The Maloneys' Magical Weatherbox (3 page)

Good old horrible old Hugh. One year older than Neil. Three years older than me. Tall, tall, tall—not to mention slim and golden-haired, with a face like an angel in an old painting, and every time he met us he beat us up. We didn't let him! We'd fight back or run away and, if it was Neil and me together, we'd sometimes very nearly almost kind of sort of win. Mostly it was just hitting and slapping and pulling hair, pushing us down, rolling us around on the ground with his foot while he laughed and said mean things. I'd gotten really good at hearing him coming and hiding and following without him knowing it.

I ducked off the path and behind a thick clump of nettles. I watched his back as it moved out of the shade into a patch of light and back into shade again. That was him—Hideous Hugh, light-dark, light-dark, all tangled in his own shadows. He had his mum's face and his dad's hair. He was lucky it wasn't the other way around, Neil always said, or they'd keep him in a kennel and teach him to round up sheep.

I drew myself in and went still, and cold shivers ran over me and through me. I'd been startled by the Tourist, and he'd made me jump and breathe fast. I was wary of Hugh because, while I'd fight him if I had to, I didn't want to. I preferred to practice my stalking on him instead.

But now I felt scared, really scared, because I'd suddenly realized something was stalking
me
.

I heard voices, high and cracked and old, like trees creaking before they fall. I squatted down even farther behind my clump of nettles and tried to stop myself from shaking while Hugh stepped out onto the main path. Two toothless, bent old women, with bony faces and sharp chins, wearing dirty, raggedy dresses came up the big path, leaning on sticks but moving surprisingly fast. They called Hugh over to them.

Don't go,
I thought. It seemed stupid. Why was I scared of two old women in the woods? So scared I was even worried for flipping Hugh?

The women were complete strangers to me. I had no idea who they were or where they'd come from. Sometimes buses brought groups of pensioners out here for walks along the big path, but these two looked older than anyone I'd ever seen on the path before. Their clothes and their hair and their skin were so dirty and worn and ragged they might have come out of ancient times, when old women lived wild in the woods and everyone kept clear of them because they said they were mad or witches or hags or mad-old-witch-hags, which is an absolutely disgraceful and horrible way to treat old women.

Except maybe not these old women.

“Have you seen our cat?” one of them asked Hugh.

Hugh stopped and stared at them. I could tell by his face he was more disgusted than scared.
Idiot, Hugh! Run while you can!

“No,” he said, and he stuck his hands in his pockets, hunched his shoulders and walked past them. One of them did something with her stick, and Hugh's foot flew up into the air like a high kick in a dance. He fell flat on his back with a cry and a groan. The old women whirled around him like savage birds.

“He tripped!” one said.

“He is clumsy,” the other one added.

“Tripped over his own feet, the
craytur
.”

“He has a nice singing voice.”

“Sing us a song, little boy.”

“About our cat.”

“We're looking for our cat.”

“Have you seen him?”

“Naughty cat.”

“Sing again and he might come running.”

They were standing over Hugh, one on either side. He was sitting up now, leaning on his elbow and trying to rub his back with his hand, his expression all puzzled and mad.

“Go away, you crazy old—”

One of the women, her crooked stick in her crooked hand, poked him in the stomach.

“Aaagh!” Hugh cried.

“That's it, sing!”

They were both poking him now. He was flat on his back, trying to fend them off. They must have been stronger than they looked. I should have been enjoying it, I suppose. I'd never seen anyone torment Hugh like that before, and God knows he deserved it, but something about the old women was so wrong and out of place I felt as if I were almost on Hugh's side, and I just wanted him to get away from them.

Please don't see me,
I thought.
Please don't see me.

“Here, kitty, kitty, kitty!” called one of the women.

Poke, poke, poke.

“Aaghaaghagh!” squawked Hugh.

“Louder! He can't hear you!”

At last Hugh rolled himself out of poking range. He groaned and clutched his stomach.

“Golden boy! Golden giant! Did you eat our cat?” demanded one of the women. “Will I poke you some more to see if he flies out of your mouth?”

She waved her stick at him with her left hand. The other one waved a stick with her right hand. They made for Hugh, sticks ready to poke. Then one of them stopped and pointed with her stick.

“I see him!” she screeched. “Over there!”

“Get him!”

“Bad cat!”

“Do you want the golden boy to eat you? Is that it?”

“He'll eat you! He'll eat you all up!”

Waving their sticks and screeching, the old women hobbled across the track, straight for my nettle patch. They stopped in front of it, and through the leaves I saw their scabby knuckles gripping their sticks and their hairy chins and their squinting eyes and knotted hair. I was taking tiny little breaths and my heart was beating like a rock that's hurrying down a mountain because it's late for an avalanche.

“That's not the cat! That's a dandelion!” one of them cried suddenly.

“Bad dandelion! Pretending to be our cat!”

And they whacked furiously at the dandelion, missing it completely and flattening a small bunch of ox-eye daisies.

Then suddenly they pushed their way through the nettles. I put my arms around my head, but they ignored me completely, brushing past me and knocking me over. I scrambled away from them and stumbled down onto the path. I slipped and went down on one knee. The old women were gone, their voices fading into the trees. I looked around and saw Hugh standing upright, face flushed, glowering furiously at me.

“Wow,” I said. “Who were—”

“There you are,” he interrupted. “I was looking for you.”

“You were?” I got ready to run. I'd just watched Hugh get beaten up by two little old ladies. There was no way I was going to let him take it out on me.

“Well,” he said. “Your brother, really, but you'll do. Tell him—”

“I'm not your messenger!”

“Shut up! It's important!”

“Important? A message to Neil from you,
important
? What is it? ‘Next time I see ya, I'll fight ya'? That sort of thing?”

“No! God, why do you have to be so difficult? Just tell him to come to the lake, right? He's to come to the lake. There's something there for him.”

“What, a beating?”

“No! Come on! This isn't me, this is Mum, right?”

“Your … your mum?”

“Yeah, so, you know, it's important.”

I wasn't sure what to say to that. Why would Mrs. Fitzgerald want Neil to go to the lake? I was kind of surprised she even knew Neil existed.

“Fair enough,” I said. “If it's important to you and your mum, then you can be absolutely sure and certain that there's no way in hell he'll ever come.”

“He has to! We've been trying to get your old man to come all Summer, but he won't. Mum says Neil will do instead, and I'm supposed to—”

He stopped. The two old women must have shaken him up even more than I'd thought. Hugh was obviously supposed to get Neil up to Loch Farny, either by using some clever plan or by just twisting his arm behind his back and forcing him. Instead he'd blurted the whole thing out to me, and I saw him clench his teeth as he realized what he'd done.

“Dad?” I said. “Why do you want Dad?”

“Never mind,” he said through gritted teeth. “Try this. You tell Neil I'll be waiting for him at the lake if he wants to get back at me.”

“Back at you for what?”

And for the second time that day, someone took me completely by surprise. Hugh lunged at me, hands outstretched, and gave me an almighty shove that lifted me right off my feet and threw me off the road and into the dry, stony ditch. I landed on my back, and my legs went flying over my head, rolling me onto my front so that I was lying facedown, mouth full of dust and sharp pebbles, half in the ditch and half in a patch of nettles and briars. The breath had been knocked so far out of me it was probably a gentle sea breeze on a distant beach. I waited for it to come back, and, when it did, a whole lot of hurting came with it.

“Ah! Ah! Ah! Ow!”

There were nettle stings and briar scrapes all along my legs, bruises and cuts on my back, more on my front and my arms and hands. I was covered in yellow dust, my head was ringing and my eyes watered. I hobbled out of the ditch, climbing the side with tiny, stiff steps. With every step I vowed an unholy vengeance on Hugh, who must have slithered off home like the snake he was while I was having all that fun getting to know the bottom of the ditch.

“What happened to you?” Owen asked. He was standing on the big path, holding my bow and arrows, which I had dropped.

“Hugh,” I spat, wiping my eyes clear. “Flipping Hugh Fitz
flipping
gerald happened to me. What the heck are you doing here?”

He held out the bow and arrows.

“You have to help,” he said. “He's trapped and you have to get him out.”

“Who?” I asked, waving the bow and arrows away. I could barely put up with the breeze blowing on me, I didn't want them knocking against my scrapes and bruises, too. “Who's trapped? Where?”

“I'm not sure. At the smoky barn.”

“Owen,” I said. “I need … I need to go … I can't…”

“Please,” he said.

“Oh, for flip's sake, Owen.”

We went slowly and carefully—me limping and groaning and grabbing clumps of dock leaves to rub on my nettle stings. There's a big wide boggy clearing called the Ditches next to the road, just up from our house. We crossed over the mud and the reeds and the goat willow and climbed onto the road. I nearly turned and headed for home. I wanted a cool shower and a soft bed, and maybe Mum to put cream on my cuts and bruises, and Dad to make me hot chocolate, and both of them to tell me I was an idiot but smiling while they did it.

“Come on!” said Owen. I thought of all the times Owen had tagged along and driven me crazy by going slow and dawdling and wandering off to look at a flower or a stick, and now it was his turn to get mad at me. “You have to hurry!”

“Go boil your head, Owen,” I said, but I turned away from home and followed him down to the smoky barn.

The smoky barn was on the right, set just off the road with a big, overgrown clearing in front of it. It had burnt down years before when some boys had snuck in there to smoke cigarettes and ended up setting the whole thing on fire. It had never been rebuilt or repaired—it was just a big mess of bent and burnt and rusted metal, all covered in weeds growing through blackened piles of hay, and nobody ever went there, not even to smoke cigarettes. Now I could see that there was a great big truck and a big long trailer parked beside it, and banging on the side of the trailer with their sticks and screeching at the tops of their voices were the two old women who had tripped Hugh in the woods.

I grabbed at Owen, but he was just out of reach and he ran right at them.

“No! Owen!” I shouted after him.

“Cat!” said one old woman.

“Cat!” said the other.

“We know you're in there, cat!”

“Hiding!”

“Cowardly cat!”

“Baby cat!”

They stood side by side, whacking away with their bent, crooked, thorny sticks that must have been hard as iron. The trailer was ringing like a set of church bells, booming and clanging and donging. Something inside cried out in rage and bumped against the walls. The whole trailer rocked from side to side, and so did my head.

“Get out, cat!”

“Out! Out! Out!”

“Stop!” Owen cried, running toward them and waving his arms about.

“Owen!” I yelled, and went after him as fast as I could, which was not very fast because I was not at my best.

The women stopped screeching and lowered their sticks.

“Stop?” said one.

“Why stop?” said the other.

“Our stupid, lazy cat won't come out.”

“Won't do what it's told!”

“Bad cat.”

“No!” said Owen. “It can't! Look! Look!”

He pointed at the doors at the back of the trailer, which were held shut by a long metal lever. He dropped my bow and arrows and climbed up and grabbed the lever.

“Help me!” he said.

“Help him!” said one of the old women, pointing her stick at me.

I froze.

“Help him,” said the other, jumping up and down with excitement.

If my bow and arrows had been in my hands instead of on the ground I might have used them, but I can't be sure it wouldn't have just made them mad. Madder.

Owen was pulling and tugging at the lever, gradually working it loose. I reached up with both hands, took hold of it, and pulled. It came away, the doors swung open, and a furry red elephant streaked out and yowled, then arched its back and hissed. The elephant was a cat, a cat the size of an elephant, an angry cat the size of an elephant with teeth and claws and blazing green eyes, and there we were, a pair of mice ready to be gobbled up.

It swiveled round, raised one paw, and crouched and stalked toward us. I had my bow picked up off the ground, an arrow nocked and drawn. I aimed for an eye—I knew I could hit it—and hoped it would be enough because I wouldn't get a second shot.

“Sssssh!” said Owen, and stepped into my line of sight.