“Well, that’s why we have a meteorologist on the panel!” said the announcer. “So how about it? What on earth is up with the weather, and why is the sky yellow?”
“I have absolutely no idea,” replied the meteorologist.
The radio cut out in a haze of static when Ed swerved off the street and down a ramp into an underground garage. It was empty, except for Ed’s truck, and dark, except for Ed’s torch and an exit light over the door at the far end.
“Right,” Ed said, when we were out on the street. “Let’s see if I can remember how to get there from here.”
We found the Weathermen’s Club on a quiet, Georgian street a short walk from the center of the city. The row of terraced houses was old and dignified and expensive-looking, except the one with the brass plaque beside the door that read Weathermen’s Club in big curling letters, and underneath, in smaller letters, Deliveries Around Back. The brass was weathered and worn and faded and scratched. It had not been polished for a very long time. The windows were all boarded up. So was the door. The wrought-iron gate in front of the steps was rusted, and down in the basement, behind the railing, there were piles of rubbish and leaves.
I had a key. Dad had given it to me and warned me not to lose it. It would grant me access to the venerable halls of the Weathermen’s Club, where I would be treated with the deference and respect due to the Weatherman’s son and heir. I hadn’t lost the key, but I was beginning to think that I should’ve brought a hammer and crowbar instead.
“I don’t think anyone’s at home,” Ed said.
I stood in front of the door with the key in my hand, waiting for a keyhole to magically appear on the warped wooden board nailed across the door frame. There was some sort of notice glued to it, but it was worn and torn and I couldn’t work out what it was trying to tell me. I studied the graffiti for a clue or a message or a map. It was all dates and squiggles and love hearts.
“Here,” said Ed, pushing past. “Let me.”
He made a fist, raised his arm, and began pounding on the board.
“Hello? Hello? Anyone home? Hello?”
“Ed, stop,” I said, though not very loudly. This whole thing was leaving me a bit depressed.
Ed kept pounding. And pounding and pounding and pounding. Most people would have given up after the first minute. Without interrupting the hammering, he turned his head and gave me a wink.
“Stop it, Ed,” I said. He stopped.
“Sorry, did you say something?” he asked.
“Stop hitting the door, Ed.”
“Oh. Are you sure? I could keep this up all day. When it comes to magical entrances you have to be persistent. Even if you don’t know the magic word, they’ll usually let you in if you annoy them enough.”
“It’s not magical, Ed. It’s just boarded up.”
“Could be a magical board.”
“Yeah, right, Ed. Magical board. Hey, board! Open sesame!”
The board slowly tilted forward. We jumped to either side as it fell onto the steps and slid down to the footpath. Underneath was an old red door, and there was the lock. The key fit and the door opened without any trouble and we went inside.
It was dark, dusty, and cool, and smelled damp and sour and smoky, as if someone had lit a fire not so long ago and burned something nasty. Sunlight slanted in beams through the windows on either side of the door. Sad old shadows rested in every corner. The walls were made of paneled wood and the floor was covered with cheap plastic linoleum that peeled away from the skirting boards. The overhead light fittings had been stripped away and cracks zigzagged along the yellowing plaster in the ceiling.
“Hello?” I called. Nobody answered.
“Come on,” said Ed. “Let’s explore.”
He was already walking off down the hallway, trying doors and rapping his knuckles on the wooden panels. I went after him, rapping on any spots I thought he missed.
There wasn’t much to see, unless seeing how empty and deserted and run down the place was counted, which I suppose it did. I’d always got the impression that this was a hushed and hallowed place, full of varnished wood and velvet trimmings and wise old men who smoked cigars and drank brandy and looked up with annoyance whenever anyone breathed too loudly. I’d imagined stiffly upright butlers gliding by as though on well-oiled wheels, fires burning and crackling in the grates all the year round, bookshelves filled with ancient volumes of facts and figures lining every room, portraits of valued members looking fierce and bad-tempered, possibly because they were dead, gracing the walls. Well, this place might have looked like that once. Not anymore. Not for a long time.
All the rooms were empty. All the shelves were bare. The paintings had been taken down from their hooks. The trimmings had been stripped. The butlers had rolled themselves away. The wise old men had been carted off having smoked their last cigar and sniffed their last brandy. The Weathermen’s Club was an empty shell. There was nobody here to help anyone.
We went upstairs to find more empty rooms, and upstairs again to even more empty rooms. One thing the Weathermen’s Club had plenty of was empty rooms. There were cobwebs in every corner, mouse droppings on every floor, mold on all the windows. The building was slipping bit by bit from being vacant to being derelict. It wasn’t spooky. It was depressing. That was almost worse.
There were no Shieldsmen here. No clues, no signs, no secrets, no revelations.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go.”
I locked the door and together we lifted the board back over it. We’d no hammer and nails to secure it, so we left it leaning there, waiting for a stiff breeze or a vandal to come along and knock it down again.
“What’s that?” said Ed, pointing at the faded notice on the board.
I peered at it.
“It’s all smeared and torn. Let me see. There’s a squiggle, a dash, a something, another something … AtmoLab! What’s an AtmoLab?”
“AtmoLab?” said Ed. “What’s that short for, Atmospheric Laboratory? Probably a club designed to look like a laboratory with soft lighting and smooth jazz on the sound system. Nice.”
“No, no, it’s on the notice. AtmoLab is the only word I can make out. Is it a clue? Please tell me it’s a clue.”
“Even if it isn’t, it might be a cool place to hang out for the afternoon,” Ed said. “Hang on.”
He took out an iPhone and began to slide and tap his fingers around the screen. I sat on the step and watched the traffic go by while I waited.
I know I was aware of the birds before I really noticed them. I’d seen them at home, around the house, and along the road all the way up to Dublin, but it was a scary moment when I looked around and finally really saw them. Everywhere.
On the houses, they lined the roofs and the gutters, crowded together in uneven rows. Perched on electricity and telephone wires and street lamps, sitting wing to wing. Every now and then one of them would ruffle its feathers or stretch its beak wide without making a sound. Crows, robins, swallows, thrushes, wrens, martens, wagtails. All of those and hundreds more. Every type and species, all crushed together. Jackdaws beside sparrows beside gulls beside finches.
I shivered, remembering that old horror film Mum had let us stay up late to watch one night. The one with the birds, which should have been completely daft, but wasn’t. I could feel thousands of black, beady eyes watching me. I thought about what I’d heard on the radio.
We were all caught in this terrible pause in the turning of the Seasons. People didn’t understand it yet, but the birds did. They were waiting for the rhythm to start again, or to change, or to end. Had the worms in the ground stopped wriggling? Had rabbits and badgers and foxes and rats and mice all stopped moving and grazing and hunting and eating?
Sitting on the steps outside the derelict Weathermen’s Club, I could feel the edge of a great catastrophe creeping toward me. How long would they survive like this? How long before they all simply dropped dead where they sat or stood or lay? And how long would we surviv
e without them? Were we all slowly winding down to a final halt, a stillness and a sleepiness that would leave us standing, empty-minded, empty-eyed on roadsides, in doorways and kitchens, sitting in cars, as though we had been moving all our lives to a beat we couldn’t hear, and with that beat gone we could move no more?
Or maybe we wouldn’t last that long. What were the Seasons doing right now? Waiting patiently for the Doorways to open? Or getting angry because after millennia, the system had finally failed? And if they got angry enough to decide they didn’t need Weathermen anymore, what then? Could something as huge as this really start with something as small as our tiny old Weatherbox and a phone that didn’t ring?
“According to this,” Ed said at last, “AtmoLab Inc. is a company involved in the development of technologies to monitor and control atmospheric conditions for agricultural and maritime purposes. Monitor and control, eh? I like the sound of that.”
“Right,” I agreed, “So what’s their name doing on the board over the door of the club? Hey, maybe it is the club! Maybe they, like, rebranded themselves because they wanted to be young and hip and stuff! Do they have an office anywhere?”
Ed sat beside me on the step and showed me the phone.
“This is their website. There’s not much on it—just lots of pretty pictures of sunsets and seascapes. But, look, their headquarters is here in Dublin, down by the canal.”
I looked at the tiny screen and tried to pretend I didn’t have a feeling that we were wasting precious time and that Dad had sent me up here to keep me out of the way, to protect his heir in case anything happened to him. Then I saw the name.
“Oh,” I said.
“What?”
“Look. Their CEO.”
“Yeah? What about him?”
“I know that name. Do you know how to get there?”
“Of course. It’s not far,” Ed said, taking the phone back and reading the name. “Huh. Never heard of him.”
“Let’s go,” I said, striding away from the club. “Come on! Hurry!”
“Er, other way, Neil,” Ed said. “So how come you’re so fired up all of a sudden? Is it the CEO?”
I continued walking in what I now hoped was the right direction.
“Hey, Neil!” Ed called after me. “Come on! Who’s this Tony Holland fella?”
CHAPTER 14
LIZ
The house was still horrible, but it was too hot to do any more, and anyway we were too miserable and worried. Dad took a deck chair and put it down right beside the phone box. He sat leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his fingers all clasped together in front of his mouth, looking at the middle of the road. Owen was on the lawn, hovering over Neetch, watching him anxiously. The hag ladies hid themselves away in their rooms. For a while nothing happened.
There were birds on all the wires and on the roof and in the trees. None of them flew, none of them sang or croaked. They were looking, too.
I made a chant, and I danced around the house singing it.
“Leafyman, leave here,
Birds fly in the air.
Leaves die, fall down
Hedgehog sleeps in the ground!”
My shoelaces were untied and they flew and flapped as I danced, and kitten Neetch jumped and pounced and chased them around my feet.
“Who’s the leafy man?” Owen asked as he watched Neetch play with my laces.
“The Season,” I said. “The Summer. She’s stuck here and she’s angry.”
“Why is he leafy? Seasons are all air and water and stuff.”
“She’s been the Summer for thousands and thousands of years, so she looks a bit like the Summer now—or how the Summer would look if it was a thing.”
“How do you know?”
“I sometimes see her in my dreams. Far off. The sun is so bright in my eyes, I can barely make her out. I hide, because I don’t want her to see me seeing her. I don’t think the Seasons like being seen.”
“What does he look like?”
“Leafyman,” I sang. “Leafyman, Leafyman.”
“Why do you keep saying ‘her’ and ‘she’ but when you sing you say ‘Leafyman’?”
“Because that’s the word you use. When you are something you’re a something-man. A policeman. A fireman. A Shieldsman. So everyone thinks you have to be a man to be these things, even though there are women policemen and women firemen and women Shieldsmen. But I think man isn’t just man; it’s short for woman too, see? So I don’t say policewoman or firewoman or Shieldswoman, because that makes you different from all the policemen and firemen and Shieldsmen and people might say you’re not a proper one of them because of the woman bit at the end. So I’m a Shieldsman and the man at the end is just short for woman, and the Summer is Leafyman, but it’s a she.”
“You should be the Weatherman,” Owen said. “Dad says it’s going to be Neil, but I think it should be you. I don’t think Neil will like being a Weatherman much.”
“I can’t be the Weatherman. I’m a girl.”
I sang and danced some more.
“I’m sorry,” Owen said.
I pretended I didn’t hear him. I hopped and kicked and Neetch jumped and swiped at my laces with his tiny paws.
Mum came and sat on the doorstep and watched me while she sipped tea from her favorite red mug that I had got her for Christmas one year. I stopped dancing and sat down beside her.
“What was it you said to Mrs. Fitzgerald, Mum, that made her go away?”
“I didn’t make her go away, dear. She went because she was ready to go.”
“But it was because of what you said. Why is that?”
“I don’t know. I just made it up. Like the little songs you make up. It’s something my gran would have said.”
Mum had lived with her gran for a while after her parents had died in a car crash. Then she’d gone to live with her uncle Matt, who had been an important person in the Weatherman’s Club. It was easy to forget that Mum had a whole life that happened before she became a Maloney.
“Sometimes I remember her voice, telling me stories, singing songs, chanting. Sometimes it’s like she’s still whispering in my ears, telling me things.”
I wished Mum’s gran would come whisper in my ear. I was always saying the wrong thing.
“You said you knew her—Mrs. Fitzgerald.”
“No, Liz. I said I knew her like.”
“How, Mum? How do you know her like? Is it because of your gran?”
“That’s part of it,” she said, and she sighed, put the mug down, and stretched her legs out in front of her. I crossed my legs and Neetch crept into my lap. Owen lay flat on his back and looked up at the sky. The clouds had yellow in them, like cloths that have been wiped across a dusty table.
“I remember,” she said, and sighed and shook her head, and started again. “I remember the day the magicians from the Weathermen’s Club all climbed into their cars and their vans and drove as fast as they could out of the city. It was early in the morning when the phone call came into the club. Uncle Matt had no one to mind me, so he put me in the back seat and took me with him. I’d been living with him for a few years by then, but I’d never seen anything like this. Everyone was in such a panic, and so angry. You’d think the world was going to end.
“We drove to a farm in the middle of nowhere—the Fitzgeralds are living there now, of course—and there was an old man and his son standing together in the yard, waiting for us. The old man was thin and gray, defeated and ashamed, and his son—your dad—no older than me, the same age as Neil is now, furious with everyone. The men from the club piled out of their cars and started shouting, and the old man stood there and said nothing, just a quiet word here and there, while the son yelled back and told them to leave him alone and it wasn’t his fault. Then the Fitzgeralds showed up, that nasty little rat of a man and that scary, beautiful woman. My God, she hasn’t aged a day! She stayed in the car while John-Joe tried to chase everyone away, but the old man and the boy h
ad nowhere to go, so he gave them twenty-four hours to find a new home and clear out.
“Uncle Matt took charge. He sent some men to the well and sent others to scout around and others to ring estate agents and others to help the old man and the boy to pack. Oh, your dad was so strong. He protected his father as fiercely as any Shieldsman ever would or could. I liked him for that. I helped him pack his things and his father’s things.
“The magicians found this house and the phone box and decided to move the Doorway. It was dangerous, but they were desperate and scared. They said it would only be for a while. They said they’d get the farm and the lake back as soon as they could. The spell nearly killed them, but it worked.
“Your dad and your granddad moved in here, of course, and I went back to Dublin, but the club was cracked and it didn’t take much to break it. They no longer trusted the Weatherman, and the Weatherman no longer trusted them. The spell that moved the Door to the phone box left the magicians weak, and they never fully recovered their powers. It was as if they were being punished for what they did. Years went by, and the club lost power and influence bit by bit. The members grew old and retired, and there was no one to replace them. Uncle Matt bent and broke the rules and brought me in to help—that’s how I ended up learning about magic and magic people and Mrs. Fitzgerald’s sort. I loved it, but it was also sad because it was dying.
“Your granddad passed away and so did Uncle Matt. Your dad became the Weatherman. The men in charge of the club let me know that with Uncle Matt gone my help was neither needed nor welcome. But your Dad and I had kept in touch over the years, with letters and phone calls, and we used to visit each other and go on holidays together.
“He proposed to me one morning when the Spring arrived. There’s nothing quite like the Spring—all the life and energy and warmth coming back into the world. When he went down on one knee and asked me to marry him I felt as if I were flying high over the world, bursting with happiness.
“I started the bed and breakfast because all of Uncle Matt’s money vanished when Tony Holland robbed the club. Dad told you all about that, didn’t he? How they blamed your dad for everything? They said Dad rang them and persuaded them to give Holland a job looking after their finances, and over five or six years Holland robbed them blind, then vanished. But Dad never rang them, though it’s true he and Tony had been at school together. But Tony Holland’s dad and John-Joe Fitzgerald were cousins—which makes me think … How long has she been planning this? And why?”
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