Milo and the Raging Chieftains

by Mary Arrigan

  ‘Osgur,’ the redhead interrupted. ‘My name is Osgur, in honour of my father’s ancestor.’

  ‘I know, I know,’ said Mister Lewis. ‘So you keep telling me.’

  I was surprised at his attitude.

  ‘You shouldn’t be rude to a girl, Mister Lewis,’ I called up.

  ‘I’m not a girl. I’m a BOY!’ Ossie shouted down at me.

  Well, there was no answer to that. Folks from the past have strange taste in clothes and hairstyles, that’s for sure. However, I didn’t fancy hanging about listening to a grumpy guy, especially one in a frock.

  ‘I’d best be off home, Mister Lewis,’ I said. ‘It’s great to see you again, but it’s getting dark. I’ll be in right trouble …’

  ‘No, Milo. Wait!’ Mister Lewis called out. ‘We need your help. Can you come back tomorrow night? About ten thirty would be good.’

  ‘Huh?’ I exclaimed.

  ‘Please,’ Mister Lewis added urgently.

  ‘How could I help?’ I began. ‘What would—?’

  ‘Good lad. I knew we could depend on you,’ Mister Lewis interrupted, before I could find a polite way to say ‘no’ to more ghostly shenanigans.

  ‘Oh, and bring your bicycle,’ he added, before the two of them disappeared inside.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  DAD’S ADVICE

  Luckily, I got home just minutes before Mum and Dad arrived.

  ‘Sorry we’re late, Milo,’ said Mum. ‘We met your nice Miss Lee in the supermarket and we went for coffee.’

  ‘She says you’re a great kid,’ said Dad.

  ‘No need to sound so surprised, Dad,’ I muttered.

  ‘Surprised? No,’ he said, straight-faced. ‘Just shocked.’

  I wondered how really shocked he’d be if I told him I’d been at the castle talking to a couple of ghosts. I should have said ‘no’ to Mr Lewis. And now he’d gone away thinking I would meet him the next night. I was so worried I stayed up as late as possible. I even offered to make sandwiches for Mum and Dad to stretch out the time, but they just fell about laughing and sent me to bed.

  ‘You might be sorry’ was my parting shot. As I went upstairs, I imagined them sniffling into their hankies and being totally woebegone when me and my bike disappeared. That would teach them a lesson – except I wouldn’t be around to say ‘I told you so’. I’d be floating about on cold moonlit nights.

  When Dad arrived in my room later with a mug of hot chocolate, I was still sifting through all the scariest stuff you could imagine.

  ‘I thought you were looking a bit peaky, son,’ he said, sitting on the bed and feeling my forehead. ‘Everything OK?’

  ‘No, Dad,’ I sighed. ‘I’ve kinda promised to help someone and now I don’t want to.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘do what I do when I don’t want to face up to a big guy with a squashed face and a hammer who’s running out of a shop with wads of cash.’

  ‘You run away,’ I said eagerly. ‘That’s the right thing to do, isn’t it? Save yourself.’

  ‘No, lad.’ Dad was shaking his head. ‘I do what a cop is supposed to do. I nab him because I’ve sworn to do that. And that’s how it is. If you’ve promised help, then it’s only right to go through with it. You want to talk about it?’

  ‘No thanks, Dad,’ I whispered, so that my voice wouldn’t come out as a scream. If I told him the truth, my dad would laugh and pat my head before sending me to a shrink, who’d be even scarier than any of the dead people I’ve come up against.

  ‘OK,’ said Dad, getting up. ‘You’ll be glad when you’ve helped. You’re an honourable kid, Milo,’ he went on as he plumped my pillow. ‘Now, get that hot choc inside you and get some sleep. You’ll laugh at yourself in the morning.’

  ‘Yeah, Dad, I’m laughing already,’ I groaned.

  CHAPTER SIX

  WHERE’S MISS LEE?

  Naturally, after a night of tossing about before finally falling asleep when the town clock chimed three a.m., I was late for school. The shouting was the first thing that stopped me in my tracks. It was coming from my classroom! Then I figured Miss Lee was putting on some sort of modern play – she often does kooky things like that. Everyone was jumping around like mad fleas. Of course they all stopped dead when I came in.

  ‘Aw, it’s only Milo,’ Willy Jones shouted and they all went back to yelling and chasing.

  ‘What’s up?’ I asked Shane.

  ‘Miss Lee isn’t in,’ he said, offering me a bite of his lunch apple.

  ‘Not in? Miss Lee not in?’

  ‘Yep,’ he went on. ‘And her car isn’t outside. She’s been abducted by aliens,’ he cried.

  ‘That’s a hairy old joke, you nerd,’ I said.

  The word ‘hairy’ was scarcely out of my mouth when the door opened and the principal stormed in.

  ‘And there’s another hairy old joke,’ Shane giggled in my ear, before I slipped into my own desk.

  Everyone stopped.

  ‘You hooligans!’ she bellowed. ‘I could hear you from my office. Miss Lee is – eh – not available, so I’ll be with you for the rest of the day.’

  We would all have groaned out loud, but we were too distracted, not so much by Miss Lee being absent, but by our constant fascination with the wobbly hairs above the principal’s upper lip.

  Every now and then someone would come to the door, and the principal talked to them in whispers. She looked so worried that she never even asked us to hand up the yawny stuff she gave us to write. It got so that we didn’t even bother to try out the sums or puzzles she dished out on the whiteboard. Instead, we drew mad cartoons and passed them around. And she never even noticed when we sniggered.

  ‘Do you think Miss Lee has done a runner?’ Shane asked me on the way home. ‘I know I would if I had to teach our class.’

  ‘Shane,’ I said, laughing. ‘It’s no big deal. My mum says that teaching is such a stressful job that teachers should be able to take the odd day off, to stop them from going mad. Miss Lee is probably at home with her feet up, munching chocolate and watching daytime telly.’

  ‘Cool,’ said Shane. ‘I think I’ll go for teaching instead of nuclear psychics.’

  ‘Physics, you nelly,’ I said. ‘Come on, let’s get our bikes.’

  It was only when I went home to our empty house (Mum works in a home for the elderly two afternoons a week) that my mind threw up the whole Mister Lewis thing. I had pushed it to the back of my head all day, but now it was back like a giant wart sitting on my nose. How would I get myself out of this mess?

  ‘Are you ready?’ Shane appeared at my door and his loud bellow broke my thinking. ‘So, where will we go?’ he asked, fastening the shiny red helmet he’d got to match his bike. He was wearing his new rapper T-shirt. ‘Somewhere out of town?’

  ‘Sure,’ I agreed, putting on my own blue helmet. Anything to avoid thinking about Mister Lewis and our meeting.

  ‘What about down by the castle and out the road beyond that?’

  I shivered. That ‘castle’ word almost caused me to fall down.

  ‘NO!’ I shouted too loudly. ‘I don’t want to go there.’

  ‘Why not? You’re always going on about the castle.’

  I looked at his beaming face, and I so wanted to tell him everything, but even Shane wouldn’t believe me. He was bound to double up laughing and make me feel even worse. ‘Maybe go in the opposite direction,’ I went on more calmly. ‘Let’s go the old road to the ruined cottages.’

  ‘OK,’ said Shane. ‘The old road will be fine.’

  That’s what’s great about having a pal like Shane. He doesn’t go fussy when things don’t go his way.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  A FIND ON THE ROCKS

  More than a hundred years ago there had been cottages along the old road, but when the people left for America, or some other place with paid work and sunshine, the cottages fell into ruins.

  ‘Wow,’ said Shane. ‘Look at all that grass. Acres and acres of it. Gra
n says that there are huge areas in Africa where there’s no grass at all. Imagine that, Milo. Baldy fields.’

  We left our bikes on the ground and wandered into the ruined cottages. Some of them even had broken chairs and rusty kettles and things like that, just left there.

  ‘Why did they leave their stuff?’ Shane muttered, picking up a dinged tin cup and shaking his head.

  ‘I suppose they were rushing away to catch the ship,’ I said. ‘Wouldn’t you do a runner too if you were living in this misery? Anyway, this is boring. Let’s go a bit farther.’

  We wandered along beyond the cottages and into a wilderness of weeds and half-hidden stones. It was Shane who found the first carving.

  ‘Hey, Milo,’ he called out. ‘You have to see this.’

  ‘What have you found?’ I laughed. ‘A dozy leprechaun?’

  ‘Don’t be so dumb,’ said Shane. ‘Look.’ He pointed to a stone in the grass. ‘That looks like part of an arch.’

  We gave it a closer look. Sure enough, it was part of an arch with carvings on it.

  ‘Did the people who used to live in these cottages make things in stone, Milo?’

  ‘I wouldn’t think so,’ I said. ‘Their whole time was spent catching things to eat and knitting woolly jumpers. Anyway carvings like that were way before these cottages.’

  ‘Let’s see if we can find any more arches,’ said Shane, moving away.

  ‘Boring,’ I groaned. But I followed him. Sure enough, the farther on we went, the more we found lots of fragments of carved stones.

  ‘Maybe when they were building the town castle,’ Shane went on, ‘these were the ones that were rejects, like carvers made mistakes and had to dump them, because you can’t rub out mistakes on stones like when you’re drawing.’

  ‘Good thinking,’ I said, looking around. ‘Look there’s loads of them all over the place, hidden in the grass.’

  ‘Or maybe a World War II bomb fell here,’ whispered Shane, looking up at the sky. ‘KABOOM! And the whole place fell apart.’

  ‘Nah,’ I said. ‘The Germans didn’t bomb small places like this, in the middle of nowhere.’

  ‘It’s kinda spooky, isn’t it?’ said Shane, looking around the wasteland.

  That brought up all the fears I’d been holding back. I gave a huge sigh and sank on to the grass, covering my face with my hands.

  ‘I wish we could rub out bad days, Shane,’ I sighed.

  He laughed and threw some grass at me. ‘You daft nutter,’ he said. ‘Hey,’ he went on, when I still had my hands over my face. ‘What’s up, man?’

  ‘I have to go somewhere tonight,’ I squeaked.

  ‘Ha. That’s it?’ Shane laughed. ‘What’s so awful about that?’

  I looked at my best friend, and I so needed tell him everything, but something in the grass caught his attention.

  ‘Hey!’ he shouted, looking over my shoulder. ‘Doesn’t Miss Lee wear shoes like that?’

  ‘She does!’ I exclaimed, looking at the shoes tucked neatly beside a broken carving in the grass. There was no mistaking the red high heels and the shiny little half moons on the toes.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  WEDGE AND CRUNCH

  ‘What will we do with them, Milo?’ Shane asked.

  ‘We’ll hold on to them,’ I said.

  ‘Not me!’ Shane backed away. ‘Fingerprints, Milo. We’d be interrogated and jailed for theft.’

  ‘How did they get here?’ I whispered. ‘Surely Miss Lee didn’t come all the way here on her own and lose her shoes?’

  ‘That’s it!’ yelled Shane. ‘She’s been kidnapped or, maybe …’ He put his hands around his throat and gurgled loudly.

  ‘That’s ultra gross,’ I said.

  ‘Or,’ Shane’s imagination was working overtime, ‘she might have been looking for rare rocks, or flowers, or something, and fell and banged her head and is wandering around with concussion.’

  ‘And left her shoes here, all neat and tidy?’ I scoffed. ‘I’m going to search for her,’ I went on, putting the shoes inside my jacket and zipping up.

  ‘Me too,’ Shane said.

  We wandered around, tripping over more and more broken stones and carvings buried in the grass. But no Miss Lee. We even went as far away as a small stone building with iron bars on the windows. The entrance was covered with crude wooden planks and had a huge ancient bolt that was too stiff to move. I climbed on to Shane’s shoulders to peer through the bars on the high window.

  ‘What can you see?’ Shane grunted.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Pitch black. But there’s a strange smell.’

  ‘Cow dung,’ suggested Shane.

  ‘No,’ I sniffed again. ‘A smell that’s kinda like a mixture of rotten stuff and sort of sweet lemons.’

  ‘How can you tell the difference?’ Shane laughed as he dumped me from his shoulders. ‘Did the lemon smell go into one nostril and the rotten smell go up the other nostril? Nice one, Milo. You could join a circus as the Great Smelly Master. People would be invited to hold stuff under your nose and you’d identify the smells. And I’d be your assistant, of course …’

  ‘You’re mad,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, well speaking of mad, we’d best get back,’ Shane said. ‘Gran will hold back my ice-cream dessert if I’m late. What will you do with the shoes?’

  ‘I’ll bring them with me,’ I said, not really thinking ahead.

  ‘Bring where?’ Shane asked.

  ‘I don’t know yet,’ I replied.

  ‘You should give those shoes to your dad,’ Shane said. ‘That’s evidence, that is.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I sighed. ‘But if I show them to him he’ll want to know where I found them.’

  ‘So?’ Shane shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘Well, I’ve come much farther than the two-mile distance I’m allowed on my bike, so I’d be in worse trouble. I’ll think of something. Unless,’ I went on, ‘unless maybe you’d hide them?’

  ‘No way,’ said Shane, holding up his two hands.

  However, the matter was taken out of our hands when we saw two familiar figures walking towards us.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Shane. ‘Look who’s here.’

  ‘Ha, if it isn’t our two friends Porky and Worm,’ laughed Wedge. ‘What are you guys doing on our patch?’

  ‘It isn’t your patch,’ Shane said, with a poor attempt at a snarl.

  ‘I hope you two haven’t nicked the tin that we sell for good money,’ said Crunch. ‘See, me and Wedge here have a nice little number in selling old tin things for melting down.’

  ‘Yeah, and we don’t want anyone butting in on our turf,’ added Wedge. ‘This place,’ he went on, waving around the whole wasteland, ‘is ours – mine and Crunch’s.’

  ‘Well. You can have it,’ I said, trying to keep cool.

  ‘Especially that smelly stone house,’ put in Shane, pointing to it. ‘Just your sort of mucky place.’

  I closed my eyes and waited for the battle to begin. Nothing happened.

  Wedge and Crunch were looking at one another with dismay.

  ‘You went there?’ said Crunch, his face actually scared.

  Wedge grabbed my jacket and pulled me closer to his mean face. ‘What did you see?’ he snarled.

  ‘N-nothing,’ I tried to snarl back. ‘It’s just a smelly—’

  That’s when one of Miss Lee’s red shoes fell from my jacket.

  Wedge and Crunch stared at the red shoe.

  ‘That’s Miss—’ began Crunch before Wedge stamped on his toe.

  ‘Shut up,’ he snarled.

  For a big chap, Shane can make a good move when he wants to. Quick as a flash, he scooped up the shoe and pedalled away, with me after him.

  ‘Hey! You get back here!’ Wedge yelled. ‘We’re not finished.’

  ‘As if!’ Shane yelled back.

  We rode away like bats in a gale.

  When we got to my house, I took the shoe from Shane, wrapped it with the other one in my jacke
t and put them on the carrier.

  ‘Aren’t you going to show them to your dad?’ Shane asked.

  ‘Later on maybe,’ I said.

  ‘So,’ he went on. ‘Where are you going tonight? Are your mum and dad going too? And why’s it a problem?’

  ‘Oh, stop asking me questions!’ I groaned, and then felt awful for talking to my best friend like that. ‘Sorry, Shane,’ I went on. ‘It’s just something I have to do on my own.’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ Shane muttered. ‘Well I hope you’ll enjoy – whatever.’

  I bit my lip while I watched him cycle away, and I so wished I could tell him what I had to do. I’d never felt so alone in all my life. And scared. Very scared. Too scared.

  ‘Wait!’ I shouted, running after him. ‘I’ll tell you …’

  But he didn’t hear me.

  I stashed Miss Lee’s shoes away in my bike carrier and trudged into the house like a condemned man.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE SEARCH CONTINUES

  ‘Not hungry, Milo?’ Mum asked at dinner. ‘I made your favourite, shepherd’s pie with grated cheese. Have you been munching chocolate with Shane?’

  ‘No, Mum,’ I said, pushing my fork around the plate. ‘I’m just not really hungry.’

  Luckily, Dad arrived before Mum could ask more questions.

  ‘Sorry I’m late,’ he said. ‘Bit of a crisis,’ he went on as he hung his coat on a chair. ‘Miss Lee is missing. We’ve been searching everywhere. Her car is outside her house. The driver’s door was open, and her school stuff was scattered along the footpath.’

  ‘Oh, that’s awful,’ said Mum. ‘She must have forgotten to lock it.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Dad went on. ‘It’s more than that. We’ve brought in extra gardaí to help the search. I’m going back later.’