The Maloneys' Magical Weatherbox Read online

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  To my dear friend Kasey, as well as her Mom and Pop, Joan and Dave, and all their friends and neighbors and relatives who are as kind and hospitable a bunch o’ folk as you could hope to meet anywhere, let alone the wilds of Connecticut.

  PART 1

  The Maloneys’ Legendary B&B

  CHAPTER 1

  NEIL

  There’s Mum and Dad and me and Liz, my younger sister—who’s mad and dangerous so watch out—and our little brother, Owen, who’s as soft as wet soap and needs looking out for. We’re the Maloneys, and once upon a time we lived together in a house in the middle of Ireland—the bit they call the Midlands in case anyone gets confused about which part of the country they’re living in and to remind them that they’re not actually in any danger of falling into the sea. The house was called Maloneys’ Bed and Breakfast, and there were always people staying with us, and Mum was always using us like slaves and servants, cruelly making us do jobs like cleaning up and sweeping the floor and changing the sheets and filling the dishwasher.

  Summer was the busiest. We’d get tourists driving or biking or hiking around the country. A lot of them didn’t speak English. Mostly they were nice, friendly people, and sometimes they had kids who would stay a few days and we’d make friends for a while. Then they’d go away and we’d never see them again, which was kind of sad. Sometimes we promised to write, but we never did.

  “Back to being the Lonely Maloneys,” Liz would say, and run off into the woods or climb up onto the roof or do a strange dance in the middle of the lawn.

  Mum was in charge of the bed and breakfast, doing the booking and the cooking and some of the cleaning, except for most of it, which her slaves had to do for her.

  Our dad was the Weatherman. Our dad was one of the Most Important People in the World.

  That was one of our secrets.

  Here’s another …

  Outside the B&B there was an old-fashioned wooden phone box, the sort nobody uses anymore. We called it the Weatherbox. The phone inside rang only four times a year and only my dad answered it. When he did, something amazing happened: the Season changed. The old Season left, and the new Season came through the phone and went to work making things warmer or colder or wetter or drier or whatever it wanted to do.

  There are only four special places with four special people like this in all the world. There’s the hollow of an ancient tree. There’s a deep underground chamber. There’s the summit of a holy mountain. And there was our Weatherbox.

  When Summer arrived that year, the last year Summer arrived, everything seemed fine. Everything seemed normal. We walked, all together in the early morning, down from the house to the gate, rubbing sleep from our eyes. Owen held mum’s hand tight, and Liz was doing her weird dancing and her weird chanting. She used to get me to do the dancing and the chanting with her, but I don’t do that anymore.

  The sky got brighter. The stars and the planets all faded away, and there was a tiny sliver of moon lying on its back like God’s coat hook. Mum put the thick blanket down on the wall. We sat on it and draped it over our shoulders to keep out the chill, and we waited, and we watched the Weatherbox grow solid and real as the morning light spread around us. Molten gold began to flow into the sky behind the house. The few cottony clouds were glowing. An airplane laid a snail’s trail of white vapor across the rim of the sky, and the twin white lines were like a welcome mat laid out for the sun.

  We waited, and we watched, and when the tip of the sun rose above the horizon and the light touched the words carved above the door of the Weatherbox, the phone began to ring.

  Dad, the Weatherman, opened the door. It swung easily, heavily on its hinges, while large springs at the top and bottom tried to pull it closed again. Dad stepped inside and let the door shut, and we heard the ringing stop as he picked up the phone and put it to his ear. It was hard to see through the small square panes of glass into the darkness of the box, but Dad seemed to change. For a moment he became something else.

  I don’t remember ever really seeing what happened, not clearly. What I remember is the smell. Summer came pouring from the box, and it was …

  the sweetness of flowers …

  and fruits …

  and warm sand …

  and deep waters …

  and cut grass …

  and insects buzzing …

  and birdsong …

  and endless days …

  and hot sun …

  and cool showers.

  I laughed and danced and sang, and Mum and Liz and Owen laughed and danced and sang with me. It was the most perfect, beautiful magic.

  Then we went in for breakfast. We had pancakes, as usual, and after that we had a Summer. We didn’t know it was going to be the last one before everything went wrong. We didn’t even begin to know until the Tourist arrived, the day before the Autumn.

  CHAPTER 2

  LIZ

  It was me that met the Tourist first. It was me that saw the hags first, too, and the bog beast, though Owen was with me at the time.

  The Day of the Tourist, which was when it all started, was bright and warm and sunny—September twenty-first. I decided I was a hawk and climbed up the wall and up the tree and up the drainpipe until I was perched on the roof beside the chimney. There was no breeze. No birds flying or singing. Sometimes a car went past. Sometimes I ruffled my feathers and flapped my wings, ready to spring into the air and fly.

  It had been a Summer of extremely Weird Weather, so I had decided to be particularly alert coming up to the day the new Season was to arrive. Dad told us that there’d been Weird Weather every couple of years since he and Granddad moved from the farm, but this Summer had been pure hectic. Not a week had gone by without Weird Weather breaking out all over us. In June we had hailstones the size of golf balls. Umbrellas were useless so Dad made us wooden shields that we held over our heads while we pelted like rabbits to and from the house. In July we had multicolored rain—starting with black, then red, then green, then yellow, and then flippin’ purple! It was from all different types of dust and sand and mud and muck being swept up by winds, mixed in with the moisture, carried through the atmosphere, and then falling in the raindrops all over our house and garden. Purple precipitation, Dad called it.

  Dad was usually able to cut the Weird Weather short fairly sharpish, no bother, except he always found fogs tricky, which was why we spent three weeks in August under a white block of fog. It was like being blind, and everything sounded funny, but the fog itself stretched only about fifty yards in each direction.

  “So what the heck’s going on, Dad?’ we asked him.

  And Dad furrowed his brow and chewed his lip and didn’t answer.

  Anyway, there was no sign of any Weird Weather trying to sneak up on us that afternoon, so I decided to stop being a hawk, climb down off the roof, and go patrol the woods.

  L
ong ago, I’d made up my mind that I was going to be a Shieldsman when I grew up. It’s the Shieldsmen’s job to protect the Weatherman. Way back in the days when the Doorway was protected by a fort that stood beside where Loch Farny is now, that was where the Weatherman, the Shieldsmen, and the Weathermages all lived together for hundreds of years until the Weatherman threw them out, knocked down the fort, and built a farm because things like guns and cannons had made forts next to useless.

  “Go hide,” the Weatherman told the Shieldsmen and the Weathermages. “Do your duty, but be quiet about it.”

  And they did. Some people may have decided the farm would make a nice prize and tried to attack, but they never reached it. Bandits, rebels, redcoats: none of them so much as set foot on the hill. They all went into the bogs and the woods and the glens, and they never came out.

  After a few hundred years, however, the Weathermages got tired of hiding in ditches, wandering the roads, fighting nasty, sneaky battles, and chasing the rich and powerful to recruit them or warn them off. They left the Shieldsmen to do the dirty work and decided they preferred to protect the Weatherman from the luxury and comfort of somewhere warm and dry, where the rich and powerful could come to them, and rebels, bandits, and redcoats were unpleasant rumors that occasionally disrupted the traffic and startled the servants. They opened an extremely exclusive and snooty gentlemen’s club in Dublin, the Weathermen’s Club. Its members were rich and powerful secret Weathermages, and they had rich and powerful friends in politics and business and the military. Everything the club did was designed to hide what went on in one small farm in the Midlands.

  And so the Doorway—where each Season comes through—was well protected from everything. Well, nearly everything.

  Dad was the Weatherman now, and Neil was going to be Weatherman one day. I couldn’t be the Weatherman because I hadn’t been born first. If I had been born first I still couldn’t be the Weatherman because I’m a girl. They told me there had never been a girl Weatherman. I told them I thought they were wrong and that hundreds and hundreds of years ago someone decided they didn’t like girls being in charge of anything, so they made up a rule saying only boys could be Weathermen and pretended that it had always been that way. Dad said this was a conspiracy theory, but I pointed out how much effort boys put into making sure girls aren’t in charge, or, if they are in charge, pretending they weren’t all through history. Dad just said, “Hmmm.”

  So, I was going to be a Shieldsman. But the Shieldsmen were all gone so I was learning how all by myself.

  I went into the house and got my bow and my arrows and went down the path and through the front gate, testing the string on my bow and making sure the feathers in my hair weren’t going to fall out. It’s moments like that, when you’re distracted by small things, that the unexpected sneaks up on you …

  “That’s a very nice bow,” someone said.

  I jumped and dropped the bow, both of which are unforgiveable for a Shieldsman. The man was big and wide, wearing faded jeans and a big checked shirt, which were full of his fat and his muscle, and he had a huge dark beard that exploded from his face in all directions like a clump of wild moss. As I looked up at him, he seemed to fill the sky, while under the beard was an apologetic smile and eager eyes.

  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 shif
ting 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.