The Maloneys' Magical Weatherbox Read Online Free PDF Page B

blood there, between us all.
    Before the Seasons started arriving through our phone box, they used to come through a well on what was once my grandfather’s farm. Tobar Farny, the well was called—the Well of Rain—a pool of sweet, pure water that lay under a few limestone boulders in the middle of a field. That field and that well had been in my family for thousands of years. That well was one of the four corners of the world. Then Hugh’s lousy dad, John-Joe Fitzgerald, persuaded my grandfather to invest in a new pub. My grandfather had no interest in pubs or investments, but John-Joe had befriended Granddad after Granny died and he begged Granddad to get the money for him. And Granddad, being a good friend, took out a mortgage against his farm.
    There was no pub. The money vanished. Granddad could not manage the repayments. In his pride and shame, he never asked the Weathermen’s Club for help. Everything happened with sickening speed.
    The bank took Granddad’s farm, put it up for sale, and it was bought for a song by John-Joe. Granddad and Dad were kicked out. John-Joe and his young wife moved in.
    John-Joe drove a hired digger across his new field while his wife watched. When he reached the pool, he extended the arm of the digger and began gouging great chunks of earth out from under the boulders. That was when the water began to flow. A few hours later, Fitzy was left sitting on the roof of the digger, calling for help, surrounded by the waters of a brand-new lake. Loch Farny, they call it now—the Lake of Rain.
    I went over the wall and down the hill to the edge of the trees in a white-hot fury. It was a fight I couldn’t win, but that wasn’t the point. Even if you lose a fight, you can do enough damage to make the other person sorry they started it and not likely to start another—if you’re in the right mood.
    There was the field and the lake and the farm, all pretty as a picture, the digger long gone. I stared at the lake for a long, slow moment. It was small, round, and not very deep. Nothing moved on the water.
    There was no sign of Hugh. Flippin’ Hugh—he wanted me here, didn’t he? This was his idea of a clever trap? The best idea that moron could come up with! Well, here I was and—typical Hugh—he was too stupid to turn up for his own ambush!
    I waited. My breathing slowed. My roaring, growling, snarling voice grew quiet, and my small, worried, sensible voice began asking what the heck I was doing here. Even thinking of my poor little sister and her stings and cuts didn’t make me angry again, just sad. I knew me fighting Hugh wouldn’t make her feel one little bit better.
    Somewhere between the angry thoughts getting quieter and the worried thoughts getting louder, I began to hear a voice that wasn’t mine—thin and faint, wordless and sad, desperate and lonely—calling for help. I left the trees and crossed the field to the edge of the lake. The voice grew louder. I couldn’t help myself. I took off my shoes and socks, stripped down to my underpants, and waded into the lake.
    Everything that happened next might as well have been happening to someone else because I felt as if I was watching it all from a long way away. I dived under the water and started to swim.
    I swam down, down, down. The water was clear as crystal, though there wasn’t much to see—just flat mud and scraps of weed and, toward the center, a pile of stones, even and regular like a cairn on a mountaintop, coated in slime and mud. There was a gap like a door, all black and shadowy, and in that door was a hand, reaching for me. The voice was growing louder all the time.
    Without thinking, I reached out as if to shake hands. It was a funny-looking hand, thin and gray—more like the end of a branch of a tree at twilight—but it closed around mine like a living hand and held me tight.
    The moment the hand touched mine, everything changed. It