AllFreeNovel
Share Us
When the end of school came, Jaide and Jack were the first out of the door, scooping up their bags and hurrying on up the path. Tara called ‘Bye!’ after them, and Jaide waved as they fled. Jack was too busy watching the trees across the road as he always did, looking for any sign of The Evil. That was where it had first attacked them, dragging him into the sewers underground on a tide of ants and rats. Just thinking about it still made him feel nervous and unsettled.
They raced each other to Parkhill Street, where they turned right. Watchward Lane lay between a hardware store and a second-hand bookshop called The Book Herd, which had a front window full of adventure novels from the 1950s and incomplete encyclopedias from some even more distant era. The twins kept an eye out for Kleo the cat, who at least notionally lived there, but she wasn’t visible. The only living creature around was Rodeo Dave, the bookshop’s mustachioed owner, who waved from the open doorway as they ran by.
Up the cobbled lane they went, under a whitewashed arch topped with weather-worn gargoyles, then along a curving gravel drive. Their grandmother’s house appeared from behind a long line of poplars that cast creepy shadows across a scraggly lawn. The faded bricks and shingled roof that had once seemed strange and threatening to them were now a welcome sight. The house provided a secure base of operations for their grandmother’s secret work in Portland. From the widow’s walk, they could see across most of the small town, and the weathervane next to it had proven a handy indicator of The Evil’s presence on more than one occasion.
Jack reached the front door first, as he always did in the race home from school, unless Jaide tripped him along the way. The door was unlocked. They burst inside with a loud clatter of shoes on polished floorboards, threw their bags into the den and hurried up the hallway.
‘Grandma! Grandma!’ they both called out.
‘She’s not here,’ came the voice of their mother from the kitchen.
Immediately the twins knew that they had to contain their excitement. If their mother noticed, there would be too many questions that they couldn’t answer, with consequent difficulties. Grandma X had ‘helped’ Susan forget the worst parts of the twins’ recent adventures, and they didn’t want to do anything that might make those memories return.
‘Do you know where she went?’ Jaide carefully ventured.
‘She didn’t say.’ Susan Shield emerged, wiping floury hands on an apron. ‘How was your day?’
Both twins skidded to a halt in the middle of the hallway, staring at her as though they had seen a ghost.
Jaide said, ‘Mum, what are you doing?’
‘Cooking of course.’
‘But,’ said Jack, ‘you never cook.’
‘That’s not true. I do occasionally.’
She turned and went back into the kitchen, with the twins cautiously following, as if something horrible might be lying in wait. ‘With my shifts giving me four days off in a row, I have to find something to do with my spare time. I thought you’d be excited.’
‘That depends,’ said Jaide.’ What are you trying – I mean, what are you making?’
When Hector Shield was home, Susan wasn’t allowed anywhere near the stove. Her disasters were legendary, including scones that could be used as paperweights years later, steak as tough as plastic and baked potatoes on which she’d sprinkled sugar instead of salt (Jack had quite liked those).
‘I’m making a cobbler,’ she said proudly. ‘I found it in one of your grandmother’s recipe books. Mamma Jane used to make it for me when I was a kid. You’ll love it.’
‘I thought a cobbler made shoes,’ said Jaide, thinking about things Susan had made in the past that tasted like old shoes.
‘It’s also an old word for a kind of cake,’ replied Susan.
Jack looked around the kitchen and tried to be enthusiastic. The room was a mess. Every cupboard was open, and every drawer too. A giant pot sat on the stovetop, splattered with dark green gloop. The table was covered in dishes and exotic instruments designed to beat, whip and blend even the most reluctant ingredients into line. Jack didn’t recognise any of them, and he hugged his bag close to his chest to ensure none of the mess got on it.
Some of Susan’s cheer faded. ‘Unfortunately your grandmother doesn’t have any modern appliances – nothing that works on electricity anyway – so I’ve been using trial and error. I think I’ve got it worked out now . . . and the oven appears to be behaving itself at last . . .’
Jaide peeked over at a baking dish broad and deep enough to wash a dog in and saw a glutinous mass that she thought might – or might not – be a cobbler in waiting.
‘Do we have to eat it?’ she asked.
‘Don’t be like that,’ said Susan, her face falling even further. ‘I’m making it for you as a treat.’
‘But we didn’t ask you to.’
‘I know you didn’t, but that doesn’t mean you won’t like it.’ Susan put her hands on her hips. ‘I mean, I know we’re here for a reason, and your grandmother is a very good cook, and you need her to . . .’
Her voice faltered, and her eyes lost focus for a second, as though she had momentarily captured a memory, only to lose it again.
‘That is . . . I mean, I ought to be able to look after you too . . . shouldn’t I?’
‘Yes, Mum,’ said Jack, braving the mess to give her a hug. It had been little more than a week since their old home exploded, but already it felt as though they were living separate lives. Every aspect of their troubletwister training, from their Gifts to the house’s special properties, had to be kept hidden from their mother. It was a kindness really, since she couldn’t cope with the truth.
Jaide joined him, letting her mother squeeze her around the shoulder. ‘Can we go and play now?’
‘No, I want you to do your homework.’
‘But we don’t have any homework,’ said Jack triumphantly.
‘I know Mr Carver never assigns any,’ said Susan, ‘but that doesn’t mean you can’t do some anyway. Look in your room. I’ve downloaded and printed out some maths problems. Do them now and there’ll be cobbler when you’ve finished.’
‘But Mum –’
‘No buts, Jaide. It’s either that or help me clean up in here. Not that this was all my mess. The kitchen was in a terrible state before I even started. Your grandmother has been steaming up some rather odd greens in that big pot. Now, I’ve finished with the mixing bowl, so you can wash that up for starters –’
‘Homework’s fine, Mum!’ chorused the twins, as they beat a hasty retreat.
On their beds were two pages each of closely spaced exercises. Jaide barely glanced at them. She threw herself on to her bed. If there was one thing she hated more than her mother’s so-called cooking, it was maths.
‘This isn’t fair,’ she said.
‘It’s not so bad,’ said Jack. He was good with numbers and had already completed the first three problems in his head, just by reading through the questions. ‘The sooner we start, the sooner it’ll be finished.’
That was one of their father’s pet sayings. Jaide didn’t appear to be listening.
‘I mean, there are so many better things we could be doing,’ she muttered, kicking one trainered foot against a pole of her four-poster bed, making the knob on top rattle in a very satisfactory way. ‘If Grandma was here, I bet we wouldn’t have to do this.’
‘She’d only make us work on the Compendium,’ said Jack. The Compendium was the repository of knowledge every Warden needed to possess to help them fight The Evil. Over the past week, Jack and Jaide had spent hours writing up their own experiences for the benefit of others and reading about previous encounters until their eyes crossed with exhaustion.
‘Yes, but at least that’s interesting. That’s what we’re here for, isn’t it? Not to do adding and subtracting. We won’t need any of this stuff when we’re Wardens.’
Jack put his pencil down and thought about that.
‘We might, you know,’ he said. ‘I mean, being a
Warden is a secret job, so we’ll have to have ordinary jobs as well. Dad has his antique-finding business. I know it ties in with being a Warden, but he must need it for money, and to look normal, I suppose.’
‘Normal?’ Jaide scoffed. ‘Since when does Dad look normal?’
‘OK,’ Jack replied, picking up his pencil again. ‘I’m just saying that even when we’re Wardens we’ll still need ordinary jobs and everything.’
‘Maybe,’ Jaide agreed grudgingly. She thought about being a Warden and wondered what her cover identity might be. ‘It depends where we have to go to fight The Evil. If we get to go somewhere interesting, like Africa, I could be an archaeologist. Or if it’s to a tropical island, I could be a marine biologist.’
There were a number of special places all around the world, like Portland, where The Evil found it easier to get through and take over living things. The Wardens blocked these entry points by establishing magical wards. But the twins didn’t know where these places were. They didn’t even know where three of the four wards were in Portland, or what they were.
The only thing Grandma X had told them about the wards so far was a simple rhyme:
SOMETHING GROWING
SOMETHING READ
