‘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.
But there, emerging from the dust, was the twins’ father. He had blood streaming from a cut above his left eye and his corduroy jacket was ripped to shreds, but he was alive. In his right hand, he held the iron rod.
Jack and Jaide felt an incredible surge of relief. They smiled up at their father, but their eyes were dazed, and their exhausted minds stunned with shock and incomprehension.
‘What have you done?’ asked Susan.
‘Susan, it’s not —’
‘Not your fault?’ She pointed angrily at the metal rod in his hand. ‘I knew you didn’t go by plane. I looked up the arrivals, but I thought maybe – just maybe – I missed one and you had kept your promise.’
‘I was going to say it’s not that simple.’ Hector knelt by the children and laid the rod down on the road.
Jack blinked up at his father, slowly regaining his senses. Next to him, he felt Jaide shift, and Jack knew that he should say something, but he didn’t have the strength to speak.
‘Dad,’ Jaide whispered. It took a great deal of effort to get the words out, so much that she hardly knew if she was saying them right or getting them in order. ‘We touched the . . . we saw the . . .’
‘I know, sweetie,’ said Hector. ‘It’ll be okay, I swear.’
‘How will it be okay?’ asked Susan. ‘How will it be okay, Hector? Our house has just been destroyed. You and the kids almost died.’
‘We knew this might happen one day,’ Hector said quietly. ‘The potential is there, and one way or another, it will be realised.’
‘She made it happen!’ Susan tugged the letter out of her back pocket and flung it at him. ‘She did this.’
Hector scanned the five short lines and sagged back on his heels.
Jack didn’t know what was stranger – what had happened, or the fact that his parents didn’t seem to be as surprised as he was. Jaide, meanwhile, wondered what on earth the card from the mysterious Grandma X had to do with it all.
‘There must be a way to make it stop,’ Susan said, clutching the twins tightly. ‘There has to be.’
‘She didn’t make it happen,’ said Hector. ‘The children have to go to her now.’
Go to her? Jaide thought. This was all happening too fast.
Susan could barely put her fears into words. ‘No! She’ll want to take them . . . she’ll want to use them . . . I won’t let them go!’
Jack had so many questions. But he was so tired and shocked, he couldn’t even begin to ask them. For now, he just listened. Questions would come later. Plenty of questions.
‘She won’t use them,’ said Hector firmly. ‘The choice will be their own. As it was for me, when I chose you.’
‘But you didn’t stick with that choice,’ said Susan, her words as sharp as a knife. ‘Did you?’