THE WITCH, THE SAINT
& THE SHOEMAKER
Aonghus Fallon
Cover by the author.
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All characters in this compilation are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER ONE
Hy-Brasil turned out to be a big old brownstone on a street where the houses all looked equally as big and as impressive, each decorated with no end of crenellations and balconies and turrets.
Donald, Beverly, Melvin and Penny were staying at their Great-Uncle Begley’s because their mom—a famous, beautiful but headstrong film star—and their dad—a Wall Street broker who wasn’t famous at all—were getting divorced, and there was nobody else their parents could ask to take care of them in the meantime.
Of course the four had heard about Great-Uncle Begley. Dad had told them all sorts of stories about him, only he’d always seemed like a character out of a book or a film rather than a real person. He’d come over from Ireland as a boy and helped build some of the biggest skyscrapers in America. Then he’d become a banker, buying stocks and shares, and ended up being very rich indeed.
But that had been years and years ago. He was nearly a hundred now, and lived in his great big house with just his housekeeper for company.
He was waiting for them in the hallway: a tiny man in a wheelchair, and Beverly thought she’d never seen anybody so thin and frail in all her life, or anybody with such a scary face. “A haunted face,” she thought, with a little shiver.
It was true. Great-Uncle Begley might have been very successful, but he looked like somebody who’d once done something terrible or had something terrible happen to him and who’d never quite gotten over it.
But he’d shaken them each by the hand and welcomed them in his soft Irish brogue and each of them had decided he was okay
Then his housekeeper—a tall, stern-faced old Irishwoman who looked nearly the same age as he did—had escorted them up to their rooms. Although they were to get to know the house pretty well in the weeks to come, their first impression was that it was full of big, dark, old furniture and that a lot of it seemed to be in shadow.
Their rooms were on opposite sides of the same corridor. “One for the boys and one for the girls,” the old women said dryly. “You choose which you prefer—and no going up to the fourth floor! That’s off bounds. Goodnight.”
And with this she bustled back downstairs.
Both rooms had the same bay windows, overlooking the street. One was bigger but without much furniture: just two beds and a chest of drawers by the door, although the beds and the drawers were big and heavy and ornate. The other room was smaller but cozier. There were even a few pictures up on the wall. Also, it had a dressing table.
“You girls can have this room if you like.”
Melvin was determined to be as considerate to the others as possible—for a change. It was the nicer room, and he reckoned Beverly and Penny would appreciate having a dressing table. Being so considerate all the time was real hard, because he was missing his mom like mad and this made him grouchy. “Only I guess we all got to make an effort,” he told himself.
“Meaning you want the bigger room, I suppose,” Beverly retorted.
“Hell, no! I just thought—”
Melvin sighed. It struck him maybe Beverly wanted the other room because it looked just like her bedroom back home. He knew she really missed her old room. “Have the other room if you like. I don’t care either way. Honest.”
“Thanks so much,” Beverly sniffed. “You don’t get to decide where everybody sleeps, Melvin.”
Privately Beverly reckoned this was her job. She was the second eldest, after all.
Melvin just shrugged and rolled his eyes, even though he knew this would only annoy Beverly even more, which it did. So of course Beverly then turned and said to Donald—“Don’t you agree, Donald?”
“Agree about what?”
Donald hadn’t been listening. He was too busy imagining himself as a captain who’s had to camp with his men in unfamiliar territory and wants to make sure there’s no bears around. Or in this instance, spiders.
“That Melvin doesn’t get to choose which room he sleeps in.”
“Of course he doesn’t.”
“You two get to decide just because you’re older?” Melvin was already forgetting how he’d promised himself to be nice to everybody. “You call that fair? Why don’t we just vote on it?”
“Suppose I vote me and Beverly get the other room?” Penny pointed out. “Then that would be three against one, right?”
“Taking their side as usual, huh? Why do you always have to be such a kiss-ass?”
‘Melvin!’ Beverly was apalled.
“I am so not a kiss-ass!” Penny started to cry.
“Now look what you’ve done!” Beverly snapped.
“Melvin—”
But Melvin was already headed for the door. He didn’t want to hear what Donald had to say. Donald would just want him to apologize and no way was he going to. He was going to find somewhere in this big old house instead, somewhere he could read his comic in peace and quiet.
I hate them, all three of them, he thought.
Not that he’d ever say so to their faces. But something made him stop at the doorway all the same. “You know something? Sometimes I wish—I really, really wish—I was an only child.”
“He’d no right to talk to you like that, Penny,” Donald said after Melvin was gone. “You want me fetch him back and make him apologize?”
“Oh, let him go,” Beverly said. “I don’t think I could stand another argument.”
“Bev is right,” Penny said quickly, angrily rubbing her eyes dry. “It’d be a total waste of time. Let’s just unpack our stuff, okay?”
They only started having second thoughts about the house next day. Their uncle had set out early in the morning to attend to some business, and Mrs. McCready wouldn’t let them leave the house on their own. “I don’t want you children going off somewhere unless your uncle says it’s all right beforehand.”
By then they’d discovered the house was out in some leafy suburb and miles from anywhere. Still, it would have been nice to go out, if only for a walk. It was such a nice day. Shafts of dusty sunshine fell in through those tall windows onto the dining room’s parquet floor—where the four were having breakfast—making the parts of the room still hidden in shadow seem all the darker and more mysterious, while around them furniture creaked and groaned in the heat.
“So if we can’t go out, what can we do?” Melvin demanded.
“I brought some games,” Beverly said. She’d decided to forgive Melvin, if only because she felt it was up to her to make sure there were no more arguments. “We could play scrabble.”
“Nah,” said Donald. “It’s time we did a full recon.”
“I don’t think that’s such a great idea,” Beverly said cautiously. “Mrs. McCready’s already told us not to go near the fourth floor.”
“Yeah? So that still leaves the rest of the house.”
And the four of
them set off.
Across the hall (where portraits of famous Irish patriots hung on the wall overlooking the staircase) they found a ballroom with a crystal chandelier. Upstairs on the right was a library: a library filled with dusty leather-bound books. And across from this was a funny little bar with only Irish drinks behind the counter.
There was a snooker room, a smoking room, and a conservatory. Even an elevator, only you needed a key to open it.
“I bet we’re not allowed,” Beverly said. “Or Mrs. McCready would have used it last night. She doesn’t want us to know it’s even here.”
It’s impossible to say what might have happened next—probably nothing at all—if Penny hadn’t been woken the very same night by the sound of voices coming from downstairs. One was Great Uncle Begley’s. The other was very thin and high. Every so often the murmur of conversation was interrupted by laughter.
Penny looked at the clock by her bedside: it was nearly one o’clock in the morning.
“Now who could be visiting Uncle Begley this late?” she wondered.
For a moment Penny thought about waking up Beverly. Only then Beverly would either tell her (a) to go back to sleep or (b) to stay in bed while she and Donald went down to investigate. Penny was very fond of her older brother and sister, but being the youngest, she found all too often they tended to treat her as if she were just a baby, even though she was nearly nine.
Which was why she decided to go down and investigate all on her own.
She eased herself very slowly and quietly out of her bed and crept downstairs.
The door leading into the little bar was open. She peeked inside. Her uncle was in his wheelchair by the fire. His face was ruddy and shiny, and he was grinning from ear to ear. He looked totally different from how he’d looked the night before—so different Penny was suddenly sorry she hadn’t let Beverly come down instead.
There was a chair facing him, but with its back to her, so she had no way of knowing what the person sitting in it must be like.
“Or if there’s anybody sitting in it.” She should have seen their legs and the top of their head, at least. “Maybe he’s talking to himself—maybe that’s why he looks so weird,” she thought suddenly. “Because he’s crazy.”
But then something happened to make her think otherwise. Great-Uncle Begley held out his glass of whisky and a tiny hand appeared out of the depths of the armchair, also holding a glass of whiskey. The two glasses clinked together and a high, thin voice said, quite distinctly—“Tis grand news, Ignatius! Fair dues to ye for never giving up!”
That hand gave Penny such a fright she backed away from the door and crept straight upstairs.
She lay in her bed for a long time, listening to the two talking, until—after what seemed hours—she heard somebody scurry past her bedroom door.
What was going on?
It was even hotter the following afternoon, almost too hot to go out, so while Donald was busy making a plane out of balsa wood and Beverly was playing solitaire, and Melvin was reading some comic up in his room, Penny decided to investigate.
It had taken ages to make up her mind—seeing that tiny hand the night before had really freaked her out—but in the end she’d decided she was quite grown-up enough to get to the bottom of the business without any help from the others. “It’s not like they’d even believe me, anyway,” she told herself.
It helped how the house was so large and Mrs. McCready was so old. Most of the upper floors had a very dusty, neglected feel about them.
Penny found what was she was looking for almost right away: a set of tiny footprints—so tiny and faint in fact, you might never have noticed them at all unless you’d been keeping an eye out for them. They were really only visible in certain places—mainly in spots where there was no carpet covering the stairs—but Penny still tracked them from the bar all the way up to the fourth-floor landing. By then her heart was beating away like mad and she was way too curious to care if she was disobeying Mrs. McCready’s instructions or not.
Here they vanished completely.
There was quite a lot of stuff crowded together on the landing: a Chinese vase as tall as Penny herself, an old mahogany dresser, and a side-table covered in knick-knacks, with a trunk underneath it and a mirror on the wall above it.
Penny was just about to give up when she glimpsed something under the table. It was nearly hidden by the trunk: a tiny paneled door not more than two feet high.
It was half-ajar.
Penny hesitated. By now she wouldn’t have been remotely surprised if Great-Uncle Begley turned out to be some sort of evil wizard, with a tiny demon for a familiar.
Finally she took a couple of deep breaths and scrambled down onto her hands and knees, wriggling past the trunk (which looked way too heavy to move) then teasing the door fully open.
She was looking down a narrow hallway with greenery of some sort at the other end. The hallway didn’t seem very long, but the other end of it still looked miles away, so she couldn’t make out any details. It was like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. Strangest of all, cold, fresh outside air was curling out from this little hall and into the stuffy stairway, which was all the stuffier if you happened to be crouching under a table.
Wherever the door led to, it didn’t lead to anywhere in her uncle’s house.
Penny sat back.
Suddenly she wasn’t so scared anymore. But while one part of her was dying to find out what the place at the other end of the hallway might be like, and to meet her uncle’s mysterious visitor face-to-face, another part of her still wanted to run downstairs and tell the others, even if it meant Donald and Beverly taking charge as usual.
“Only I found the door. This is my adventure, not theirs,” she told herself. So she got down on her hands and knees again and crawled through.
The hallway turned out to be very cramped indeed, and wriggling along it was a lot harder than Penny had expected. She was very out of breath by the time she got to the other end.
Then suddenly there was soft, damp grass under her hands and knees and when she sat up and looked around her, she saw she’d come out in the middle of a patch of gorse; there were dark, prickly bushes on all sides of her and a gray drizzly sky above. When she glanced back she could just make out the hallway behind her, half-hidden under those low branches. She could even see the open door at the other end, and the sunlight falling onto the landing carpet. And if she listened really carefully, she could hear the ticking of the tall clock downstairs.
“But why would some hallway lead out here? The middle of nowhere?” she wondered. “Unless—unless the door is the outside of somewhere and this is the inside. All of it.”
It was a really weird idea, but Penny could think of no other explanation.
Where was she, though?
She decided it was time to explore.
Her dress got badly torn, fighting her way through the gorse, and all the while the ground grew steeper and steeper. Soon she was half-slithering half-falling down towards a deep cleft between two hills—the hill she was on and the hill opposite. Both hills were covered in gorse. A muddy track wound up out of the great bog on her left and vanished into this cleft, half hidden by hawthorns and other small trees.
The drizzle falling down out of that gray sky was so fine as to be nearly invisible and in fact, wasn’t a whole lot different from mist. Already she could feel its dampness seeping into her bones, but the damp (and the gloomy sky) only made the hawthorn bushes below look all the greener and turned the bog a deep, rusty red.
Five minutes later she’d come out onto the track and was wondering which way to go, when she heard the chink, chink of a hammer.
“Right it is, then,” she said to herself.
CHAPTER TWO
He was sitting under a hawthorn bush: a little man in a red coat with a black, triangular cap tilted back on his head, several nails sticking out of the corner of his mouth and a leather apron tied around his waist. He was tappi
ng away at the sole of a tiny shoe with an equally tiny hammer, his wizened little face set in a scowl of concentration.
His clothes looked like they might have been expensive once-upon-a-time—a swallow-tailed coat, a yellow vest and pale gray breeches—but the weather had left them very stained and faded and dirty. Also, Penny couldn’t help noticing the brass buttons on his coat were way too big. “They’re actually ordinary-sized buttons,” she thought to herself. “They just look big because he’s so small.”
He really was tiny, not much bigger than a cat. He had a sharp, clever face she wasn’t sure she liked much, very brown and weather-beaten, with dark side-whiskers running down either side of it, and crafty gray eyes. Tiny or not, his face made Penny think of all the times her dad had warned her about not talking to strangers.
“Only I wonder if he’s the same person who’s been visiting Great-Uncle Begley?” she thought. “And if he knows where this track leads?”
Finally she cleared her throat and said—“Excuse me!”
“What is it?” the little man said, barely bothering to glance at her.
He sounded so grumpy, Penny decided she must be looking for another little man entirely. “I—I was just wondering where this track goes.”
“Never mind where it goes!” retorted the little man, carefully examining the heel of the shoe he was fixing. “If I was you, I’d turn round and go back the way you came right now! This is no place for little girls.”
Until then Penny had been considering doing exactly as the little man suggested. Now she changed her mind. “Why should I do as he says, if he’s being so rude about it? I’ll just keep on going.”
But she’d barely set off again before the little man was blocking her path.
“Will you go home?” he demanded.
“I will not,” Penny retorted, more determined than ever.
The Witch, the Saint & the Shoemaker Page 1