Troubletwisters

by Garth Nix

  Jack felt as though he’d forgotten something, but the aroma of the hot chocolate reminded him of what was really important. He raised the mug to his lips and sipped. It was absolutely delicious. If every day in Portland started with hot chocolate, he was going to like it here very much.

  Jaide’s frown hadn’t completely faded, but she did the same as Jack, telling herself that she was worried about nothing. If it’s important, it’ll come back, her father was always saying. Hector was notoriously absent-minded, another Shield trait Jaide hoped she wouldn’t inherit.

  After their hot chocolate, Grandma X served the twins thick slices of toast spread with real butter and her own homemade gooseberry jam. They had just finished clearing up when a slender, blue-grey cat came through the window, landed elegantly on the table, and immediately jumped to the kitchen bench and paraded along it like a model to receive a pat from Grandma X.

  ‘Kleo, at last,’ said Grandma X. ‘What kept you? These two troubletwisters, as you no doubt already know, are my grandchildren, Jaidith and Jackaran.’

  The cat rubbed her chin under Grandma X’s hand, then turned and meowed at Jack and Jaide.

  ‘She missed breakfast,’ said Jack, remembering Ari’s hungry eyes. ‘Can I get her a snack?’

  ‘She’s fed well enough already where she lives.’

  ‘I thought she was your cat,’ said Jaide.

  ‘If Kleopatra here belongs to anyone, it’s to David Smeaton, who runs the second-hand bookshop around the corner. She just likes to visit, when it suits her.’

  Kleo meowed again, defensively.

  ‘Rubbish!’ said Grandma X. ‘Ari is always happy to see you, whatever his other . . . ah . . . engagements. Wait here and I’ll get the cards.’

  Kleo inclined her head in regal agreement and turned her attention to the twins. She watched them and the children watched the cat until, one after the other, they found Kleo’s cool blue gaze too unnerving. Surely cats weren’t supposed to look people in the eye, Jack wondered, or engage them in staring contests?

  ‘Uh, can I pat you?’ asked Jaide.

  ‘Rowr,’ Kleo acquiesced. She lay down and allowed herself to be stroked.

  Grandma X bustled back into the room, holding a rather large pack of cards.

  ‘Who wants to deal?’ she said. Instead of waiting for an answer, she continued, ‘You try it, Jack. Five cards each, facedown, just like poker.’

  Jack took the deck from her and almost dropped it, surprised by its weight. The cards were more square than rectangular, and though at first he had thought they were gilt-edged, by the weight alone he realised they were actually thin plates of gold that had been enamelled with colourful designs, the diamond pattern on the backs a rich green and red, reminiscent of a tartan.

  ‘Deal Kleo in, too,’ Grandma X added as Jack tentatively shuffled the metal cards. ‘She can sit in this round.’

  Mad as a meat axe, Jack thought, using a phrase his father sometimes employed to describe very rich people who paid millions for paintings they didn’t like by artists who were famous. It was bad enough that Grandma X talked to cats as though they could understand her. Now she expected them to play cards as well!

  Odder still was what he saw on the cards when he picked up his hand. Instead of the usual suits and numbers, there were illustrations in red and green lines of enamel on the first three cards: a cave mouth in a mountain; a crescent moon; and a wave that reminded him of a famous Japanese woodcut of a tsunami. Even stranger, the last two cards were blank, just burnished gold, without enamelled illustrations.

  Jaide was puzzling over her cards, too. She had been dealt an old-fashioned sun with long, wavy streaks of fire around a disc; a bird in flight, its wings outstretched, with more wavy lines that she supposed represented the wind underneath; a half-shut human eye with very long lashes; and she also had two cards of plain burnished gold.

  ‘Let’s see what I’ve got,’ said Grandma X. She laid her cards on the table, but stacked so only the topmost card was visible. It was a crescent moon.

  ‘As one might expect,’ she commented. Quickly she flicked over her other cards. The next three were all also crescent moons. The fifth card was the same eye Jaide had, only instead of being half-shut, it was open and staring.

  Jaide and Jack looked at each other and knew they were thinking the same thing: What kind of game was this, when Grandma X showed her hand at the start?

  Instead of explaining, Grandma X pointed at the five cards sitting in a stack in front of Kleo, who was sitting up again and had one paw sitting on them as if she actually did know how to play. ‘Do either of you know what cards Kleo has?’

  ‘How could we?’ Jaide asked. ‘We can’t see them.’

  ‘Well, if you don’t know, perhaps you can guess. Let’s see if, between the three of us, we can get all five by guessing two each. That gives us one spare guess. I’ll go first: a tree and the hanged mouse. Now you guess, Jaidith.’

  ‘But the only cards I know in this weird deck are yours and the ones I have!’ Jaide protested.

  ‘That doesn’t matter,’ said Grandma X with a wink. ‘Perhaps this deck contains anything you can think of.’

  ‘Uh, if you say so . . .’ Jaide looked at Jack, who shrugged, and then said the first things that fell into her mind. ‘A house and the number two.’

  ‘Jackaran?’

  Jack scratched his nose.

  ‘Um, I guess . . . a nose . . . and a . . . doughnut.’

  Grandma X reached over and Kleo delicately withdrew her paw. Her blue gaze was curious as Grandma X turned over the first card. It showed a mouse hanging upside down in a snarl of threads.

  ‘The hanged mouse!’ said Jack. ‘How did you know?’

  Grandma X just smiled mysteriously and turned over the remaining four: an acorn; a barbed arrow; a gutted fish; and an oak tree, her first guess.

  ‘No correct guesses from the troubletwisters,’ said Grandma X, with a rueful look for both of them. ‘Perhaps we shall see something from the other perspective. Show me your cards, Jackaran.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Jack. He folded his cards into a stack and put them in front of him, as she had done. The first he turned over was plain burnished gold, and the second was, too. But so were the third, and the fourth, and the fifth. The illustrations were gone.

  ‘But . . . but there was a wave, and a cave, and . . . uh . . .’

  ‘Not unexpected,’ said Grandma X, ‘and not terribly helpful, either. What about your cards, Jaidith?’

  Jaide laid her cards down and turned them over one by one. Four of hers had become blank, too, but the fifth card still showed the wavy lines of a breeze supporting a bird caught in mid-flight.

  ‘How can they change?’ Jaide asked. ‘What’s going on?’

  Grandma X swept up the cards in one smooth motion and clicked her fingers. The click echoed through the room, and with its echoes, Jaide and Jack felt the warmth of the hot chocolate rush through them again, and they forgot the card game completely.

  ‘Here we are, I’ve got the cards,’ said Grandma X. ‘Not the usual type. These are more fun. Before we play, who thinks they can flip a card into that bronze bowl in the corner?’

  Jack took a card and was surprised by the weight and the fact they were metal, and by the strangest sensation that he had handled cards like this before.

  ‘I’ll try,’ he said, but when he flicked the card it missed by several inches.

  They all had several goes. Grandma X missed most times. Jaide missed her first two attempts, but then got the knack of it. Four out of her last five went in with resounding clangs of metal on metal, and Kleo came to sit at her side, as if the cat was a prize that Jaide had won.

  ‘How are you doing that?’ asked Jack, growing frustrated. He had missed every time, and even managed to lose one of the cards in the process.

  ‘Oh, it’s easy,’ she boasted, and perhaps became a little overconfident, because her very next attempt ricocheted off the lip of the spitt
oon and whizzed about their heads like an excited hummingbird before finally embedding itself in the side of a loaf of bread. Kleo yowled and ran out of the room with her ears flat to her head.

  ‘All right, that will do.’ Grandma X picked up the cards and shifted the spittoon out from the wall. ‘Well done, Jaidith. Don’t look so glum, Jackaran. We’ll try something else you might be good at next. First, though, I’d like to find that missing card. Will you help me look? It must be in here somewhere.’

  They turned the kitchen inside out, looking in all the obvious spots first, then opening drawers and even shifting the fridge to see behind it. There was no sign of the card anywhere.

  ‘Hmm,’ said Grandma X, putting her hands on her hips and staring at Jack as though he had lost the card deliberately. ‘Let’s see if you can find something else instead. Before I went to bed last night, I hid six coins in the lounge. Think of it as a treasure hunt. But remember, everything else has to go back in its place afterward. No permanent mess, please.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Jack, feeling uncharacteristically rebellious.

  ‘Why no mess? I had enough of that with your father —’

  ‘I mean, why find the coins? If it’s a game, it isn’t a very good one.’

  ‘How about if I say what you find, you keep?’ said Grandma X. ‘There’s a sweet shop on the main street. They make their own licorice and lollipops. I’ll take you there when it stops raining.’

  Jaide and Jack exchanged another look. Homemade licorice and lollipops were not something they could get excited about. While Jack liked food, he didn’t have a sweet tooth, and Jaide didn’t have the patience for anything that took too long to eat. A lollipop would just annoy her.

  Still, money always came in handy. They didn’t have to spend it on sweets. The twins loped off to search, riffling through books, upending cushions, and scrabbling around on the floor to see under the couches.

  The coins were: (1) under the corner of the rug; (2) on the windowsill behind the velvet curtains; (3) behind an antique clock that had long lost its tick; (4) tucked out of sight beneath the easy chair; (5) sitting out in the open on the mantelpiece; and (6) between pages sixty-four and sixty-five of Travels, Travails and Toilets of Tibet, about a man and his pet pig who visited that country in the 1930s.

  The twins returned with three coins each, somewhat reassured that the exercise hadn’t been a complete waste of time.

  ‘Look what turned up while you were distracted,’ said Grandma X, pointing.

  Right out in the open, where the shadow of a chair cut an elongated line across the floor, lay the missing card.

  ‘How did we miss that?’ asked Jaide, amazed.

  ‘Good question. Can you guess the answer?’

  Jack studied his grandmother closely, wondering if she had placed the card there herself in order to trick them. Why would she do something like that? He didn’t know, and the uneasy feeling grew stronger.

  ‘You’re testing us, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, but not in the way you think.’

  Grandma X snapped her fingers again. The smell of chocolate was fading, and the effect it had on the twins was weakening with it, but Jack’s brow smoothed and he looked around, wondering momentarily what he was doing.

  ‘Here you go,’ he said, picking up the card and giving it back to his grandmother. ‘It should go with the others, shouldn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, dear,’ she said, slipping it onto the pile. ‘All things have their place. Sometimes you just have to look a little harder to find it.’

  Jaide was staring at the coins in her hand, wondering where they had come from.

  ‘Were we going outside somewhere?’ she asked.

  ‘I had hoped so,’ said Grandma X. ‘But the prospect of lollipops seems more remote than ever.’

  One glance out the window confirmed that impression. What the clouds had threatened earlier had finally arrived in full force. The rain was falling in steady sheets.

  Jaide’s spirits immediately fell, too. She liked bright, warm days, and hated winter. Jack was the opposite. He loved dim, cloudy weather and disliked the heat and glare of high summer. Jaide’s idea of a perfect afternoon was to be at the beach under a hot sun. Jack preferred the dusk of a cool evening, or a still night with just a sliver of a moon.

  ‘Still, there’s lots to do in here,’ their grandmother said. ‘Come into the drawing room. I’ve got a bunch of . . . interesting objects . . . in there that you might like to see.’

  Puzzled, the twins followed her into the drawing room and watched as she unlocked the desk and rolled back the cover to reveal all manner of contraptions. There was a spark gap generator that sent a bright blue jolt of electricity shooting between two metal points, especially when Jaide pulled the trigger. An old compass spun wildly as they passed it from hand to hand, pointing every direction other than north. There was a small box that Grandma X assured them was an old camera, with no LED screen and a shutter that clicked solidly behind the lens’s glass eye. When Jack clicked the button, he saw people and places from long ago, but all Jaide saw was her brother in the drawing room, pulling faces.

  Grandma X watched them as they played their way through the odd collection. Sometimes she wrote in a pink leather notebook she had produced from a drawer. Once she even took a magnifying glass out of her pocket and studied the top of Jack’s and Jaide’s scalps, as though looking for head lice, but she didn’t seem to find what she was looking for. She put the magnifying glass away and lit some old lanterns that stank of kerosene and cast a lovely warm glow over the room.

  As the last lantern wick flared, Kleo returned, and her eyes caught and reflected the flame. She meowed and jumped up to sit like a sphinx on a straight-backed chair, as if waiting for something interesting to happen.

  ‘What’s this, Grandma?’ Jaide asked, pulling a strange contraption from behind the desk.

  ‘A pogo stick, dear. Have you never seen one before?’

  Both twins shook their heads, then gasped with surprise as Grandma X demonstrated it for them. The floor and the furniture shook as the elderly woman in her silver-tipped cowboy boots climbed onto the crossbars and took two spring-fuelled bounces across the drawing room. A cloud of dust rose up, Kleo fled again, and Grandma X climbed off and hurriedly opened the windows to let some fresh air in.

  ‘They were all the rage when I was a girl,’ she said, looking slightly pink in the face. ‘Why don’t you have a go?’

  ‘Really?’ asked Jack. ‘In here?’

  ‘Outside isn’t an option with all that rain coming down.’

  ‘All right.’ He took the device from her and pointed it spring down toward the floor, glancing around at all the fragile-looking things in the room. ‘Mum would never let us do this.’

  ‘Guess we’d better not tell her about it, then,’ said Grandma X with a wink. ‘Go on. Let’s see who can bounce the highest.’

  That was all the encouragement the twins needed. Jaide took the pogo stick from her brother and immediately mastered it. She laughed and felt as light as a feather, bouncing around the room. Vases danced and books swayed on their shelves, but she bounced with total control and only reluctantly handed it back to let Jack have a go.

  Jack lacked his sister’s easy grasp of the art of pogoing, and distantly, distractedly, he was sure this wasn’t the first time that day he had missed out on something fun, although he couldn’t quite remember what else there had been. He watched himself in the mirror above the mantelpiece in the drawing room trying to do everything Jaide had done, exactly as she had done it. The daylight from the window, although greyer than it normally would have been, cast a dazzling silver halo around him, and he bounced to his right in order to see himself better. But the moment he was away from the window it seemed that he faded into the heavy folds of the curtain and his reflection disappeared from the mirror entirely.

  Suddenly disoriented by his lack of reflection, Jack mistimed his next bounce, careened into the desk, ricoc
heted off it, and fell over, smacking his temple on the cushioned front of a chair as he went down.

  For an instant, the world went black. He hadn’t knocked himself out. He hadn’t even hurt himself very badly, apart from feeling as though all the air had been sucked out of him. But somehow all the light around him vanished, and he was falling through an empty void. Empty, that was, apart from distant white points that looked at first like stars, but soon revealed themselves as eyes, rushing rapidly closer —

  ‘Jack!’ Jaide was crying out as she knelt down next to the fallen pogo stick. ‘Jack! Where are you . . . oh!’

  ‘I’m here,’ answered Jack crossly. ‘Where else would I be?’

  Jaide shook her head in bewilderment. She was sure that Jack hadn’t been there, that he’d disappeared as he hit the floor, vanishing into the shadow of a chair. The fear that he somehow might have gone for good slowly ebbed, but the memory of that sharp stab of fear remained. He was her brother. Sure, he annoyed her sometimes – but what would she do without him?

  A sudden gust of wind made the window rattle like a drum, and both twins twisted around, startled by the noise.

  ‘I think that’s enough bouncing for now,’ said Grandma X, helping Jack up.

  ‘Are you sure you’re all right, Jack?’ asked Jaide.

  Jack glanced at the mirror and saw himself, perfectly visible again, as he should have been. But he was distracted by a sound from outside, something rising above the sounds of the rain and wind.

  ‘What’s that noise?’ he asked. ‘Is that someone shouting?’

  Jaide squinted through the rainswept glass and gasped. There was a man being blown like a leaf up the drive, his feet never quite touching the ground, his mouth open and bellowing.

  ‘Oh, dear,’ said Grandma X. ‘That isn’t right.’

  THE TWINS FOLLOWED GRANDMA X as she rushed to the front door, threw it open, and ran outside. The wind howled and roared almost loudly enough to drown out the shouts of the man who was caught in its grip. He was in his fifties, heavily moustachioed. He wore jeans and cowboy boots very similar to Grandma X’s, and was waving an umbrella around and around his head.