The Maloneys' Magical Weatherbox (15 page)

When I paused to take a breath between screams, I heard something come ripping through the canopy. Neetch, leaping from tree to tree, a screeching streak of red, legs splayed, claws gleaming, mouth spread to show his teeth, plunged down into the Gray Thing's head and began to rip and tear. The Baby Season stopped, shuddered, and screamed, groping for Neetch with its free hand. A stone crashed into its shoulder. I saw Owen below on the path, bringing his arm back for another shot.

I grabbed a finger and pushed, bending it back and back until if it had been one of my fingers it would have been broken and I'd have been on my way to the hospital to get a splint put on it. The Baby Season didn't like it. It was pulling Neetch away from its face and trying to dodge Owen's stones at the same time. It shook its hand, the hand with me in it, and flung me away, out into the air over the path, with a long way down to fall.

I heard Owen shout.

I tried to scream. I had no breath. Nothing to grab hold of. Nothing to land on. The ground came up with sickening speed.

I landed on a flying carpet.

Landing on the ground would probably have been softer. Under the red carpet were thick, hard muscles that moved and bunched and flexed. I grabbed handfuls of fur and held tight, and Neetch landed feet first on the path. I lost my grip and rolled down his flank to hit the ground after all. I couldn't even groan. Owen was tugging at my arm. It hurt.

“Come on! Come on! It's coming!”

It wasn't just coming. It was standing right there over us. Its eyes and its mouth wide and black like something wild and howling and hungry. There was no escaping that. Not for me anyway.

“Run,” I said to Owen. “Get away. Go!”

“Come on!” he said, and kept pulling.

I forced myself upright, if only to push him under a bush or something. He pulled me toward Neetch.

Neetch was crouched low, waiting for us to climb on his back. He was the size of a horse, trembling with tiredness.

I hoisted Owen up and threw myself over, barely managing to grab some fur before Neetch was off and running.

Riding a cat is not like riding a horse. Horses have those long legs and big barrel-shaped bodies. Even barebacked, it's all about gripping with your legs and, like, rolling with the movements of the horse. Cats have short legs and all their power comes from their flanks and their haunches. It's like riding a bag of angry stoats. Every movement tries to throw you off in a different direction, and cats don't run straight. They're always speeding up and slowing down, and they sort of crackle with static electricity, and if they're being chased through a wood by a magic monster it's even worse than that. Still, it was better than the Baby Season and
her
. So we hung on.

Neetch ran down the path away from the Gray Thing. Owen and me bounced so hard our legs came loose from around his sides and we were hanging on just by the handfuls of fur. He didn't like that and screeched in pain, and we didn't like it and screeched in terror. The Baby Season was not as fast as Neetch, but those long bendy legs kept it right behind us, lashing at us with those weird fingers, punching trees and pulling out small bushes and tearing up thorny undergrowth in frustration. Neetch jumped and leaped and howled and dodged and hopped and climbed. All this time we were slipping down his back and down his sides, trailing our legs, bouncing them painfully off hard things and through soft things.

But no matter how much he jumped and leaped and dodged he couldn't get ahead of the Baby Season's long legs and long hands. They kept blocking him off, herding him in and out. We were going around and around in circles. It stooped down and reached for us, its arms and hands all tangled now with ivy and briars and broken branches. Owen let go of Neetch's fur and slid down his back. I grabbed the collar of his shirt. He dangled behind us like an extra tail.

And Neetch started to shrink.

He was tiring fast. I could hear his breathing becoming more labored, feel the weakness in his muscles and in the way he slumped every time he paused. Now he was pony-sized, staggering and limping. The fur I was holding on to was coming loose. My arm was in agony.

Neetch was big-dog-sized now. Without letting go, I let my legs slide down and tried to sort of run alongside him. He went from big-sized dog to medium-sized dog and both my shins bashed into a root. I let go. Neetch tripped and fell with me. Owen rolled along with us, and we all slipped and slid and rolled, and when we came to a stop we were out from under the Baby Season, lying in a heap on the path. I could see the boggy pools of the Ditches through a gap ahead. Behind us the Baby Season was bent over, turning this way and that, searching for us.

I pushed Owen down the path and picked up the tiny mewling Neetch. He was so small I could have slipped him into my pocket.

Ignoring the pain and the tiredness, we ran down the path, out from amongst the trees, and into the Ditches. I didn't bother with the tussocks. I knew where the highest parts were and the flooded paths. I splashed right through, hopping over places where I thought the deeper holes were. I could see the hedge and the road. Nearly there. Nearly there.

By now the Baby Season had worked out that we weren't underfoot. It turned to give chase with a long honk like a goose or a hunting horn. It came crashing out of the woods and into the bog behind us, taking great long strides that ate up the distance, sending ripples like waves rolling across the flood. We had seconds.

I turned away from the road and took three long, loping leaps to the left, landing on a tiny, muddy island of heather and reeds. Right in front of that island should be the deepest bog hole in the county—or so they said. I stopped and handed Neetch to Owen and stood in front of them with my arms spread wide.

“Come on, then!” I screamed.

The Baby Season took another step, sending bog water flooding over the island and around my legs. Its left foot landed in the bog hole, and sank. It tried to pull it out, stumbled, and its right foot went into the hole. That sank, too, right down. It waved its hands to keep its balance as it pulled and struggled and heaved, sloshing black mucky water all over us, but sinking deeper and deeper. It pushed down with its hands, and they sank down into the mud and became stuck. Its face was scared and confused now, its long stiff hair, all wreathed in ivy and thorns from the chase in the woods, was bending from side to side as it shook its great head and let out a long wail of fear.

I wondered then why, it if was a Season of some sort, it didn't use weather to get out of the bog hole, and why it hadn't used weather to catch us. A strong wind or a block of ice or a blast of lightning would have stopped us before we'd gone ten yards. I guessed that Mrs. Fitzgerald wouldn't even let it do that, keeping it as her slave, keeping the weather for herself and Hugh.

“OK,” I said, and I carefully backed away from it. I picked up Neetch and caught Owen by the arm.

“But the poor thing!” Owen wailed.

“Shut up,” I told him. “You were pelting rocks at it a minute ago.”

When you defeat a monster you're supposed to feel triumphant and brilliant and punch the air and sing songs of heroism and happiness. All I felt was guilt. It wasn't the Baby Season's fault.
She
had forced it to chase us, and now I'd gone and put it back underwater. Well, I wasn't sorry I'd saved
us
, but I was sorry for
it
. And I was mad at her for making me do it.

“Come on,” I said. “Mum and Dad will have our guts for garters.”

And that's when Mum and Dad appeared through the hedge and hurried us back to the house across the road. I knew I was in trouble. But there are some kinds of trouble it's better to be in than others. I babbled about warning Neil not to go to AtmoLab, but nobody knew what AtmoLab was.

The two old hags were sitting on the wall. They looked even younger now, more Mum's age. Their hair seemed to be shrinking back into their heads, and their faces were unlined and their clothes shimmered with silver and lace. One of them clapped her hands delightedly; the other looked sideways down at us and winked.

“Thank you, dear, for saving our troublesome cat. We would have missed it if she'd taken it away from us.”

“Catnapping,” said the other. “Nasty sister.”

“Yes, dear,” the first said. “But not as nasty as us.”

Then we all stopped and turned and looked down the road, listening to the sound of an engine getting louder and closer.

 

PART 3

The Maloneys and the Míthráthúlacht

 

CHAPTER 17

NEIL

The van that held but just ourselves had been white once, maybe. Probably. Now it was mostly just dirt, thick and gray from the roof to the wheels. It was small and had something written on the side I couldn't make out. When they opened the back and threw me in, I landed on a bed of newspapers and coffee cups and bottles and rusty tools. The men in colored sweaters and kilts climbed in after me, sat me up against the wall, slammed the doors shut, and off we went.

One of them drove, with another beside him in the passenger seat. I was in the back with the other three. It wasn't very clean. Neither were the men. They all smelled sour and smoky, dusty, and dirty. It was hard to breathe, and I was shaking, my clothes clammy as ice against my skin.

One of the big men had a beard. The beard was thick and had food and twigs in it. One was completely bald. His head looked like a piece of polished wood. The other had a spider tattooed on his face. I only realized it was a tattoo when he reached up and scratched his cheek. At first I thought it was a pet. Their woolen sweaters hadn't seen the inside of a washing machine in a long time. The sleeves were ragged and frayed, so that colored threads hung from their wrists, waving and twisting whenever they moved their hands about, and they moved their hands about a lot. They rolled some cigarettes with pieces of paper they filled with tobacco from pouches. They passed them round, and the acrid smoke covered the sour stink of the men and the van just a little.

“Boys!” Beardie said, looking down at me. “Would ye look at the state of him?” Then to me, “What the heck is wrong with ye, like?”

“What?” said Baldie. “What are ye on about, by?”

“Hypothermia, by! And shock, like. He's in a bad way!”

Baldie took a closer look at me. “Hey, boys, he's right, like. We're losing him, by.”

“What's the matter, by?” Spidey said. “He's just a bit tired, like, aren't ye? Aren't ye?”

Spidey nudged me with an elbow. I tipped over into the back of the passenger seat. “Uh-oh,” he said.

“Look at the old lips, like!” Beardie. “They're, like, totally purple!”

“Flip!” said Baldie. “The poor child, like! He'll waste away from the chills!”

“Get off them blankets there, by,” said Spidey. “There you go, by. Wrap those around yourself.”

A thick, heavy blanket that gave off clouds of dust and ash was dropped on me. It was warm, but I couldn't breathe. I was being polluted to death, which, when I thought about it later, turned out to be pretty ironic.

The blanket helped, but not much. I was exhausted. Rocked by the movement of the van, I was sinking away from the aching cold and into a deep, warm, dangerous sleep.

“AS I WAS GOIN' OVER THE CORK AND KERRY MOUNTAINS!”

The five voices boomed in the tiny space.

“I MET WITH CAPTAIN FARRELL AND HIS MONEY HE WAS COUNTIN'!”

My eyes opened and I gasped in shock.

“I FIRST PRODUCED MY PISTOL AND THEN PRODUCED MY RAPIER!”

I breathed in, filling my mouth and lungs with smoke, dust, ash, and the stink of the choirboys.

“I SAID STAND AND DELIVER OR THE DEVIL HE MAY TAKE YE!!”

I coughed and choked. Without missing a beat one of the singers gave me a heavy slap on the back.

“MISHU RIN DOR-RUM DO-RUM DO-RA!!”

I spat out a thin stream of water into my blanket. That was the closest it had come to being washed in a long time, though it was already damp through from my clothes.

“WHACK FOR THE DADDY-OH! WHACK FOR THE DADDY OH!!”

My head cleared a little. I began to shake off the warm sleepiness.

“THERE'S WHISKEY IN THE JAR-OH!!”

This lovely little song went on and on and on, and the singer was betrayed by his true love and flung in jail and was just plotting his escape when that song ended and they launched into another one, about a goat that got loose on Grand Parade, and after that yet another about a soldier's wife looking forward to her husband getting back from Salonika. I tugged the blanket up to my ears, but I couldn't keep the songs out.

By the time we got to wherever it was we were going I was tingling painfully all over.

The van turned and slowed and began to rock and bounce as though the road was made of nothing but rocks and holes. The lads stopped singing and they each put one hand on the floor and one hand on the ceiling and began to shout and whoop as though riding a rollercoaster. All my bruises and my bones and my muscles screamed with pain at each and every jerk and jolt. After an endless, agonising time the van finally stopped. I was crying silently.

The lads were amazed. They looked at each other and then at me. They tugged their beards and rubbed their bald heads, muttering to each other. They seemed to be feeling some guilt at the state of me, but not enough to do anything about it.

“We'll tell him, like,” one of them said. “We'll tell him to hurry up.”

“Needs a flippin' ambulance is what he needs, by!”

“Nah,” one said and clapped me on the shoulder. I moaned, and he took his hand away as though it had been burnt. “Sorry, like, sorry, by! Come on lads, get a move on, like. We need to hurry.”

They opened the doors of the van and helped me out. There was a fire smoking near some trees, and they sat me down next to it and blew on it until it flamed and fed it some wood. They told me to sit tight—“it would all be over soon, like, by,”—and then they ran off into the trees together, looking back over their shoulders as they went, as if they were abandoning a puppy in the snow.