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Jack glanced behind him and saw nothing but darkness. Ahead was nothing but white, growing brighter by the second. He felt the end coming near.
“Pull harder,” he said, pushing against the chest of drawers with all his strength.
Cornelia walked up Jack’s arm and took up the cry, tugging on the handle with her beak for emphasis. “Heave away! Haul away! Set course for Charlie!”
“Who’s Charlie?” asked Tara.
“I’m guessing it must be Lottie,” said Jack as he pulled. “Grandma called the thing that looked like her Charlotte, which must be her full name.”
++You cannot escape us, troubletwister. You and your friends will join us soon. It is your destiny!++
Jack hoped very much that his destiny was to get back home, and pulled harder than ever to make sure of it.
Around them, the vortex flexed and shook. The umbrella began to smoke. Jack gritted his teeth as the handle grew hot in his hands, but he refused to let go. Stark white light rose up around them. Any second he expected to see the terrible eyes of The Evil surrounding them.
Then suddenly the vortex blew itself out. They tumbled onto a powdery white surface — Jack, Tara, Kyle, Cornelia, and the chest of drawers, all rolling head over heels until they came to a halt, their arms and legs tangled up, and Jack practically upside down, with his back against something soft.
He rolled over and stood up, holding the umbrella in front of him with both hands, ready for anything, or at least hoping he looked as though he might be. Quickly, he took in his immediate surroundings. The soft thing behind him was a dune. The white surface was sand, as pale as day-old snow, but warm. Wreckage from the blue room surrounded them, in shallow craters they’d made upon hitting the sand. Dead gray trees reached for the sky like skeletal hands. Not far from their landing site was the huge, curving rib cage of a beast that had died long ago, bleached as white as chalk.
The sky was yellow. There were two suns hanging high above. The horizon was misty and dark to their left and there were what looked like hills to the right, but Jack didn’t dwell on that for longer than a second. Kyle was dancing up and down, waving his hands in the air and scaring Cornelia.
“I don’t believe it,” Kyle cried.
“What?” said Tara, standing up in a shower of sand. “What is it?”
“We’re on an alien planet, that’s what!”
“How can you tell?”
“The sky, the suns, the way I can jump heaps higher than I could before —”
“It doesn’t matter where we are,” said Jack, feeling a surge of alarm that made him want to curl up somewhere shady and cover his head. He could deal with an Evil Dimension; an Evil Planet was something else entirely. “As long as we’re all … wait, where’s Cornelia?”
He jumped as the macaw landed on his shoulder. She rubbed his ear with her feathered head and clucked.
“Charlie,” she said.
“Is she here, Cornelia?” Jack asked her. “Can you sense her somehow?”
She cocked her head, then bobbed it twice. Jack didn’t know how that was possible, or why it was possible, but at that moment he wasn’t worried about an explanation.
“Will you go find her for us?” he asked. “Make sure she’s here, then come back and get us?”
Cornelia bobbed twice more, then took off in a startling rush of wings.
“Good luck!” Jack called after her.
Her answering squawk was lost as she flapped off into the distance, flying even faster than usual in the lighter gravity.
“That storm is getting closer,” said Kyle. “An alien storm. Awesome!”
Jack’s eyes were drawn to the dark patch on the horizon. It seemed to be changing shape.
“That’s not a storm,” he said. “We have to get moving.”
“You think that’s The Evil?” asked Tara.
“I think that’s where we were supposed to land.” Jack swallowed, trying not to imagine what that would have been like. He had other things to think about, like Tara and Kyle. He was the troubletwister. He was responsible for them. “We’ve got to get away while we can. Cornelia will find us like she’ll find Lottie.”
She has to, he said to himself. What other hope do we have?
“What about all this stuff?” asked Kyle. “That umbrella saved us back there. Maybe something else here could, too.”
“Yeah, good thinking,” said Tara. She started opening the drawers and looking inside. “There are clothes in here. We can take pants and tie up the legs. Then we can use them as sacks to carry the small stuff.”
“Neat idea,” said Kyle. “And I saw some hats. We’ll need them to keep the sun off.”
“There’s a sword somewhere; I’m sure of it….”
While his friends excitedly rummaged through the wreckage, Jack put a hand to his temple. He could hear a voice calling him from far away.
++Jack? Jack, can you hear me?++
It was Stefano! He had been so busy thinking about survival that he had forgotten about everyone left behind. Jaide hadn’t followed him here, so that meant she must have found a way to close the vortex before the entire world was sucked into it. Good for her, he thought. Jaide never shied away from a challenge, even if it did mean they were now separated.
Jaide’s voice came next.
++Jack! Hold on! I’ll come and find you!++
He concentrated on teeping back to her.
++Jaide, stay where you are. Look after Grandma. It’s dangerous here. I’ll call you back when I can.++
He listened and listened for a reply, but nothing came. Did that mean she had heard him or not?
“Jack? We’re ready.”
He opened his eyes and gaped at his friends.
Tara was wearing the metal chest plate from a suit of gold armor under a frilly white hat and what Jack initially took to be a cloak, but was in fact a pair of pants tied at the ankles and dangling down her back. The waist of the pants was also tied shut, and it had been filled with all the junk she had managed to scramble out of the sand, so it jingled when it moved. In her left hand she held a sword, point down like a walking stick.
Kyle was wearing a bearskin coat with its head hanging down his back. He had a bulging sweater tied around his waist and a deerstalker cap on his head. The wooden oar Jack’s mother had used to hit Stefano on the head was tucked into his sweater-belt. In his other hand he held the umbrella Jack had used to guide the vortex, opened to keep the sun off his head.
“You’d better get a move on, Jack,” he said. “That storm’s getting closer, and I don’t think it’s bringing rain. We need shelter, and if this really is a desert, we’re going to need water soon. That’s what I learned in Scouts. Water first, worry about the monsters later.”
He grinned, and Jack couldn’t help but grin back. He might be stuck in the realm of The Evil with no obvious way to get home, but at least he wasn’t alone.
The black stain now covered much of the horizon. Jack hurriedly rummaged through the remaining wreckage and found a broad-brimmed cap with a feather sticking out of it, a wickedly curved bone four feet long with a natural handle at one end (he suspected that had been in the ground already and wasn’t part of Grandma X’s inventory), and an embroidered sack into which he put as many interesting items as he could find, including dozens of loose pages that appeared to have been ripped from the Compendium.
In a cigar box he found several small brooches of a type he recognized: Grandma X had stuck them on him and his sister once to protect and hide them from The Evil. The protection wasn’t total, but it could make all the difference in this terrible place. He pinned two to his T-shirt, gave three each to Tara and Kyle, and kept another for Cornelia. If he bent the pin far enough, it would go around her leg without being too tight.
As he considered taking the brass bowl to catch any rain that might come their way, he heard a familiar chattering noise coming from under the upside-down dragon chair. Tipping the chair out of the way, he found a long
ivory skull staring up at him from the sand with glowing red eyes, its jaws clacking anxiously.
“Don’t want to be left behind, eh?” Jack told the Oracular Crocodile. “I’ll take you if you tell me everything you know about this place without trying to bite my finger off.”
“Realm of The Evil, very dangerous,” it chattered.
“I mean something I don’t already know.”
The chattering stopped for a second, then resumed.
“Run?”
Jack reached around the eager jaws to pick up the skull and put it in his sack. He wasn’t going to leave the Oracular Crocodile behind for The Evil, even if it wasn’t being very helpful.
“All right,” he said, “I’m ready.”
“ ’Bout time.” Tara hefted the sword. “Hills, ho!”
“I don’t think they’re hills,” said Kyle, squinting. “I think that’s a city.”
Jack also squinted at the horizon, but he couldn’t make out any details. Maybe he did need glasses, as Susan sometimes told him. But his ears were fine, and they were telling him that the rising rumble coming from the direction of The Evil was definitely something to get away from, and fast.
Through the open kitchen door, Jaide could hear the adults arguing.
“What does it hurt to ask?” Susan was saying. “I’m sure Aleksandr isn’t the monster you make him out to be.”
“He’s not a monster,” said Hector. “He’s just determined to do what he thinks is right.”
“But how can he not think this is right? There are children over there now. Can’t you convince him that we have to rescue them before his people cut them off forever?”
“Project Thunderclap will only work if The Evil doesn’t get wind of it first. That’s how he and the Hawks will see it.”
