missed it. We’ll have to go back around.’

  ‘Why does she call us troubletwisters?’ Jaide asked.

  ‘She’s old,’ said Susan. ‘It’s probably some saying from long ago, like a pet name.’

  ‘I don’t like it,’ said Jaide. ‘We’re not trouble.’

  ‘Yes, you are,’ said Susan. ‘Sometimes, anyway.’

  ‘And what do her cats have to do with anything?’

  Jack glanced out the window and caught a glimpse of a narrow lane between a bookshop and a hardware shop. He blinked and lost sight of it, then spotted it again through the rear window.

  ‘There!’ he called out. ‘We’ve gone past it! Next to the shop with all the different stepladders out the front.’

  ‘Well done, Jack!’ Susan said. She spun the wheel and executed another U-turn. ‘There’s the wretched lane at last.’

  The car turned into the narrow, cobbled lane that zigzagged between two blocks and then up a slight hill, ending in a cul-de-sac opposite a high, whitewashed stone wall topped with gargoyle cats and roosters. There was an arched entrance just wide enough for the car, its gate propped open behind it.

  Susan drove through the entrance and followed the long circular drive and its companionable line of poplar trees around to the front of the house. When she turned the engine off, they all sat in silence for a moment, looking out.

  The house was old and built of once-rosy bricks that had mostly faded to a dull pink. It was three storeys high, and in place of a fourth storey it had a widow’s walk, a kind of veranda that embraced the very steep roof, which was made of pale timber shingles. Several chimneys pr
ojected up much higher than the roof peak, and on the tallest, a weathervane in the shape of a crescent moon with attendant stars pointed firmly southwest despite the wind quite obviously bending the tops of the poplar trees from the east.

  ‘I bet it’s mouldy inside,’ said Jaide.

  ‘And there’s no hot water,’ said Jack.

  ‘We’ll just have to make do,’ said Susan. ‘It’s not as if we have any choice, thanks to your fa —’

  She bit her lip. Jack waited expectantly for her to finish.

  Neither Jack nor Jaide bought the official story of a slow gas leak that rapidly got worse and ended in the explosive destruction of their house. The only problem was, they couldn’t explain what had happened, either. Jack and Jaide had talked about it between themselves, but all they could recall was taking their father’s suitcase upstairs, touching some kind of metal pipe, and then suddenly everything was twisted and staring and exploding. But the only other person who’d seen it was their father, who was gone. It made them think that maybe it hadn’t been like that at all. Because it was so unbelievable. Even thinking about the weird white eyes made Jaide shiver.

  ‘What I mean is,’ Susan said, ‘we’ll have to make do as best we can. And this,’ she added, looking gloomily at the big old house, ‘is what’s best.’

  ‘I didn’t know Grandma ran an antique shop,’ said Jaide, pointing out the window.

  ‘What?’ asked Susan. ‘What are you pointing at?’

  ‘The sign, about the antiques,’ Jaide replied. ‘Over the blue door, there.’

  The house had two front entrances. There was one with four broad stone steps leading up to a big door, right where they were parked, but there was also another one further along, consisting of three small steps that led down to a sunken door that was painted a lovely cornflower blue. An old, hand-painted wooden sign above the door read: Antiques and Choice Articles for the Discerning.

  ‘Where?’ asked Susan. ‘Honestly, I don’t have time for this, and I doubt Grandma X will appreciate you making jokes about her being an antique or whatever it is you’re thinking.’