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THE YEAR THE TWINS TURNED TWELVE, EVERYTHING CHANGED.
It started with a black cloud scudding over a perfectly ordinary suburban landscape. Neither Jack nor Jaide noticed it, even though they were standing sentry outside their house, eyes peeled for the first sign of their father’s arrival. Their attention was fixed on the street and its occupants, not the sky above.
A taxi appeared in the distance, and the twins craned their heads hopefully, but it turned off two blocks ahead of their house. They sagged in disappointment.
‘I wish Dad wasn’t late all the time,’ said Jaide.
‘Here’s hoping it’s not genetic,’ Jack gloomily replied. This time, their father was a full day late . . . and counting.
Jaide sent a hard look her brother’s way. ‘Speak for yourself, Jack. I’m not the one who takes after him.’
This was true. Jaide had her mother’s green eyes, red hair and fair skin, though she never burned in the sun, whereas Jack had the brown eyes, black hair and brown skin of his father’s side of the family. Or at least they assumed their father’s family looked like that; they had never actually met any of the other Shields. They all lived far away, the twins were told, and weren’t very friendly. Even their mother had only met their father’s relatives once. And clearly it hadn’t gone very well.
Jack vowed to himself that if the Shields were late all the time, he wasn’t going to be like them. Genes weren’t everything, their mother liked to say. Jack wanted to believe this.
Several hundred yards behind their house, the cloud turned right at a church spire and spun twice anticlockwise, as though lost.
Instead of their hoped-for father, the next person the twins saw was the postman. He smiled at them and put a letter in their letterbox.
‘Hey, maybe it’s a card from Dad!’ said Jaide. Hector Shield was a treasure-seeker, hunting lost masterpieces for auction houses and galleries. Sometimes cards from him took even longer to arrive than he did.
‘He’s probably just making long-distance excuses,’ muttered Jack.
Jaide pushed past her brother, opened the letterbox, and took out the envelope.
‘It’s not from Dad,’ she said, examining the cream-coloured envelope curiously. ‘But it is for us.’
The envelope was made of a thick, flecked paper and was addressed in ornate, formal handwriting that neither twin recognised. It also referred to them by their real names, the ones their mother only used when they were in big trouble:
‘Who’s it from, then?’ asked Jack, peering over Jaide’s shoulder.
Jaide turned the envelope over. There was no return address anywhere, and next to the stamp was a four-pointed star – like the compass symbol on a map – printed directly on the envelope.
Something about the star unsettled Jack. But he couldn’t help asking his sister, ‘Are you going to open it?’ Jack would rather know something disturbing than have to wait in suspense.
‘Of course,’ Jaide told her brother, trying to sound as calm and cool as she usually did. It took a lot to bother Jaide. ‘What’s the hurry?’
She didn’t tell him that there was something about the card that made her hesitate, too. Something about it just felt . . . odd.
She ran her thumb along the flap and tore it with a satisfying rip. The smell of salt and sand hit her nostrils, as though a strong sea breeze had just rushed over her – even though they lived nowhere near the sea.
Jack wasn’t hit by this strange sensation. As his sister hesitated, he pulled the envelope from her frozen fingers and tugged out the card from within. It was white, with the same four-pointed star embossed in gold on the front.
The day darkened momentarily. Then the single black cloud moved on, and the sky was immediately blue again.
‘Maybe we should show it to Mum first,’ Jack said.
‘It does have our names on it,’ Jaide pointed out. She flipped open the card.
Inside were a few lines written in the same old-person handwriting.
‘Grandma who?’ asked Jack.
‘That’s not Mamma Jane’s writing,’ said Jaide, thinking of their mother’s mother, who lived with their aunt in an apartment on the other side of town.
‘Let me see that.’
Both Jack and Jaide jumped as their mother reached past them and snatched the card from Jaide’s fingers. Neither twin had heard her coming.
After reading the message, Susan Shield’s lips tightened and she shut her eyes for a moment. The twins watched her, puzzled by her reaction.
‘This isn’t really for you,’ she said finally. ‘I want you to forget you ever saw it.’
‘But it was addressed to us,’ Jaide said.
‘I know, but it shouldn’t have been,’ their mother replied firmly.
Jack couldn’t help himself. ‘What’s a troubletwister?’ he asked.
‘We’re not going to talk about it now. I want you to forget it,’ Susan repeated in a warning voice. The twins knew that tone. They only ever heard it when they were caught doing something particularly bad, like climbing on the roof or blowing things up in the microwave.
‘But we didn’t do anything wrong,’ Jaide protested.
‘I know,’ said Susan. She knelt down and pulled them both in for a quick hug, which typically Jaide resisted and Jack leaned into. ‘But let’s move right along, okay? Why don’t you go and have a jump on the trampoline?’
‘We did that already,’ said Jack.
‘Who jumped the highest?’ Susan asked.
‘I did,’ both twins declared. They glared at each other for a moment, then ran off through the house, since that was marginally faster than going around to the backyard.
Susan watched them run. As soon as they were out of sight, she read the card a second time, then realised that there was something else in the envelope. Susan pulled it out just far enough to see it was a map, with some instructions written on the side. Angrily, she stuffed it and the card back in the envelope, which she then shoved into her back pocket.
‘Where are you, Hector?’ she said savagely as she closed the letterbox flap with a loud rattle and went inside.
Half a mile away, the single black cloud stopped above a derelict building site and a single stroke of lightning flashed down. The muted clap of thunder that followed could have been a car backfiring.
The twins, busy on the backyard trampoline, didn’t notice it. Jaide, the eldest by four minutes, was shorter by half an inch, but even so she could nearly always jump far higher than Jack, much to his annoyance.
‘Do you really think I take after Dad?’ Jack asked while gathering his breath for another challenge.
‘I don’t know. I guess we both do, a little bit.’
‘So you could be the late one, not me.’
‘Maybe, but I’ll always jump the highest.’
‘Only because you hog the middle.’
‘That’s not true!’
‘You know,’ said a voice from the back fence, ‘I reckon you both hog the middle, given the opportunity.’
The twins stopped jumping. For all their differences, the surprised looks on their faces were identical.
‘Dad?!’ they both asked.
The familiar floppy-haired figure of Hector Shield smiled at them over the fence.
‘Better late than never!’
The twins practically bounced over the trampoline net in their haste to get to him.
‘You made it!’ Jack said.
‘What took you so long?’ Jaide asked.
‘It’s good to see you, too, kids.’
The twins opened the gate and Hector stepped into the yard. He was dressed in his usual rumpled dark blue corduroy pants and jacket, and was wheeling a large and battered black suitcase behind him. His long arms easily enfolded them both in a great big hug.
Neither twin noticed that there were scorch marks on his jacket. But Jack, burying his head in his father’s shirt, withdrew after a moment, sniffing. Hector smelled like burnt toast.
‘Why did you come this way?’ Jack asked.
‘My, uh, taxi dropped me off on the wrong street.’
Jaide didn’t care how their father had got there, just as long as he was home. ‘Did you bring us any presents?’ she asked.
Hector smiled at Jaide. He always brought back a little bit of treasure for each of them from his trips. His presents were invariably exciting and strange, like the antique wind-up horses he’d brought back from Spain the year before, or the Mayan goblets for drinking ceremonial hot chocolate he’d produced at Christmas.
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘We’ll have a present-giving ceremony after I’ve had a shower and a cup of coffee.’
They turned toward the back door, and all three stopped as they saw Susan standing there with her arms folded and a tense expression on her face.
‘Ah,’ said Hector. ‘You go on ahead, Jack and Jaide. I think your mother wants a word.’
The twins grabbed the handle of the battered Samsonite case. It was something of a ritual for Jack and Jaide to take it up to their parents’ room, and they were happy to get out of the way of the brewing parental argument. Since their mother worked shifts as a paramedic, any unexpected change of schedule (like their father being a day late) wreaked havoc with all the complicated juggling of school, after-school activities and work.
‘It’s heavy,’ puffed Jack when they reached the stairs.
‘Our presents must be huge!’ Jaide let go of the handle and lifted the suitcase from its base. Together they negotiated the hairpin bend halfway up and lugged the suitcase into their parents’ bedroom. The room was decorated with a series of nineteenth-century watercolours by an artist their father had discovered in Paris, depicting small animals and birds all dressed in Victorian costumes.
The twins started to hoist the suitcase up onto the bed, but Jack lost his grip at the last second and Jaide couldn’t hold it alone. The case fell back on the floor. Jack leaped aside, and with an almighty crack, the solid outer shell of supposedly indestructible plastic split in the middle and all the contents cascaded out across the twins’ feet.
For a second, Jaide and Jack were shocked into silence. Out in the garden, they could hear their mother cry, ‘But, Hector, you only just got back!’
The twins stared down at the shattered suitcase.
‘Dad’ll be mad,’ said Jaide. ‘What do we do?’
‘I can’t believe it broke,’ said Jack. ‘It must have fallen a million times before.’
Jaide picked up the two broken halves of the top of the suitcase and held them up to her brother.
‘Look! It’s burnt. No wonder it broke.’
Jack came around and saw a jagged scorch mark running from one end to the other. He sniffed, and smelled the same odd smell that had been on their father when he had hugged them.
‘Do you think – do you think he was in some kind of accident, and that’s why he’s late?’
‘I don’t know.’
Jaide put down the broken lid and looked at the pile of things at their feet. Most of it seemed pretty ordinary, just shirts and socks, underwear and toiletries. But there was a pair of particularly old and tattered corduroy pants that had something sticking out of the leg.
Jaide picked up the pants and an iron rod fell out. Jack quickly reached down to pick it up.
‘Ow!’ he exclaimed as a bright blue spark jumped to his grasping fingers. He dropped the rod onto the bed.
Both of the twins looked it over, eager to see something special in it. But it was just a two-foot-long length of iron, pitted and scarred, utterly unmarked by rust.
‘Not much of a present,’ Jaide said, reaching for it. There was no spark, but a wave of dizziness rolled through her.
She shut her eyes and waited for it to pass, but instead the feeling got stronger.
‘Are you all right?’ Jack asked nervously. Jaide had suddenly gone very pale.
‘No,’ she said, and swayed sideways. Jack steadied her and tried to snatch the rod away, to throw it back on the bed. But the moment he touched the cold iron again, a wave of dizziness hit him as well.
The floor sagged underneath them. The ceiling bowed. Every corner curved and twisted, as though they were seeing the walls through buckled glass.
‘What’s going on?’ Jack’s voice boomed like a foghorn.
‘It’s the rod!’ Jaide’s voice squeaked like fingernails down a blackboard.
‘Let it go!’
‘I can’t!’ She shook her hand, but the rod was firmly attached to her palm. ‘It won’t let go of me!’
/> Jack tried to let go, too, but he was stuck as well.
The angles and lines of the room bent even further, tangling their world in knots. Bile rose in their throats. Jack shook his head wildly and Jaide blinked and swallowed, hoping that this would somehow make things look right again. But it didn’t, and they felt a sudden pain in their ears, a pain followed by a horrible, whispering voice that at first was so soft they could only feel it and not understand. But it grew louder and more strident, until it was the only thing they could hear, as if it emanated from inside their own heads.
+Come to us, troubletwisters. Join us . . . welcome, most welcome!++
The twins spun around and tried to head for the door, though now it was only a tiny rectangle at the end of a distorted tunnel of walls. Their feet still moved, but it was no use – the rod was fixed in place above the bed and they couldn’t let go.
+We see you! We see you!++ crowed the voice triumphantly. ++So close, so close!++
As the voice spoke, the watercolour animals on the walls twisted and writhed out of their frames, morphing into hideous, three-dimensional shapes with bulging eyes like those of monstrous goldfish, eyes that rotated and shifted to peer intently at the twins.
Even worse than their attention was the fact that the eyes were entirely white, without iris or pupil, and the whiteness was buzzing and blurry, like the worst kind of fluorescent light.
+We see you! We see you!++
Jaide almost yanked her arm out of her shoulder socket as she tried to free herself from the rod. She kept her head down as she struggled, trying not to meet the gaze of those terrible eyes, the eyes that she felt were drawing her in, sucking her into some other place, some other dimension.
Jack, too, averted his eyes, but the room warped and weirded around him even more. He sensed more than saw that there was something behind these impossible spaces, and desperately tried to look at something that didn’t hurt his brain, but there was nothing.
Both twins screamed at the same time.
Hector and Susan Shield heard the scream, and when they whirled around to the house, they were shocked to see its angles shifting. The roof, which normally peaked at a sharp point, was now as flat as the horizon, while the chimney had stretched up a dozen feet.
