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He huffed into his palm, but could only smell his hand.
‘What does it matter? They’re only ladybirds. Maybe like butterflies they just drop dead after three days. You look like you just lost your pet budgie.’
Jack shrugged, wishing she couldn’t read him so easily. Maybe he had entertained the thought that he might keep the ladybirds in a matchbox or something. Neither he nor his sister had ever had a pet – an unfairness they now understood to be driven by The Evil’s ability to take over animals, and their father’s wish to keep them safe at all times. Jack would do anything to have a dog, but some ladybirds would have done for a day or two.
He also didn’t like that they had died when they landed on his hand.
‘Come on,’ said Jaide, dragging him up. ‘Mum’s probably back already. Let’s go and see.’
Susan was indeed home. She was in the den, reading the latest Portland Post, which came out on Monday afternoon. The headline was all about the bloody circular saw – definitely the most exciting thing to happen since the storms.
After she had said hello to them and given them both a kiss, she returned to the article.
‘It says here that there was no body or . . . bits . . . anywhere on the site. Still, they’re looking for anyone who might have gone missing overnight, or lost a limb mysteriously.’
She put the paper down and looked the twins in the eye.
‘This doesn’t have anything to do with you, does it?’
‘What makes you say that, Mum?’ asked Jaide innocently.
‘Yeah,’ said Jack. ‘We weren’t even here most of the weekend.’
‘I know, I know,’ she said. ‘Grandma checked with me about you staying with Tara and of course I approve. I’m all for you having normal friends like you did back home, before . . . before.’
She pinched the bridge of her nose as though warding off a headache. ‘I just want to know that you’re safe.’
‘We don’t have anything to do with this saw thing,’ declared Jack, with absolute honesty.
‘Yeah, you don’t have to –’ Jaide started to say.
‘We haven’t had a murder in Portland for fifty years,’ interrupted Grandma X from the lounge. ‘No one’s planning to start now.’
Susan believed them, or chose to pretend that she believed them, and the rest of the night passed uneventfully. In fact, Susan went to bed surprisingly early, blaming a hard shift and too many mashed potatoes with dinner. The twins sat up playing cards until Grandma X turned out the light, and then they too went straight to sleep.
It was Jaide, again, who woke in the dead of night to an unusual sound. This time, though, it wasn’t cats.
She opened her eyes, startled by the weird clarity of her brother’s Gift. She could see as clearly as though the sun was shining through the window, but at the same time she knew it was dark. There were no shadows. There were no spots brighter than others. She could just see . . . everything.
The low, soft, bubbling moan that had woken her came again.
She sat up, clutching her covers to her throat. It was quite different from the massed cat yowling, and it didn’t sound human either. It was full of pain and anger, but there was fear in it too, that came to the fore when it finally sighed off into silence.
Jaide sat completely still for a good three breaths, waiting for it to come back. When it didn’t, she got hurriedly out of bed and, before she could change her mind, shook Jack awake.
‘What now?’ he asked, blinking blindly around him.
‘Shhh. Listen.’
‘I can’t hear anything.’
‘I know. Wait.’
Jaide held her breath. Beside her, Jack picked up on her nervousness and did the same.
‘Uuuuuggggghhhhhhhhhhblblllellaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh.’
By the time it had finished, Jack was clutching his sister’s arm.
‘What is that?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘but I think it’s coming from the house next door.’
They peered out of the window, but even Jaide couldn’t see anything unusual in the garden over the fence.
The groaning utterance came again, more terrible than before.
‘That has to be the monster,’ said Jack.
‘We’d better tell Grandma,’ said Jaide.
But when they ran upstairs, Grandma X’s bed was empty.
‘Maybe she’s already doing something about it,’ Jaide said, just as another terrible, bubbling moan came from next door.
‘Then why does it keep happening?’
Grandma X wasn’t on the widow’s walk either, and neither were the cats. The Resonator turned and clicked as normal, and wasn’t smoking.
The twins went back downstairs and looked in their mother’s room, at least in part hoping she would wake up and reassure them that the noise was only the plumbing. But Susan continued to sleep through it all, just as she had slept through the massive catfight.
‘I think we have to check it out ourselves,’ said Jaide. ‘I mean, this is our chance to find out about the monster.’
‘I’m not sure I want to find out,’ said Jack.
Jaide wasn’t sure either. But with Grandma X and the cats away, she felt it was their duty to investigate.
‘We have to,’ she said. ‘Who else is there?’
‘OK.’ Jack sighed. ‘After you. I still can’t see in the dark.’
Jaide led the way out of the house and across the garden, to where the fence had still not been properly fixed after the bulldozer had crashed through it. It felt weird to both of them, her being the guide in the darkness. Jack felt Jaide’s Gift lashing away inside him as well, reaching out to the air around him. It took an effort to stop it from whipping up whirlwinds or raising a storm. In fact it took so much of his concentration that he forgot to think about ghosts and haunted houses entirely – until the next awful, liquid groan. Up close, the house next door was very much like a haunted house, with peeling paint and a sagging verandah. The wind echoed through the empty rooms and out through the boarded-up windows, a soft, whistling counterpoint to the horrible groaning.
‘It sounds like its coming from the basement,’ said Jack. ‘Do you think this place has one?’
‘I guess it does, if it’s the same as Grandma’s.’
Jack pulled at Jaide’s pyjama collar.
‘Uh, what are we going to do if we do find the monster?’
‘I don’t exactly want to find it,’ Jaide whispered. ‘I just want to get a look at it and see if it’s part of The Evil.’
‘And what if it is?’ asked Jack. ‘What do we do then?’
‘We use our Gifts,’ replied Jaide impatiently, without thinking.
‘But I can’t control your Gift. And what can you do with mine? Except run away faster than me?’
‘I wouldn’t!’ Jaide protested. ‘But maybe you’ve got a point.’
The awful groaning sounded again, inside the house. The twins jumped and backed off a few paces. As they did so, Jaide noticed something on the steps that led up to the front door.
‘What’s that?’ she whispered, pointing.
‘What? I can’t see a thing,’ replied Jack in a panicky voice.
‘There’s a little mirror on the step. I saw the starlight reflected in it for a second . . .’
Jack didn’t quite see so much as feel Jaide bend down and pick it up.
‘It’s a mirror,’ she said. ‘Like from a powder compact. Why would –’
‘Jaide!’ hissed Jack. ‘Hear that?’
‘Hear what?’
‘The groaning has stopped. But there’s a kind of . . . slithering noise . . . ‘
Jaide backed up to Jack and they stood silently together, listening.
There was a shuffling noise inside the house, like a big heavy carpet being dragged across the floor.
The hair on Jack’s neck suddenly prickled. A horrible feeling crept over him, one he had felt before.
Someone . . . or something . . . was
watching them.
‘Jaide . . .’ He barely breathed the word, afraid of drawing the unnatural attention any closer. ‘Jaide . . . can you feel that?’
‘Yes.’ It was her turn to clutch him. ‘Let’s get out of here!’
They turned to run, but stopped in panic as the mirror in Jaide’s hand suddenly cracked with a sharp retort, and a shimmering white light blossomed in front of them.
++Jackaran, Jaidith – what are you doing here?++
Ahead of them, the spirit travelling version of Grandma X coalesced out of sparkly motes of light. As always, she looked much younger than she did in real life, but no less annoyed.
Jaide didn’t know whether to be relieved or not that it was clearly she who had been watching them, not the excision, or the monster, or whatever had been groaning in the house behind them.
‘We heard a noise,’ Jaide said. ‘You weren’t around, so –’
++Did you find anything?++
