“We’re here to help,” Clive said with a nice, friendly smile, waving his hands up and down.
“That’s right, lass,” Bob added. “Just let us in and we’ll have this phone box back working in no time!”
“Shiny boxes and phoney roots,” said Hazel.
“Blunt little knives,” said Ash.
“Uh,” said Bob. “They’re called screwdrivers.”
“Roots carry the signal,” Hazel said. “Not the weather.”
“The Weatherman is the Door,” said Ash. “Not the box and not the lake.”
“When is a Door not a Door?” asked Hazel.
“When is a Weatherman not a Weatherman?” added Ash.
“When is a Weatherman not a Door?” remarked Hazel.
“Oh God! Oh God, what are you doing? Get away from there! Get away now!” Tony Holland interrupted, running down the path and out through the gate. He tripped and stumbled to a stop in front of Mum.
“Look,” he said. “Don’t do this. You must have some idea what she’s like. You must! You have to let them work!”
“No,” Mum said. “We don’t. Go away, all of you. Go away while you still can.”
“Look,” Tony said again, moving his arms and bobbing his body up and down like Owen when he’s nervous or excited. He kept turning his head one way and another, looking up and down the road as if Mrs. Fitzgerald was going to come flying down on us any second now. “Listen, I’m begging you. Just let them reconnect the line and we’ll be gone. I can put this behind me and forget this whole thing. My whole life has been on hold, you know? My whole life! Can you imagine? Can you imagine what it’s like? Course you can’t. You’ve no idea. None. I want my life back!”
“You don’t really think she’ll let you go, do you, Tony?” Mum said, looking at him as if he were a dog that had just made a mess on the carpet.
“She promised!” he said. “She said once it was working again I could go home and she’d never bother me again! I want to go home! And you won’t stop me!”
“I’m not stopping you, Tony. Go on. Go home, if you want.”
“I can’t! You don’t know what she’s like! You don’t know what she can do—so shut up, right! Shut up and go away!”
“Don’t talk to my mum like that, you rotten lying coward!” I shouted, nocking an arrow and drawing it back.
He stared up at me in disbelief. “Put that down before someone gets hurt, you stupid little—”
The arrow went past his head. He screamed in pain and clutched his ear. I felt a shock go through me. I hadn’t actually meant to hit him. I ignored it and tried to look tough and mean, like a Shieldsman should.
Clive and Bob and Cherie were standing with eyes and mouths wide with shock.
“She’ll kill me!” Tony screeched, hands over his ear and blood on his shirt. “She’ll kill you, too! For God’s sake! Ow!”
He took a step forward, but Mum got in front of him.
“Step back,” she said. “Step back and go home, you great fool.”
Now the three AtmoLabbers were moving to help their boss. I nocked another arrow. Neetch flowed down around the Weatherbox and grew, and all his hair stood up and he bared his teeth and hissed. They all took a step back then. Owen stood beside him and stroked his back.
“You’re scaring him,” he said. “You shouldn’t scare him.”
“Look,” Bob said. “Nobody wants anyone to get hurt.”
“We’re just trying to help,” Cherie said. “Look, Tony’s bleeding. We have to call an ambulance.”
“You don’t know what you’re doing,” Mum said. “You don’t know who you’re working for and you don’t know what it means. You should drop everything and walk away and not look back.”
“GET BACK TO WORK!” screamed Tony. “Never mind them! Never mind me! Forget everything! Fix that line and fix it now or you’re fired! You’re all fired!”
“There are worse things than being fired,” Mum said.
“Nothing else matters!” said Tony. He was pleading with everyone. “Don’t be scared of them and don’t be scared of me! Be scared of her! She’s worse than anything you can imagine!”
“Who?” asked Clive.
“FIX IT!” screamed Tony.
That’s when Mum pushed him. She put both hands on his chest and shoved him hard, and sent him sprawling back across the road.
“What the hell is wrong with you people?” said Clive. “Have you gone crazy? It’s only a phone box!”
Neetch hissed again, raising an outstretched paw and long wicked claws.
“I don’t think he likes you talking to us like that,” Owen said.
Mum stood over Tony.
“Get out,” she said. “Get far, far away from here.”
She pointed at the AtmoLabbers, then pointed down the road. “Go.”
“Go nowhere!” Tony roared from all fours. Clive and Bob helped him up and took him over to a spot on the wall, as far away from the Weatherbox as they could get, while Cherie found a first-aid kit and wiped the blood off Tony’s ear. I thought I was going to throw up. I lowered the bow, and Neetch curled up on the ground and Owen nestled into him and fell asleep. Mum looked up at me and smiled, and I nodded back down at her because I couldn’t quite remember how to smile just then. I squatted down, the bow and arrow held loose in my hands and we commenced to waiting.
Time passed, the sky grew dark, and the air turned cold. There was no wind, not even a breeze. I saw strange clouds rising on the horizon. On all the horizons. To the east, climbing over the mountains, glowing green and sinister; to the west, billowing like smoke, filled with a deep angry red; in the north, beyond the hill, spreading itself wide, a dark rolling purple. And in the south, behind our house, there was a blank gray haze, as if the sky itself were vanishing bit by bit into nothingness.
“Here they come!” said Hazel.
“All the Seasons but one,” agreed Ash.
“Three in the sky. One on the road.”
“And the babby in his bath.”
“Put that down, Liz,” Mrs. Fitzgerald said, stepping out of the trees and crossing the road to stand beside the Weatherbox. “You don’t need it anymore.”
CHAPTER 21
NEIL
Ed drove like a lunatic. He swerved around cars, blew his horn at anyone going under eighty kilometers an hour, went the wrong way down one-way streets, drove on the wrong side of the road, and generally acted like a road hog. If he’d driven like this on the way up I’d have spent the trip under the dashboard. I felt sorry for the other drivers—and occasional pedestrians and cyclists. It must have been terrifying to have a ten-ton truck, driven by a one-ton maniac, bear down on you and then whip past. But mostly, I was looking at Dad.
You can’t look at your dad the same way after he’s unleashed a little pocket Summer in a police station. You can’t look at anything the same, really, but particularly not your dad.
“Dad,” I said. “That was amazing.”
He looked at me, ran a hand through his hair, shook his head, and sighed. “No, it was stupid.”
“But Dad, I—”
“Listen, Neil, what I just did was forbidden. Absolutely forbidden. It means I can’t be the Weatherman anymore. I had to do it. I have to get you home as fast as possible, and I’d do it again, but I’ve played right into Mrs. Fitzgerald’s hands. If they weren’t going to fire me for the delay with the Weatherbox, they’re definitely going to fire me for this. I’ll be lucky if they don’t do worse.”
“Worse?” I knew the story of the Weatherman who’d destroyed the fort and banished the Shieldsmen and Weathermages. That couldn’t happen to Dad. Could it?
“Never mind that now. I have to get you home. I have to get you home before the Seasons assemble over the Door to judge me and appoint a new Weatherman. It has to be you, because otherwise it’s going to be her.”
“But, Dad, she’s too strong!”
Dad smiled. Even his teeth looked green. “I’ve become the
Summer, Neil. I can’t do it for long and I’m only supposed to do it in the direst of emergencies, and I’m going to pay for doing it. But I’m not finished yet.”
“Oh. Wow! Dad, I … I…” I felt slightly ill. Whether it was from Ed’s driving or from what Dad was saying, I wasn’t sure. It didn’t matter. Dad had become the Season. To rescue me. And now Dad couldn’t be Weatherman anymore. Because of me. And it was starting to look like I would never be Weatherman, either. Oh. My mouth was dry. My head felt light. I bent over in my seat because suddenly my stomach was cramping. Dad patted me gently on the back.
“What are we going to do?” I asked. My voice was muffled because my head was between my knees.
“I’m going to fight Mrs. Fitzgerald,” Dad said. “You’re going to become the Weatherman.”
“I am?” I sat up. “Oh. Right. OK. Uh, Dad? I’m not ready to be the Weatherman. I’m really not.”
“I’m not ready to stop being the Weatherman, but we don’t have a choice.”
“Sorry to interrupt,” said Ed. By now we’d torn through the city and out onto the motorway, rolling down the outside lane with horn blaring and lights flashing. “I think you two should have a look outside. There seem to be unusual weather phenomena all over the place.”
We looked out through the windscreen, then out the side windows and the back. The police van full of Shieldsmen was following on the road behind us. Weisz gave us an excited thumbs-up from the passenger seat.
Climbing into the sky from all points of the compass except the south were heavy masses of cloud, building fast and full of light—red, green, and purple—sweeping like an avalanche across the sky.
“That’s them,” Dad said. “Faster, Ed. Faster.”
The needle on the speedometer jumped until it couldn’t go any higher.
“Them?” I asked, scared now, of the speed and the clouds and the note in Dad’s voice.
“The Seasons,” Dad explained. “All except Summer, who is here already and who, for the moment, I have inside me.”
“Wow,” Ed said, turning on the radio. “Best holiday ever!”
“‘Supercell thunderstorms are rare but not unknown,’” said a voice on the radio. “‘You see, what happens is you get these giant columns of cloud that sort of pull up hot humid air in a powerful rotating updraft. You can expect heavy downbursts of rain and hail accompanied by thunder and lightning and possibly even tornadoes. Alarming, but explicable. What’s slightly terrifying is that three of them have formed spontaneously out of nowhere and are now crossing the country from the east, west, and north, respectively, all looking to converge somewhere over the Midlands.’”
“‘And in your considered scientific opinion, will that create a massive super-mega-terror storm that could lay waste to the entire country?’” asked someone else on the radio.
“‘That’s the optimistic outlook, yes. We should probably evacuate.’”
“‘The Midlands?’”
“‘The country.’”
“‘And what if they are, in fact, alien mother ships disguised as clouds about to commence a devastating global invasion to enslave humanity?’”
Dad switched the radio off. “Listen carefully, both of you. We don’t know what will be waiting for us when we get home, but Neil has to stay safe at all costs. Neil, whatever is there, whatever has happened, whatever you see, I want you to run for the lake as fast as you can. Take the Shieldsmen. They’ll protect you.”
“The lake? Oh God. OK. What about you?”
“I’ll be fine. I’ll keep Mrs. Fitzgerald occupied, but Hugh and the elementals will be after you.”
“Hugh?”
“Run for the lake, you hear? Straight up through the woods to the lake.”
“Why?”
“And Ed, listen, when we get there you’re to do exactly as I say, you hear? Don’t question me, just do it.”
“Uh, OK,” said Ed. We’d left the motorway now, and the truck leaned to one side as we went through a roundabout.
“There’s something else, Neil. I’ve been thinking about the Gray Thing—the new Season.”
“So you really think it is a fifth Season? Dad, how can that work? What’s it the Season of? Where would it fit? What would we call it?”
“We don’t have to call it anything yet. We just don’t know yet what it’s for or why they made it.”
“Doesn’t making another Season violate the agreement?” Ed said.
“It depends,” Dad said. “Two things have occurred to me. One is that it may take centuries for the Baby Season to mature. The other is that we don’t know whether Seasons die. We don’t know whether in the past Seasons have died. And been replaced.”
“You…” I said, and shook my head to try and get my thoughts to work properly. “You think that one of the big Seasons is dying and the Baby Season is going to take its place? And you think it’s happened before?”
“Seems like the sort of thing you’d notice,” Ed said.
“As far as I’m aware,” Dad said, “No scientist has yet made a study of the life cycle of a Season. Anyway, that’s just a theory.”
“That’s some theory, Dad,” I said.
“Here’s what I think happened,” Dad said. “Mrs. Fitzgerald, the third hag, left the Black Pool and traveled south to the Midlands. She decided that the only way to be sure of not being sent back was to have another, even more important, job. She decided to become the Weatherman. First she tried to steal the gate, using John-Joe to swindle my father. Then, when the Weathermen’s Club moved the Doorway, she set out to destroy the club, using Tony Holland. Tony wrecked the club’s finances, bought it out, gained control of the phone line and, finally, this summer, cut the line off. And they did all this right under my flippin’ nose! Make no mistake, I don’t deserve to be Weatherman anymore.”
“Dad, it wasn’t your fault,” I protested.
“It was, Neil, and that’s all there is to it. I cut myself off from the club and let it be destroyed. That’s on me. To protect the gate and the agreement—that’s my job, Neil. I failed.”
“Oh, Dad.”
“It’s OK. It’s not over yet. Mrs. Fitzgerald must have sensed the presence of the Baby Season in the lake, but she waited—and when the time was right, she provoked it into creating all the anomalous weather until finally you went down and freed it. The young Weatherman freed the young Season. Then she captured it and now she’s using it, even after Liz sunk it down into the bog—probably a bit like I’m using the Summer. It’s young and vulnerable in a way the other Seasons aren’t. And it allows her to control elementals, making her incredibly powerful and dangerous.
“With the Season late, I’m in disgrace. She knows the power I have, but she also knows I’m reluctant to use it. If I use it, I’m finished, which is what she wants, but I’m also every bit as dangerous and powerful as she is, so it’s a risk. Once the Seasons were well and truly furious with me, her plan was to have the line reconnected. Her people are working on it right now, but I’d know if they’d finished. When the Autumn comes through, chances are I’ll be deposed and she’ll offer herself as a better candidate than you. She may use the Baby Season as a bargaining chip; I’m not sure. Now, though, I’ve used my power and the three Seasons are coming, and…” He trailed off.
“What?” I said. “What does that mean?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Neither does she.”
“But why do you want me to go to the lake, Dad? I don’t understand!”
“How are we doing, Ed?” Dad asked.
“We’ll be there in twenty minutes, give or take, so long as we don’t hit anything.”
“Don’t stop,” Dad said. “Don’t slow down.”
“Don’t hit anything,” I said.
Dad looked over at me. “It’s you or her, Neil. So it has to be you.”
He turned in his seat, put one hand on each of my shoulders, and leaned in close. “I know what it’s like, Neil. I know what it’s like to h
ave everything you thought was safe and secure suddenly fall apart, and for someone to come in and take it all away from you. I know what it’s like to watch your dad lose it all and to have the whole weight of the world come down on your shoulders. You’re gentle, Neil, and I don’t mean that as a bad thing. It’s a good thing. The best. It’s not something the rest of the world always values, but I do. We do. You’re a gentle young man, a real gentleman, and you’ve been through a lot, so you’re strong as an ox, too, and you don’t deserve to have all this fall on you. But I know you’ll use your head and use your heart and get through it. I thought I was alone when my dad lost the farm, but it turned out I wasn’t, and neither are you. We have our own little tribe, and when you’re Weatherman you’ll be the chief, so don’t ever feel alone, or weak, or too scared to go on, OK? You’re my son, and it’s well pleased I am with you.”
I nodded dumbly, and he put an arm around my head and pulled me to his chest, which smelled of rich green growing things. I breathed in deep and closed my eyes.
We drove on, tearing down the narrow country roads, horn blasting, right into the heart of the gathering storm. I thought of those old ghost stories about the man and his son on a horse-drawn carriage who, having vowed to race the storm home, were cursed to ride ahead of it forever. We didn’t have forever. We had minutes. It got darker. It got colder. The sky was full of angry light.
Dad told me what had happened while I was gone, and I told him what had happened to me. Then we were quiet for a while. The roads grew familiar. My throat clutched, my heart jumped, my stomach clenched. I wasn’t ready for any of this.
“There,” Dad said. The old barn went past. Trees closed around. It was as if we were falling down a dark tunnel, as if we were one of Liz’s arrows in flight. There was the house, the Weatherbox, people clustered around it.
“Now,” Dad said. Two white shapes flew from the roof of the Weatherbox.
The Maloneys' Magical Weatherbox Page 15
