Troubletwisters (19 page)

‘She also told Kleo to help us,’ said Jaide. She looked at Kleo very sternly. ‘You heard her, didn’t you?’

‘I’m not entirely sure that an oath made as a
kitten
, sworn in
blood
on a saucer, can be overturned by a mere instruction,’ Kleo said. She was about to go on when Ari suddenly stood up on his hind legs and gave a very nasty, hissing yowl. It gave Jaide and Jack a start, since Ari had always seemed so placid and under Kleo’s paw.

‘But then again,’ Kleo continued, both eyes warily on Ari, ‘I suppose that, taken with the circumstances, your heritage, her order . . . I have no choice but to obey.’

Ari backed down and made a playful strike at his own tail, which was curling toward his mouth.

Jaide never thought she could feel such relief simply from a cat actually doing what it was told.

‘So what are the wards?’ she asked. ‘And how do we fix a broken one?’

‘
WE’D BEST GO BACK TO
the blue room,’ said Kleo. ‘Everything you need is there, and there’s nothing more you can do here for your grandmother.’

Jaide took a look out the window before they left. As Jack had said, the house was surrounded by white-eyed dogs, whose shaggy coats writhed and crawled with the insects that were becoming part of them. But even worse than that, Jaide thought, was the way they all turned their heads at the same time and looked up at her window. The dogs weren’t just one breed – they were every breed. Hounds and poodles. Dobermans and dachshunds. German shepherds and pugs. It was as if every dog in town had been taken over by The Evil.

She couldn’t see any people at all, or hear any of the usual traffic noises. It was strangely quiet, save for the occasional patter of rain as a remnant squall from the storm blew over.

Grandma X didn’t move as Jaide brushed past the bed and headed for the door. She hated leaving her alone, but she felt a lot better knowing that her bedroom was little more than six steps away via the secret passage.

They went back down to the antique shop, where Kleo immediately started prowling around the room, diving over and under displays and peering into bookcases. ‘It’s here somewhere. Ari, can you help me?’

‘I would if you’d tell me what you’re looking for.’

‘That piece she bought last month – in the roll, remember? She said it would be for the troubletwisters’ room, when they were ready.’

‘Ah.’ The ginger head turned to consider the many alternatives. ‘Over here, I think.’ He disappeared into a half-open drawer and emerged a second later. ‘Yes. In here.’

Jack pulled open the drawer and found several long white fabric tubes, some as slender as wands, others as thick as a telescope. ‘Huh?’

‘That one,’ said Ari, tapping one of the smaller ones with an outstretched paw. ‘Unroll it.’

Jack did as he was told, revealing a square of embroidered tapestry that he held up to the light. Instead of Home
SWEET HOME
, it read:

SOMETHING GROWING

SOMETHING READ

SOMETHING LIVING

SOMEONE DEAD

‘What does that mean?’ Jack asked.

‘Every Warden knows this rhyme,’ said Kleo. ‘It’s one of the first things they learn.’

‘But what does it
mean
?’

‘The Evil comes from somewhere outside our world,’ explained Kleo. ‘But it can’t come through just anywhere. It needs to find weak points, where it is easier for it to reach out and find suitable hosts. Portland is one of those weak points and, as in other such places all around the globe, Wardens have made wards to reinforce its natural defences.’

‘Okay so far,’ said Jaide. ‘But what are these wards?’

‘The wards are magical barriers that hold back The Evil and prevent it coming through into our world. There are always four wards, one for each cardinal point of the compass. They come in many different shapes and guises, but the tapestry you hold describes their general type. There will always be “something growing, something read, something living, someone dead”.’

‘Fine,’ said Jaide. ‘So what are the four wards of Portland?’

Each cat looked at the other, waiting for an answer.

‘She never told me,’ said Ari. ‘What about you, Kleo?’

Kleo half-lidded her eyes. ‘She never told me, either.’

‘You don’t know?!’ exclaimed Jack. ‘That’s just great!’

‘If you can’t even tell us what the wards are,’ said Jaide, ‘how can we fix the broken one?’

‘I’m sure you can work it out,’ said Ari in an encouraging tone. His words were somewhat undermined by Kleo’s sniff. ‘That’s one of the things Wardens do. Very clever at finding things out, they are.’

‘We’re not Wardens . . . yet,’ said Jack. He didn’t say aloud that the odds were against their ever becoming proper Wardens. It was far more likely they were going to get absorbed by The Evil and lost forever.

‘But it’s true we’re good at working things out,’ said Jaide. ‘We got through the blue door, didn’t we?’

‘That is true,’ said Jack.

‘Are there any places Grandma X used to visit a lot?’ Jaide asked the cats. ‘I mean, more often than anywhere else? Any particular things she looked at?’

Kleo shook her head. ‘No.’

‘She usually inspected the wards in her spirit form,’ said Ari. ‘So no one could see where she went.’

‘You never followed her?’ asked Jaide. ‘Can’t you guys do that spirit-travelling thing, too?’

‘We could if we wanted to, I’m sure,’ said Kleo. ‘Not that we need spirit travelling to move about mysteriously.’

‘Your grandmother . . . ah . . . discouraged our
perfectly natural
curiosity,’ said Ari. ‘We had to eat dry food for a week the last . . . that is to say, we really,
really
don’t know where she went. You’ll have to find some other way to work out where the wards are.’

Jaide looked toward the door. The Evil was out there, in all those hideous dog-insect creatures. It could be spreading into more living things; it could be doing anything; maybe it was going to attack at any moment, and they were stuck and clueless and she could feel a terrible panic in her stomach, rising up to choke her —

‘She took us on a drive the day after we arrived, remember?’ Jack suddenly said. ‘She seemed distracted, like she felt something was up but didn’t know what it was. Maybe she was checking on the wards then, without us knowing.’

‘Yes!’ exclaimed Jaide. ‘Good thinking, Jack!’

‘We went to the cactus park,’ he said. ‘There was that really big, weird cactus there, the one she went right up to and looked at the top with her funny little binoculars.’

‘Yeah, I’d forgotten that,’ said Jaide thoughtfully. ‘I guess the cactus could be the “something living”?’

‘Or “something growing”. She also took us to Mermaid Point.’

‘That’s right. She said something about a giant —’

‘That it was a her, not a him.’

‘So maybe the rocks are the giant!’

‘Alive or dead?’

‘Either way, it fits.’

‘“Something read,”’ mused Jack, running a finger across the cable-stitched letters on the fabric before them. ‘What could that be?’

‘A sign?’

‘There are lots of those, even in Portland.’

‘A book?’

‘We didn’t go anywhere near the library.’

‘No, but Kleo’s owner has the bookshop around the corner from here.’

‘If the ward was one of his books, and he sold it, what would that mean for Portland?’

‘Okay, something else, then.’

‘It could be anywhere. We’ll never find it!’

‘Hang on! I wonder . . .’

Jaide was looking at a compass on the wall, an old brass compass with an internal card that had North, East, South and West written out in very large red letters, with all the lesser points in tiny black type.

‘I’ve just remembered,’ said Jaide slowly. ‘When I tried to help Grandma X with the storm, I could
feel
The Evil pressing in on us – but only from one direction, from the east. It was like we had walls around us on the other sides, so that east was the only direction it could attack us from.’

‘So it must be the East Ward that needs fixing,’ said Jack. ‘But east of what?’

‘This house,’ said Ari. ‘We know that much. The wards will be arranged around this central point.’

‘Where did she take us that’s east?’ asked Jaide.

‘The graveyard,’ said Jack. ‘And the lighthouse.’

As he said
lighthouse
, the crocodile skull started to chatter.

‘One brass plate, three inches by four, fixed by four two-eighth screws fashioned entirely from silver, the plate etched in acid, the words made clear.’

‘What does that mean?’ asked Jack.

‘Who knows?’ said Kleo. ‘That skull spouts off all the time.’

‘“The words made clear,”’ mused Jaide. ‘Words to be read, like the rhyme says? One of the wards?’

The crocodile skull laughed maniacally, its jaw moving so much that its vibration shuddered it off the table. It fell into a woven wastepaper basket, which muffled its cackling until it fell silent a few seconds later.

‘Words on a plate,’ said Jack. He bent down and very carefully retrieved the skull, making sure his fingers were not at risk. ‘Some of the stones in the cemetery had brass plates on them.’

‘There might be a brass plate in the lighthouse, too,’ said Jaide.

‘There are lots of brass plates all over the place. How can we tell if one of them is the “something read” ward?’

‘The silver screws, maybe?’

‘That’s if the skull was talking about the ward and not some other plate,’ said Jack.

‘There
are
instruments that indicate the presence of Warden magic,’ suggested Kleo. She pointed with her paw. ‘Ari, show them the flower.’

Ari jumped across to one of the shelves and gently butted a tall silver cylinder with his head. Jack lifted it down, took off the lid, and he and Jaide looked at the glass flower inside.

‘If you take it out, the flower will change colour to indicate the presence of Warden magic,’ said Kleo. ‘Powerful magic makes it turn a very deep blue. I’m sure it would do that in the presence of a ward.’

‘So if we took this and held it near any brass plates we find in the cemetery or the lighthouse, it would tell us which one is the ward,’ said Jaide.

‘How do we fix the ward, though?’ Jack asked.

‘Finding it is the first step.’ A plan was already starting to form in Jaide’s mind. ‘Then we’ll need to see what has to be done.’

‘But we’re surrounded by The Evil,’ protested Jack with a shudder. ‘Those dogs . . .’

‘I think I know how to find the brass plate and get back here without being caught by the dogs,’ said Jaide. She put the silver cylinder under her arm. ‘Let’s go up on the roof again.’

When Jack opened the hatch at the top of the last flight of stairs, he was surprised at how old the day was getting. Through a break in the clouds, the lazy afternoon sun was sinking slowly into the last quarter, sending long shadows across the yard below.

There were even more dogs in the yard now. Hundreds of them, made horribly shaggy and creepy by heavy encrustations of cockroaches and other bugs. Their eyes were white and they all raised their snouts together as they caught the scent of their human prey.

‘At least they’re only watching,’ said Jaide. ‘They’d come inside if they could.’

‘Somehow that doesn’t make me feel any better,’ said Jack.

He looked further afield. The yellow shoulder of a bulldozer was visible over the fence by the derelict house next door, but there were no people in sight. The storm had made everyone stay indoors. He swung Grandma X’s opera glasses south, over houses along Cutting and Crescent streets, two curving streets south of Watchward Lane, then looked further east. The roads had no moving cars on them, and there was a train stopped at the station just south of the Little Rock.