Troubletwisters by Garth Nix, Sean Williams Page B

people and places from long ago, but all Jaide saw was her brother in the drawing room, pulling faces.
    Grandma X watched them as they played their way through the odd collection. Sometimes she wrote in a pink leather notebook she had produced from a drawer. Once she even took a magnifying glass out of her pocket and studied the top of Jack’s and Jaide’s scalps, as though looking for head lice, but she didn’t seem to find what she was looking for. She put the magnifying glass away and lit some old lanterns that stank of kerosene and cast a lovely warm glow over the room.
    As the last lantern wick flared, Kleo returned, and her eyes caught and reflected the flame. She meowed and jumped up to sit like a sphinx on a straight-backed chair, as if waiting for something interesting to happen.
    ‘What’s this, Grandma?’ Jaide asked, pulling a strange contraption from behind the desk.
    ‘A pogo stick, dear. Have you never seen one before?’
    Both twins shook their heads, then gasped with surprise as Grandma X demonstrated it for them. The floor and the furniture shook as the elderly woman in her silver-tipped cowboy boots climbed onto the crossbars and took two spring-fuelled bounces across the drawing room. A cloud of dust rose up, Kleo fled again, and Grandma X climbed off and hurriedly opened the windows to let some fresh air in.
    ‘They were all the rage when I was a girl,’ she said, looking slightly pink in the face. ‘Why don’t you have a go?’
    ‘Really?’ asked Jack. ‘In here?’
    ‘Outside isn’t an option with all that rain coming down.’
    ‘All right.’ He took the device from her and pointed it spring down toward the floor, glancing around at all the fragile-looking things in the room. ‘Mum would never let us do this.’
    ‘Guess we’d better not tell her about it, then,’ said Grandma X with a wink. ‘Go on. Let’s see who can bounce the highest.’
    That was all the encouragement the twins needed. Jaide took the pogo stick from her brother and immediately mastered it. She laughed and felt as light as a feather, bouncing around the room. Vases danced and books swayed on their shelves, but she bounced with total control and only reluctantly handed it back to let Jack have a go.
    Jack lacked his sister’s easy grasp of the art of pogoing, and distantly, distractedly, he was sure this wasn’t the first time that day he had missed out on something fun, although he couldn’t quite remember what else there had been. He watched himself in the mirror above the mantelpiece in the drawing room trying to do everything Jaide had done, exactly as she had done it. The daylight from the window, although greyer than it normally would have been, cast a dazzling silver halo around him, and he bounced to his right in order to see himself better. But the moment he was away from the window it seemed that he faded into the heavy folds of the curtain and his reflection disappeared from the mirror entirely.
    Suddenly disoriented by his lack of reflection, Jack mistimed his next bounce, careened into the desk, ricocheted off it, and fell over, smacking his temple on the cushioned front of a chair as he went down.
    For an instant, the world went black. He hadn’t knocked himself out. He hadn’t even hurt himself very badly, apart from feeling as though all the air had been sucked out of him. But somehow all the light around him vanished, and he was falling through an empty void. Empty, that was, apart from distant white points that looked at first like stars, but soon revealed themselves as eyes, rushing rapidly closer —
    ‘Jack!’ Jaide was crying out as she knelt down next to the fallen pogo stick. ‘Jack! Where are you . . . oh!’
    ‘I’m here,’ answered Jack crossly. ‘Where else would I be?’
    Jaide shook her head in bewilderment. She was sure that Jack hadn’t been there, that he’d disappeared as he hit the floor, vanishing into the shadow of a chair. The fear that he somehow might have