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She climbed inside the car and firmly shut the door behind her.
‘Straight home, both of you,’ she ordered through the open window. ‘I’ll be right behind you all the way, so don’t even think about taking any short cuts.’
With that, she reversed the Hillman back about twenty yards, its headlights fully illuminating the twins, as if she might confine them within the light.
Jaide ground her teeth together. Trying to get Grandma X to admit that she was wrong was like arguing with a brick wall. They’d definitely heard someone, and there was no one else around. It must have been Grandma X.
‘Come on,’ Jack said quietly. ‘She’s right about getting home. If Mum gets mad, she might take the bikes away. Or something even worse.’
‘All right.’ Jaide climbed on and kicked the pedals into motion. ‘But there’s something going on here – I just know it.’
‘I know it too. Did you see those tracks back there? They were huge!’
Jack was thinking of tracks he’d seen once on a beach while on holiday. His father had explained how, when the moon was right, sea turtles dragged themselves out of the water to lay their eggs in the sand.
‘I reckon the monster was right here, tonight.’
Behind them the Hillman Minx crept forward, like a sheepdog beginning to drive a flock. Jaide looked over her shoulder, scowled and then pushed off. As they rode away, she half turned to Jack and muttered, ‘She said the monster doesn’t exist.’
‘No,’ replied Jack thoughtfully. ‘She didn’t actually say it doesn’t exist. She said something like she’d tell us if there was some kind of Evil monster creeping around.’
Jaide wrinkled her nose.
‘I wish she’d just give us a straight answer sometimes. Does that mean there is a monster?’
‘I don’t know. But I reckon Grandma doesn’t want us to go looking for one, either way.’
‘Secrets!’ spat Jaide. ‘There’s just too many of them in this town.’
They rode in silence for a moment, deep in thought.
‘What if there are different kinds of secrets?’ Jack said. ‘There are secrets like the wards, which we’ll learn about one day and which we know we have to avoid right now. We don’t know anything about them really, but we know they exist.’
‘Like there being other Wardens,’ said Jaide. ‘Or that Dad is in Venice, only we don’t know exactly what he’s doing.’
‘Yeah. And then there are the other kind of secrets – secrets we’re not allowed to even know exist. Because it’ll be bad for us, or we might make things worse . . . or maybe just because Grandma doesn’t trust us enough yet.’
‘Secret secrets?’
‘Secret secrets,’ Jack confirmed.
‘There might even be secret secret secrets,’ said Jaide. She tried to elbow Jack to emphasise the joke, and their bikes almost collided. A warning beep from the Hillman made them separate again and keep straight.
‘Secret squared secrets,’ said Jack, as they turned right on to Main Street.
‘Secrets to the power of secret,’ said Jaide, straight back.
‘Secret times infinity,’ said Jack.
The sun was completely down now, and the night still and cool. Stars were beginning to come out between a light scattering of cloud.
‘You know,’ said Jaide with new determination in her voice, ‘as well as not saying whether the monster exists or not, Grandma also never said we can’t look for it.’
‘I suppose not,’ replied Jack as they rode on to the drive of the house and had to suddenly grip their handlebars more tightly and focus on riding through the loose gravel. ‘So what do we do?’
‘If she won’t tell us more about the monster, we’ll just have to find someone who will.’
CHAPTER SIX
Dark Times Recalled
If Susan Shield detected any abnormal tension around the table that night, she said nothing about it. She had been out getting dinner when the twins had returned home on their bikes, and had therefore been none the wiser about their lateness. As they unwrapped the newspaper and divided up battered fillets and perfectly greasy chips, she asked them if they had enjoyed their bike ride, and they replied that they had.
‘The one and only time I came here while your father and I were dating,’ she said as they ate, ‘we went on a long bike ride to Scarborough and back. It took hours.’
‘Why didn’t you take the train?’ asked Jack.
‘I don’t know. Time didn’t seem to matter so much back then.’ Her eyes were focused on something far beyond the kitchen walls, and only with an effort did she force herself back to the real world. ‘There’s plenty of cobbler left, when you’ve finished.’
‘Thanks, Mum,’ said Jaide.
‘Yeah, awesome.’ Jack tried to smile, but he didn’t need a mirror to know it came out all wrong.
‘I suspect they’re still full from the cobbler they had before,’ said Grandma X, patting Susan’s hand. ‘They can take a piece each to school tomorrow in their lunch boxes.’
‘Perhaps we could give some to Mr Carver too,’ suggested Jaide with an innocent expression.
‘What a good idea.’ Grandma X smiled. ‘I’m sure he’d love that.’
After dinner, it was Jack and Jaide’s turn to do the dishes, but there was no sign of the mysterious soup pot and its thick green stains, just ordinary plates, cups and cutlery. Having done their homework and their chores, they would once have looked forward to watching some television, but Grandma X wouldn’t allow one in the house. Susan was using her laptop, so the twins had two options: play a board game or read.
‘Can we read the Compendium ?’ Jack asked Grandma X when Susan was distracted.
‘Of course,’ replied Grandma X. ‘A very good idea. Your mother is going back to work tomorrow, and we have much to do while she is gone.’
Grandma X ushered them up to their room, promising to return with the Compendium when she could.
‘Do you think we’ll find anything about the monster?’ Jack asked as they took the first turn on the stairs. ‘The Compendium never really does what we tell it to.’
That was one of the most annoying features of the Wardens’ repository of knowledge regarding The Evil. The trick was to think of what you most wanted to know, then open to a random page. Supposedly the Compendium would lead you straight to the information you needed. More often than not, though, the twins found themselves staring at recipes for exotic teas or methods of translating ancient entries into a language they could understand.
The only really useful thing they’d found was a way to quickly heal Jaide’s injured finger – which had been savaged by the Oracular Crocodile – but it still tingled at unexpected times. Her fingernail had also turned slightly silver, as if she’d painted it, and the colour could not be removed.
‘Well, maybe we’ve just been asking the wrong way,’ she said. ‘Or we haven’t needed to learn something badly enough.’
‘How do you think it tells the difference?’
‘I don’t know. We just have to concentrate harder, I think.’
They read ordinary books until Grandma X came in with the Compendium several minutes later.
‘Your mother will be up in an hour to turn off your lights,’ she said, putting it on the rug directly between them. ‘Make sure it’s out of sight by then, won’t you?’
They promised they would. Jack brought his quilt over to sit with Jaide in front of the Compendium. As always, he felt a tingle of anticipation before opening the enormous blue folder. Within lay all the secrets of the Wardens and their long fight against The Evil. Who knew what it would reveal to them this time?
‘Think of the monster,’ Jaide told him, remembering how Grandma X had helped her find Jack when he was lost in the sewers, by holding a clear picture of him in her mind. The trouble was, they didn’t have a terribly clear picture of the monster to go on. ‘What do we know about it?’
‘It’s big,’ Jack said. ‘And
it drags itself along.’
‘It might have shark’s teeth and an insect shell.’
‘And it might be hairy like a gorilla.’
‘It can’t be all those things at once,’ Jaide said. ‘Can it?’
‘Maybe that’s why they call it a monster.’
‘But there’s a word for that particular kind of monster, I think.’ She sighed. ‘Let’s just open it.’
They took one corner each to reveal what lay within the Compendium. There, on the page facing them, was the word chimera and a drawing of a creature with two heads, one that of a lion, the other a goat, and a snake-head for a tail.
‘Oh yeah,’ said Jaide. ‘That’s the word I was looking for. Chimera.’
Jack turned the page. There was a drawing of another chimerical beast, this time a part-eagle, part-lizard. ‘Do you think these are real?’
‘I don’t know. We’re not looking at photos after all. Someone could have just made these up for fun.’
‘We’re looking for real monsters,’ Jack told the Compendium. ‘Don’t show us anything that doesn’t exist.’
The next few pages contained images of mushroom clouds and dictators.
‘Ha ha,’ said Jaide, turning the pages faster. ‘Very funny. You know what we mean.’
‘Wait,’ said Jack, sticking his finger on to a photo before it could whizz by. ‘That looks like the Rock.’
