The Maloneys' Magical Weatherbox (24 page)

“We agreed to a truce,” Dad said. “When we saw you were all in danger, we agreed to a truce. The truce will hold until we reach the lake together.”

“Sorry, Dad,” I said, feeling as though I had failed yet again.

“Not your fault, Neil. None of this is your fault.”

“Mum?” Hugh said, finally looking up and realizing that he was alive. “Mum, look what he did! He wrecked all my elementals and then he burned our field and he nearly burned me!”

“The truce will hold,” Mrs. Fitzgerald said. “The advantage is ours. The Weatherman will perform his final duty, then relinquish his position, and the Seasons will decide on his replacement: his wretched and tainted offspring, or a new family, powerful and reliable. The advantage is ours.”

“We'll see,” Dad replied.

They kept their eyes locked tight on each other.

“Come on, then,” Dad said. “They're waiting.”

“And angry,” she said. “And getting angrier.”

The fires had died, leaving steam and smoke everywhere, thicker than any fog. And the rain drove down into the glowing cinders and hot ashes. Back at the edge of the wood, the oak tree was now a blackened, smoking stump.

Dad pointed to a spot between himself and Mrs. Fitzgerald. The ground was covered with a thick layer of burnt grass that crumbled to hot ash under our feet. I refused to move until Hazel climbed onto my back again. She put her arms around my neck and rested her head on my shoulder. I could hear her breathing softly. Everything hurt. I could barely stand, I was so exhausted, but she felt like no weight at all. Hugh snorted, and we went and stood there and began to walk down toward the shore of the lake—Dad and Mrs. Fitzgerald moving slightly sideways, like a pair of lizards in a staring contest.

Over the lake the three Seasons in their cloud towers were slowly, ponderously turning. Way up high at the uppermost limits of the sky they all merged in a great flat cold mass that spread from horizon to horizon. The vivid colors that flashed and glowed in the clouds lit up the landscape below. Each of the three rotating columns was thick and wide at the top, growing thinner toward the bottom, until it tapered away to a tiny wisp that touched the surface of the lake and danced and moved like a flame in a breeze.

We reached the edge of the lake and stopped. I set Hazel down and she took my hand. Dad and Mrs. Fitzgerald held their stare for one long moment more, and then Dad turned and looked out at the lake and spread his arms wide and let the Summer go.

 

CHAPTER 28

LIZ

“Go on,” John-Joe said. “Drop it back in. Go on!”

“Leave her alone!” Mum told him.

“I'll leave her alone when she does what I says!” He lifted the gun to his shoulder and pointed it at me. Mum and Ed both splashed into the bog hole in front of me.

“Get out of the way!” He swung the gun around, pointing it at Owen and Ash.

“OK,” Ed said. “Look, we'll do what you say. We'll do it.”

“Do it, then!”

Mum and Ed slowly and carefully took hold of the Baby Season. Ed got its arm and Mum got its body and they gently pulled.

“What's taking so long? Get it off and drop it back in, ye eejits!” John-Joe moaned.

“It won't come off!” Mum pulled and tugged, and Ed dragged at it and yanked, but it wouldn't budge. It wasn't even holding on that tight, and it didn't feel stuck or anything, the way a limpet sticks to a rock at the beach. It just would not move.

I shivered and shook. I felt the black bog muck drying my skin. I didn't care about any of it. I felt myself rock back and forth. “I fly big sky. I fly big sky. I fly big sky…” I chanted, trying to hold on to the memory of the sky dance under the bog hole.

“Hush, honey, hush,” Mum said. “You have to help us.”

John-Joe stalked around the bog hole to where I was sitting.

“If you don't get it off I'll throw them both in! I don't care! You hear, girlie? I said I'll drown you like a pup!”

“Get away from her!” shouted Mum.

John-Joe pointed the gun in her face and pushed her back, then he squatted down beside me like a fat old toad. His breath puffed like smoke and stank of something rotten and old and dead. “I'll put you both in, girlie, that's what I'll do. And do you know what I'll do then? Oh, it's a nice deep hole, it is. I'm thinking a deep hole like that could hold all of you. Every last one of you, and no one would ever find you down there with that precious thing. It's like bog butter. You know bog butter, don't you? They find lumps of it thousands of years old and it's still good for making a sandwich. That's what that thing is like—buried in the bog but still doing its job. Not the rest of you, though. You'll be more like them bog men, dried up old mummies, all black and withered. That's what I'm thinking. And I'll start with you, so I will. In you go, girlie!”

He grabbed my arm and lifted.

Just then, something yellow grew and spread behind the crown of the hill. A long thin ribbon of fire, dancing and bending, coming up from somewhere beyond the treetops and outlined against the glowing clouds. Even John-Joe paused to watch as the flame seemed to jump all across the top of the hill, a great black gush of smoke leaking out of it.

“Oh my God!” cried Mum. “Oh, Neil! Oh no!”

“Neetch!” I yelled. “Neetch help! Get him!”

John-Joe pushed. We splashed back into the bog hole, and I could feel the mud sink and deepen under me. John-Joe could too, because he dropped me and jumped for the edge as I sank down. The Baby Season on my back shifted, and I heard it whine softly in my ear.

“I'm sorry,” I said. I wondered if we would fly again when we got down there, or if it had just been a dream—one of those dreams you have once in your whole life and then never again no matter how much you want it, or long for it, or try to remember what it was and what it felt like. Oh, well. I wouldn't be wanting or longing for much down in the black, anyway. The water closed around my head. I was so cold I couldn't feel it anymore.

Then something big splashed into the pool.

There were bubbles, and there was foam, and there was a shape, dripping with water and muck and dirt and weeds—a shape with huge yellow eyes and a mouth bursting with teeth like jagged knitting needles. And those needles, cruel and sharp and bigger than the bones in a tyrannosaur skeleton, closed around me as delicately and softly as a pair of oven gloves, and I was lifted out of the water and dropped gently on the edge of the bog hole, wiping the cold, dirty water from my face while Neetch, the bog-water frothing all around him, turned on John-Joe.

Neetch wasn't a cat. Neetch just kinda looked like a cat when he was small. Neetch was a bog beast—a bog beast as big as a house.

He was covered in long, thick shaggy fur like a woolly mammoth. His legs were tall and crooked and had six claws each. His tail was as long as his body and lashed the air behind him. His ears stretched back like a bat's, his whiskers drooped like a massive Victorian moustache, and his face was like a demon's. He climbed out of the bog hole, wrapped in a coat of mud, and hissed at John-Joe.

In his terror John-Joe must have jerked at the trigger of the shotgun. There were two sudden bursts of flame and smoke, two quick, stabbing cracks that hurt my ears and made everyone flinch and duck. Then John-Joe dropped the gun and ran into the trees. Neetch went after him, bounding into the fog, and then they were both gone, though we could hear them as they went crashing one after the other through the wood.

“Come on out of that,” Ed said slowly, and he lifted me up and hugged me to his chest. We stood shivering and silent for a moment. Up on the hill, the ribbon of fire was gone and everything was covered in a thick gray layer of smoke and steam.

“I've got to get to the lake,” I said. “I've got to get the Baby Season there.”

“NO!” Mum said. “You're not going up there! Hugh and his elementals are up there in the woods, and John-Joe, and that fire … I'm not letting you go up there!”

“But, Mum…”

“She has to go,” Ash said quietly.

“I can't let her!”

“Mum,” I said. “I'm not—”

“You're not?” she said. “Good!”

“Then she will win,” said Ash, sadly.

“No, she won't. Mum, I'm not going through the woods because that would be stupid. I'm going to ask Ed to drive me around in his truck. Ed, would you drive me around in your truck?”

“Sure,” he said, but his voice was strained.

“Ed!” said Ash. “Ed?”

“It's OK,” he said, bringing his hand, all covered in blood, around from his back. “Just a scratch. Oh, dear. Would you look at that?”

He wasn't talking about the blood. He was pointing at the hill.

One of the three cloud blocks was directly above us, and the other two were over to our left and to our right. All three had long, thin trailing wisps that ran down from their massive bases to vanish somewhere beyond the hill—at the lake, I guessed. Now a fourth thin cloud, like a jagged, crooked line drawn by a pencil, rose up into the southern sky, and started to spread, full of light.

“Summer,” said Ash. “Summer is here. The Weatherman is at the lake.”

 

CHAPTER 29

NEIL

A quivering wisp of light appeared on the lake, like a flame of burning gas. It turned, and danced, and rose. A cone of silvery dew full of a white light that broke into hazy, glittering rainbows quivering like flags, swirling up into the sky, churning and teeming, the rainbows spreading and merging into a titanic cone of glowing colors, taking its place with the other Seasons. Liz, Owen, and me had always loved rainbows. As children of the Weathermen they seemed like special signals from the Seasons meant just for us, bright, beautiful bridges we might one day climb to join them in the sky. This rainbow looked like the fang of a kaleidoscopic serpent biting into the water of the lake. The Summer was angry. The Summer was furious. The insult and indignity it had suffered would never be forgotten. Whatever happened next, I reckoned the chances of Ireland ever getting a decent Summer again were pretty slim.

Dad's light went out. I'd got so used to it I'd almost forgotten it was there. He shrank back down to ordinary Dad-size, small and dull and tired, barely able to stand on his own two legs.

Not that Mrs. Fitzgerald looked much better. The two of them had been fighting with powers that just didn't fit into human bodies or human minds. Her power, even boosted with what she'd stolen from her sisters, had been drained by the battle. Now her hair was snowy white, her face thin and lined, and her hands and fingers like crooked claws. I saw Hugh watching her, and a crafty, calculating look came into his eye: maybe it wouldn't be so long until he became Weatherman. I felt sick just looking at him.

Dad slowly waded out into the lake. By the time he reached the middle the water was up to his chest. He stopped, and looked up, and shut his eyes. The clouds boiled and gushed, the great cyclones turned, the colors flared too bright, and I covered my eyes. When I opened them again and blinked the light away, the colors were gone, and the clouds, and the cyclone. The change was so complete it was as if we had jumped to a different world. Now it was night, and a million stars had appeared, and the moon, full and bright, hung directly over the lake. Dad was standing perfectly still in the dead center of the moon's reflection. A single ripple floated away from him and through the four other figures that stood around him.

They were dim shadows in the moonlight, four or five times as big as Dad, standing in or hovering above the lake. One was sort of man-shaped, covered in lumps, all irregular, put together as if it were some sort of jigsaw. It was a body made up entirely of fruits and vegetables, all fitted together to make something that looked human, like a joke. I saw carrots and apples and oranges and bananas and leeks. Its fingers were zucchini. Its lips were pea-pods. Its eyes were some sort of flower. From its back grew two thick, crooked wooden limbs that split into smaller branches and twigs all covered with leaves, but the leaves were brown and withered and dead. Autumn.

To one side of Autumn was a huge, thick ring, braided out of shoots and creepers and ivy and weeds. It was constantly moving and shifting and changing as a hundred different creatures—mice, rats, birds, monkeys—crawled over it and clung to it and fluttered through it, weaving it into patterns and then unweaving it again, so it was growing and spreading and changing all the time. Its long green shoots trailed in the water, thick with pond weed and willow branches. It was like an elaborate mask, but never once in all its moving and changing did it even come close to looking human. Spring.

Winter was a constant steady fall of rain and snow and perfectly round hailstones that never struck the lake but danced up and down the length of a shapeless column. Each raindrop was filled with silver moonlight, each snowflake glowed and fluttered, and each hailstone shone like a pearl. It looked like a living chandelier.

And Summer was a hot round ball of sparkling, glittering, flashing lightning, changing from bright blinding blue to blazing, angry red and back again. It seemed to lean toward Dad and reach for him with its lightning fingers, but Dad stood perfectly still in the middle, head up, shoulders back, looking proud. He wasn't sorry for what he'd done, so there was no point in trying to pretend he was.

They talked. I couldn't hear what was said. I mean, it wasn't really talking. They don't talk. It didn't take long. Dad bowed his head, and Summer sent a torrent of lightning scorching into the sky that lit up everything for miles around and blinded us and deafened us. Dad flinched and stumbled, going down under the water for a moment. Then Summer subsided and the others remained completely still, and Dad dragged himself out of the lake and fell onto the shore.