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‘I don’t know,’ he said, putting both hands round a wooden post and holding on for grim life.
‘I must . . . I must have your Gift now.’
Jaide stared at him in surprise and dismay. Was that even possible? She supposed it was, since for a while there she’d had both their Gifts and he’d had none.
‘This is why you can’t help,’ said Ari, not without sympathy. ‘Until you have yourselves under control, you will do much more harm than good.’
Jack closed his eyes and sighed. It was exhausting, not knowing what his Gift was going to do next.
‘How am I going to get downstairs?’ he asked. ‘I’ll blow away if I let go of the railing!’
‘Think heavy thoughts,’ Jaide suggested.
Jack thought heavy thoughts. The heaviest thing he could think of was the huge rusted red ship anchor that was down at the fish market, as a kind of public sculpture. It was a hundred and twenty years old, weighed two and a half tons, and had been retrieved from the wreck of a whaling ship that had been lost in a storm just off Portland. He imagined himself being as heavy as that anchor, secure on its concrete plinth.
Rather surprisingly, it worked. A bit too well, as Jack’s legs suddenly gave way and he collapsed on to the roof, feeling his normal weight once more, with some extra on top.
‘Sorry, Jaide,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to have your Gift.’
‘I don’t want yours either,’ his sister replied. She sat down glumly next to Jack and added quietly, ‘But I do want mine.’
Jack nodded in agreement, and they sat together in silence for a minute. The Etheric Resonator kept revolving across from them, issuing its now annoying snap every thirty seconds or so. No smoke issued from the funnel. For all it told them, Portland was as peaceful and placid as any small town.
‘I thought Grandma might have been making poison to kill the monster,’ Jaide mused, ‘but that would mean that she was the one responsible for Kleo’s troubles. I can’t seeing her doing that.’
‘And we still don’t know who tried to run us over,’ Jack said.
‘At least your mother’s coming back tomorrow,’ said Ari. His ears fell back flat when the twins both looked sharply at him. ‘What? That’s a good thing, isn’t it?’
‘I suppose so,’ Jaide said. ‘That means four days of pretending to be normal though.’
‘If there’s one thing I know about troubletwisters,’ said Ari, rubbing the side of his head against her arm, ‘it’s that you’ll never be normal.’
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Jack and the Ladybirds
The twins didn’t spend all of that day watching the Resonator, but it felt like it. When Grandma X returned from wherever she’d been – with the needle bent and corroded, as though it had been dipped in acid – she took out the gold cards again to test their Gifts. The results clearly demonstrated that Jaide now had Jack’s Gift and Jack in turn had Jaide’s, but the ability to control the Gifts hadn’t transferred with them, so both troubletwisters were back to square one, with Gifts they couldn’t command.
After dinner, Jack and Jaide were sent to work on finishing their first entry in the Compendium, concerning their own experiences with The Evil. It was something they were simultaneously proud and resentful of. They had to get it right, but it felt far too much like homework. It was also something they were loath to revisit, except for the ending, where everything had worked out for the best.
‘What’s another word for horrible ?’ asked Jack, stuck on his description of the sewer, as he had been all week.
‘Awful ?’ said Jaide without looking up from the screen. She was typing her own version of events straight into their mother’s laptop, while Jack wrote his out by hand first. ‘Hideous? Revolting? Terrible?’
It had been all of those things, but something more as well. Jack realised that overriding all these emotions was the sheer terror he had felt at the sight of the waterfall of possessed rats pouring out of a pipe, all wanting to smother him.
‘Terrifying,’ he said quietly, and wrote that down.
There was no way, though, that he could capture the dreadful voice he had heard, and the way it still seemed to whisper to him even now, when everything else was quiet.
‘Let me read it,’ said Jaide, peering over his shoulder.
‘No!’ He clutched it to his chest. ‘It’s not finished.’
‘You’ll never be finished at this rate.’
‘You can read it after I type it in.’
‘Of course I will. So can anybody. Well, any Warden anyway. It’ll be in the Compendium forever.’
That thought made Jack want to crumple up the pages he had already written and throw them away, but Grandma X would only make him start again, and he couldn’t bear that thought either.
Slowly he went back to work. Perhaps by writing down his experiences, he thought, he might be able to start forgetting them.
At school the next morning, Tara came running up to them from where she had been quietly drawing by herself. She was always the first there, it seemed, dropped off by her father while he went about his work in Portland.
‘Have you heard?’ she said. ‘Work’s resuming on the sawmill site. Dad got the word yesterday. The council passed a motion overruling community objections, so he can get started straight away.’
‘I wonder if “community objections” means our grandma?’ said Jaide.
‘Probably. Dad said she didn’t turn up to the last meeting. That’s probably what did it.’ Tara lowered her voice. ‘And that’s not all. Dad and I looked at the site this morning. You’ll never guess what we found.’
Jack wanted to say A giant snake skin? but managed to keep it in. ‘Tell us.’
Tara drew them into a huddle so she could whisper.
‘One of the circular saws had been taken out of the tool shed overnight. The blade was covered in blood.’
Jaide’s eyes narrowed. ‘Blood?’
‘It looked like blood. I only got a glimpse though. It was all over the ground. Dad took me away and called the police. Did you know Portland actually has a police station?’
‘Yes,’ said Jaide. ‘It’s next to the hospital. Tell us more about the blood. What happened then?’
‘Well, it was gross, what I saw of it, but
I had to wait in the van until the police arrived, and then Dad took me to school. You know everything I do now.’
‘Police?’ said Miralda, who had seen the huddle and come up behind Tara. ‘What about the police?’
Tara told the story again, and the whole class gathered around to listen. Even Kyle paid attention. When Tara had finished, she was grilled for more information, which she couldn’t provide, and the class dissolved into wild speculation that Mr Carver found very difficult to stop, no matter how much he turned his back and counted to ten in some obscure language.
After that, Miralda asked Tara to sit with her during break, but Tara chose to stay with Jack and Jaide.
‘Dad’s going to be busy after school,’ she said as they exited the classroom. ‘Want to hang out this afternoon?’
‘We can’t,’ Jaide said. ‘Mum’s back today and she’ll want to spend quality time with us.’
‘Yeah,’ Jack echoed, ‘by making us do homework and baking another cake probably.’
‘What about tomorrow?’ Jaide suggested.
‘Can’t,’ Tara said. ‘Guitar lessons. Wednesday?’
‘Done!’
They shook hands and laughed when they saw Miralda scowling at them.
‘Hey, there’s a ladybird!’ said Jack on their way home. ‘And another one . . . two . . . there’s loads of them!’
‘So?’
‘Isn’t that, like, good luck or something?’
‘Only if they land on you and then fly off your thumb or something like that.’
Jack held up his hand. Half a dozen ladybirds immediately landed on his outstretched fingers and he rotated his hand to try to make them crawl on to his thumb. But they barely crawled an inch before they fell off, one by one, straight down to the ground, where they lay still.
Jack knelt down and poked them with his finger, but they didn’t move.
‘They’re dead,’ he said wonderingly. ‘They were fine, flying . . . now they’re dead.’
‘Maybe they were old,’ said Jaide. ‘Or maybe your bad breath killed them.’
‘I don’t have bad breath! Do I?’
