Ed hit the beams. He sounded the horn. Faces turned in shock. Mum. Liz. Mrs. Fitzgerald. Three people I vaguely recognized rolled away from a hole in the ground. Hugh and John-Joe gaped from the ditch. Owen on the wall scooped up Neetch and jumped back onto the lawn. Mum, Liz, and Mrs. Fitzgerald scattered. I braced myself, and shut my eyes.
Under the rumble and the roar, as if echoing across hillsides and over treetops, I heard the far-off sound of a telephone ringing.
CHAPTER 22
LIZ
They were coming from the east, the west, and the north, blazing clouds blocking out the dead yellow sky. Huge and angry and ominous. The sky was filling up with Seasons, and we were running out of time.
Hugh, glowering, and John-Joe, grinning like an idiot, followed Mrs. Fitzgerald across the road like a pair of headless chickens. Hugh saw me up on the Weatherbox and gave me one of his sneeriest sneers. John-Joe pointed his shotgun at Mum. Neetch’s back arched so high I thought his spine would snap. Mrs. Fitzgerald stood in front of Tony, sitting on the wall, one hand still covering his ear, looking up at her in holy terror.
“Now,” she said. “This has taken long enough.” She pointed at the Weatherbox. “Make it ring,” she told him.
“You’re not welcome here,” Mum said, and went and stood right in front of her. I think that was the bravest thing I’ve ever seen anyone do.
“Scarce are the places that welcome me,” said Mrs. Fitzgerald. “Why would I expect any different here? I go where I go, and need no welcomes.”
“I suppose that means you’ve none for us, then, either, Holly, dear?” said Hazel from the wall. Mrs. Fitzgerald’s head snapped up, her eyes widened in shock.
“Aren’t you going to introduce us to our brother-in-law?” asked Ash.
“And our nephew? I’m sorry, but our invitations to the wedding must have been lost in the post!” added Hazel.
“And to the christening!” put in Ash.
“You!” said Mrs. Fitzgerald. Her eyes narrowed and her lips grew thin. Hugh and John-Joe looked at each other uneasily.
“Who are they, Mum?” asked Hugh.
I slipped the bow over my head and climbed down the side of the phone box.
“You do not belong here,” Mrs. Fitzgerald said. “This is none of your concern. Who stirs the pool? Who sings to the beast?”
“The beast will keep,” said Hazel.
“We’re sick of songs, anyway,” said Ash.
“And of stirring,” finished Hazel.
“You’re the one who doesn’t belong!” I cried, running up and standing beside Mum. “You’re the one who isn’t welcome! Go away!”
Mrs. Fitzgerald tore her eyes away from her sisters and looked down at me. “Don’t you want the line fixed?” she said. “Don’t you want the year to have an Autumn? Barely a day late and already the cycle of Seasons is close to breaking. What chaos would be unleashed on the world if they no longer held to the old agreement? Can you not feel their approach? The air is thick with their presence. They have left their allotted quarters and come to pass judgment on the Weatherman. The Weatherman who failed to bring in the Autumn, who unleashed his forbidden powers and deserted his Doorway.”
“Even if you get the line working,” Mum said, her voice tight. “Even then, the Autumn can’t come through without the Weatherman.”
“Oh, but the Autumn is coming.” She gestured to the east. “It will be here soon.”
“That’s not the right way—”
“No. It isn’t,” Mrs. Fitzgerald interrupted. “They are angry now, and when they get here they will be beyond all human reason. I wouldn’t want to be the Weatherman, or his kin. So, either the agreement fails and the Seasons wander at will across the face of the world, or a new Weatherman steps forward.”
“That’s Neil!” I said. “Neil is the next Weatherman. Not you!”
“You keep quiet!” Hugh shouted. “You’ll learn how to keep quiet when you come to live with us!”
Mum’s eyes went wide and her lips went thin with rage. I saw her hands clench into fists. “No,” she said. “You can’t have her.”
“Oh, yes.” Her voice so calm and cool and reasonable, but with every word you could feel fear in the small of your back and the nape of your neck—cold and sharp. I could feel my teeth grinding together, not because I was angry or frustrated, but because I was scared. But she wasn’t looking at me or Mum. She was looking at her sisters. “I am claiming Liz as my own. She’s worth more than the rest of you put together, and I always wanted a sister for Hugh—just as I had sisters. She’ll learn more and do more and see more with me than she ever could on her own, or with you. WHY ARE YOU NOT FIXING THE LINE?” It wasn’t a shout. It was like her voice was a whip made of ice. Clive jumped like a startled frog, and lurched back to the hole. Bob and Cherie hurried to help. Tony tried to stand up, but John-Joe pushed him down flat on his back. The clouds were moving in from the horizon. Everything was getting darker and stranger.
Neetch was going wild, shaking and shivering, hissing and screeching and spitting, his size shooting up and down. Owen tried to calm him, stroking his fur and whispering gently.
Mrs. Fitzgerald’s face contorted and she lashed out with her left hand. Out of her palm came a stream of brambles and thorns that flew straight at Owen and Neetch. I grabbed for her arm but something threw me back with great force. I jumped to my feet and drew my bow. Mum pulled me back. But it was all right—the brambles and thorns tangled in a huge knot against a wall of woven willow trunks that suddenly sprang from the ground in front of Owen and Neetch. Hazel and Ash, standing now on top of the phone box, lowered their hands.
“Leave him alone!” said Owen, scrambling out from behind all the sudden vegetation. “He’s my friend!”
“Creatures like that have no friends, boy,” Mrs. Fitzgerald snarled. “Their hearts are black. Their minds are twisted and hungry and cunning. Why did you bring it here?”
“Oh, Holly, dear,” said Hazel. “He’s our friend, too.”
“Our cat! Our foolish, stupid cat!” said Ash. “Oh, Holly, dear, we missed you so! Awfully! Terribly!”
The hags stared down from the top of the phone box. They were as young and as fresh as mountain streams, now—as young as Neil and me. Their faces white as drifts of snow, their eyes dark, their smiles wicked. Hazel sat with her legs crossed at the ankle, bare feet kicking out and back. Ash stood with her hands behind her back and her head cocked to one side.
“What are you doing here?” said Mrs. Fitzgerald. “I’ve done so much and worked so hard for this. Why work against me?”
“Why, we’re here to send you home, dear!” said Hazel.
“The Black Pool needs you, dear!” said Ash.
“Send?” repeated Mrs. Fitzgerald. “You want to send me back?”
“Yes!” said Hazel. “We like it out here. Fresh air and green grass and nice people and being young again! You’ve had years of it. Years! While we sang and stirred in the cold dark. It’s your turn!”
“You didn’t even ask! Left without asking, you did! We’d have let you go. We could have taken turns. But, no. You deserted us! Ochón, ochón, we wept and wailed liked oinseachs for a year and a day. Now it’s our turn for freedom! You’re going home, and we’re staying to enjoy hot showers and cooked breakfasts.”
“No,” said Mrs. Fitzgerald. “You don’t understand. You don’t see. When I’m Weatherman, I’ll not stir and I’ll not sing in a stone shell to a black hole. And neither will you. I was going to come for you. I was going to take you out of there.”
“Were you?” said Hazel. “Oh, sister dear, how kind and thoughtful!”
“But, my dear,” said Ash. “With us frolicking free in the world and you ruling the weather, even the blind and senile old beast is sure to notice sooner or later that he’s all alone with a CD player and a charmed stick. What then?”
“It won’t be alone,” said Mrs. Fitzgerald, and she looked quickly down at me, and away. My breath
caught in my throat and a cold black pit opened in my stomach.
“Never,” said Mum.
“The Autumn has not come and the Summer is gone,” Mrs. Fitzgerald said. “This is never.”
“Got it!” said Clive from the hole. “All done! Er, just have to ring now and, er…”
“Ring!” commanded Mrs. Fitzgerald.
Clive pulled out a mobile phone and dialed. Everyone waited in silence. If Mum hadn’t been holding me up I would have fallen over. “Yeah, uh, listen,” Clive said. “I need you to reactivate a line for me here. Let me just give you the location and the authorization.” He reeled off a string of numbers.
“It’ll be soon,” Mrs. Fitzgerald said. “I’ll be Weatherman, and I’ll take her and I’ll teach her and she can take your place. Just wait. Go back. What difference will one more year make? When you come back out, the whole world will be ours.”
“No you won’t!” I yelled. “No it won’t! No I won’t!”
“My dear,” said Hazel sadly. “That does sound nice. How wonderful that would be! So thoughtful! But we don’t want to be ruled by you anymore.”
“And we like Liz,” said Ash. “We like them all. They gave us showers and breakfasts and eight channels of television. All you’ve ever given us was a thousand years of the cold and the dark with mad heads on us from listening to the whispers of that awful old beast.”
“Then what do you think you are going to do?” asked Mrs. Fitzgerald. “My powers have grown with the years. Even the two of you together with that wretch of yours could not match me now.”
“No,” said Hazel. “We couldn’t. We won’t. But we will fight you.”
“Oh, yes. Fight, fight, fight!” agreed Ash.
Mrs. Fitzgerald drew herself up. Her eyes flashed. “Try me, then.”
Hazel laughed. “Not yet, you silly!”
“We’re waiting for them, of course,” said Ash.
“Them?” asked Mrs. Fitzgerald, glancing at the sky. “When they get here they’ll make me Weatherman. If you can’t make me go back now, what chance can you possibly have then?”
“Oh, not them, dear,” said Hazel.
“Our friend Ed!” explained Ash.
“And his truck!” added Hazel.
“Oh, you’re not Weatherman yet, dear!” said Ash.
“Done!” said Clive.
There was a silence. The clouds filled the sky. Night had fallen. Purple, green, and red light washed over everyone’s faces.
John-Joe lifted the shotgun and aimed it at us. Hugh made fists of his hands and held them up. Behind them, shapes began to appear in the air above the road—elementals that Hugh was shaping into monsters. Claws of ice. Bodies of wind. Heads of fog. Mum and I stepped backward, my shoulder rubbing her elbow. Owen was behind me, and Neetch slunk around like a snake on legs. We heard a far-off rumble, then the sudden, shrill sound of the phone ringing. Mum gasped and we both jumped. Mrs. Fitzgerald took a step toward the Weatherbox with her hand raised, reaching for the small brass handle that opened the door. I aimed my arrow right at her, and Mum sketched shapes in the air with her fingers.
Mrs. Fitzgerald laughed. “They’re nearly here,” she said.
“Oh, they’re here,” said Hazel, and the hag girls leaped like salmon, and something roared and a blinding white light filled the air and the shattering sound of a horn blasted like the end of the world.
Mrs. Fitzgerald whirled away, and we jumped the wall, Owen grabbing Neetch as he went.
There was an awful tearing, crashing noise as the truck ploughed through the Weatherbox. The sides of the box spread out like a pair of wings. Glass and wood and plastic flew. The wings seemed to clutch the front of the truck as it swung around and slid sideways along the road, smoke coming from its wheels. The Weatherbox, flattened, was wrapped around the front of the truck. The telephone, crushed to pieces, lay on the road behind it, wires running back to the ragged square where the Weatherbox had stood, and down into the ground.
The ringing had stopped.
PART 4
The Maloneys and the Lake of Rain
CHAPTER 23
NEIL
The Weatherbox got bigger and closer. The beams from the headlights seemed to pull it toward us, or us toward it. All the little glass squares flashed twenty pairs of lights right back at us. I was expecting time to slow down. I wanted time to slow down. It didn’t.
The Weatherbox crumpled, torn inside out, squashed flat against the windscreen. A second after that happened I heard the noise, the terrible, final crunch, and felt the all-destroying bump. Ed spun the wheel and jammed his foot down on the brakes, and I was thrown against Dad who was bracing himself against the door.
The truck hissed and jerked to a stop. I stared in shock at the mess, at the inside of the phone box. Our phone box, our Weatherbox, our magic, spread across the windscreen of Ed’s truck like a bird made of glass and wood, broken and shattered. Oh my God. What had we done?
“Now,” Dad said opening the door and sliding out. “Go, Neil, go!”
There was a scream of wind like a passing train and the door was ripped away with a screeching tear of metal. Dad was whipped away with it, out and up like a rag doll. The phone box was torn away from the front of the truck and sent cartwheeling down the road like a crash-landing kite.
A thick coat of ice crept down the windscreen. Ed was getting himself out on his side, and I slid across the seat to the hole where the passenger door had been. In front of the truck, three Shieldsmen in glowing, flying animal shapes were busy attacking an elemental. They were screaming and howling and laughing, leaping, and jumping and slashing and cutting while the elemental tried to fend them off with more gusts of fog. I grabbed hold of the wing mirror and leaned out, waiting for a gap in the battle.
Above the woods and the hill, all the clouds swept together and swirled, angry and blazing with light. They piled in closer and closer, a great rim of yellow sky all around them.
I heard a thump, and the young hag girl in the white dress landed on the windscreen.
“Hello,” I said.
“Hello,” she said, sideways, on all fours, her hands and her bare feet on the icy glass, her head tilted, her hair falling down over the grill, smiling.
“I’m Hazel,” she said.
“I’m Neil,” I said.
“Are you here to join the fight?” she said.
“Sort of,” I said. “There’s a plan. I’m going to the lake.”
“OK,” she said, and looked up over her shoulder. “Just one thing.” Then she was gone.
Two white shapes shot above the crest of the hill—the girl hags in their dresses, arms outstretched, grabbing on to someone dark, outlined against the red and the purple and the green.
Mrs. Fitzgerald must have been shocked when we destroyed the Weatherbox. If she had flown the very second the truck hit, she would have reached the lake first and won. But she hadn’t, and her sisters flew fast, too. Now they held her by her feet, slowing her, stopping her.
A greenish-gold glow brightened the dark and Dad, trailing vines and leaves and willow branches, flew up from wherever the wind had carried him. Birds and insects swirled around him. He passed the three sisters and turned at the crest of the hill. Mrs. Fitzgerald kicked, and the girl hags tumbled away from her, falling fast, down into the trees, their bodies limp, their hair streaming. Before they struck they swerved, and swirling gusts of Summer wind sent by Dad carried them safely across the road and lowered them gently onto our lawn.
Dad and Mrs. Fitzgerald faced each other. He was covered in a golden glow, she shimmered with a cold blue light. The glow and the light grew stronger and met. There was a blinding flash, and the real war started.
I dropped down to the road. The battle between the Shieldsmen and the elementals was a confusion of fog and wind and rain and flying rainbow figures, all rushing furiously about between me and the woods. A gust of wind nearly knocked me off my feet, and ribbons of lightning danced wildly on the ro
ad.
“Look what you did,” Liz growled beside me, fitting an arrow and firing it at a frozen elemental that was lobbing hailstones everywhere. The arrow chipped a chunk of ice off its head and the Shieldsmen gave a cheer.
“It was Dad’s idea! I’m supposed to—aaagh!”
We dived apart as a burst of lightning shot out of the fog and struck the truck in a shower of sparks, leaving a black scorch mark on the metal.
“Oh, Ed won’t like that,” I said.
“The Shieldsmen are cool,” Liz said.
“They’re not bad.”
The elementals retreated, pushed back into the woods by the fury of the Shieldsmen, leaving pools of melting ice and snow and burning patches of tar and scorched and broken trees. The van was on fire and big chunks had been knocked out of our wall. Over the woods Dad and Mrs. Fitzgerald were turning, turning, a long wide stretch of greenery against a long wide stretch of darkness.
Beyond the hill, the towering cloud columns lit up everything with their garish colors.
“OK,” I said, my heart sinking. “I have to go.”
“Lead the way,” Liz said.
“Hold up,” Mum said. “Where do you two think you’re going?”
I told her Dad’s plan as quickly as I could, horribly aware of every moment that passed. I somehow managed to do it without tying my tongue in knots.
“Come on!” Liz said.” We’ve got to get going!”
“Nobody’s going anywhere!” Mum roared.
“But, Mum!” I wailed.
“Except you,” she said, pointing at me.
“And all of you,” she said, pointing at the Shieldsmen.
“But, Mum!” Liz wailed.
“Stay. Where. You. Are,” Mum told her. “And you Shieldsmen, guard him with your lives.”
“WE WILL!” they all roared, snapping to attention.
“I’ll come, too,” said Hazel.
“But she broke our powers,” said the other.
“So I’m not much use,” said Hazel.
“But we don’t want to be left behind,” said the other.
The Maloneys' Magical Weatherbox Page 16
