She didn’t give up. ‘Give me a minute and I’ll get it for sure.’
‘But you can’t see, and that whirlwind is going all over the place. You need help from the inside.’
She blinked and looked up at him. Understanding dawned. ‘We need to do it together – me pushing and you telling me where to push!’
‘Yep,’ said Jack. Then his face fell. ‘Uh, that’s if I can talk as a shadow . . .’
‘Maybe we can talk inside our heads, mind to mind,’ said Jaide. ‘Grandma X could do it —’
‘And so can The Evil.’ Jack shuddered. ‘I don’t know if I can cope with mental voices after that.’
‘I know.’ Jaide remembered the feeling of The Evil trying to force its way into her mind. ‘But it’ll feel different with us, I’m sure. Anyway, maybe your shadow-self can talk. Let’s try!’
They turned back to the door. Shadow Jack went under and up again so he could see the latch. Jaide’s miniature whirlwind followed a minute later.
Shadow Jack tried to talk, but nothing happened at first. He was moving his mouth, but no sound was coming out. Or at least that’s what he thought, until he heard a voice on the other side of the door that wasn’t Jaide’s but did sound kind of familiar.
‘Testing . . . testing . . . I can’t make this work, Jaide . . . can you hear me?’
It took him a moment to realise it was his own voice, coming out of his body on the outside.
‘Of course I can,’ snapped Jaide. It took a lot of effort for her to keep her miniature tornado going. ‘Which way and how far?’
Shadow Jack slid along the door a bit to get a better view.
‘Move to the right about a foot . . . a bit less . . . a bit less . . . Perfect! Now go straight up . . . straight up . . . Stop! Go back down and left a bit . . . Left! Okay, start going up again, steady . . .’
The latch shivered and rose up out of its cradle.
‘Almost there! That’s it!’
The tornado winked out, and Shadow Jack slipped down and under the door. A few seconds later, the twins leaned on the blue door with all their weight, and with a crash it finally opened.
The secret room was secret no longer.
THE TWINS SLIPPED WARILY INSIDE. TWO crystal chandeliers fixed to the ceiling sparkled into life, revealing an unexpectedly large room, with one half-flight of steps leading down to a lower level and another flight up to a mezzanine floor dominated by a huge mahogany writing desk covered by pots of pens, pencils and feathery quills, plus stacks of receipts impaled on spikes. Shelves and display cases lined the walls, and they were filled with even more exotic items than the shelves inside Grandma X’s house. There were clocks, crystals, telescopes, globes, goggles and goldfish bowls – far too many things to take in at once.
The room itself was littered with objects too big to fit on shelves. Jack saw a tall rack heavily loaded with outrageous hats, a chair shaped like a dragon’s mouth, and a bed board containing the repeated motif of a four-pointed star. Jaide’s gaze lit on two cases full of gleaming jewellery, a gold suit of armour and a fur coat that seemed to be made out of an entire bearskin, including its head. The air was thick with the stink of age and discovery.
‘What is this place?’ Jack asked.
‘What the sign originally said, I guess.’ Jaide cast her mind back. ‘“Antiques and Articles” – something like that.’
‘So it is a shop?’
‘It’s a collection.’ Ari appeared from behind them. One ear was kinked over, but he seemed otherwise unharmed by Kleo’s wrath. ‘Wardens are always looking for old things. The older the better. But not just any old things. They wouldn’t like something that had been buried in the ground for a hundred years, for instance. They like their antiques to be worn in.’
‘Why?’
‘Things that Wardens use take on power from their Gifts,’ said Kleo in a tight voice. She was sitting stiffly in one corner, beside a trio of large, faded umbrellas. ‘Particularly when it was made to do that in the first place.’
‘So are you okay to tell us things now?’ asked Jaide pointedly.
‘We are bound by our oaths to keep everything we know from all but full Wardens,’ said Kleo. ‘Until they are no longer secret. Like this room.’
‘You mean you can’t tell us things until we practically already know them or can work them out anyway?’ asked Jack. ‘Great.’
Kleo didn’t look at all repentant. ‘Sardines don’t grow on trees,’ she said with a sniff.
‘We’re not looking for sardines,’ said Jaide. ‘We need to help Grandma before she’s lost forever. Won’t you even give us a clue?’
The cat met her gaze unflinchingly, and it was Jaide who turned away, feeling faintly ashamed. Promises were important. That was something her parents had hammered into her since she was old enough to talk. But surely when someone’s life was at stake, that was the perfect time to break them?
‘Troubletwisters are dangerous,’ the cat repeated. ‘You being in here is dangerous.’
‘More dangerous than The Evil?’ Jack asked, picking up a skull that had once belonged to a small crocodile or alligator and looking in its crystal eye.
Before Kleo could answer, the crocodile’s eye flashed and its jaws snapped open. Jack hastily put it back down, only just avoiding getting one of his fingers bitten off.
‘One brass plate,’ chattered the reptile, ‘three inches by four, fixed by four two-eighth screws fashioned entirely from silver.’
‘What does that mean?’ Jack asked.
The crocodile didn’t answer.
‘Be careful, for one thing,’ said Jaide. ‘Don’t touch anything.’
But she didn’t follow her own advice, picking up a brightly coloured tube with an eyehole at one end.
‘Don’t put it near your —’ Jack started to say. But he was too late. Jaide was already looking into it. ‘— eye.’
‘Oh, yeah. Anyway, it’s only a kind of kaleidoscope, but with letters.’ Jaide could see an endless stream of letters rather than random geometric patterns. ‘Just a whole lot of them, all mixed up . . . Hang on . . .’
‘What?’ asked Jack. He was eyeing a short, very highly polished silver sword that was thrust into a block of very dark, gnarly timber.
‘The letters spell something backward,’ said Jaide. ‘Write this down. Maybe it’s another message.’
‘Write with what?’
Jaide pointed to the desk on the mezzanine without looking away from the tube. Jack reluctantly left the sword and ran up the steps. There were lots of different kinds of paper on the desk, but most of the pens were the really ancient kind with nibs, and some were just cut feathers. Only after a quick hunt did he find a modern ballpoint pen.
‘Okay,’ he called out.
‘Write this down,’ instructed Jaide. ‘Ready? P-o-t-s-s-r-e-t-s- i-w-t-e-l-b-u-o-r-t- a-m-m-o-c-s-d-r- a-w-e-h-t-o-t-k-o-o-l.’
‘Okay, that says, “look to the wards comma troubletwisters stop,”’ said Jack, reading it backward. ‘Like an old telegraph. But what are the wards?’
‘Grandma X talked about wards,’ said Jaide thoughtfully. ‘Whatever they are, I think they’re meant to keep The Evil away. But she never said anything else about them.’
‘So what are these wards, Kleo?’ asked Jack. But the cat had disappeared again. Jack opened his mouth to repeat the question to Ari, just in time to see the ginger tom’s tail disappear under a leather chair.
Jack bent down to try to talk to the cat and accidentally knocked over a bronze cigarette lighter in the shape of an artillery shell that suddenly roared out a jet of fire four feet high. Jack dived out the way, and sheepishly emerged from under a table a second later, patting down his singed hair.
Jaide laughed, and backed into a globe of the world that spun a
round and discharged a ferocious spark of static electricity into her arm.
‘Ow!’
‘I told you. There are a lot of dangerous things in here,’ said Kleo’s voice from somewhere hidden. ‘You need to be careful.’
‘It’s not like we have any choice,’ said Jaide. ‘Grandma X could be dying up there! If you won’t tell us exactly what we can find to help us, then we’ll just have to keep looking.’
‘Kleo, I really think given the circumstances that the oath is flexible enough —’ Ari started to say from his position under the couch.
He didn’t finish. Eight of the dozen or more clocks in the room suddenly started to chime frantically, the needles on three barometers swung to Stormy, two flags unfurled, a mechanical drumming bear beat out a staccato alarm, and the crocodile skull chattered its teeth.
‘The Evil,’ warned Kleo, appearing from the inside of an ornate box with the lid on her head like a hat. Her back arched and she spat: ‘It’s got strong enough to pass the garden walls and gate!’