The Maloneys' Magical Weatherbox (2 page)

I couldn't understand how someone so big could have snuck up on me like that.

“Sorry,” he said, and he dropped the suitcase he was carrying and bent down to pick up my bow, and then dropped the other suitcase he was pulling behind him on little wheels. He turned to catch it, still bent over, and his fingers got tangled in the handle and he tripped over the other suitcase and fell sort of sideways, like a mountain tilting over, but he was so big and wide he didn't fall fully; instead he went down on one knee, waving his arms for balance, and the suitcase on wheels went flying out of his hand and over the wall. The lid popped open and clothes spilled everywhere. He lurched after it, kicking the other suitcase, which also sprang open, and books and books and more books, flapping like crows—a murder of books—went flying all over the road.

I grabbed my bow and ran for the woods.

 

CHAPTER 3

NEIL

It was as if, I don't know, a giant balloon made out of extra-extra-large clown costumes stitched together had exploded all over the front lawn. Enormous checked shirts and stiff denim jeans and woolen socks and long underwear lay everywhere. If we'd hoisted one of the shirts like a sail over one of the pairs of jeans, the whole family could have gone floating down the Shannon. We could have built a small cottage out of all the books, which had spilled out onto the road as if a library had sprung a leak.

“Sorry!” said the Tourist as he tried to stuff everything back into his suitcase. “I had a … I saw a … There was a girl with a bow and then, well, I—er—Sorry.”

“And where did Liz go?” Mum asked as she and Dad folded the ends of a tent-sized sweater together.

“Oh, across the road into the woods. I think I scared her.”

“Scared?” I said. “Liz?”

“My name's Ed,” said the Tourist. “Ed Wharton. Uh, I booked a room…”

“Yes, Mr. Wharton, that's right,” Mum said. We had the clothes and the books more or less repacked. Dad carried one suitcase, and I pulled the other along while Owen pushed. Mum held the door open and invited Ed Wharton inside.

“Great!” said Ed, striding up the path. “I've been driving for half the day. It's great to finally be here. I drive a truck for a living—left it parked up the road there a bit; I hope nobody minds. Didn't think you'd want a great big truck blocking your drive. Lovely house. What a view! And that phone box—classic design! And so well maintained! You do that yourself, do you? So nice to see people looking after their heritage. Well done, well done!”

I think I was the only one who noticed Owen's head go up at the mention of the truck, mostly because he left me to pull the suitcase all on my own and went trotting off to have a look.

The Tourist blustered into the house, stopping to open door after door and peer into the living room and the dining room and the kitchen, until Mum cornered him against the greeting desk, forced him to sign the book, and ushered him up the stairs.

“Lovely old farmhouse this. Beautifully preserved. Love what you've done with the paneling. Is this the original staircase? When do you serve dinner? Oh! Who am I standing on? What's your name?”

“Neil,” I told him.

“These narrow corridors can be a bit tight, can't they?”

Mum was trying to squeeze past him to unlock the door to his room. He turned and nearly flattened her against the wall.

“Sorry!”

Dad and I carried his suitcases into the room, which had always been bright and airy, but now seemed dark and cramped with his huge body blocking all the light and dwarfing everything. Dad touched my elbow and made a gesture with his head, so we left Mum to settle our visitor and slipped away.

“Weathermen,” mused Dad as we went down the stairs, “were not traditionally renowned for their hospitality, you know. By nature we tended to be closed off and secretive. Visitors were not encouraged. Travelers seeking shelter were not welcomed. Some Weathermen shrouded the fort in mist and rain all year round, which must have been a bit glum. One guy thought it was a good idea to embed the whole thing in a block of ice! He was frozen solid for a month and nearly didn't thaw out in time for the next ceremony. Never thought I'd be nostalgic for those times.”

Instead of leading the winding way down to his study where I do most of my Learning the Awesome Responsibilities of Being the Weatherman, he went out through the front door and stood on the path and stared out over the wooded hill in front of our house.

“Can you feel it, Neil?” he said. “Can you feel it building up over there?”

I swallowed and stood up straight and tried to reach out with all my senses, to feel the weight of the air and the movement of things too small and light to be seen or touched, but whose shifting patterns fill the sky with avalanches and tidal waves. It's hard, sometimes, to tune into the elementals. It's like the trick with that picture that's a woman one minute and a rabbit the next. I can't always make myself see the one I'm looking for. But this time the dark cold mass building behind the hill was impossible to miss. I felt it like an angry chill running over my skin.

“What the heck is that?” I asked.

“Snowstorm,” Dad replied. “Now, Weatherman, what are you going to do about a snowstorm in September?”

“Me?” I squeaked.

“What have I taught you, Neil? You have everything you need. Take your time. But hurry up, or we'll get snowed in on the last day of Summer!”

Yeah, so, what exactly had he taught me?

Liz and Owen and I had never gone to school. Mum and Dad had always taught us at home, because all the stuff I had to learn to be Weatherman couldn't be learned at school. When they tried to send Liz, she ran away and hid for two days, and when they tried to send Owen, he looked up at them with his big brown eyes and his lower lip all wobbly and they gave up on school for any of us altogether. So the two of them kept crowding into classes that were supposed to be just for the future Weatherman. They were learning all the stuff that was supposed to be secret Weatherman knowledge. Liz said it would save her the trouble of having to learn it all later when I turned out to be useless and she had to take over, and Owen was emergency backup Weatherman in case I went mad with jealousy and started a Weather War with Liz and we ended up destroying each other with giant tornadoes. Stuff like that is why you should never, ever listen to Liz.

Lesson one: how the weather works.

The skies are crowded. Honestly, they're just packed.

We call them the elementals, because they're, well, elements. They live in the sky and make the weather, and the things they do affect stuff like temperature and moisture and air pressure and who knows what else? (Hint:
I'm
supposed to know what else.) And when they clump together you get wind and rain and snow and heat and frost and fog and monsoons and squalls and everything else that is, you know, weather.

The big ol' sun does most of the work, heating things up and letting things cool, while elementals run around, doing their thing—mixing it up, making the weather,
being
the weather.

The winds that roar through our upper atmosphere you would not believe. Powering through the stratosphere, around the poles and across the tropics. Those winds used to be everywhere. Some could freeze you solid. Some could roast you in a flash. Some were full of dust that could strip you to the bone, and some were full of rain so hard and heavy that it could flatten you to a strip. Mostly you stayed in your cave and you didn't go out much. If you were lucky, the weather wouldn't scour everything edible off the face of the Earth while you were in there.

We were all going to die. All of us. Everything. There would have been a planet of nothing but rock and dust and water for the elementals to play with till the sun went nova.

Whoever the first Weatherman was, he (or she, Liz would say here) somehow saw the elementals and reached out to them and touched them and tried to talk to them—even though elementals don't talk, any more than the microbes in your bodies talk. But somehow that Weatherman pushed them together, made them cooperate—more and more of them clumping together, working together, until finally they became complex creatures that could take control. And the Weatherman could speak to it—and it could listen.

That first lonely, lost, amazing genius of a Weatherman saved us all. We owe that person everything. We have no idea who he was.

There were four of these creatures. We call them Seasons. Don't try to understand them. They're too big and powerful and alien, and they don't care about us. Except for one thing. Without that first Weatherman, they would not exist, and so they kind of owe us, and they pay us back every day by NOT sweeping us into the air and sending us flying around the top of the world for all eternity.

The Weathermen at the four corners of the world regulate the Seasons, ushering them through the Doorways, allowing the Seasons to change at the right times around the world, ensuring the weather doesn't spiral out of control and destroy us all. The Seasons don't just pass through the Doorways, they pass through the Weathermen, becoming part of them. Weathermen have the special and terrible power of last resort to bring a Season back into them and become that Season in all its might. It's supposed to be a safeguard in case a Season goes crazy and forgets the agreement, or against a truly planet-threatening threat. To use that power is a crime, no matter how justified, and the person who uses it can no longer be Weatherman and will probably be dead. The last time it happened the four Seasons came from the four quarters of the world to judge the Weatherman, and they were so disgusted and enraged they exiled him from the Earth. I think his body is still up there, in orbit somewhere between here and the moon.

The Seasons don't like it when anyone interferes with the weather at all, which is why the Weathermen almost never do, even though they can. Except when things get weird. It's Weatherman's work to wrestle Weird Weather, and though I was not the weather wrestler I was the weather wrestler's son and I'd have to wrestle weather until the weather wrestling's done.

The skies were crowded, so I felt my way into the crowd. I rose up through the top of my head, seeing my body standing next to Dad on the path below. I floated away from the house, out over the trees and the hill to Loch Farny and the farm beside it. Low over the lake, practically on top of it, I saw a heavy black cloud—the sort that's only supposed to form under certain conditions at certain times of the year. Not here and not now. I could hear Dad's voice beside me, guiding me. I could see down, down, down into the microscopic world where elementals were swarming and rushing. Wherever they went the wind blew, snow formed, clouds billowed, air froze. All those tiny things were joining together, building and swirling, working to make a cloud full of snow. I reached out to them. Dad showed me how. I touched them and changed them, I turned them and broke them up and sent them away.

Back you go to where you should be,
I told them.

The cloud broke and the elementals scattered and the temperature rose. Something under the lake wailed and groaned, so faint and far away I might have dreamed it, but this wasn't dreaming.

“Dad,” I said, sick and horrified for reasons I didn't understand. “Dad, there's something under the lake.”

“It's OK,” he said. “Come back now.”

There was a rush and a sound like the flapping of wings, and I was back in my own body again.

“Dad,” I began.

“Don't worry about it,” Dad said. “I'll take care of it.”

“Wow!” said a voice from behind us, and we whirled around to see Ed Wharton grinning at us from the open door. “Heightened sensory perception, extraphysical projection of consciousness, and fine-particle manipulation. I knew it!”

“Now, look here, Mr. Wharton,” Dad said.

“Call me Ed!” he boomed. “So which one of you is the Weatherman?”

 

CHAPTER 4

LIZ

I leaped the ditch and ran along the tree trunk that had fallen across the wire fence years before. The trees swallowed me up, and I was safe and hidden. The woods are about a half a mile wide and a mile and a half long. There's a wide path for walkers that runs down the middle, but we mostly stayed off that and roamed and quested and fought through the twisty small paths and tracks, the hidden hollows full of ivy and ferns and the broken mossy walls.

Behind me the Tourist was bent over trying to gather up his stuff, and I heard the door open and the others come out. I knew I'd get into trouble for not staying to help him, but I was mad at him for sneaking up on me and mad at myself for being snuck up on. Nobody should be able to sneak up and startle a Shieldsman like that.

Neil and me, we used to play in the woods a lot. I'd be a Shieldsman and fight battles and defeat enemy armies and ninjas and monsters. He'd be the Weatherman and cast spells and fight witches and wizards and warlocks. We didn't play much anymore. Sometimes Owen would come into the woods with me but he was too little and annoying to be any good at those games.

Neil didn't think being the Weatherman was a game anymore. Well, neither was being a Shieldsman. He had his job to do. I had mine. All the Shieldsmen had vanished hundreds of years ago and the Weathermen's Club was nearly gone—the members blaming Dad for it, too, telling lies and things. So to heck with them. It was up to me and Neil now.

I was just crossing the big path when I heard footsteps coming down the hill.

The woods ran from the road to the big path, then up from the big path to the crown of the hill, and on the crown of the hill was a tall old wall. On the other side of the wall was enemy territory where we could not go. That was where the Fitzgeralds lived, on the shore of Loch Farny, in the house they stole from my grandfather. When you heard someone coming down from there it usually meant Hugh Fitzgerald was riding forth to do evil. It was not a good idea to meet Hugh Fitzgerald.