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“Ah, Alfred!” Grandma X declared, making a space for him at the table and offering him a cup of coffee.
“No need, no need,” he said with a slightly odd accent, which the twins couldn’t place, particularly as it seemed to shift around a bit. “Good morning to you all. I’m not too early, am I? The beams are recalcitrant this morning.”
The twins wanted to say, Yes, give us another week — and also, What beams and what do they have to do with anything? But instead they said hello and introduced themselves. Stefano just nodded and fiddled with the sleeve of his shirt, looking nervous. Clearly, he and Alfred the Examiner were already acquainted.
“Very good,” he said. “I’m pleased to be here, Jack and Jaide, to test your fitness to advance to senior troubletwister status. Your grandmother assures me that you have been ready for some time. We will find out shortly if she is correct.”
“Am I ever wrong, Alfred?” Grandma X asked.
“We are all wrong sometimes,” he said with one eyebrow upraised.
“Yes, sir,” said Stefano, unexpectedly. “Is it time for school yet?”
“I suppose so,” said Susan. “If you’re that keen I can drop you off early. Kids, your grandmother is coming with me. We’re going to have morning tea at the fancy new place by the marina. There are sandwiches by the stove for lunch if you’re done by lunchtime.”
“They will, as you put it, be very much done by lunchtime,” the Examiner said.
The twins were afraid to ask what that meant, and anyway, the kitchen had dissolved into chaos. Dishes were collected, washed, and put away. Grandma X went upstairs to change her around-the-house cowboy boots for her going-out cowboy boots. She had many pairs of cowboy boots, and some system that decided which ones were to be worn for different occasions. The ones she wore when she came back down were crocodile or alligator skin, and had very sharp points.
“Are we ready? Good.” She kissed the twins on the cheeks, something Jaide let her do in front of Stefano only because she was feeling so nervous suddenly. She wished Grandma X and Susan weren’t leaving. “Don’t let Ari have any of your lunch: He’s getting fat.”
“I am not!” protested Ari, emerging from behind the door. His ears flicked as Grandma X and the twins looked at him with disbelieving expressions. “Or not that much. Besides, it is a mark of distinction among cats to be a little heavy….”
“No human food,” insisted Grandma X. “We’ll return when Alfred calls us.”
Susan looked just as unhappy as the twins felt as Grandma X bustled her out the door. Stefano was already out by the car, a 1955 Austin 1600 with bright red-and-yellow flames painted down the hood. This car had replaced the yellow Hillman Minx that had met its end at the bottom of the river. Jack and Jaide stood on the veranda and waved them off, feeling absurdly — they hoped — as though they might never see them again.
When the car had vanished up the lane, they turned to go inside.
“Where did he go?” asked Jaide. “I thought he was right behind us.”
Jack blinked rapidly as a sudden gust of wind threw dust into his eyes.
“I don’t know,” he said, stepping into the hallway. It was empty. “Hello? Did you see where he went, Jaide? Jaide?”
He spun around on the spot and was shocked to discover that he was alone. Not only was Alfred the Examiner missing, but so, too, was Jaide. It was as though she had vanished into thin air.
“Come on, this isn’t funny.”
He spun around one more time, in case he had missed something completely obvious, and in doing so he brushed against the long shadow cast by the open doorway across the entry hall rug. Suddenly, darkness consumed his vision. The house vanished. The world vanished. And he was gone, too.
* * *
Inside the kitchen, Ari felt the hand holding him by the scruff of his neck relax. He immediately leaped from Alfred’s lap, where he’d been held prisoner, and ran to the front door. Looking around, he saw no one except Kleo, padding regally around the corner, shaking her head.
“You were told to stay away,” she scolded him.
“Not told as such,” he said. “It was more a suggestion. Anyway, I just wanted to see —”
“Curiosity is not a survival trait,” said the Examiner from the kitchen. Ari shook his head. The man had the hearing of a cat!
Faintly, as though from an exceedingly distant place, Kleo thought she heard someone calling for help. She cocked her head, but the cry was gone as quickly as it had come. She hadn’t even been able to tell which troubletwister it was.
“Stay right here,” she told Ari. “They’ll need us when they come back.”
“If —”
Ari’s mouth clapped shut at a look from Kleo that said as clearly as words: Don’t say it.
Jaide was utterly lost. She didn’t know where she was or even what she was. Everything around her was confusing and strange, a blur of movement and light that never ceased changing. But what was most disorienting was not knowing how she was experiencing it. She couldn’t feel her arms and legs. She couldn’t blink her eyes. She didn’t seem to have eyes. She felt as if she was tumbling and flailing and screaming, but there was nothing she could do to stop it.
Is it The Evil? she wondered. Have I been attacked?
That was nonsense, she told herself. Alfred the Examiner had been there. The Evil would never have gotten past him.
But what if he’s one of them? What if he’s an Evil minion and Grandma never suspected?
She reminded herself of all the times she had doubted Wardens before. First her grandmother, who she had thought was a witch. Then Custer. Then Rodeo Dave. They had all turned out to be good, trustworthy people, firmly on her side.
Don’t forget Uncle Harold. We trusted him, and look what happened!
Jaide told herself to ignore that panicky internal voice. It wasn’t helping. Evil attack or not, she needed to find out what was going on and get herself out of it, somehow. She needed to breathe slowly, even if she didn’t appear to have any lungs, and calm the frantic beating of the heart she no longer had. Whatever was happening to her, she wasn’t dead yet.
“While there’s life,” her father always said, “there’s hope. And Brussels sprouts.” Unlike most sensible people, Hector Shield loved Brussels sprouts.
His optimistic mantra didn’t help Jaide at all when she was sucked into an engine and torn violently to pieces.
* * *
Jack willed his eyes to open, but they wouldn’t. He could tell that there was light out there, but he couldn’t see it. He couldn’t feel anything either
. For all his groping and fumbling, he might as well have been in deep space. He couldn’t even feel his hands. Soon he began to doubt they even existed.
If he didn’t have hands, what about the rest of him? He couldn’t feel his feet, either, or his head, or his heart….
Stay calm. There has to be an explanation.
Jack did his best to forget an old book he’d read about people who had been buried alive. Being trapped underground had always been something that frightened him, and his experiences in the sewers under Portland hadn’t helped that fear. But he would know if that had happened to him. This was something else, some kind of trick. Perhaps by The Evil. It had attacked them yesterday. Why not today as well?
We’ve beaten The Evil before. We can do it again.
But how, he wondered, could he fight something he couldn’t even see?
The first step, he told himself, was to find himself. All he had to do was touch something and he would know where he was. That was easier than it sounded, but it was something to aim for. He might not have hands, but he still existed. And if he existed, he had to be somewhere.
He could tell that he was moving, tumbling and rolling through spaces he could neither see nor sense. But weirdly, he could tell that these spaces weren’t infinite. There were boundaries and edges, and somehow, without eyes or hands, he could glimpse what those shapes were.
Was that a chair? Or a table?
Just as he was beginning to make sense of it, a giant’s boot heel came down and crushed him.
* * *
Jaide screamed, and the fact that she was still able to scream was oddly reassuring. She wasn’t dead. She was still herself. But where was she now? The engine was roaring and rumbling around her, and she was violently gusted from side to side without warning. The pitch of the engine kept changing, like someone was working a gas pedal in a car. It made her think of Mr. Holland, the town butcher, who drove through Portland like he had never heard of a brake pedal.
A lightbulb went off in her mind. What if she was somehow in the engine of his car? The only way that could be possible was if she had somehow, madly, impossibly, become the air.
