The Maloneys' Magical Weatherbox (23 page)

I tried, but I couldn't stop the elementals. They were closed off from me, slaves to Hugh through his mother and the Baby Season. I needed elementals of my own, but the idea of enslaving them to do my bidding was revolting. And, anyway, I already had a loyal, free, magical army. I just needed to trust, keep my head down, and give them a helping hand.

Weisz, the eagle, rallying after the ice nails, opened his beak, and a streak of lightning shot out and blew an elemental away. A Shieldsmen-wolf howled like the north wind and a gale sent an elemental spinning into the sky. The fly buzzed and a torrent of rain flattened another into a muddy pool. The seagull snapped her wings and a roll of thunder like a cannonball shattered a wall of ice. The Shieldsmen closed in on the remaining elementals, and Hazel pulled my hand.

I fell back into my head, dizzy and a bit sick. She dragged me across the path and into the trees, up toward the crown of the hill.

Trees around us were creaking and bending and shaking. Billows of thick fog blew past us and around us. Hailstones as big as my fist hammered down on our backs and our legs and heads, leaving bruises, drawing blood.

“It's such a pity you can't fly,” the girl hag said. We were breathing hard and aching from head to foot.

“You can fly, can't you?” I said between gasps. “Maybe you could give me a lift?”

“Not anymore,” she said. “I can't do anything anymore. Sorry.”

“Don't be,” I said. “When all this is over, I'm going to get you a pair of shoes. Flying's all well and good, but when it comes to walking you can't beat a pair of shoes.”

We left the fight behind. The world got quieter and less violent and things stopped falling out of the sky and hurting us, though we could still hear the sizzling and crackling and roaring down below. We reached the wall and climbed over it, and I saw that Hazel's bare feet were cut and bruised and muddy.

I turned my back toward her. “Get up,” I said.

“What?”

“Get up. Haven't you ever played piggyback?”

“Not in … a long time.”

“Come on, then. Before Hugh finds us.”

She climbed up on my back, and I carried her down through the strip of woodland above the farm. There was no sign of Hugh until we came to the edge of the trees. He was standing just beyond, in grass up to his waist, between us and the lake. Over the lake were the huge continents of clouds and light that were the angry Seasons.

The man on the radio had talked about downbursts and lightning and tornadoes, but apart from the occasional flicker, the undersides of the cloud columns did nothing but glower and boil, spreading around the edges into flat, sinister hazes. The Seasons were holding back, for now, but, if someone didn't sort out the Doorway soon, they might really lose their tempers and then we'd have that super-mega-terror-storm the other radio guy had been so excited about. Dad and Mrs. Fitzgerald were still up there, somewhere, lost in the vastness.

“Put her down,” Hugh said. “Your hippies have wrecked all my elementals, so I'm going to have to boil you alive myself.”

“Do you want to get down?” I asked Hazel.

“No,” she said. “I'm happy where I am.”

“OK,” I said. I stared at Hugh, and he stared back at me. Tiny elementals shimmered around us like a beaded curtain. The strip of grass that stretched from him to us was turning yellow. Hugh was heating the air between us, his elementals stoking it like a furnace. A flare of dry heat that wilted every living thing it touched struck us, and we curled like Autumn leaves, surrounded by a storm of wavering, dancing air. It was like being trapped in the middle of a desert mirage. When we breathed in, it was like swallowing red-hot balls of cotton wool wrapped in barbed wire. The grass was crisping, blackening, smoking.

My mind reaching out beyond the wall of heat, pulling elementals to me.

Cold,
I told them.
Cold, cold, cold.

My skin prickled as a layer of cool air settled around us, but the heat kept rising, and I felt it burning through the cool. Blinking in the shimmering haze, I could see that Hugh's shirt was soaked in sweat. He hadn't been very precise with his heat wave. He had caught himself in the wall of hot air meant for us. He was swaying on his feet, trying to dismiss the heat, but it was like a chain reaction, rising beyond his control, rising and roasting. He collapsed.

I put my head down and charged like a bull down the strip of smoking grass. The tip of a single blade glowed as an ember flared, and everything ignited at once. Flames exploded around us, eating everything they touched, sucking all the oxygen from the air, chasing us down the long strip of grass as we stomped toward Hugh. Even with our layer of cold turned to deep freeze I could feel the scorching heat of the firestorm as it bore down on us and I bore down on Hugh.

A fierce, sudden wind lifted the flames higher, roaring and whirling around and around, faster and faster, walls of speeding flame, twisting and turning.

My legs gave out, and I fell to my knees and slid down the last of the slope to where Hugh had curled up into a ball, hands clasped around his head, calling for his mum. I pushed the layer of cold elementals out to cover him, too.

Cold, cold, cold,
I told them.

Hazel's arms were wrapped tight around my neck, her face buried in my shoulder. We were gasping in air that seared our throats and lungs, utterly exhausted, half roasted—the three of us now at the bottom of a burning tornado. If my elementals got any colder we'd all die of frostbite.

I knew, in that moment, that we had seconds to live.

 

CHAPTER 26

LIZ

There's an amazing difference between being dry, or just a little bit damp, and being completely wet and getting wetter by the second. It's one thing when you're jumping into a swimming pool or taking a shower, and you're ready for it and all you have to do is get out, or turn it off and find a warm towel. It's another thing when you're fully dressed and you're in it from head to toe and getting deeper and deeper and you're not at all sure about getting out.

It was pitch black and it was filthy and it was freezing, and, in the first few seconds, or even minutes, I wasn't thinking about finding the Gray Thing or holding my breath or anything, I was just looking at the only things I could see, which were loads and loads of bubbles running fast in front of my face. I remembered something Mum had once told me about how, if I was underwater and I got turned until I wasn't sure which way was up and which was down, all I had to do was blow some bubbles from my mouth and the direction they went in would always be up. So I could tell which way was up, and I knew I had to go in the opposite direction.

I kicked my legs and moved my arms and turned and twisted until I was swimming down. I could feel the rope in my hand, or I thought I could, through the cold and the mud. All I had to do now was keep going down until I found the Baby Season. How hard could that be? It was a bog hole. Bog holes weren't that deep. Or were they?

I swam. Down and down. Or was it? I couldn't tell if I was moving at all. Maybe I was just floating in place. Maybe my legs were still sticking out of the surface of the bog hole and everyone was staring at them as they kicked and kicked and me with my head stuck in the mud. Any second now they would grab hold of me and pull me out.

No. I was going down, and the mud was getting thicker all around me. There were no bubbles now. I groped ahead, feeling for the Baby Season. Poor Baby Season, down here in the dark and the mud. At least it didn't have to breathe.

Thicker and thicker. Slimy and cold and sticky. I was clawing, digging, pulling myself down like a worm, burrowing deeper. I wriggled and pushed, blind, freezing, breath all gone, mud squeezing me tight—too tight to move. I was going to drown. I was going to die. I was going to open my mouth and try to breathe and all the mud would rush in and fill my lungs. I'd be stuck down here until they dug me up.

I pushed with everything I had. My hand was stretched out in front of me, and I felt something solid. I pushed again, my whole body shuddering, and it crumbled and broke and I fell through—into light and air.

Under me was a carpet of clouds. White mountains and gray valleys and deep pits that fell away to a far-off greenness. All around me was blue, bright and fierce and clear, and roaring with breath like endless laughter. Above me was dark where the air and the light ended.

I think I had fallen into the Baby Season's mind—into its memories.

*   *   *

And there, shining in the dark, was the burning life star that roars energy and light into the world—the shining mouth that sings everything into being. And I was part of the song, and the song was movement, always movement, forever rising and forever falling. A sky dance, the greatest of all dances, and as I danced the sky dance I forgot everything except the incredible joy of sky dancing. I rose with the warm air; fell with the cool. I turned in the wind and flew through a terrible, raging storm. I let it rage, then let it die. Clouds dissolved until there was clear still air, and I soared through the clear still air. There was no yesterday and no tomorrow, just this, until the cool air stirred and clouds appeared and began their long steady march, drifting a veil of rain beneath. And this was all there ever was or would be, just this fierce unending happiness until …

 … something took hold of my hand—took hold of it, or was I already holding it? I knew I could let it go and just be there forever, dancing joyfully in the light and dark, hot and cold, air and electricity, with the shining mouth singing to me and singing to everything. I wanted to dance forever. I wanted to let the hand go, but another hand closed around my arm and pulled me up into the dark where I felt I wasn't supposed to go—up where there was no air and only dead cold and the song couldn't be heard.

*   *   *

My mouth filled with mud.

I couldn't even choke or cough. I definitely couldn't breathe. My arm was being pulled from its socket and there was weight all around me. I knew I couldn't hold on to the hook and the rope for much longer. I just couldn't.

Gradually, the mud got thinner, turned into black water, and now I could cough it out of my throat and mouth, but I still couldn't breathe. I went limp as water filled me up. I wondered if they would send me back down. I wondered if they would be angry because I hadn't saved the Baby Season.

Then I was on my hands and knees in the middle of the bog hole, coughing water out of my mouth and trying to gasp in air. My throat was raw and my chest was on fire and there were hands holding me up and clapping me on the back. But the bog hole I had just swum to the bottom of now only came up to my elbows, even though I was sinking a little into the muck underneath.

It wasn't deep at all.

And I hadn't got the Baby Season.

Mum and Ed helped me crawl to the edge of the hole and sit with my head between my knees, more water streaming out of me and off me.

There must have been a branch or a tree down there that had caught around me somehow, or maybe it was the rope all tangled about me, but it was tight and heavy on my shoulders and my back. I tried to twist and shrug it off, but it wouldn't move.

“Help,” I said, hoarse and tired and soaked, freezing with the cold and ready to start crying in a minute from how horrible everything was. “Please, help.”

“Liz,” Mum said. “You did it.”

I blinked up at her. No, she was wrong. I hadn't done anything except … I remembered something to do with a song, a dance and flying forever and … For a moment I had been a Season. I had ruled the sky. Oh, my heart. My heart, it broke. I opened my mouth and moaned because I had lost it—the wild mad song and dance. “Oh, Mummy, Mummy, it's gone…” I wailed.

“Tell her to be quiet,” John-Joe said.

I didn't care. I didn't care that he was standing there on the other side of the bog hole with his shotgun and the AtmoLabbers kneeling in a row with their hands on their heads, and Owen and Ash huddled together beside them with Neetch crouched between. The loss hurt too much. Mum knelt and wiped my face and hushed me, and Ed on my other side took the rope and the hook out of my numb, shivering hand. He had to open my fist finger by finger, and underneath was another fist, and that's when I realized that there had been another hand closed around mine—a thin gray hand, and an arm lying along mine. I turned my head, and lying on my shoulder was the narrow little head of the Gray Thing. It was sitting on me, riding piggyback, wrapped around me.

“You did it,” Mum said again.

“Yeah,” John-Joe said. “You did it. And now you can go and put the flippin' thing back.”

 

CHAPTER 27

NEIL

The tiny bubble of cool air I was fighting to keep around us shrank and grew in time with my breathing. It was as if we'd been flung into one of those coal-fired boiler engines and were surviving by spitting on the coals to put them out. But they kept reigniting, and I was running out of spit. The air froze and melted, froze and melted, freezing a little less and melting a little more each time. It might have been easier if I hadn't made the bubble big enough to cover Hugh, too. Hazel had climbed down off my back and we crouched close together right over his moaning head, but even so, realistically, my bubble was going to die long before the fire did.

The first drops on my back were close to boiling, and they were big and thick and heavy enough to leave bruises. Then the rain came thicker and faster and colder and the smoke swept around with the flames, and then the flames were gone and the wind died and the rain hammered on as we coughed and hacked and wheezed and tears streamed down our faces.

The smoke parted around us and before us, bending up and away as two figures emerged from the swirling darkness together—Dad and Mrs. Fitzgerald.