Lizard Loopy (7 page)

“Nah, won't happen,” Josh said. “A toenail maybe. You know what? I did that deliberately!”
He pointed proudly at the stump, which had stopped bleeding altogether now and was already scabbing over.

“What—chopped your own tail off? Are you nuts?” spluttered Danny.

“Chop—no—detach, yes! Don't you remember? Lizards shed their tails if they get in a panic! And it doesn't get much more panicky than being owly din-dins. My tail detached! I bet it's still up there wriggling about now!” He chuckled, even though he did feel a little bit dizzy at the thought of it. “They wriggle on their own for ages after they've dropped off, to distract the predator from the rest of the lizard while it runs away.”

“That is quite cool,” Danny admitted. “As long as you aren't missing a limb when we get back to human form.”

“Nah,” Josh said again. “Remember when we were crane flies? We lost lots of legs between us, didn't we? And we still came back to normal . . . well, apart from wanting to headbutt hot lightbulbs . . .”

“So now what?” Danny looked around anxiously. “A fox could get in here, maybe . . .”

“More likely a weasel,” Josh said. “We're not safe. We never are while we're S.W.I.T.C.H.ed. I can't believe we did this again.”

“Well, next time we'll just stay put in Petty's lab,” Danny said. “So we can S.W.I.T.C.H. and come back to normal without a scratch.”

Suddenly Danny exploded out of the brambles—as a full-sized human eight-year-old. He got a lot of scratches.

Thud! Crackle! Rip! Josh joined him a few seconds later with a howl of pain. The brambles had scraped red wounds across their cheeks and foreheads and arms. They both looked as if they'd been in a serious fight.

Two young owls took off in haste from the little wooden hut behind them. Danny went up on tiptoes, peered over the low roof, and then gave a squawk of revolted delight. “Looook!” he said. “Your tail!” A bloodied bit of scaly tail-tip was indeed writhing back and forth on the roof. “That is beyond creepy!” Danny said.

“Could've been worse,” muttered Josh, checking his limbs and finding them all intact. “Now—can we go home please?” He headed off back towards the oak to collect the S.W.I.T.C.H. spray bottles.

“But what about the marble?!” insisted Danny, following him. “We still haven't found it!”

“Well, if you think I'm going back in that owl nest again, you're off your head!” snapped Josh. “I've got a whole bag of marbles at home. I don't need any more.”

“But . . . our destiny!” whimpered Danny.

“Don't you think it's exciting enough?” demanded Josh. “We're going to help Petty Potts reveal
S.W.I.T.C.H. to the world someday soon. We'll be famous! The only kids on the planet who've been insects and spiders and frogs and newts—and now lizards. We've even TALKED to real animals! Isn't that a pretty cool destiny already?”

“I suppose . . .” huffed Danny. “I just hate not being able to solve the riddle . . . Where the silent wise one slumbers . . . We found it! We found the silent wise one in its bedroom . . . but we didn't get to look for the marble.”

Josh suddenly stopped and turned to Danny. He laughed and clapped his hand to his scratched and bleeding forehead. “We were looking in the wrong place anyway, Danny!” he chortled.

“What? We weren't! It was the right place, I know it!”

“No.” Josh shook his head as he walked another yard and collected the S.W.I.T.C.H. spray bottles from under the oak tree. Up in the hole they could see the female owl back in her roost, sitting very still with her eyes half-closed. “She's not silent. Nor is a male. They go
t-wit—t-woo
all the time, remember?”

“Don't remind me,” shuddered Danny. “I'll get the heebies every time I hear it from now on.”

“But what you won't hear,” went on Josh, “is a barn owl. I mean, they do make noises—they can screech and hiss—but 95 percent of the time they are completely silent. They don't go
t-wit
or
t-woo
. They are the quietest bird on the wing. That's why they can hunt in daylight.”

“But the tawnies were out in daylight,” pointed out Danny.

“Just roosting, half asleep,” Josh said. “Not hunting. I mean, Tawny Mom didn't hunt us, did she? She only woke up when we showed up, all delicious and defenseless. No—tawnies roost in trees and other places, having a bit of a doze through the day—but they usually only hunt at night. Barn owls hunt at dawn and dusk and sometimes even in broad daylight. Reeeeallly silently. Your marble . . .”

“Our marble,” Danny corrected. “The package and the message were for both of us!”

“OK—our marble,” Josh said, turning back across the wood and walking fast, “is in a barn
owl nest. And I know exactly where to find one. I put it up myself.”

“You did what?” asked Danny, scooting up behind his brother.

“I went out on a Wild Things nature day last summer, and we put up bat boxes and bird boxes. I put up a barn owl box in Farmer Coggins's barn. Just the other side of this wood. I even know where the ladder is kept for checking the box. I can undo the top. We don't have to S.W.I.T.C.H. again.”

They reached the old barn ten minutes later. In the gable at one end, as Josh had said, was a stout wooden nesting box. And around the corner of the barn, behind some bales of hay and a couple of old steel drums, stood a wooden ladder. Josh eyed the ladder and then looked up at the box with a frown. “I really shouldn't be doing this, you know,” he said.

“Of course you should!” argued Danny.

“It's not good to disturb wildlife,” Josh said.

“Josh!” snapped Danny. “Wildlife has
more
than disturbed
me
today!”

Josh grinned. “True!” he said. “And there won't be any babies . . . Hold it steady for me!” He set up the ladder under the owl box. Danny did, and soon Josh was detaching the top of the box. A sudden flurry of white and golden feathers rocked him back on the step. The barn owl was high in the air in three seconds. Josh gazed after it, enthralled for a moment, and then reached into the box. He felt about, grimacing, and then replaced the lid and came back down the ladder. “Yuck!” he said. “It stinks in there!”

And then he held out his hand. In it, with some gray goo and bits of feather stuck to one side, was a marble.

“Keep it still!” Josh said, glaring impatiently up at Danny. “I'll never see anything if you keep waving it about!” He bent his head back to the lens of the microscope that he'd placed on the air hockey table and peered again at the magnified marble, held between Danny's magnified thumb and forefinger.

On the way back through the woods, they'd squinted at the small glass orb time and time again, trying hard to work out if it was anything but a perfectly ordinary marble. The ribbon of colored glass threading through its core was blue this time, but aside from that it seemed very unexciting—considering they'd both nearly been eaten alive trying to find it.

But Danny was convinced it was something
very important to their “destiny,” so Josh dug out his microscope as soon as they got back to their bedroom.

“Well, it's very clear glass,” he murmured as he looked again. “Better quality glass than my normal marbles, I think.” He'd studied lots of his things under his microscope over the years. “But . . . hang on! Hang on, hang on! Hang . . . on!”

“I am hanging on!” Danny said. “What can you see? What is it?”

Josh raised his eyes to Danny, one of them a little pink from pressing against the viewer. “We've seen this before,” he breathed. “Look!” He took over the marble-holding duty, pinning the glass orb steadily to the plate beneath the microscope, and waved Danny in to look.

As his eye adjusted, Danny drew in a shocked breath. Inside the blue ribbon of glass within the orb was something else . . . There was a holographic image right inside the glass. It looked like a bat. And there were symbols . . . old, strange symbols too. “It's a hologram and symbols—like in Petty's REPTOSWITCH cubes!” he gasped.
“The same! It must be another bit of S.W.I.T.C.H. code!”

“You don't think Petty set this up, do you?” Josh asked, sitting back on the bed and rubbing his tired, sore forehead. “Maybe she sent us the first marble and the message . . . just so that we would get the S.W.I.T.C.H. spray and try out being reptiles in the wild after all.”

“But that doesn't make sense,” Danny said. “She already knew we wanted to S.W.I.T.C.H. this time. She didn't need to trick us into it. And she was the one who told us not to go outside. No . . . this isn't Petty.”

“But it's someone who knows about S.W.I.T.C.H.,” Josh said. “Because those symbols in that marble are just the same as the symbols Petty uses for the BUGSWITCH and REPTOSWITCH codes.”

“Check this one, too,” Danny said, holding out the yellow-centered marble.

Josh did, but he soon shook his head. “No—it's ordinary. The note said it would be.”

Danny read the note again.
THIS ONE IS EMPTY. SIX OTHERS ARE NOT. WITH EACH YOU FIND, YOU MOVE CLOSER TO YOUR DESTINY. DARE YOU SEEK?