Mystery of the Golden Card Read online

  ALSO BY GARTH NIX AND SEAN WILLIAMS

  Troubletwisters

  The Monster: Troubletwisters 2

  GARTH NIX &

  SEAN WILLIAMS

  First published in 2013

  Copyright © Garth Nix & Sean Williams 2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  ALLEN & UNWIN

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  A Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available

  from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 74237 400 0

  EISBN 978 1 74269 893 9

  Cover design and typography by Ian Butterworth

  Series logo and typography by www.blacksheep-uk.com

  Cover illustration by Paul Young

  Text design by Bruno Herfst

  Set in 12.5 pt Centaur MT by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  To Anna, Thomas and Edward

  and all my family and friends

  — Garth

  For my grandmothers, Isobel Jean Williams

  and Evelyn Mary Schiller

  — Sean

  Contents

  OUT OF THE RAIN

  THE ACCIDENT

  AN UNEXPECTED ENCOUNTER

  THE MISSION

  FORGOTTEN THINGS

  MONSTERS OLD AND NEW

  TREASURE HUNT

  SEEKING AND HIDING

  THE SLEEPER

  BETWEEN THE EVIL AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA

  EVERY CASTLE HAS ITS SECRETS

  THE HIDDEN DOOR

  MEET THE MENAGERIE

  THE LADY IN YELLOW

  MULTIPLICATION AND DIVISION

  THE CORNELIA CONUNDRUM

  A TWIN THING

  HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT

  THE FIELDS OF GOLD

  BOOBY TRAP!

  TO TRANSLOCATE OR NOT TO TRANSLOCATE

  REMEMBERING RODEO DAVE

  THE WRONG GIFTS

  NO ESCAPE

  NOT ALL TWINS ARE TROUBLETWISTERS . . .

  THE LEGACY OF THE DEAD

  PROLOGUE

  Out of the Rain

  YOUNG MASTER ROURKE SAT UPRIGHT in his armchair, startled awake by a sudden noise. Despite his name, he was actually an old man, only a few days short of his eighty-fifth birthday. He was known as ‘Young Master Rourke’ because his father had been the one and only ‘Mister Rourke’ in the area for many, many years. Old Mister Rourke had built Rourke Castle and had bought up all the railways, shipping lines and whaling stations for miles around. In doing so, he’d become one of the richest and most influential men of his time.

  Most of the riches were now gone, but Young Master Rourke still owned Rourke Castle. A vast, rambling palace that extended across two sides of a hill, it had towers, stables, three ballrooms, a Greek temple, a Venetian canal, and a scale copy of an Egyptian pyramid that was a hundred feet high. (The pyramid looked like stone on the outside but was in fact hollow, made of concrete slabs over a steel skeleton.)

  Rourke Castle was so big that it was spread across two towns. Half was within the bounds of a small town called Portland, the other half in the neighbouring town. When the castle had still had staff, they’d used to joke about going to Portland or going to Dogton when crossing from one side of the castle to the other.

  Over the years more and more of the castle had been locked up and left, as it was too expensive to maintain. Young Master Rourke kept moving from large rooms to smaller ones as his needs shrank. Finally he left the main castle entirely and moved to the old porter’s lodge near the front gates, past the lake that had once boasted real icebergs and penguins, even in summer. Now the giant ice machine was broken and the penguins had been sent to a proper zoo. The lake was just a dark expanse of water, choked by rotten lilies.

  The lodge and the land around it were half a mile outside the boundary of Portland. Rourke had not thought this important when he moved. He had forgotten that someone had once told him he should take care to stay on the Portland side of the boundary at all times.

  The sound that had woken him came again. Young Master Rourke tilted his head back as he tried to work out what it was. The grandfather clock in the corner of the room ticked slowly and melancholically, but that wasn’t it. The time was five minutes short of midnight and the clock far from striking.

  The night was quiet for a few seconds. Then the noise came a third time – a quick rush of beats that swept across the roof and were gone.

  ‘Is that . . . rain?’ muttered Young Master Rourke, blinking the sleep from his eyes.

  He took off his half-moon reading glasses and consulted the ornate, gilded barometer that stood next to the grandfather clock.

  The barometer’s needle was sitting at FAIR.

  ‘Stupid thing,’ Young Master Rourke mumbled.

  He struggled out of his deep leather armchair and crossed the room to tap the face of the barometer firmly. The needle quivered, then moved, but not towards STORMY. It kept insisting the weather should be fair.

  Another round of what sounded like heavy raindrops crossed the roof. Rourke went to the window and looked out. There were still a few lampposts working on the broad avenue that led up towards the castle, alongside the lake. Above, the sky was cloudy and utterly empty of stars, but Rourke couldn’t see any actual rain.

  ‘Just a shower, you daft old fool,’ he told himself.

  ‘Forget about it and go to bed.’

  He bent down and picked up the book he’d been reading, his mood improving instantly. Rourke had read Gorillas vs The Fist before, but it was one of many favourites that he often revisited. Reading pulpy old detective stories was one of his two main activities. The other one was looking after the only legacy of his father’s that he actually treasured: the animals of the old Rourke menagerie.

  In his father’s time, the menagerie had contained elephants, lions, tigers and other kinds of exotic animals. Now there were only two chimpanzees, a warthog, three lemurs, a zebra, a jackal, two wolves and a macaw named Cornelia, who was at least a hundred years old and may once have belonged to an actual pirate.

  In old Mister Rourke’s day all the animals had been housed in a complete zoo, up past the eastern wing of the castle. But that area was a weedy wasteland now. The remaining animals lived in a much smaller collection of cages and enclosures built on the old polo field, right next to the lodge where Young Master Rourke lived. It was nowhere near as impressive as the grand old menagerie had been, but it was closer and much easier to deal with.

  The new cages were also outside Portland’s boundary.

  Rattling rain fell on the roof again as Rourke shuffled out of his study into the lodge’s main corridor. This time, when the heavy beat of the drops ceased, a sudden loud bang immediately followed, then a much heavier thudding along the roof.

  ‘That’s not rain . . .’ whispered Rourke, looking up to follow the sound as it travelled towards
the back of the lodge. His heart was suddenly thumping in his chest, faster than was good for him. ‘That’s footsteps.’

  The sound stopped. Rourke’s head snapped back down as a man-shaped shadow passed across the narrow stained-glass window to the left of the back door.

  There was someone out there – someone who had apparently come down with the rain.

  It was only then that Rourke remembered the warning about staying inside the Portland town limits, and what might happen if he didn’t . . .

  The book was still in his hand. He raised it, his gnarled old fingers moving faster than anyone might expect, and flipped it open to the back page, where there was a simple white sticker with a phone number and address of a business in Portland.

  Rourke stumbled to the ancient phone that sat on a seventeenth-century chestnut table in the corridor and put one shaking finger into the rotary dial.

  At that moment he heard Cornelia the macaw, who had a free run of the new menagerie but most often slept in a custom-made box under the eaves at the back door of the lodge. Cornelia normally never said anything but ‘Who’s a pretty girl?’ and ‘Nellie wants a nut.’ Now she started shrieking.

  ‘To the boats! Abandon ship!’

  The other animals started braying and screaming and kicking, making noises that Rourke had never heard, not in all his long lifetime spent looking after them. They were hooting and howling, barking and biting, shaking their cages and filling the night with unnatural terror.

  Frantically, Rourke dialled the number.

  As the dial whirred in its final rotation, the noise of the animals suddenly stopped, as if a conductor had snapped down his arms for a sudden finish.

  Rourke held the phone to his ear, hardly hearing the sound of ringing at the other end. All his senses were focused towards the back door and the menagerie beyond.

  The animals were quiet now, but there were other noises. Cages were swinging open, one by one. These sounds were familiar to Rourke, who opened them every day. There was the screech of the chimps’ door, the one he had been meaning to oil for weeks. There was the scrape of steel on concrete, the bent door in the fence that surrounded the wolves’ enclosure . . .

  The phone kept ringing, and now Rourke could hear animals moving. Much more quietly than normal, though he still heard the soft pads of the jackal, the hooves of the zebra, and the shuffling gait of the warthog. The wolves, he assumed, remained stealthy, moving with their characteristic silence.

  ‘What?’ asked a tired voice on the phone. A man, grumpy at being woken up so late.

  Rourke’s mouth opened and closed. He struggled to speak but couldn’t get any air into his lungs. The uncaged animals were at the back door now – he could see their shadows against the stained glass.

  ‘No!’ he tried to say, the word emerging as little more than a croak. ‘No!’

  The handle of the back door slowly turned. The door edged open.

  ‘Who is this?’ asked the voice on the phone.

  The back door swung open. A man stood there, a man wearing a hat and a trench coat just like the one on the cover of Rourke’s book, except both were thoroughly wet. Water dripped from the brim of the hat that shadowed this man’s face.

  The animals were gathered around the stranger, silent companions pressing in as close as they could as he eased through the doorway.

  ‘David?’ the old man gasped.

  There was something very odd about the animals. It took Rourke a second to process exactly what it was.

  ‘Their eyes . . .’ gasped Rourke. ‘Their eyes are white!’

  The phone fell from his hand as the man in the doorway lifted his head to stare at him. The shadow of the man’s hat brim rose and light fell on his face, reflecting from his eyes – eyes that, just like the animals’, were utterly white, without pupil or iris.

  ++Where is it, old fool?++ asked the intruder. No sound came from his mouth, and his lips did not move, but the voice was clear in Rourke’s mind. ++Where is it?++

  Rourke opened his mouth, but only a choking rattle came out. His hand flew to his head, as if he could ward off the stabbing, awful communication that was going straight into his brain.

  ++Answer the question!++

  Rourke suddenly clawed at his chest with both hands. Gorillas vs The Fist fluttered forgotten to the floor.

  ++No!++ shouted the stranger. He dashed forward and caught Rourke as he fell.

  White began to swirl in Rourke’s eyes, too, but it could not outpace the other change that gripped the old man.

  Young Master Rourke went limp. The life ebbed from his eyes, leaving them open and unseeing.

  The stranger lowered the heavy body to the floor. He grabbed the phone and pulled it from the wall, the cord coming out with a piece of plaster the size of a dinner plate. Then he bent down and searched through the pockets of Rourke’s dressing-gown.

  Without any sign or gesture from the stranger, the two white-eyed chimpanzees went into the study while the other animals silently roamed the room as though looking for something.

  The stranger flicked through the pages of Young Master Rourke’s book. As he did so, a thick, grey mist formed above him and several heavy drops of rain fell onto his back. He paused and looked up, and made an angry, dismissive gesture that caused the mist and rain to immediately disappear.

  In the study, the chimpanzees began to move books out of the bookcases, carefully opening each one before dropping it disinterestedly onto the floor. The wolves circled Rourke’s fallen body, sniffing his pockets.

  ‘It must be here,’ whispered the stranger, using his voice this time. It sounded strangely like a growl, at first neither man nor animal, but then shifted to being fully human. ‘But if it’s not, there’s always Plan B.’

  Behind the chimps, the clock shook. Springs whirred inside its cavernous casing, cogs grated, and a chime sounded the first of twelve strokes of midnight.

  The sound echoed through the lodge and, faintly but clearly, outside. The ancient macaw, hiding in the topmost branches of one of the great elms that lined the castle avenue, heard the clock and lowered her proud-beaked head.

  ‘Every parrot for herself,’ she muttered, and launched herself into the air, beginning a slow but steady flight to the east, towards the shimmering lights of Portland.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Accident

  THE TWINS WERE DOING MATHS questions when they heard the first siren scream past the school, heading north, and then stop not much further on. Back in their old home in the city, they wouldn’t have paid it any attention at all. But in the small town of Portland, even a single siren was unusual. When it was followed by another, as was the current case, it became almost interesting.

  ‘That’s the ambulance,’ said curly-haired Kyle, one of those kids who could recognise the slight individual variations in the sirens of the local emergency service vehicles. ‘And the second one is the fire engine . . .’

  His voice trailed off as another, more distant siren joined the mix, getting louder as it raced towards the town.

  ‘And that’s the rescue rig from Scarborough!’ he exclaimed. ‘Something big must be going on!’

  He jumped up and rushed to the window, followed by most of the class.

  ‘Children, children!’ admonished Mr Carver, but as he didn’t actually raise his voice, only the front row heard him and stayed in place.

  Jack and Jaide looked at each other, and didn’t immediately follow, having already experienced quite a lot of disasters and emergencies in the last few weeks. Also, they were from the city and had a reputation to hold up of not being impressed by something that probably wouldn’t rate a mention on the news back home.

  Over the cacophony of all the sirens, there came a deep, fast beat that the twins knew very well: the wokka-wokka-wokka of an approaching helicopter.

  ‘Airswift Aeromedical 339, twin-engine,’ said Jaide, jumping up and angling quickly between a couple of kids to get to the window. Jack followed in her
wake.

  ‘How do you know?’ asked Kyle.

  ‘That’s our mother’s helicopter,’ said Jack. ‘This must be serious. Can you see anything?’

  ‘Not really, but the helicopter looks like it’s going to land near the iron bridge.’ Kyle craned up on tiptoe, trying to get a better view. ‘Yeah, there it goes – must be right in the middle of the road!’

  ‘Class, I would particularly appreciate it if you would return to your seats,’ said Mr Carver, still in his normal conversational voice, ‘while I endeavour to ascertain if this emergency affects the school.’

  His students didn’t even turn around. The kids at the back kept jostling to get to the window, while the kids in front pushed back with their elbows to stay in place.

  ‘CHILDREN! Back to your seats!’

  No one had ever heard Mr Carver shout before. There was a moment of shock, followed by a sudden cascade of students rushing back to their desks, several of them tripping over the beanbags that were used during Mr Carver’s ‘meditation time’. They didn’t so much sit back down as do controlled crashes into their chairs.

  ‘Continue with your maths problems.’ Mr Carver wasn’t shouting now, but his voice was still louder than usual, clear even over the noise of the sirens and the helicopter winding down. ‘I am going to see what’s going on. I expect everyone to stay in their places until I return.’

  He took his phone out of his pocket as he strode out of the classroom, dialling with one hand as he pushed the door open with the other.

  ‘Wow! I’ve never seen him like that before,’ said Tara, the newest student in the school. ‘I mean, I thought he was nothing but peace and light all the time.’

  ‘Nah, old Heath loses it occasionally,’ said Kyle, using Mr Carver’s first name, as he preferred his students to do, although few of his students could ever bring themselves to do it. ‘Three years ago he freaked out when that tree branch fell down in the car park just before the bus left for the whale-watching excursion.’

  ‘That wasn’t three years ago, Kyle,’ said Miralda King, daughter of the mayor.