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Her frown deepened. There were other things she knew she’d forgotten and couldn’t quite retrieve. But they were coming back now, becoming less dreamlike and more concrete, as if the wind was clearing cobwebs from her mind.
‘The door!’ she cried.
‘What?’
‘The blue door!’
Jack stared at her blankly, a puzzled look flickering across his face. Then he knuckled himself in the side of the head.
‘Of course! How could we have forgotten?’
‘I don’t know.’
Jaide thought back to that morning, but everything was still a little blurry. They had been looking for a cellar, hadn’t they? She was sure of it. Grandma X had said something about it, then they had had some hot chocolate, and after that it had just been playing around with golden cards and other odd things, and Grandma X’s fingers clicking loudly . . .
She was suddenly afraid, although she didn’t know exactly what she feared. It wasn’t only the wind almost taking her up, or the weirdness of everything to do with their grandmother, or even the uncertainty surrounding their move from their old home. There was something else, a chill that came not from the wind alone.
‘Let’s go down now,’ she said, suppressing a shiver. ‘She’ll be looking for us if we’re not back soon.’
The downhill path was rougher and steeper, and they had to proceed much more slowly than either of them would have liked. Both of them felt an urgent need to get off the Rock, to get out of the wind, especially as the sky grew darker and spots of rain dotted the grey boulders around them.
Jack concentrated carefully on putting his feet down safely, and as a result didn’t notice when the path turned, putting the bulk of the Rock between them and the lighthouse.
The moment the lighthouse was out of sight, a swarm of tiny flying insects – midges or sandflies – fell upon them. Buzzing almost inaudibly, they numbered in the thousands, it seemed, and Jack waved a hand in front of his face to keep them out of his eyes and nose, but they were impossible to deter. The air was full of little specks with wings. He could feel them wriggling into his hair and tickling into his ears. He waved more furiously and was conscious of Jaide doing the same beside him.
‘Yuck!’ she cried, then spat and spluttered as a dozen midges shot straight into her mouth.
The swarm followed the twins as they inched down the side of the Rock, slowing them down even more than the difficulty of the path. Blinking, gasping, flailing, it was all they could do to keep moving.
Then, as quickly as it had come, the swarm disappeared, leaving Jack feeling as though he had stepped out of a cloud of smoke.
‘What was that?!’ he asked, wiping his eyes clear with the back of his hand.
‘At least they weren’t the biting kind,’ Jaide said as she combed midges out of her hair with her fingers.
She’d barely said those words when a big, fat, green-backed fly flew onto the back of her hand and stung her. It wasn’t a bad bite, just annoying, but the shock of it made her cry out.
‘Ow!’
Before Jack could say anything, a second green-backed fly got him on the back of the neck. He swatted it, but there were more of them on the way, dozens of them, barrelling in with the wind, aiming for the twins’ hands and faces. Where they landed, they bit.
‘Get off!’ shouted Jack, wildly batting at the air with his open palms, like a kung fu maniac. The midges had been insubstantial, but these flies were solid lumps . . . with a bite.
To Jaide they felt like fuzzy little hailstones dropping out of the cloudy sky. Each individual impact was barely noticeable, but added together the swarm was like a barrage of tiny missiles. And then there was the biting. The flies were voracious and seemed intent on stinging every exposed part of her.
Together the twins raced down another ten yards or so, constantly slapping their own faces and necks and clapping their hands, leaving a trail of dead flies behind them.
Then there were no more green-backed flies. Like the sudden onset of the midges, the assault of the flies was over as abruptly as it had begun.
‘We must smell good . . . or something,’ said Jaide. Both of them were thinking not very happy thoughts about what the ‘or something’ might be, given all the other strange stuff that had been happening.
The twins warily descended another ten steps before they heard the deep chorus of thousands of bugs suddenly start up, and saw the next onslaught of insects gathering just below.
‘You’re kidding,’ said Jack as a dense, dark cloud of crickets boiled up the Rock toward them in a tide of tiny legs and antennae. He looked back the way they’d come, as if hoping for some secret line of retreat to suddenly reveal itself. But the fog of flies was standing firm. ‘This can’t be happening!’
‘It is,’ said Jaide. The swarm of crickets would be on them in a moment, hopping, scratching, staring at them with their wild insect eyes. ‘We’ve got to run through them! Go!’
They broke into a sprint down the treacherous path. Even though the slope was starting to flatten out, the path still doglegged back and forth as it descended, and there were many dangerously steep spots. Jack went first, windmilling his arms in front of him, running headlong into the mass of crickets.
The hard-shelled insects pummelled the twins only from the front at first, but soon from all sides. The swarm followed them as they ran, swooping back to make multiple attacks, chirruping and clicking all the way. The noise was deafening, drowning out all attempts by the twins to talk to each other. Even Jaide felt her confidence weaken at that. There was definitely something sinister in the insects’ united determination. First midges, then flies, then crickets —
All of a sudden, they burst out of the swarm. The cloud hung behind them, but the crickets did not pursue.
‘Yee-ha!’ shouted Jack in victory. He slowed down and glanced back. Crickets started to fly off in all directions, the horde suddenly disbanded.
But even as he shouted, he heard Jaide gasp, and he whipped back around to look ahead.
A living, moving, three-inch-thick carpet of cockroaches was coming up the path, a great roiling mass of big brown bugs that extended for a dozen yards or more.
Jack didn’t waste any more time shouting, and neither did Jaide. They ran quickly down the hill, lifting their feet high and half-running, half-jumping, crunching up hundreds of cockroaches as they went. But for every hundred they squashed, there were hundreds more, and with every step, cockroaches latched on to their shoes and ankles and started to climb up their legs.
The twins jumped higher and ran faster. Both of them instinctively knew that the cockroaches were trying to drag them down. If enough of them got a hold, they might even be able to do it . . .
It was the strangest, grossest thing Jack had ever experienced – the squish, the splat, the oozing guts and the terrifying attack of legs, legs and more legs. Cockroaches on his skin. Cockroaches in his hair. Cockroaches climbing into his sleeves. All he could do was run faster. Harder. He had to breathe through his nose so the cockroaches wouldn’t get in his mouth. But h
is ears – they were attacking his ears. He swatted at them. Stepped on them. Pushed himself, with Jaide right next to him. Then they broke through – once again, the cloud had passed, but this time there were still bugs all over them. The twins slowed a little and bent over to smash cockroaches off each other’s legs, while continuing to stumble forward like crazy clowns.
‘Let’s stop and get them . . . get them all off!’ shouted Jack.
‘No! No time!’ yelled Jaide. ‘That’ll do! Run!’
She started off straight ahead, but Jack pulled her back.
‘Not that way!’ he yelled.
There were dozens of horrible, jar-size things sliding down invisible webs from the branches of the trees uphill from Grandma X’s house. As they hit the ground, their eight legs uncurled, and they began to scuttle toward the twins, moving with alarming speed.
Spiders. Jaide couldn’t stand spiders.
The twins ran from the spiders to dive frantically through a hole in the fence of the derelict house, sprint across the empty garden, and duck down the long-abandoned drive. At the front of the house there was a van with Repairs & All Maintenance painted on the side, and the odd-job woman they had met at the school that morning was sitting in the front eating a sandwich. She didn’t look up as the twins dashed past and onto the cobbled street.
Ahead of them, at last, Jaide saw the arched entrance to Grandma X’s yard and slowed down. But from behind them came the throaty snarl and scrabbling paw-steps of a large, angry dog.
Jack didn’t bother to turn around. He grabbed his sister’s arm and put on a last desperate burst of speed. Together they rocketed through the gates, skidded on the gravel, and fell over in a tangled heap. Behind them, with a yelp, the dog also skidded to a halt. Further down the lane, a few remnant spiders were seeking the shadows of the drain. They didn’t look as big as they had only a few moments before.
Hearts pumping, Jaide and Jack rolled over, hands raised to fend off a dog attack.
But the heavy-set pit bull terrier was still on the cobbled street, not quite under the arch of the gate, staring at them with its piggish eyes – eyes that were entirely white and shiny, without any trace of a pupil. Its flanks were heaving and its chops dripped spittle, but it wasn’t following them anymore, or growling. It paced back and forth just outside the gate, shaking its head and snapping at the air.
