Milo and the Pirate Sisters

by Mary Arrigan

  ‘Do you think the Maguires might come after Mister Lewis, Milo? We can’t leave him there on his own,’ Shane went on. ‘He’s a good friend and he must be scared stiff. He might even be dead!’

  ‘Shane, he’s already dead,’ I said. ‘Been dead for over a hundred years.’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ sighed Shane. ‘But in our minds, he’ll always be our spooky pal.’

  Well, his words were very poetic and something sparked in my head. ‘Right,’ I said before I could change my mind. ‘Let’s go to the mill.’

  ‘Serious?’ Shane’s voice wobbled.

  ‘Positively serious,’ I said. ‘Could we ever live with ourselves if we didn’t at least check the place?’

  ‘You’re right,’ Shane sighed. ‘Let’s do it.’

  So we went the same route – was it only recently we’d helped Mister Lewis with his pathetic few things in a supermarket trolley?

  As we walked warily through the field towards the mill, I so wished we were simply going to have fun and chat with the old guy, instead of worrying about whether he’d be all scattered bones and rags – that was the image that kept coming into my mind. I didn’t mention that to Shane because he’d freak out. But he had already tuned in to my mind, though not in a nice way.

  ‘Milo,’ he whispered, ‘what’ll we do if we find bits of Mister Lewis all over the place? What part of him would you take to remember him by?’

  ‘Huh? That’s gross!’ I hollered. ‘You’re a sicko.’

  ‘No, I’m not,’ he retorted. ‘Gran told me that years ago when she was young, people used to keep small bones of dead folks and talk to them – the bones, I mean.’

  ‘That’s double gross,’ I snapped and put my hands over my ears. Like I needed that sort of talk when we were hoping to see our dead friend alive. Well, you know what I mean.

  The door of the mill was open.

  ‘It’s quiet,’ I said, as we tip-toed warily up the winding stairs.

  ‘What did you expect?’ asked Shane. ‘Trumpets and drums, huh?’

  He was still miffed with me over the bones thing.

  The first thing we saw when we went in through the half-open door was Mister Lewis’s hat. But, yet again, no Mister Lewis.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  MILO’S PLAN

  Neither of us said anything – it was like we were waiting for him to waft along and be glad to see us. The room was pretty messy, which was strange because Mister Lewis is what Big Ella calls a ‘real tidy gentleman’.

  ‘What will we do, Milo?’ whispered Shane, staying close beside me.

  ‘Dunno,’ I gulped, picking up the hat.

  We stood nervously together, looking around the room.

  ‘What’s going on, Milo?’ whispered Shane. ‘Mister Lewis wouldn’t go anywhere without his hat.’

  Then we heard a shuffly groaning sound from behind an upturned armchair, and we both made a dash for the door, me still clutching Shane’s jacket and him hanging on to my Man U sweatshirt.

  ‘It’s me, boys! And I’m so very glad to see you.’

  We turned to see Mister Lewis’s body becoming visible from behind the chair. I’ve always wished he wouldn’t do that. It freaks me out.

  ‘Whoo,’ gasped Shane. ‘Are we glad to see you!’

  ‘Not half as much as I am to see you two,’ Mister Lewis sighed.

  ‘What’s going on, Mister Lewis?’ I asked as I handed him his hat.

  He sighed again as he wiped the hat with his gloved hand. ‘It’s those women from next door,’ he said. ‘They’re witches!’

  ‘Witches?’ Shane and I said together.

  ‘Witches are just fairytale folks, Mister Lewis,’ I said as calmly as I could.

  ‘Were they wearing pointy hats?’ asked Shane.

  ‘No,’ Mister Lewis replied.

  ‘What about big noses and hairy chins?’ I put in.

  Mister Lewis shook his head.

  ‘What about broomsticks?’ Shane asked.

  ‘No, nothing like that,’ sighed Mister Lewis. ‘They just barged in and snatched the buns that Big Ella gave me!’

  ‘Well then,’ said Shane, ‘they’re definitely not witches.’

  ‘It’s true, Mister Lewis,’ I added. ‘My dad is a Garda and he says times are so bad that there are people who can’t pay rent so they get turfed out of their homes and try to find shelter anywhere.’

  ‘Especially derelict buildings like this,’ put in Shane.

  Mister Lewis sighed again. ‘Well, whoever they are, look what they’ve done to my lovely room. They just barged in without knocking and went around messing with my things. I can’t stay here with shrieking crones like them. Where shall I go now? I’m tired of moving about.’

  I looked at him, with his crooked hat and wobbly nose and it was like a big surge of electricity went through me from my toes right up to my head.

  ‘Listen, Mister Lewis,’ I said. ‘Me and Shane will help you.’

  Shane’s eyebrows shot up his forehead. ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘We’re not afraid of a couple of straggly women with no manners,’ I nodded to him.

  ‘Sure,’ said Shane. ‘We’ll … we’ll …’

  ‘We’ll work something out,’ I put in. ‘Now let’s clean up here and we’ll be back later.’

  ‘Huh?’ said Shane, sounding like he wanted to object – until he saw my frown. ‘Er, yeah,’ he went on. If they come sniffing around, you tell them that you have tough guys coming who’ll sort them out.’

  It was good to see Mister Lewis smiling again, even if there was still fear in his eyes.

  ‘Thank you, boys,’ he said. ‘You have cheered me up already. With your help, we’ll handle this together. I’m staying put,’ he added decisively.

  Fighting words, but we both knew that he was mad scared. And so were we.

  ‘What were you thinking, Milo?’ asked Shane shortly afterwards as we headed for home. ‘How are we supposed to deal with a couple of wild women with no manners?’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘But I felt so sorry for him. I just wanted—’

  ‘I wonder where the horses are,’ Shane interrupted. ‘There’s still no sign of them. Come on, let’s see where they are. It’ll give us a bit of reality after Mister Lewis’s stuff,’ he went on as he ran towards the field.

  I sighed as I followed. Much as I like horses, I just wanted to get away from here, and I wondered how we could possibly help Mister Lewis against two wild women.

  Up ahead, Shane stood on a bar of the gate.

  ‘Milo!’ he shouted. ‘All the horses are gone. The whole field is empty.’

  ‘Maybe they’ve just been moved to a different field,’ I called out.

  ‘No way!’ Shane shouted back. ‘The far gate is broken in bits. It’s like they barged right through it.’

  ‘Crunch and Wedge!’ we both said together.

  ‘Imagine those two getting their evil fun by chasing poor horses around the field and making them break through that gate,’ said Shane.

  ‘Creeps, the pair of them,’ I said angrily.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  SLEEPOVER

  Mum was taking a shepherd’s pie out of the microwave when I got home at teatime. I hoped it was the last one. Mum feels that she’s being really clever by making a load of pies at the same time and then freezing them. She says it makes life easier – though, frankly I prefer Dad’s idea of cooking, when Mum is out with friends and he phones for a delivery of fish and chips and we watch telly. I sneaked upstairs before she saw my muddy shoes and dirty hands.

  ‘Come on, Milo,’ she called up after a few minutes. ‘We can’t wait for your dad.’ (She always puts in the your dad bit when she’s annoyed with him.)

  ‘Any news, Milo?’ she asked when I sat down at the table.

  The real answer went whirling inside my head. Yes, Mum. Me and Shane are going to spend the night saving a dead man from a couple of loco women who are driving him mad.

  ‘Nothing
much, Mum,’ I said. ‘Me and Shane had a chat with Miss Lee about history stuff.’

  ‘Good lads,’ she nodded as she dished out the shepherd’s pie. ‘You two will go far.’

  Well, that was for sure, I thought, considering my promise to Mister Lewis. ‘Going far’ might be somewhere up there on a cold moon with raggedy corpses floating about on it. But then I shook my head to stop crazy thoughts; after all, in spite of Mister Lewis’s weird imagination, a couple of poor women could be tamed.

  Halfway through our meal, Dad came in. He was sweating and his shoes were even muddier than mine.

  ‘Heavens, man,’ Mum exclaimed. ‘Where have you been? Look at the state of you.’

  ‘We were out looking for Harry Donnelly’s horses,’ Dad said. ‘They were all over the place … Oh, shepherd’s pie again,’ he said as he dried his hands. ‘Lovely.’

  ‘Did you find them, Dad?’ I asked. ‘The horses.’

  ‘We did – eventually,’ he said, shaking lots of pepper on his dinner. ‘They broke into a couple of farms. Very strange,’ he went on. ‘Every one of them was shivering. They were really scared.’

  ‘What scared them?’ Mum asked. ‘Perhaps a couple of youngsters messing about in the night?’

  ‘No,’ said Dad. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it. Those horses were extremely traumatised – as if the devil himself was after them. We had to put them into another farmer’s field because they refused to go back along the road to Harry’s. I’ve never heard such a commotion.’

  ‘Is it OK if I stay with Shane tonight?’ I cleverly asked while they were absorbed in the runaway horses.

  ‘Sure,’ said Mum. ‘That means we can watch what we like on telly.’

  I rushed upstairs and packed two torches, matches and a couple of candles.

  ‘Have a good time, and be good,’ Mum called out as I ran down the stairs.

  ‘And stay alive,’ I muttered to myself, trying not to think of what might happen in a dreary old mill with just a dead man for company.

  I called in for Shane, who had already told Big Ella that he’d be sleeping in my house.

  ‘And please don’t phone me, Gran,’ he said, putting his bag over his shoulder. ‘And don’t phone Milo’s mum because I’m not a baby. OK?’

  ‘OK,’ laughed Big Ella. ‘Here.’ She went to the fridge and took out a box of goodies. ‘I know you boys,’ she laughed, handing it to Shane. ‘You’ll probably be peckish at midnight.’

  ‘Oh, we’ll have a blast, Gran,’ Shane replied.

  ‘Well, have a good time now,’ she smiled.

  ‘I wish,’ I whispered.

  ‘We’ll be fine, Milo,’ said Shane, closing the front door. ‘And look,’ he went on as he fished something from his pocket. ‘I’ve brought my mouth organ to help while away the time.’

  ‘Or we could just play I Spy,’ I said, because I know how he plays the mouth organ and I felt a headache forming already.

  ‘No, this will keep us calm during the night, Milo,’ he said seriously.

  I took a deep breath and hoped he might lose it on the way.

  Naturally we brought our schoolbags with us – it would be pretty awkward if we’d left them behind and Big Ella and my parents found them next morning!

  On the way down Main Street we saw Jimmy Riley’s bus pulling in and a gang of guys from fifth and sixth classes got out, all wearing football gear and chattering like high-pitched starlings. We were amazed to see Wedge and Crunch among them.

  ‘Ha, look at Sleepy and Grumpy,’ laughed Wedge. ‘We’ve been at a soccer blitz, while you two were mincing around the town like girls.’

  ‘Our whole class was away since yesterday,’ added Freddie Murphy.

  ‘We were in a posh school with a big soccer pitch,’ boasted Wedge. ‘We had a blast. Soccer all yesterday evening and this morning. Pure cool! They even have lights.’

  ‘Yeah,’ put in Crunch, whose bee stings had settled down nicely. ‘But not a place for losers like you nerds,’ he added in a whisper.

  ‘How come you got to go there?’ asked Shane.

  ‘The boarder guys were away on a break, and our teacher Mister Dunne is friendly with the principal,’ said Crunch. ‘That’s how we got invited to play on the pitch yesterday and this morning.’

  ‘And we got to stay the night,’ Wedge gloated.

  ‘In sleeping bags!’ added Dave Malone. ‘It was mega fun.’

  That’s when it hit me. ‘Shane!’ I hissed, dragging him away.

  ‘What’s wrong, Milo?’ he asked.

  ‘They’ve been away since yesterday! Remember Crunch’s ma telling him not to miss the bus?’

  ‘Yeah, so?’ Shane put in impatiently.

  ‘Think,’ I said.

  And then he got the message. ‘Hey, Milo!’ he exclaimed. ‘That means it couldn’t have been Wedge and Crunch who chased the horses.’

  Well, if we were scared before, we were heart-thumpingly panicky now.

  ‘What’ll we do, Milo?’ Shane asked in a low, quiet voice to stop himself from screaming. ‘Maybe leave it till tomorrow, huh?’

  Several things shot through my mind – all of them cowardly. But I thought of Mister Lewis alone in that old mill with just a couple of loonies and his bees for company. We had made a promise. So there was no turning back from the scariest decision ever.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  GATECRASHERS

  ‘It’s Milo and Shane!’ we called out, so that Mister Lewis wouldn’t be scared when he heard our voices.

  ‘Come in, come in!’ Mister Lewis whooped, looking over our shoulders to check that it was just us. ‘I’m so glad you’re here,’ he sighed as he locked the door and pushed a rickety chair up against the handle.

  Shane and I looked at each other with amazement – like this wood-wormy chair and rusty lock would keep out anyone that’d come knocking? No way. We’d already heard those croaky crow sounds above the rafters again and I wished the door was made of solid iron.

  ‘I know what you chaps are thinking,’ Mister Lewis said as we eased ourselves onto the cushions.

  ‘You can read our minds?’ Shane almost choked and he pulled his jacket over his head to hold in his thoughts.

  ‘No, lad,’ said Mister Lewis, shaking his head and wobbly nose. ‘Indeed no. What I mean is that I imagine you’re both wondering why I’ve decided to stay put in this place.’

  ‘So why are you staying?’ I had to ask. ‘It’s well creepy. You can still come back to my wardrobe.’

  ‘I know that, Milo,’ he whispered. ‘But, if you think about it, I’m pretty creepy too, so I decided that I wasn’t going to be intimidated. It’s time I stuck up for myself.’

  ‘Good thinking, Mister Lewis,’ said Shane, with over-the-top enthusiasm. ‘We’ll be right behind you, me and Milo.’

  We chatted a bit about school, because that’s the sort of stuff Mister Lewis likes to hear. He says that school in his time was all whacks and yells and freezing classrooms, and he never can understand how we could see ‘moving pictures in a box’. The first time he saw Big Ella’s telly, I switched it on to show him how it works. Unfortunately, it was an old Dracula film. He screamed all the way back to the tower – people talked about that sound for days afterwards.

  It was beginning to get dark now, so we lit the candles and put them on the mantelpiece, leaving the torches until later to preserve the batteries. Shane freaked out when one of the candles cast his shadow on the wall and only settled down when we put out the goodies that Big Ella had given us for our fake ‘sleepover’. The buns and cakes and fizzy coke took our minds off all things eerie. When the sky outside got darker, we lit the torches. We were actually so relaxed we were laughing at one of Mister Lewis’s stories when suddenly the doorknob rattled. We froze, like glassy-eyed dummies in a shop window. I swallowed the sausage I’d been chewing and half wished I’d choke and pass out before whatever was out there would enter. There it was again, that rattle.

  ‘Don’t w
orry, boys,’ whispered Mister Lewis. ‘The door is locked.’

  Like that was comforting? I was too numb to even yell when the door splintered. Worse still, Mister Lewis wafted towards the door of his small bedroom farther across the room. He turned to Shane and me and put his finger to his dead white lips. ‘Sshh,’ he whispered before going through a wall, ‘I’ll be back.’

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  RAGGEDY HAGS

  The awful shrieks of whoever was hammering the door made me want to leap through the window. Shane was holding my arm so tightly my fingers went numb. But my biggest scare was that there was no way to escape.

  The door burst open and a raggedy woman barged in, causing the candles to splutter. She was tall and skinny with hair like mangy cats’ tails under what looked like a battered pirate hat. Her black dress had lots of patches, which didn’t quite cover some of the holes.

  ‘Ah, food,’ she cackled. ‘Ooh, are those new breads? Come, Eulalia,’ she bellowed, ignoring me and Shane, ‘there are wondrous items to fill our bellies.’

  Eulalia stepped over the broken chair, a wide, gappy grin on her face. She too was wearing a grotty black dress and pirate hat. Her eyes lit up when she spotted the food. ‘Is it real, Mellie?’ she whooped as she lunged across the room like a pin to a magnet.

  Without so much as a how do you do and may we join you?, they launched into our precious food with their bare hands, stuffing Big Ella’s sandwiches and buns into their wide mouths, slurping our coke and belching loudly.

  Shane and myself stood like zombies, too dumb to move. What was Mister Lewis thinking, leaving us on our own?

  ‘Don’t worry, Milo,’ Shane whispered in my ear. ‘Just remember that they’re only poor, raggedy folks who’ve probably been put out of their home. Just like other down-and-outs. They’ll go away when they’ve had a bit of food.’

  But when they hurled themselves at Shane’s favourite chocolate cake he went ballistic. If there’s anything that fires Shane’s temper, it’s when anyone messes with Big Ella’s special, scrumptious chocolate cake.