Troubletwisters (2 page)

The twins started to hoist the suitcase up onto the bed, but Jack lost his grip at the last second and Jaide couldn’t hold it alone. The case fell back on the floor. Jack leaped aside, and with an almighty crack, the solid outer shell of supposedly indestructible plastic split in the middle and all the contents cascaded out across the twins’ feet.

For a second, Jaide and Jack were shocked into silence. Out in the garden, they could hear their mother cry, ‘But, Hector, you only just got back!’

The twins stared down at the shattered suitcase.

‘Dad’ll be mad,’ said Jaide. ‘What do we do?’

‘I can’t believe it broke,’ said Jack. ‘It must have fallen a million times before.’

Jaide picked up the two broken halves of the top of the suitcase and held them up to her brother.

‘Look! It’s
burnt
. No wonder it broke.’

Jack came around and saw a jagged scorch mark running from one end to the other. He sniffed, and smelled the same odd smell that had been on their father when he had hugged them.

‘Do you think – do you think he was in some kind of accident, and that’s why he’s late?’

‘I don’t know.’

Jaide put down the broken lid and looked at the pile of things at their feet. Most of it seemed pretty ordinary, just shirts and socks, underwear and toiletries. But there was a pair of particularly old and tattered corduroy pants that had something sticking out of the leg.

Jaide picked up the pants and an iron rod fell out. Jack quickly reached down to pick it up.

‘Ow!’ he exclaimed as a bright blue spark jumped to his grasping fingers. He dropped the rod onto the bed.

Both of the twins looked it over, eager to see something special in it. But it was just a two-foot-long length of iron, pitted and scarred, utterly unmarked by rust.

‘Not much of a present,’ Jaide said, reaching for it. There was no spark, but a wave of dizziness rolled through her.

She shut her eyes and waited for it to pass, but instead the feeling got stronger.

‘Are you all right?’ Jack asked nervously. Jaide had suddenly gone very pale.

‘No,’ she said, and swayed sideways. Jack steadied her and tried to snatch the rod away, to throw it back on the bed. But the moment he touched the cold iron again, a wave of dizziness hit him as well.

The floor sagged underneath them. The ceiling bowed. Every corner curved and twisted, as though they were seeing the walls through buckled glass.

‘What’s going on?’ Jack’s voice boomed like a foghorn.

‘It’s the rod!’ Jaide’s voice squeaked like fingernails down a blackboard.

‘Let it go!’

‘I can’t!’ She shook her hand, but the rod was firmly attached to her palm. ‘It won’t let go of me!’

Jack tried to let go, too, but he was stuck as well.

The angles and lines of the room bent even further, tangling their world in knots. Bile rose in their throats. Jack shook his head wildly and Jaide blinked and swallowed, hoping that this would somehow make things look right again. But it didn’t, and they felt a sudden pain in their ears, a pain followed by a horrible, whispering voice that at first was so soft they could only feel it and not understand. But it grew louder and more strident, until it was the only thing they could hear, as if it emanated from inside their own heads.

++
Come to us, troubletwisters. Join us . . . welcome, most welcome!
++

The twins spun around and tried to head for the door, though now it was only a tiny rectangle at the end of a distorted tunnel of walls. Their feet still moved, but it was no use – the rod was fixed in place above the bed and they couldn’t let go.

++
We see you! We see you!++
crowed the voice triumphantly.
++So close, so close!
++

As the voice spoke, the watercolour animals on the walls twisted and writhed out of their frames, morphing into hideous, three-dimensional shapes with bulging eyes like those of monstrous goldfish, eyes that rotated and shifted to peer intently at the twins.

Even worse than their attention was the fact that the eyes were entirely white, without iris or pupil, and the whiteness was buzzing and blurry, like the worst kind of fluorescent light.

++
We see you! We see you!
++

Jaide almost yanked her arm out of her shoulder socket as she tried to free herself from the rod. She kept her head down as she struggled, trying not to meet the gaze of those terrible eyes, the eyes that she felt were drawing her in, sucking her into some other place, some other dimension.

Jack, too, averted his eyes, but the room warped and weirded around him even more. He sensed more than saw that there was something behind these impossible spaces, and desperately tried to look at something that didn’t hurt his brain, but there was nothing.

Both twins screamed at the same time.

Hector and Susan Shield heard the scream, and when they whirled around to the house, they were shocked to see its angles shifting. The roof, which normally peaked at a sharp point, was now as flat as the horizon, while the chimney had stretched up a dozen feet.

‘Keep back!’ Hector shouted to Susan, acting a second before she could. He leaped through a door that had become triangular and ten feet high, and ran up the stairs, becoming distorted himself in the process.

Then he was gone, engulfed by the bizarre geometry.

Upstairs, Jaide could feel a ghastly coldness creeping up her fingers and into her arms. It robbed her of her natural warmth and weakened her muscles, making it even harder to fight. She knew that if it spread much further, she wouldn’t be able to resist at all, and whatever lay behind the voice would get her.

To Jack it felt as though he were being skewered by the multiplying eyes. Each new pair pinned him more tightly to the spot. If he met their gaze, he knew he would be lost. He kept moving his head, shifting his line of sight, blinking, but he knew there were just too many awful white eyes . . .

‘Kids!’

A flash of purple-blue light cut through the mangled angles, dazzlingly bright and refreshingly straight. It struck the metal rod square in the middle. The twins were flung apart by a soundless explosion, even as another bright ribbon lashed out like a whip, gathering up Jaide and Jack and then looping back to the hands that had cast it. Through their shock, the twins recognised their father, but he looked like nothing they had ever seen before. Light rippled up and down his body like a gas flame, concentrating in his open hands. His hair waved like a nest of electric snakes.

Hector Shield grabbed the lightning as if it were a rope and hauled on it as hard as he could, pulling the twins to him. They reeled into his arms, and he took the iron rod from their frozen hands without difficulty.

The white eyes flared brighter.

++
No!
++ the voice cried. ++
They belong to us! They want to be with us!
++

‘Never!’ shouted Hector.

He raised the iron rod. Lightning burst from its tip, chain lightning that crackled across a dozen white eyes, bursting them like trodden-on grapes. But more and more eyes kept appearing, and they grew closer and closer despite everything Hector did. The twins clung to him, not understanding what was going on but in no doubt at all that they were in mortal danger.

‘Get behind me!’ Hector croaked to the children. He held up the rod again, but only a flickering spark jumped out. The eyes were everywhere, drawing nearer and nearer, as if a vast creature with ten thousand eyeballs was peering down at the small, helpless group of humans. The floor beneath their feet was tilting and rising at the sides, turning into a funnel, making them slide forward, and they all had the growing sensation that hidden behind or below the multitude of eyes, there might also be a mouth.

‘Get . . . get behind me!’ the twins’ father called out again. ‘Then run for the stairs!’

++
Come to us!
++ countered the voice. It sounded very self-satisfied now, as if Hector’s words were a concession of weakness.

The twins disobeyed both instructions. Jack stayed absolutely still, transfixed and paralysed. Jaide actually took a step forward.

‘No!’ she shouted back at the great cloud of eyes. ‘Go away!’

‘Jaide! Don’t —’ Hector yelled, dropping the iron rod and gathering the children in.

A tide of darkness swept over the room, snuffing out the glowing eyes. At the same time, the air became hot and gusted furiously through the room. The wind tugged at Jaide, lifting her off her feet till Jack and Hector pulled her back down.

‘I can’t see!’ Jaide screamed as the wind tore at her again. The darkness was almost worse than the staring eyes, and the wind kept getting stronger, accompanied by terrible crashing noises all around.

‘Down!’ shouted Hector. He pushed them flat on the floor as something – possibly the bed – flew over their heads and smashed into the wall. Clothes whipped from the wardrobe with a sound like giant birds flapping, and then the wardrobe itself blew into matchwood. Hector started to drag the twins back through the doorway.

The walls screamed as the roof came off and spun away. The twins screamed, too, not knowing what was making the noise.

Then they felt their father’s hands on them, pressing them to him, holding them down.

‘Calm down, kids. We’ll be all right. Take slow breaths. In for five seconds . . . one . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . five – and now out for five seconds . . .’

As he counted, the darkness lifted. Jack found himself following his father’s instructions even as his heart pounded in terror. Sunshine slowly filtered in from above, through the gaping absence where the roof had been. Jaide felt her brother grow calm, and that helped her relax, too. The wind slowed to a gentle breeze, and then stopped altogether, to be replaced by an eerie silence, as if they were in the eye of a storm.

Behind the silence, as though behind a pane of glass that could shatter at any moment, the eyes were waiting.

‘That’s it,’ said Hector. ‘Nice, slow breaths . . .’

Jack’s eyes shut for a moment. He twitched and raised his head. Suddenly he felt incredibly sleepy, as if he’d been woken in the middle of the night. He looked at Jaide, who was also nodding off.

Both of them slumped in Hector’s arms, and he walked them quickly down the stairs, looking anxiously behind him several times. Halfway down, he met Susan.

‘Get them outside,’ Hector said urgently. ‘Away from the house.’

Susan grabbed them, the intense energy of her grasp keeping them just on the right side of awake. They were moving fast, running down the stairs, into the garden, out through the back gate, into the lane, and then several houses down, where Susan propped them against a fence and checked them over.

She had just taken their pulses when an incredibly loud thunderclap made them all flinch. Looking back, they saw a black column, dotted with tiny bright lights, rising up above the house. Lightning stabbed at the house out of a clear sky, and then all that was left of the building was suddenly sucked up into the column, broken into pieces, and spat back down again in a shower of debris.

‘Hector . . .’ whispered Susan.

The black column disappeared in a plume hundreds of feet high. Dust rolled out in a cloud down the lane, making Susan and the twins cough and wipe their eyes.