Lizard Loopy (4 page)

Danny and Josh pulled them on. They fitted snugly across their faces, sealing around their noses and mouths, with dusty glass ovals across their eyes. Petty put hers on too and unlocked the back door to the house. As they stepped inside, Petty made straight for the kitchen. Danny and Josh crowded in behind her. “Aha!” they heard her cry. But then, “Aaah . . . What?”

The kitchen window was smashed. But nobody was on the floor or facedown in the kitchen sink. Petty pulled off her mask. “It's all right,” she said. “The gas didn't go off.”

Josh took his mask off and Danny followed, slightly fearfully in case Petty had gotten it wrong. But the kitchen smelled normal enough. Of French toast, which Petty had cooked for breakfast on her old-fashioned gas stove.

“Must've run away after smashing the window,” Petty muttered. “Didn't try to get in.” She looked rather disappointed, as if finding an unconscious intruder would have been the highlight of her day. “Right—off home now, boys. Before you contaminate this room. I need to run some forensic tests on the glass . . . see if I can find out who tried to get in. If he wasn't very probably dead, I would think this was the work of Victor Crouch.”

Josh and Danny looked at each other. They had met Victor Crouch only once and still weren't completely sure he was the evil, backstabbing foe that Petty seemed to think he was. She was convinced that he'd tried to steal her S.W.I.T.C.H. Project work and had burnt out bits of her memory when they'd worked together in secret government laboratories.

Trouble was, Petty was so crazy about so many things it was hard to take her seriously. The Victor Crouch they had met briefly a few weeks ago had seemed pretty sinister and slightly mad . . . but then, so did Petty.

“Well,” Josh said. “He would definitely be dead if we hadn't stopped you from stamping on him.”

“A bad day's work!” Petty grumbled. “I wish you hadn't! He is—was—possibly still is—incredibly dangerous. To all of us! But then, if he did survive and S.W.I.T.C.H. back from being a cockroach, how come I've not heard from him again? Or maybe I just have . . .” She squinted suspiciously into the sink.

“Petty!” Danny interrupted her squinting, bouncing up and down with impatience. “Can't we have another go at LizardSWITCH?”

“Yeah!” Josh said. “We'd hardly gotten going!”

“Tomorrow,” grunted Petty, peering at the broken glass now. “Go home.”

“Are we safe to go through the front door?” sighed Josh. “No tripwires?”

“Plenty,” Petty said. “But”—she pulled a small
silvery gadget out of her pocket and waved it at them—“I've switched the lasers off. Go home.”

Grumpily, Danny and Josh let themselves out of the house and wandered back around to their own.

“She's never going to let up about Victor Crouch and all that guff,” sighed Danny. “I think they're both as crazy as each other. I bet neither of them ever worked for the government at all. They probably met at bingo or something.”

“Mom's going to go nuts when she sees us,” Josh said. Danny's nose was still dripping blood, and Josh had a big bruise swelling up on his forehead. Mom would think they'd been in a fight.

As they reached the front gate and walked up the path, Josh got an eerie feeling—as if he and Danny were being watched. He spun around, expecting to see somebody approaching them, but nobody was there. The wind shook the leaves of the wild hedgerow across the road, but nothing seemed to be hiding in it.

“What's that?” Danny said. He was picking something up off the path. It was a small
crumpled paper package. Written on it in black marker was “J & D Phillips.”

“That's us.” Josh peered at the package. “What's in it?”

Danny turned the small package over, just about to rip it open, when he noticed the words
NOT HERE
also scribbled in black on the underside. The brothers glanced about.

“End of the garden,” Josh said. “In the rhododendron bush.”

They ran down the side passage and through the back garden to the old sprawly rhododendron bush at the end, which had been a kind of den for them for many years. Its strong trunk and branches wiggled out in a way which created a kind of cave beneath all the waxy leaves. The earth was usually quite dry, and Mom and Dad hardly ever looked inside the cave.

In the dim light inside their hiding place, Josh and Danny unraveled the package to reveal its prize.

It was a marble.

Danny snorted. “It's some kind of joke!”

“A marble?” Josh peered at the small glass orb
in Danny's palm. It had a little ribbon of yellow color twisting through the middle and a small chip on one side. It was a perfectly ordinary marble. Not even new. They had lots like it upstairs.

“Some kid messing about,” shrugged Danny.

“Wait!” Josh said, as Danny prepared to screw up the packaging the marble had arrived in. “There's a bit of paper.”

There was. Words were written on it, in spidery black ink:

THIS ONE IS EMPTY. SIX OTHERS ARE NOT. WITH EACH YOU FIND, YOU MOVE CLOSER TO YOUR DESTINY. DARE YOU SEEK?

“What?” Josh screwed up his face. “Sounds like one of your lame dragony questy thingy games!”

“They are NOT lame!” Danny argued. “Hang on—there's more.” He flipped over another fold in the paper and read:

CLUE 1 : WHERE THE SILENT WISE ONE SLUMBERS.

“Where the silent wise one slumbers?” echoed Josh. He thought for a while. “Oh, come on, Danny. It's got to be Scott or Zac, hasn't it? Wow! Can it be true? They've actually come out of their bedrooms and decided to set you a task in the REAL WORLD?! What will the sunlight do to their see-through skin?”

“Shut up,” snapped Danny. He liked his role-play stuff as much as his skateboarding and biking. “I'm thinking . . . Silent wise one?”

“Oh, you're not taking this seriously, are you?” scoffed Josh.

Danny scrunched up his eyes and pursed his lips and nodded a few times. “Got it!” he said. “Come on! I've solved the first clue. Destiny, here we come!”

“Easy!” Danny said, getting to his feet and pushing out of the bush. “‘Wise one' has got to be an owl, right?”

Josh perked up a bit. “Well—yeah, maybe. Although in reality owls aren't that clever. Of all the birds of prey they're actually the least intelli—”

“Oh, will you shut up with the nature nerding?!” Danny strode back up the garden. “Everyone calls owls wise, don't they? So it's got to be an owl. And I know where they are!”

Josh followed him down the side passage. “All right, Sherlock—where?”

“In the woods over the road, of course!” Danny said, pointing across as they arrived in the front garden. “We always hear them at night, don't we?”

“Right,” Josh said. “So your destiny awaits you in the woods. Sure. Why not?” He shrugged and shook his head.

Danny didn't answer. He just shoved the note and the marble in his jeans pocket and ran out of the gate and across the quiet street. The wild hedgerow opposite had a few gaps in it and, if you pushed through, on the other side was a tangled woodland at the edge of some farmland. Danny wasn't normally keen on pushing through because of the likelihood of a spider or poisonous caterpillar falling down his neck. But today he was excited and didn't think about it. He just ran for the hedgerow and disappeared inside it.

Josh shook his head again and then followed Danny into the cool green shade on the other side. He didn't mind at all; he loved the woods. Persuading his twin to come with him was usually the problem. Danny normally preferred the pavement for his skateboard or the house for his computer games.

Some way into the wood, Danny was standing by a tall oak tree and staring up. “Look.” He
pointed high. “You've always said that's got to be an owl's nest, haven't you?”

“Yeah—well—probably,” Josh said. The large oval hole had formed naturally in the ancient wound of a broken off branch. It was the perfect size for a tawny owl. “But I can't imagine Zac or Scott climbing up there, can you? They get nosebleeds if they go too high on our jungle gym!”