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‘The weathervane doesn’t agree with the Resonator,’ said Jack. ‘It’s just going in circles.’
‘It must be close,’ said Kleo urgently. ‘Everyone, be ready!’
‘I can’t see anything,’ protested Jaide. ‘Are you sure?’
She stopped as the Resonator emitted a series of sharp clicks, then abruptly turned to point south, sending its smoke eddying in spirals up to the sky.
Everyone ran to the southern railing of the widow’s walk, to look out past the shoulder of the Rock to South Beach.
‘There’s nothing here either!’
The Resonator clacked again, and this time swung to point north-east.
‘It must be something flying,’ said Jack. ‘Flying around us. Like a bat?’
‘We would hear bats,’ said Kleo. ‘They squeak.’
‘Like mice,’ said Ari, licking his lips.
Jaide looked up into the sky. She looked everywhere, not just in the direction the Resonator was pointing. If the device was slow to react to something fast-moving, it might be pointing in the direction something had been rather than where it was now.
A dark shape slid across the moon, closely followed by another.
‘You’re right, Jack,’ she said. ‘There are at least two bats out there.’
‘Flying silently,’ said Kleo. ‘That is most unnatural.’
‘It has to be the excision,’ said Jack.
‘But what does it mean?’ Jaide asked, thinking of the van parked outside the house earlier that day. ‘Is The Evil spying on us?’
‘We’re not doing anything.’
‘Trying to draw us out then?’ suggested Ari.
‘That is precisely what we’re not going to let it do,’ said Kleo. ‘I think it’s lost, and trying in vain to find the rest of itself.’
‘We’ll never know without asking it,’ said Grandma X from behind them, making them jump. ‘And I for one would never trust a word it said. Now back to bed, troubletwisters. My Companions and I will handle the excision from here.’
They said goodnight and did as they were told. They were too exhausted to argue.
‘What do you think the excision is doing, Jack?’ Jaide asked as they drowsed in the dark, thinking about the bats circling endlessly around them. ‘You didn’t say, but it looked like you were thinking something.’
‘I think it’s trying to frighten us,’ said Jack.
‘Is that all?’
‘Yes,’ lied Jack. He didn’t want to admit that he was well on the way to being terrified. The Evil had got to him once before. What if it happened again?
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The Gathering of the Glass
The twins nodded off several times during school the next day. As a result, Mr Carver gave the class a long lecture about the importance of diet and spiritual well-being in maintaining healthy energy levels, but it wasn’t either troubletwister’s fault they kept being woken up at night, or that they couldn’t tell anyone about the excision without revealing the existence of The Evil. If they so much as hinted at the existence of talking cats, they’d be laughed out of town.
The bats had gone by morning, but they hadn’t forgotten that weird midnight performance, the second confirmed sighting of the excision in Portland. During the day, Jack was plagued by a swarm of mosquitoes that flew round him, but never landed. They only dissipated when he remembered Grandma X’s repellent and put it on, and even then they still hung about, just further away.
Twice Jaide saw the MMM Holdings van go by, moving slowly and deliberately, then suddenly speeding off when the person behind the wheel saw her looking at it. She presumed it was Martin McAndrew, but there was something not right about it, and she couldn’t see clearly through the windows. The interior of the car seem oddly shadowy, as though full of smoke – or thousands of bugs, she thought with a shiver.
Tara left them alone, sensing their foul moods and exploring other options in the classroom, now that she had some. Jaide felt bad about that, and sought out Tara to say goodbye when the going-home tune sounded.
‘I’m looking forward to coming over tomorrow,’ Jaide said, not adding that for the troubletwisters it wasn’t entirely a social trip.
‘Me too,’ said Tara brightly. Their surliness was clearly forgotten. ‘Shall we catch the train together?’
‘Sure, why not?’ It wasn’t until they were on their bikes and riding home that Jaide stopped to think about how this might interfere with any plans they had about the train cats, if they ever came up with one. They had twenty-four hours to scour the Compendium and see what they could find.
When they reached Watchward Lane, there was a police car outside the house next door. Martin McAndrew was talking to the officer, who was taking notes down in a tiny black book.
The twins stopped to hear what was going on. Maybe the missing body had been found!
‘ . . . when I passed this afternoon, I saw the damage and called the station immediately. I’ve been waiting here ever since.’
‘I see, sir,’ the officer said, making no apology for what Mr McAndrew clearly thought was a significant slight. ‘And what damage is there, sir?’
The police officer was a surprisingly young woman, with an untidy blonde ponytail. The back of her shirt was hanging out under the straps of her equipment vest, which was absolutely loaded with equipment: pistol, taser, mobile phone, walkie-talkie, pepper spray, handcuffs, baton . . . all the stuff that Jack and Jaide couldn’t imagine being needed in Portland.
‘I’ve already told the station, Constable . . . um . . . Haigh. And this is the second time I’ve made such a complaint. Why don’t you just come and see it for yourself ?’
‘Very well, sir. I will.’
Constable Haigh and Tara’s dad went up the driveway and into the house. Jack and Jaide hesitated only for a moment, then sneaked over. The MMM Holdings van was outside. Jaide peered into it as she went by, but there was no sign of bugs.
Voices came from inside the house.
‘ . . . scratches and scrapes, and, see here – they go out of the back door and into the garden, where the back fence, too, has come down. And I only just repaired it!’
The twins resisted the urge to interject that the bulldozer had damaged the side fence, not the back, and it still wasn’t secure. While the police officer and Tara’s dad were busy in the back garden, the twins darted across the hall and into the front rooms, one by one. They were empty, and looked like they had been for decades. There was nothing but dust and lots of cobwebs.
‘There’s nothing weird here,’ whispered Jack.
The sound of voices grew louder, so they made a hasty escape.
‘Shouldn’t we tell Constable Haigh?’ Jack asked. ‘Maybe the
re’s some test they can do to prove that Tara’s dad is up to something.’
‘Who says he is? I don’t think he’d call the police if he was guilty of anything that happened in the house.’
Jack was nearly too tired to think at all. ‘Couldn’t he be double-bluffing?’
They put their bikes in the laundry room, where their mother insisted they keep them so they wouldn’t rust any further. Susan was out somewhere, so they dumped their bags in their bedroom and then went to find Grandma X. She was in the Blue Room, looking into a long, framed mirror that normally stood upright in one corner of the crowded space, but was now lying on its side, resting against the backs of two sturdy chairs so she, sitting in a chair opposite, could look into it. The twins could see only the back of the mirror, where various letters and numbers had been drawn in white chalk.
‘The troubletwisters are here,’ Grandma X said, glancing at Jack and Jaide and then back into the mirror.
‘Yes, sorry we’re late,’ said Jack. ‘There was a pol–’
He was interrupted by a deep, masculine voice.
‘I understand. We will be circumspect.’
The twins looked round, but saw no one else in the room. Grandma X waved them over.
‘These are my grandchildren,’ she said, pulling them in to stand next to her, one on each side. ‘Jaidith and Jackaran, say hello to some of my colleagues: Phanindranath Puthenveetil of Bombay, Roberta Gendry in Montreal, Andreas Barlund from Stockholm, currently stationed in Hobart . . .’
The twins weren’t listening to the names. They were staring in amazement into the mirror, from which the faces of no less than a dozen people stared back out at them, as though the mirror was a window into another, very crowded room. Most of the people smiled and waved, but some just nodded seriously, almost impatiently, as though keen to get back to what they had been discussing.
‘This is how Wardens talk to each other, rather than using the telephone or the Internet,’ said Grandma X. ‘We call it a Gathering of the Glass. One day you will learn how to do this, in times of need.’
‘We have been discussing the matter of the excision,’ said a round-faced woman with tightly curled black hair. She was one of those who hadn’t smiled. ‘Such things are rare, and they are rarely a problem. Usually they fade to nothing within hours, days at the most, or pop like a soap bubble. That this one has lasted this long marks it as extraordinary.’
