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‘She’s not there,’ Jaide said, removing her ear from the wood. ‘That’s good.’
‘Why is that good?’ asked Jack. He was thinking only of getting back into bed.
‘I want another look in the Compendium.’
‘What for? We already asked it about the monster and it couldn’t tell us anything.’
‘I think we were asking the wrong question. Come on.’
Instead of manipulating the blue door’s trick lock, which could only be opened by someone on the other side or by using their Gifts, Jaide hurried through the front door and back up the stairs. Susan was still miraculously asleep, snoring softly. Grandma X’s bed remained empty, the covers made up.
‘Can’t we do this tomorrow? I’m tired,’ Jack whispered as Jaide opened the next door along and stepped through it. Instead of revealing another empty bedroom, it somehow warped space to lead directly to the basement Blue Room, where their grandmother conducted her secret activities. The room’s two chandeliers flickered into life – illuminated not by electric bulbs, but by actual candles that lit themselves and never burned down.
‘If we don’t do it now, Jack, I’ll never get to sleep.’
The Compendium stood on Grandma X’s desk next to two similar files that were labelled Correspondence and Receipts. Jaide picked up the thick folder and held it in both hands, closing her eyes briefly.
‘What are you asking it?’ Jack said, staring at her in puzzlement.
Jaide was concentrating too fiercely to speak. Kleo’s anger – combined with something Ari had said – had fueled her determination to get something right that night.
Can The Evil survive the re-establishment of all four wards?
The Compendium opened, revealing a page of words in fine print under the heading, ‘Extraordinarily Unusual Side Effects of Decerebration: a paper by Professor Saxon J Chiruta III’.
‘What does it mean?’ asked Jack, peering mystified over his sister’s shoulder.
‘I’m not sure.’ She liked to read and was proud of her vocabulary, but half of what she saw before her she didn’t understand, and the rest didn’t make any discernible sense. That every sentence ran for ten lines on average didn’t help.
Jack read out loud: ‘ . . . ad hoc termination of bellicose effluxion has been observed to incur a paroxysmal truncation of the resulting extrusions (Type IIIa) . . . Is this even English?’
Jaide leaned back and rubbed her eyes. ‘I asked the Compendium what happens when the wards came back on. I mean, everyone says that The Evil can’t get back in afterwards, but what if they’re wrong? What if there’s some sneaky way it can get back in and open the door again?’
‘And this is the answer?’
Jaide stared at the dense page, wishing the Compendium had been more obliging. ‘Maybe it is.’
‘Well, we’re no wiser, that’s for sure.’
‘No,’ she said, staring in annoyance at the cryptic text. ‘Not yet.’
Jaide hesitated for a moment, then gripped the corner of the page with her right hand as if she was going to rip it out of the Compendium.
Jack gasped. ‘Jaide! Don’t!’
‘I need it,’ Jaide said urgently. ‘And I can’t work out how to open the ring binding –’
She stopped in mid-sentence, the paper in her hand suddenly free of the ancient bronze rings that held all the different pages of the Compendium together. They had not opened, but the paper was released.
‘Uh . . . thanks,’ she said to the Compendium, folding the paper up and slipping it into her pyjama pocket.
‘What if Grandma notices it’s missing – ?’
‘Why would she notice?’ Jaide tapped the paper. ‘Anyway, if this page can tell me how The Evil is working through McAndrew despite the wards, Grandma will be pleased.’
Then all I’ll have to do, she thought to herself, is make things up to Kleo . . . somehow.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Weasel Words
Susan woke the twins from deep, exhausted sleep to say good morning and goodbye. This was the third time she had left for her three-day shift at her new job and, while it hadn’t become routine, it wasn’t so much of a wrench any more. Jack and Jaide hugged her and followed her downstairs to wave her off. Then they walked wearily into the kitchen to make breakfast.
The soup pot was back on the stove again, only this time the stains were blue-grey. Jack opened the lid and took a whiff. He was immensely relieved to smell something sweet and sickly, nothing at all like crushed ants. If Grandma X had been planting poisoned rats to make the cats of Portland sick . . . well, tired or otherwise, he didn’t think he could ever make sense of it.
Even to Jaide, the events of the previous night felt dreamlike and confusing. Only the hard reality of the page she had taken from the Compendium, now folded up in the pocket of her pyjamas, reassured her that it was truly all real.
Grandma X was in a blustery and distracted mood, still in her own dressing gown, with hair wild and crazy about her head. She started talking to the twins long before she had even arrived in the kitchen.
‘I’m awfully busy this morning, so you’ll have to make your own break– oh, you already have. Well done, troubletwisters. Perhaps you could pop a bit of bread in for me too?’
She stirred the pot and bustled out again, returning only when Jack had taken her toast out of the toaster, buttered it and lathered it thickly with jam, just how she liked it.
‘Thank you, Jackaran,’ she said, stuffing an entire slice into her mouth. From one pocket of her dressing gown she produced a handful of herbs and seeds, which she tossed into the pot. From the other came a salt shaker that sprinkled black dust. A powerful metallic smell filled the room as she stirred the pot again.
‘What is that, Grandma?’ asked Jack, wrinkling his nose.
‘Oh, just a herbal concoction, nothing important,’ she said, devouring another whole piece of toast. ‘It revitalises things. Like my garden, for example.’
‘Can we help?’ Jaide asked, thinking that not once in their days in Portland so far had they seen Grandma X show any interest in the garden.
‘I’ll manage, thank you, Jaidith. Besides, you have to go to school. I’m positive they’ll teach you something useful there one day, if only by accident . . .’
‘Are you sure, Grandma?’ pressed Jack. ‘You look tired.’
‘Me? Nonsense. I always sleep well.’
‘You didn’t hear anything . . . unusual?’
‘Like what?’ Grandma X’s sharp grey eyes were suddenly on Jaide, and the girl felt herself fall back into her seat as though physically pushed.
‘Um, cats?’
Grandma X looked around, as though only realising then that Ari and Kleo were absent. Normally the cats were buzzing around at breakfast, looking for early morning treats, particularly Ari, who had an appetite as voracious as Jack’s.
‘Did you hear fighting?’ she asked the twins.
‘Yes,’ said Jaide. ‘We thought it was the monster.’
Grandma X smiled.
‘You see how these things begin? If you hear it again, just ignore it. Kleo is being challenged, and we must let her sort it out.’
‘Isn’t there something we can do without her knowing?’ asked Jack, wishing she had told them that long before now.
‘No, because she would know,’ said Grandma X, turning back to the pot and giving it a vigorous stir. ‘Unless you were considerably more cunning than I would like you to be. Now, upstairs at once, troubletwisters, or you’ll be late!’
Rebuffed, the twins went to get dressed. When they returned downstairs only minutes later, they found the pot gone, and Grandma X with it.
‘I guess we’ll let ourselves out,’ said Jaide, hefting her bag higher on her shoulder.
‘She’s definitely up to something,’ said Jack. ‘I’m on to her tricks now. Like she never really said that the potion was for her garden, only kind of suggested it was.’
‘And she said she a
lways sleeps well, but that doesn’t mean she slept well last night, or even went to bed at all,’ said Jaide.
‘There’s something she’s not telling us.’
‘Secret secrets,’ muttered Jaide as they wheeled their bikes out of the laundry and set off to school. Her tone made it sound like the worst curse imaginable.
Mr Carver was in a subdued mood when they arrived at school that morning, which was unusual. Normally he greeted them individually with syrupy cheer and started the day with a singalong, accompanied by one of his strange instrumental performances. That day, he asked all his students to take a seat and sit quietly. Tara came in from the playground after Jack and Jaide arrived, and looked at them questioningly. They could only shrug in reply.
When everyone was present, he explained what was going on.
‘Today is the memorial service for a valued member of our community,’ he said. ‘I’m talking about Renita Daniels of course. Just last week she was here in this very school, making important repairs, and she will be greatly missed by all of us. Because it’s a school day, we cannot attend the service, unless you have a note from your parents, but I thought we would honour her in our own way, by sharing our memories of her and creating a mosaic. Would anyone like to start?’
