Font Size:  

Its red eyes flashed. ‘Num-num !’

‘No. You can just sit there and starve for all I care. Maybe we’ll put you in a box and lock it in a drawer!’

Jack folded his arms and turned away.

‘Mmmmmmmm.’ The skull sounded as though it was full of wasps. ‘Mmmmmmmm.’ Then it stopped and said, ‘Cast-iron wind-detection instrument incorporating astronomical details above the cardinal points.’

‘What?’ said Jaide.

With a slightly malicious tone, the skull repeated what it had told them. ‘Cast-iron wind-detection instrument incorporating astronomical details above the cardinal points.’

‘It sounds as bad as Professor Saxon J Chiruta III,’ Jaide commented, scratching her head.

‘What’s a cardinal point?’ asked Jack.

‘They’re what a compass points to,’ said Ari. ‘East, west, north, south.’

‘And what does it mean by astronomical details?’

‘I don’t know. The sun? A comet?’

Jaide clicked her fingers. ‘Moon and stars – it’s talking about the weathervane!’

They ran outside and stared up at the night sky. The weathervane’s trusty arrow was barely visible; only Jack could make out which way it was facing, and even with his night vision he had to stare at it for quite a while.

‘We should have thought of this earlier,’ said Jaide. ‘Or you should have told us,’ she added to Ari.

‘Don’t look at me,’ he said innocently. ‘I’m a cat.’

‘Exactly.’

‘It’s pointing west,’ declared Jack finally.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Positive. And the wind is from the south.’

‘So the excision is to the west.’

Jaide shivered, thinking of the monster and all the white-eyed creatures the last time The Evil had directly attacked them.

‘You mustn’t do anything about this,’ said Ari. ‘You know what Kleo would say. You know what your grandmother would say.’

‘They’re not here,’ said Jack. ‘We are.’

‘And here’s where you should stay. You can’t get yourselves overexcited or you never know what might happen.’

‘But what will happen if we don’t do something?’ Jaide was staring out into the night, following with her mind the direction the arrow was indicating.

‘You know where it’s pointing, don’t you?’ she asked Jack.

He nodded. ‘The old sawmill. The building site.’

‘Let’s go.’

Ari protested as they went to get a flashlight and then their bikes, but once they were under way, they left him far behind.

There was nothing he could do to stop them.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Night of the Moths

The building site was as dark and gloomy as it had been the previous night. The only difference was a white van parked out the front, with the MMM Holdings logo on it.

BUILDINGS TO LIVE IN.

Someone was there.

Jack and Jaide cycled to the back of the site and tiptoed through the hastily and rather poorly repaired hole in the fence.

‘Do you feel that?’ Jaide whispered to Jack. She couldn’t explain it exactly, because it wasn’t anything she could hear or see. But the hair on the back of her neck was prickling, and she was acutely aware of the way the wind was nervously circling about her. Not like a twister. Just not at all normal.

Jack nodded. The feeling was the same as it had been earlier that day, from the house next door. He felt like something was watching them, and watching them closely. The moon hadn’t risen yet, so the shadows were dark even to his night-sensitive eyes. There were dozens of hiding spots.

‘Careful,’ he said, warning Jaide away from the trench they had skirted the night before. The squelchy patch of poisoned rats had been cleaned up, and the smell of crushed ants was gone.

‘How about a little light?’ she whispered.

‘All right.’ He flicked on the flashlight and swept it around them.

That only made it worse. Now the shadows were moving.

‘Look!’ said Jaide, grabbing his arm and pointing down into the trench.

There was something odd lying on the bottom.

Jack edged closer, playing the light across it. It looked like a long tube of plastic wrapping, until he got even closer and saw the texture was more like paper. It was kind of olive-grey and there were odd ridges and scaly patches. It was at least five yards long and perhaps six feet in diameter.

‘Is that . . . a snake skin ?’ he said, remembering Rodeo Dave’s account of the escaped boa constrictor. ‘It’s huge!’

Jaide was thinking exactly the same thing. She looked around them, imagining a giant serpent about to strike at any moment.

‘You know,’ she said slowly, ‘maybe we should go home . . .’

‘In a minute,’ said Jack, sweeping the flashlight around them again. ‘The answers are here. When we find them, we can tell Grandma and –’

He froze. The light had picked out a figure peering at them from behind a stack of corrugated iron. Definitely a person, with a head and shoulders and some kind of hood obscuring his or her face.

As soon as the light struck their dark observer, the hood boiled into a cloud of grey, heavy moths that swarmed straight for them, their eyes gleaming pure white.

The twins acted instinctively, the lessons they had learned that afternoon fresh in their minds. Jaide called her Gift up and out in a series of tiny twisters, while Jack reached for the shadows in order to draw them about him and his sister, obscuring them from view.

But something went wrong. The twisters roared away from Jaide and whistled off into the distance. Instead of shadow, Jack found he had wrapped Jaide and himself in an intense white light that, rather than shielding them, attracted even more moths, some of them not even the white-eyed ones under the control of The Evil.

The moths swarmed in on them, their fat bodies and scratchy antennae crawling over every part of their bodies, more and more flying in as the first wave tried to get under their clothes, into their ears and noses and eyes.

With the physical assault of the moths came a terrible, silent wave of pressure on their minds. This time, The Evil said nothing to them – but somehow this was almost worse than if it had. There was just a blind, groping thing reaching into their heads, trying to swallow up their minds and take them out of themselves forever.

‘Who’s there?’ called a girl’s voice. ‘What’s going on?’

Jaide recognised Tara’s voice.

‘Keep back!’ Jaide shouted, but further words were smothered by an avalanche of moths that filled her mouth. Jaide spat them out and bent over double, slapping herself in a desperate attempt to escape the smothering insects.

‘Jaide? Is that – ahhh!’

Tara disappeared under another vast wave of moths. Shrieking, she turned to run, tripped over a piece of timber and fell to the ground under a ten-inch-deep blanket of insects.

Jack ran in a circle, windmilling his arms across his face to keep it clear enough to see through slitted eyes. He was still trying to shield himself with shadow, but his Gift just kept fuelling the intense light – doing the exact opposite of what he was asking it to do.

The exact opposite, thought Jack.

‘Opposite!’ he shouted to Jaide, spitting out a moth. ‘Tell your twisters to go away!’

Jaide’s whole head was covered in moths, and they’d got into her ears as well. She heard Jack’s voice as if it came from very far away. Too afraid to open her eyes, she concentrated on the whirlwinds, imagining them leaving the sawmill, flying out across the town and then over the sea, going far, far, far away . . .

A fierce, cold breeze hit the side of her head, followed by another wind that picked her up and spun her round. Jaide opened her eyes, moths peeling off her in all directions as two small twisters spun in an eccentric dance round her and Jack.

‘Light!’ said Jack, holding up

his hands. ‘Give me light!’

The brilliant white light around him faded, till there was only the familiar yellow beam of the torch.

‘Come to me, twisters,’ said Jaide quietly, reaching out for the whirlwinds. They spun away instead, carrying off a great cargo of moths.

The twins ran over to Tara, who now only had a light coverlet of insects. Brushing them aside, they helped her up.

Distantly, on the street outside the building site, they heard the screech of tyres and pulling away.

‘Oh,’ said Tara, uncovering her head and blinking up at them. ‘Oh! What was that all about?’

‘I guess they were attracted by the light,’ said Jack, turning off the flashlight. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I . . . I was at the cinema,’ said Tara shakily. ‘I’m supposed to meet my father here. Have you seen him?’

Source: www.allfreenovel.com
Articles you may like