Turtle Terror (3 page)

For a second Danny thought it was a reckless sky diver landing dangerously off course. And then he realized he'd just gotten the scale wrong. It wasn't a
big
parachute, far away—it was a
small
parachute, close up.

Josh was already on his feet and running across to the billowing yellow chute, which was in fact about the size of a playground merry-go-round. Danny ran to it too and began to gather up the fine silk in bunches to stop the sea breeze from tugging it along the beach.

“What is it?” Josh peered beneath the chute. “A teeny weeny thrill-seeker?”

Attached to its web of fine white cords was not a tiny skydiver but a silver cylinder with a screw top, about the size of a jam jar—but much lighter.

“Aluminum, probably,” Josh said, picking it up.

“Who dropped it?” Danny scanned the high cliffs above them but could see nobody.

Josh was looking around too. “And were they dropping it for
us
?”

There were very few other people on the beach. Their holiday was during school term, so no other kids were around at all—just adults, dog walkers, and a couple of surfers. And they were all a long distance from where the parachute had landed.

“Go on then—open it!” Danny said.

Josh shrugged. “Well . . . if nobody's coming to claim it, we might as well.”

He struggled with the lid. It was very tightly screwed shut.

“Here—let me, you wuss!” Danny grabbed it off his brother and twisted with all his strength. Then he paused. “You don't think it's full of toxic gas, do you?”

Josh laughed. “Um—no! We're not in Petty's lab now!”

“OK.” Danny gave another twist and the lid gave.

Inside was a piece of folded yellow paper.

Danny stared at Josh, his heart suddenly beating hard. “You know what this is, don't you?”

Josh could hardly believe it. “Here? Two hundred miles away from home?” He felt slightly panicky.

Danny stared at the canister and then up at his brother. “
Not
Petty Potts. And now I sort of wish it
were
Petty Potts. Even if she was barmy enough to follow us all the way down here, at least she's the kind of barmy we know. But this . . .” He opened the paper with the familiar spidery writing
on it, just like the other ones. “This is . . .”

“ . . . from the Mystery Marble Sender,” whispered Josh. “Now I'm freaking out.”

Danny opened the note out and read aloud.

GREETINGS, JOSH & DANNY. ARE YOU READY FOR CLUE 3?

He gulped. “Whoever this is, they are definitely watching us. Following us. Tracking us. I mean . . . when they sent the first two clues it was all at our house and that was freaky enough—but following us here?”

Josh felt shaky too. The Mystery Marble Sender had been in touch with them over the past month, sending clues to get them to find marbles. But not just any marbles. These marbles contained a hologram and a code—just like the top secret holograms and codes hidden inside Petty Potts's BUGSWITCH and REPTOSWITCH cubes. Josh and Danny had helped Petty to find five of her missing REPTOSWITCH cubes so she could develop her REPTOSWITCH spray and they could try out being reptiles. But it seemed someone else had a code too, hidden in these mystery marbles.

What Josh and Danny couldn't work out was why that someone kept sending them clues and getting them to find the marbles.

“We really need to tell Petty about this,” Josh said. “It's time she knew!”

“Yes—as soon as we see her,” Danny said. “But that won't be until next week, after our holiday. For now—we've got another clue and another marble to find.”

He read on. “OK—here we go:

IN THE LOW, CLIMB HIGH. IN THE HIGH, LIE LOW. AIM HIGH—SHOOT LOW!

“What is that supposed to mean?” Further down the paper the message continued.

DARE YOU SEEK YOUR DESTINY?

And at the bottom of the page was something that looked remarkably like a splodge of melted chocolate. Danny sniffed it. It was melted chocolate.

“Weird,” he remarked to his brother, but Josh was staring out to sea.

“Look!” Josh pointed across the flat, sandy beach toward the water.

Danny looked and shrugged. “What?”

“All this HIGH and LOW stuff,” Josh said. “That's got to be the tide, hasn't it? See the fort?”

Danny squinted at the stubby, ruined fort that sat a quarter of a mile from the beach on a tiny island of rock. It had been there for five hundred years, their dad said.

“You can only get out to it when the tide is low. You can walk across. So . . . ‘in the low, climb high.' It's high up, isn't it? When you get out to it. But you can't reach it at high tide, so you might as well ‘lie low.'”

“What about ‘aim high, shoot low?'”

Danny asked. He was getting a fizzy feeling of excitement in his belly. He thought Josh was right—and now he badly wanted to get across to the ruined fort and search for the marble.

“Don't know—but we might as well go and look!” Josh's eyes were shining—he was excited too. Even though there was something very sinister about the Mystery Marble Sender following them all the way to Cornwall, he still couldn't resist the challenge.

Five minutes later Josh and Danny were running across the wet sand revealed by the low tide, heading for the ruined fort.

With stout rubber beach shoes on, they could jump nimbly across the rocks that reared up like small islands in the sand. Danny ran up one particularly high outcrop beside a large rock pool and jumped over the edge.

There was an angry shout. He had landed on a person. A person wearing a bright orange raincoat and an affronted expression. And turtles in her armpits.

“I don't believe it!” Josh said, crouching on the rock just above Danny's shoulder. “PETTY POTTS!”

“What the devil are you doing here?” Petty spluttered, getting up off her backside, where Danny had knocked her. This wasn't easy with a turtle in each armpit. “I thought you were Victor Crouch's government spies come to get me!” Her eyes swiveled anxiously around the beach. Petty was always convinced that the government was spying on her. She believed her former government scientist friend, Victor Crouch—who she claimed had tried to steal her S.W.I.T.C.H. secrets and had burnt out her memory—was still out to get her.

“Oh, come on!” Danny retorted, wiping wet sand off his shorts. “Like you didn't know we were here! You've followed us off on holiday before, Petty! Did you just send that parachute off the cliff? Was it you?!”

Petty glared at him. “I have no idea what you're talking about. I did not follow anyone here. I came here to do some more S.W.I.T.C.H. research, and I had no idea I'd find you two! It's a fantastic coincidence, that's all. Is the whole family here?”

“Yes—but not here on the beach,” Danny said, eyeing her suspiciously. There was wet sand and a crab's claw in her gray hair. “Mom and Dad are up in the cottage on the clifftop, and Jenny's gone off with her friend Chelsea to some stupid TV show thing in Helston.”

“Oh, I think I saw that on the way down here,” Petty remarked. “Some gaudy yellow tent in a field and lots of people wearing yellow
I *heart* DD
T-shirts, whatever that's supposed to mean.”

“Yeah—Jenny and Chelsea had them on! It's some talk show that Mom and Jenny are always watching,” Danny said. “The audience goes nuts. It's the stupidest thing on TV, isn't it, Josh?”

Josh though, was just staring at Petty's armpits. There was a look of wonder on his face. “Petty!” he whispered. “They're beautiful!”

The turtles in Petty's armpits were dark gray and had tough leathery shells with ridges running along the length of them. Their legs were wide pale flippers, and their heads were oval with dark almond-shaped eyes and a blunt snout, under which curved a mouth that seemed to be set in a sleepy smile. Their shells were hard and scaly but sleek and streamlined for fast swimming.

“They're leatherback turtles!” Josh murmured. He was just about to reach out and stroke the head of one when it gave a little shudder and vanished. The one in Petty's other armpit did the same.