The Maloneys' Magical Weatherbox

by Nigel Quinlan

  I glared.

  “Sneak,” I said.

  Owen did that thing where he turns his head a bit as if he’s looking back over his shoulder at whatever he just said or did to see what he’d done wrong this time. His eyes went wide and his face fell.

  “Sorry!”

  Dad had stood up and was looking down at me very seriously. I could see him thinking about giving out to me and telling me what I’d done wrong and that I was an idiot but without the smiles this time. He swallowed it all down.

  “I’m going to go get him. Stay here.”

  I said I couldn’t do that because I was going, too, only I didn’t say it out loud because that way he would have heard me and said no. Instead I stared at the carpet as if I was properly ashamed of myself. Mum and Owen followed him to the front door, and I hopped off the couch and went out the back and around. Dad got his bike out of the shed and cycled away, turning left down the road, and when Mum and Owen went back indoors I got on my bike and cycled after him.

  Dad went fast, standing on the pedals the whole way, and I could barely keep up with him. Even with the shower and the creams and the dock leaves, I was still sore and weary, but he was in such a hurry he never looked behind.

  The tiny old road up to the farm was muddy and rocky and broken enough to wreck a bike, rider and all. The gate was off the hinges and lying against the hedge. Dad got off and walked, and so did I. He must have heard my bike rattling on the rocks, because he stopped and turned, looking exasperated.

  “Liz,” he said. “Go home.”

  I shook my head. We stood there for a while, neither of us going anywhere.

  “OK,” he said at last, “but stay back.”

  We came up to the house. There was a big barn across from it and a wide yard between full of weeds. At the other end was the gate that led into the field and the lake, and through the open gate came Neil, tripping over his own feet, wearing nothing but his underpants, shivering, hair plastered to his head, lips blue with the cold, body smeared with mud and grass. He was trying to hold on to his clothes, which kept falling out of his hands and his arms. Behind him, roaring and cursing and waving his fists and kicking at him with his big wellies caked in cow dung, came John-Joe Fitzgerald.

  “WHAT THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING?” Dad roared. I’d never heard Dad use his Big Voice on another grown-up before. Somehow it sounded even bigger when he did.

  “Uh, suh-sorry, Duh-dad, I juh-just—”

  “Oh, not you, Neil, YOU, you big thug! GET AWAY FROM HIM!”

  “Trespassin’ and poachin’ on me land!” barked John-Joe, waving a finger in the air but keeping Neil between him and Dad. “Thinks he can come down and go for a swim on me lake as if he owns it! I’ll have the cops on him, I will! On the lot of ye!”

  “Cops, my eye, you’ll be lucky if I don’t have you up for assault!” Dad told him. Then he knelt beside Neil and began to help him dress, all the time scolding John-Joe who was doing a hopping dance, forward and backward, making more threats and accusing Neil of rustling, burglary, and tax dodging.

  I clenched my fists and took a step forward, ready to get between Neil and John-Joe and scream at him till his eardrums burst, but then an odd movement in the barn caught the corner of my eye. I do not know to this day how anything in the world could have distracted me from the sight of Neil and Dad and John-Joe, but I turned, and then I crossed the yard to get a better look.

  The barn was full of broken wood, rotting and crumbling, and choked with dock weed and thistle and ragwort. Behind the wood was Hugh. He had a stick. He was hitting something on the floor.

  Everyone’s always amazed at how good-looking Hugh is. They wonder how his Dad could have a son like that. But I think he looks just like his Dad sometimes—when he looks down his nose at something with those animal eyes, his mouth hanging open, showing his teeth. He’s not so good-looking then.

  I was slow and quiet coming around the piles of wood. There was a thing on the ground, gray and blue, thin as thread, curled up, hugging itself. I forgot that I was hiding. I forgot to be afraid of Hugh.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  Hugh turned on me, raising the stick, face twisted. He stopped, eyes wide.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” he demanded.

  I looked past him.

  “What is that?” I asked. It lowered its arm and I saw two eyes like angry black slashes on its narrow face. The air shimmered around it with a golden glow and something rattled on the roof of the barn. White hailstones fell through the holes and shattered on the ground around us.

  “Stupid!” yelled Hugh, swinging the stick at the gray-blue thing. “Stop! Stupid!”

  I jumped to grab the stick, missed, but caught Hugh’s wrist with both hands and twisted. But he was too strong and I was too small. His arm wouldn’t move. He grabbed at my hands with his free hand, and I put all my weight on his wrist, nearly pulling him over. I lifted both my feet and kicked my heels into his stomach. There wasn’t much force behind it, to be honest, but it made him double over and his face went red and he dropped me then the stick and staggered backward a bit, clutching himself, looking astonished.

  More hailstones fell. The golden glow spread.

  “NO!” Hugh, panicking, reached for the stick. I picked it up and waved it at him. He crouched down with his arms spread and started circling. I held the stick two-handed over my head, in a samurai-fighting stance. My feet were slipping and crunching on hailstones the size of golf balls, and more were bouncing wildly around us, flashing in the golden light.

  A dark shadow blocked out the light. The golden glow went out. A figure crouched low over the thing on the floor and touched it, and the thing whimpered and curled up like a drowned spider.

  “Leave it alone!” I tried to shout, but it came out as a croak. Suddenly all my aches and pains and stings started to burn, and I closed my eyes and dropped the stick and felt tears pour from my eyes and heard myself groan.

  A cool hand touched my cheek and all the pain went away.

  I opened my eyes to see a face, pale and beautiful, dark hair framing gray eyes and blue lips. I recognized Mrs. Fitzgerald. She smiled at me.

  “You must be Liz,” she said.

  “Mum?” said Hugh.

  “Be quiet, Hugh. Go check on your father.”

  She rested a hand on my shoulder and held me until I was steady on my feet.

  “Thank you,” I said. Her smile did not change. She stood between me and the thing on the floor. I didn’t dare try to look around her. Sunlight shone in a beam through the hole in the roof. The broken ice of the hailstones was melting away into shrinking puddles.

  “There,” she said. “It’s finally done, and now I can begin.”

  “What?” I said. “What is that thing on the ground?”

  “The future,” she said. “And whoever owns it, owns the future. Everything is going to change now, Liz. You must prepare yourself. The future is mine.

  “I think you and your father and brother should go now. You might think about telling them what you’ve seen in here, but that would force a confrontation and it’s too early for that. Your father still has a job to do, doesn’t he? It’s the last day of Summer. Season’s end. Tomorrow will bring a whole new world.”

  She closed her eyes and raised a finger and the barn was filled with the rushing, whispering hiss of a gentle breeze.

  “LIZ!”

  I jumped at Dad’s shout and blinked.

  “Here! Here!”

  I backed away from Mrs. Fitzgerald, and she kept pace with me as I stepped backward out of the barn and into the yard.

  “Liz, are you OK?”

  “Yeah,” I said. It was hard to turn my back on her but I had to get Dad and Neil out of there. In a day of shocks and shoves and frights and fear, I knew that the worst danger in the world was in that barn and in that woman. “Come on, let’s get out of here. Let’s go!”

  Dad looked confused, and gave Mrs. F
itzgerald a puzzled glance. Neil was dressed and looking soggy and sorry and defeated. John-Joe had his hands on his hips and his lower lip stuck out and the toe of his left boot was tapping impatiently. Hugh had tilted his chin up so he could sneer properly down his nose at us.

  “OK,” Dad said, and he waved us both out of the yard ahead of him, and we walked our bikes back down the narrow road. I let Neil cycle mine, and Dad sat me up on his crossbar. The farther we got from the farm, from the thing, from her, the safer I should have felt. But I didn’t. The closer we got to home, the more the sense of danger grew, and somehow I knew that today had been a bad day, but tomorrow was going to be even worse.

  CHAPTER 7

  NEIL

  The cycle home from Loch Farny was one of the most horrible, uncomfortable, disgusting things I have ever had to go through. My clothes were wet and cold because I didn’t have anything to dry myself with before putting them back on. They stuck to me and got into corners and itched and scraped and chafed until I thought I’d go mad. Worse than that, Liz’s bike was too small for me and my knees were sticking out and it was almost too hard to pedal and I was so tired and the road just went on and on and I thought it would never end, and then it did, and I wished it hadn’t.

  I was in trouble. Liz was in trouble. The Tourist was in trouble. Even Owen was in trouble because he kept bringing the cat into the house. Liz and I kept trying to explain in different ways that Mum and Dad were in trouble, too, though we couldn’t exactly say how or why, only that it had to do with the Tourist, the cat, the old women in the woods, the Fitzgeralds, the thing in the lake and the other thing in the barn—oh, no, wait, I think that must have been the same thing.

  But Mum and Dad were having a hard time just dealing with me going off and jumping in the lake and with Liz sneaking off to follow Dad when he went to rescue me from jumping in the lake.

  I showered and changed my clothes and had something to eat, and the whole time they were interrogating me to within an inch of my life, until I broke down crying and begged them to stop. Then they got embarrassed and said they were sorry and Liz muttered that I was a softy, but we both knew if it hadn’t been me it would have been her.

  Mum and Dad brought out the picnic table and chairs and set them up on the lawn. I got the broken one that creaked when you moved. We sat in the rosy glow of the evening, insects rising from the grass and crows flocking to roost.

  Dad made me go through what I’d seen and done under the lake for the millionth time. Then he made Liz go through what she’d seen in the barn for the million and oneth time. She kept adding stuff about two mad old women in the woods and something about Owen’s cat, which she seemed to think was important, and I reminded him of the Tourist turning up out of nowhere and knowing stuff, and how it all added up to … something. Dad didn’t argue, but he didn’t look entirely convinced, either.

  Mum was like a black cloud, glowering and staring, her eyes flashing with far-off bursts of lightning. She listened to me and Liz, glaring at the hill beyond the road as if daring the monsters hidden there to take one step closer. The monsters stayed in hiding, which was just as well for them.

  Owen and his cat, well, kitten, actually—I could have sworn it was bigger earlier—were playing on the grass with a piece of paper tied to some string. At least someone was having a good time. Liz was sitting in a chair next to me, half listening to the interrogation and half watching Owen and the kitten intently—as if one of them was going to grow fangs or something.

  Dad sat back in his chair and crossed one leg over the other and rubbed his chin. He was frowning, and his face looked worn and worried and haunted.

  “The thing under the lake has been sending strange weather to us all Summer. I think it was trying to get our attention. After the first few times, I knew something would have to be done, but I couldn’t risk doing it alone. I’ve been trying to contact the Weathermen’s Club for the last two months. I’ve phoned, e-mailed, written letters. No response. They’ve either vanished from the face of the Earth or they’re sulking because I haven’t tried to get in touch with them since … well, since I became Weatherman. I’m a bit worried.”

  “Couldn’t you just go to them?” I asked.

  Dad made a face.

  “We Weathermen don’t travel,” he said. “It’s not a rule, exactly, but there’s a strong taboo against going farther than a few miles from the Doorway. It looks like I’ll have to, though, doesn’t it? I’ve been putting this off too long. Tomorrow, when the Autumn has arrived, I’ll see about getting a lift to the train.”

  I nodded. No farther than a few miles? As the future Weatherman, I did not really like the sound of that.

  “We’ve always known there’s something … off about Mrs. Fitzgerald,” Dad said. “We’ve stayed well away from her. Now it turns out we were right and we should have been more on our guard. Mrs. Fitzgerald wanted the thing free from the lake. For some reason only the Weatherman or his heir could do it. My guess is that though she couldn’t get at it, she must have scared it somehow. It became desperate and reached out to me—to the Weatherman—in the only way it could. Now she’s captured it, and God knows what she’s going to do next.”

  I blushed furiously and sank deeper into my chair. It creaked loudly.

  “So what is it?” said Liz. “Is it an elemental?”

  Dad shook his head.

  “No. And yes. It can control the weather, but it seems more aware than a simple elemental. I don’t know what else it can be, though.”

  “But, Dad,” I said, an odd feeling inside me, a sick-scared-excited feeling. “It was trapped in the Doorway. It was trapped by the Doorway. It must have been going through the Doorway when the Doorway was moved and it got caught. Simple elementals don’t move through the Doorways, Dad.”

  “No,” said Dad. “They don’t.”

  “Is it a Season?” asked Liz, seeing as no one else was going to come out and actually say it.

  “It can’t be,” I said.

  “You opened the Door for it,” Mum said. “You merged with it. What was it like?”

  “It all happened too fast,” I told her, remembering that shimmering image of the tall shadow standing beside the lake. “It was scared and angry and sick of being under there, but mostly it was afraid of what was waiting for it.”

  “Mrs. Fitzgerald,” said Liz.

  “Sounds to me,” said Ed Wharton, “as if we’ve got a new Season. Five Seasons. How about that? What’ll we call it?”

  Everything was blue and dark in the twilight cool. Ed was leaning casually against the corner of the house, arms and legs crossed. Bats flew around the eaves over his head. Or maybe his beard came to life at dusk and went hunting for food. He straightened and before anyone could challenge him for eavesdropping under the eaves, he pointed at Neetch.

  “Great googly moogly! Do you know what that is? It’s the Bog Beast of Moherbeg! How come he didn’t eat you? He usually eats people he doesn’t like, and he doesn’t like anybody.”

  “He did try to eat us,” said Liz. “But he was … bigger at the time.”

  “Bigger?” I said.

  “Much bigger.”

  “Well, he likes me, and I like him,” Owen said. “His name is Neetch.”

  “Neetch?” asked Ed Wharton.

  “Neetch,” said Owen.

  Ed Wharton looked at Owen and lowered his beard to his chest and intoned solemnly.

  “Son, the Bog of Moherbeg looks down on the towns and villages of three counties, where people lock their doors and fasten their windows at night, not for fear of burglars, but for fear of that terrible thing!”

  Neetch had rolled on his back with the string tangled in his paws.

  “Mothers warn their children not to go out after dark, and threaten them with the bog beast when they’re bold. People lie awake at night shivering under their blankets in terror of his shadow falling over them when he pads across their moonlit lawns. There isn’t a dog in twenty miles that isn�
��t kept tied up in the kitchen every night! And you like him?”

  “He’s misunderstood,” said Owen.

  “And he likes you?”

  “We just get on well,” Owen said and shrugged. “I’m not mean to him like everyone else is.”

  Dad had stood up when Ed Wharton had first spoken, and he and Mum closed in on either side of the Tourist now, their faces grim. He smiled nervously at them.

  “Mr. Wharton,” Mum said. “Perhaps you could explain yourself.”

  “Explain? Explain what? I’m just a tourist.”

  “You’re no more a tourist than I am the Pope,” Dad said. “You know about the Weathermen. You had a bog beast in your trailer in the shape of a kitten—”

  “Much bigger!” interrupted Liz. “And the old hags! They said the cat was theirs, so he must know about them, too!”

  “Oh, now, please,” Ed said. “Don’t let them hear you call them that!”

  “I’ll call ’em what I like!” Liz grumbled.

  “Shush!” he said. “They’ll hear!”

  “You are incredibly lucky,” Mum said softly, “that none of our children were hurt. Sit down and explain yourself, Mr. Wharton. Then we will decide what to do with you.”

  Even in the fading light I could see his face turn red. Head bowed he sat on a lawn chair that creaked under his weight, even though it wasn’t cracked.

  “Look,” he said. “You have absolutely nothing to worry about. All I want to do is watch the ceremony! I want to see the Autumn arrive! That’s all.”

  “There isn’t much to see,” Dad told him.

  “Of course not. These things occur on several different levels. Sight is not the only sense! Anyway, just to be there when it happens … that’s enough! You see, I am a tourist. I travel the world, seeking wonders and marvels to behold—but not just any wonders and marvels! Not the Leaning Tower of Pisa or the Grand Canyon or the Taj Mahal. I seek secret wonders, hidden wonders!

  “When I was a little boy, no older than Owen, there, I wanted to be a magician. Not the sort that pulled rabbits out of hats and did card tricks on stage. I wanted to have power. Power to crack the earth! Part the seas! Pull the stars down to a mountaintop and command them to dance! I left school early, lied about my age, and got a job driving trucks. That took me all over the world. I read books, I talked to people and, slowly but surely, I tracked down magic, real magic. A cottage in the Black Forest. A stone on the Russian steppes. An oasis in the Sahara. Magic places guarded by magic folk! I visited these places and I discovered two things. One was that I would never be a magician. I have no talent for magic. None. But I do have a nose for it. That was the second thing. I had a talent for finding magic, and that’s what I do. I find magic.”