Jaide and Jack did as they were told. Though they could still hear and feel the music, its grip on them was lessened.
‘Another minute and you might never have come back,’ said Kleo.
Jaide looked down at the music box and across to the immobile rats. Several frozen cockroaches and spiders had dropped to the ground nearby. The bulldozer was silent.
‘This solves all our problems, doesn’t it? We keep this playing and The Evil can’t get in.’
‘Things like this can only be wound once,’ said Kleo. ‘And it won’t play for long. It’s old. Springs can break or cogs jam. It could end at any moment.’
As if it heard Kleo’s words, the music faltered for a second. The twins’ hearts almost stopped in that moment of silence, as the rats and insects rustled forward, just a fraction of an inch. Then the music started again, and the figures continued to revolve.
‘Go!’ said Ari. ‘We’ll guard here as best we can! Go!’
THE TWINS HURRIED INTO THE storm-addled night, the two of them alone against The Evil. Rain dashed down against them, and the wind blew it into their faces. It was cold, and even the exertion of their fast walk could not warm them. The moon and stars were completely hidden by the dense clouds, and it was very dark, as if a thick, heavy blanket had been thrown over the town.
Jack, who could see perfectly well, took Jaide’s hand as she stumbled for the seventh time.
‘Stay behind me,’ he said. ‘I’ll guide you.’
With Jack leading, they broke into more of a run. They knew time was short, even though they could still hear the gentle tune of the music box. Somehow it followed them, cutting cleanly through the sounds of rain and wind.
The tune had a familiar air, like ‘Greensleeves’, but there was something modern about it, too. The rhythm was both jaunty and solemn, and its constant presence reassured them that The Evil was contained behind them, at least for now.
This reassurance did not last long. As they skirted around the base of the Rock, the rain suddenly stopped.
For a moment this was a relief, until something flew into Jack’s face. He brushed it away, feeling the hard carapace and wings of a beetle.
‘Uh-oh,’ he said. Then he closed his mouth just in time, as many more beetles followed the first. It was like being hit by spiky hailstones. The twins struggled on against this assault until a beetle struck Jack’s eye and he had to stop to wipe it away. So many more beetles smashed against them that the twins had to crouch down, facing each other, and shield their faces with their arms.
‘Jaide! Blow them away!’ Jack coughed. A beetle had crawled into his mouth as he spoke, its burred legs gripping his tongue.
Jaide reached out to the wind around them. She could feel it like it was part of herself, like an extra arm. She focused her mind on it, and then swung, making a mental swishing motion against herself.
She’d expected a sudden gust of wind, but got a miniature whirlwind instead. It lifted the twins off the ground and carried them forward a dozen yards, dropping them unceremoniously at the cemetery gate. But it kept going with the beetles, sweeping them far out to sea.
‘Can you still hear the music?’ Jack asked anxiously. The storm had lashed up the sea, and though the rain had stopped, the deep boom of the swell smashing into the rocks below the lighthouse was much louder now.
‘Yes,’ said Jaide. ‘Only just, though. Come on!’
Hand in hand they raced to the lighthouse. Jaide smacked into Jack’s back as he stopped before the door, sending them both stumbling against it.
‘It’s still locked,’ said Jack. The three big bolts were all padlocked. He tugged at the padlocks, but they didn’t move.
‘The music’s stopped,’ said Jaide. She couldn’t see a thing and was already imagining The Evil’s creatures swarming toward her in the darkness. ‘Can you . . . can you see anything coming?’
Jack turned around. There was something moving between the headstones of the cemetery – a huge, dark mass that looked like a single, undulating thing, till he saw the dotted flecks of white that could only be thousands of tiny Evil-infested eyes.
‘Mice,’ he croaked. ‘Uh, probably nothing to worry about, but maybe if you could use the wind to lift us up to the top of the lighthouse, that would be good.’
‘Mice?’ Jaide didn’t feel as confident as her brother after her airborne battle with the seagulls. ‘If it’s only mice, what else is out there?’
At that moment, the mice all squeaked as one, with the voice of The Evil.
+Troubletwisters!++
The high-pitched squeal was like the amplified scream of an enraged crone.
‘Hold both my hands!’ shouted Jaide, reaching out to grab her brother.
Jack gripped her as if she were a life buoy and he was going under for the third and final time. Jaide felt the wind again, and visualised it as a cupping, gentle hand, coming up underneath them to carefully carry them just high enough to reach the walkway around the light, some one hundred and fifty feet above.
The wind answered, howling down. As the tide of mice poured around, between and over the closest headstones, Jack and Jaide were lifted up and away.
But not toward the light. Instead, the wind swept them right off the headland and shot up above the sea, before dropping them with alarming suddenness toward the spray of the great, curling waves that were pounding the rocks below.
‘No!’ shrieked Jaide. ‘Up to the top of the lighthouse! Up!’
The wind dropped them another half-dozen feet, into the crest of an enormous grey-green wave. Jack was almost torn from Jaide’s grasp by the force of the water, even though he was only caught by the very tip of the wave.
‘Up!’ Jaide commanded desperately. She put all the force of her will into that one word.
The wind responded. The twins shot straight up into the sky, far higher than the dark lighthouse below.
‘To the lighthouse walkway!’ shouted Jaide furiously. She pointed down, initially in the wrong direction, until Jack hastily wrenched her hand around.
The wind spun them about and then left them entirely. The twins fell screaming, until the wind came back and snatched them up again, taking their breath away. A moment later, they flew wildly around the lighthouse below the rail, circling it several times as Jack desperately tried to reach out and grab hold.
Then, almost with a chuckle, the wind lifted them a fraction, just over the railing, and dumped them on the walkway, a twelve-sided mesh platform that entirely circled the tall, glass lamp enclosure.
Jack staggered to his feet and tried the door that led inside. For a second he thought it was locked, but the handle was just stuck. He forced it down, and the metal-framed glass door opened with the screech of long disuse.
‘See if you can find a light,’ Jaide called out urgently. She was lying on the walkway, holding on to the railing. She hated not being able to see anything, particularly as her lack of sight made her more aware of the grasping wind. Even now it wanted her to join it again, to take off and fly far and free.
Jack was examining an electrical box on the low wall under the glass, which extended
up another dozen feet. The box had several huge circuit breaker levers, all of which were down.
‘Here goes nothing,’ he said, and pushed one up. Exactly nothing happened. He pushed the next one up, with the same effect. Then he pushed the last one, and this time there was a blinding flash. Jack reeled back into the main lantern apparatus in the centre of the room. A second later he was thrown off as it started to revolve. Lying on the floor, he blinked rapidly, liquid black blotches dancing around in his vision.
‘Thanks,’ Jaide said from the walkway. ‘I meant, like, the inside lights, not the lighthouse light.’
Jack sat up. The huge reflector, twice his height and four feet across, was rotating slowly, sending its dazzling light out over the sea, the beam slowly circling the bay.
‘The mice are all around the base,’ Jaide said urgently. ‘They might already be inside.’
Jack rushed to the rail and looked over. There was a surging mass of rodents completely encircling the base of the lighthouse. They were bound to find a way in, and would only take a few minutes to swarm to the top.
But that wasn’t all. Jack spotted something else.
‘There’s something coming up out of the sea,’ he warned his sister. ‘Something really big.’
Jaide looked out. She couldn’t see anything at first, until the beam from the lighthouse swept across, briefly illuminating a huge, bestial shape that was pulling itself out of the raging sea and coming up the cliff. Hundred-foot-long tentacles preceded a vast oval-shaped body the size of a fishing trawler.
‘It’s made of seaweed and jellyfish,’ Jack said slowly. ‘Hundreds . . . thousands of them . . . Oh, it’s falling back!’
A particularly big wave had smashed into the giant creature’s back, loosening its hold on the rocks, and then the undertow had undermined its footing. But it was only a temporary reprieve. The creature sucked in more and more seaweed, jellyfish and anything else that swam nearby, and grew even larger and stronger.
‘We need to find the plate!’ Jaide shouted. She ran inside and started searching around the low wall under the windows. She saw no brass plaques, but she did see numerous examples of graffiti etched into the stone. Lighthouse-keepers and visitors to the lighthouse had been memorialising it for decades, it seemed, including the occasional dating couple. At the base of a narrow iron ladder leading up to the very peak of the lighthouse, where a tall lightning rod invited the heavens to do their worst, she saw SAH ? HJS, and realised with a jolt that they were her parents’ initials, before they were married. She couldn’t imagine them ever being so young, or so delinquent as to graffiti a public monument!