Milo and the Pirate Sisters Read online

  REVIEWS OF MILO AND ONE DEAD ANGRY DRUID

  ‘Gripping stuff for age eight-plus and its lively style makes it a good bet with reluctant readers.’

  Evening Echo

  ‘Brilliantly written with clever humour and twists and turns.’

  Woman’s Way

  ‘Exciting supernatural adventure … great humour, pace and cliffhangers that will keep young readers turning the pages and looking forward to more in the series.’

  Children’s Books Ireland Recommended Reads Guide 2013

  For Conor and Marcella

  Thanks to my excellent editor, Susan Houlden,

  and to my husband, Emmet, for his patient input and suggestions.

  CONTENTS

  Reviews

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1 Bad News

  2 Wedge and Crunch

  3 Wonky Trolley

  4 A View from the Bridge

  5 Wedge and Crunch Again

  6 Up the Eerie Stairs

  7 Miss Lee is Annoyed

  8 The Bees

  9 Help from Big Ella

  10 Who Trashed the Room?

  11 Miss Lee’s Story

  12 Looking for Mister Lewis

  13 Milo’s Plan

  14 Sleepover

  15 Gatecrashers

  16 Raggedy Hags

  17 Shane Plays a Tune

  18 The Ghostling

  19 A Garda Visit

  20 Stars of the Future

  21 Big Ella’s Plan

  22 A Surprise Visitor

  23 An Unexpected Training Session

  24 Big Ella into Action

  25 Crisis Meeting

  26 Up for the Match

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Other Books

  CHAPTER ONE

  BAD NEWS

  ‘Rain, Milo,’ Shane groaned, pulling his football shorts out of his sports bag and putting them over his head. ‘What awful thing did the ancient Irish people do to this country to turn it into a giant loo that’s always flushing?’

  ‘That’s gross,’ I said, jumping over a puddle and landing on one foot in the middle of it. ‘But,’ I added defensively, ‘it’s the rain that makes Ireland so green. People come from all over the world to see the amazing scenery.’

  ‘Greenery me eye,’ Shane laughed as he jumped in the same puddle and splashed my other leg. ‘Whoever planned the earth must have been so fed up by the time they got to Ireland that they just dumped all the leftover dirty rain clouds here and then scarpered.’

  That so annoyed me, but I couldn’t think of any brilliant words because I was focusing on my squelchy wet feet.

  We were heading home from football training. It’s not that we’re hoping to be soccer trillionaires, it’s just that we figure it makes us look kinda macho. We steer clear of the ball and the mad guys who steamroll after it. Best of all, it gets us out of boring chores at home.

  ‘Think of it, Milo,’ Shane went on, holding out a hand to catch raindrops. ‘Gran told me that when we lived in Africa when I was a baby, people had to walk miles for water. They still do. Wouldn’t it be great if we could invent something that would whoosh buckets of those watery clouds over to Africa and sweep months of sunshine back here?’

  I stopped and looked at him, the legs of his football shorts flapping over his head like elephant ears and the raindrops bouncing on his coffee-coloured face.

  ‘What are you laughing at?’ he scowled.

  ‘You, of course! Come on, we’ll nip through the castle side-gate and have a hot chocolate with Mister Lewis.’

  ‘Smart thinking, Milo.’ Shane’s scowl changed to a grin and he patted his fat tum.

  Our good friend Mister Lewis once lived in Shane’s old house until he died. That was over a hundred years ago, when he had a fatal run-in with a very unpleasant character. Now, as a sort of half-ghost, Mister Lewis was living in the derelict tower that’s across the courtyard from the town castle. When Shane pushed open the creaky door, there was a very scary screeching sound, followed by loud wailing that echoed eerily down the winding stairs.

  ‘It’s only me and Shane,’ I shouted up.

  ‘Ah,’ the voice changed to normal. ‘Come on up, lads. Mind the holes on the stairs.’

  Not that we needed his warning; we were well used to going up those stairs to the very top where no one ever ventured because it was rumoured that it was haunted. Which was true, of course. Mister Lewis can do a really mean, gurgling death rattle that would scare the toughest trespassers.

  He was already putting on the woolly gloves that Shane’s granny, Big Ella, had given him. Being a halfway sort of ghost, you see, his hands would just go through things if he didn’t wear the gloves. As usual, his putty-coloured face lit up when we opened the door. He had already lit the little gas ring Big Ella had given him along with some Bart Simpson mugs. She insisted that, ghost or no ghost, he must have at least a warm drink inside him.

  ‘Score any goals, lads?’ he asked as he stirred drinking chocolate into the heating milk and then added a spoonful of honey from the friendly bees that had settled up in the rafters.

  ‘Nearly,’ said Shane. ‘Just missed the post.’

  ‘That’s because you were at the wrong goalpost,’ I laughed.

  Strangely, Mister Lewis didn’t laugh like he always does when we tell him fun stuff. He just sighed as he poured the hot chocolate from Big Ella’s saucepan into the mugs and handed them to us. We sat down on her squishy scatter cushions.

  ‘Ah,’ Mister Lewis sighed again, easing himself carefully onto the biggest one. ‘What a lucky old ghost I am. I have had every comfort up here in my tower and, most of all, I have two very good friends.’ Then there was another sigh. Was the hot chocolate oozing into his brain and making him go soft in the head?

  ‘You’re talking a bit weird, Mister Lewis,’ said Shane. ‘Your mouth is down and your eyes are foggy.’

  ‘Shane’s right,’ I added. ‘And you’re talking in the past tense, like “had” instead of “have”. You’re not …’ I gulped. ‘You’re not dying or anything, are you?’

  ‘He’s always been dead, you dope,’ whispered Shane. ‘At least for as long as we’ve known him.’

  Mister Lewis waved his hand around the room that Big Ella, Shane and myself had made cosy for him. We had even found him a statue of a ginger cat in a skip. Shane said that old people like cats – especially ones that sit still and don’t wee or cough up furballs.

  ‘My lovely home,’ Mister Lewis whispered. ‘I heard the castle authorities mooching around downstairs yesterday. They were discussing a makeover for the tower.’ He stopped and took a big, spooky breath. ‘They’re going to strip the tower and do it up to make it part of the whole castle complex.’

  ‘No way!’ Shane exploded.

  ‘For real?’ I put in.

  ‘Afraid so,’ Mister Lewis sighed. ‘I must move out before they start work on it the day after tomorrow.’

  ‘That means—?’ I began.

  ‘It means, my dear, good friends, that I shall be homeless.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  WEDGE AND CRUNCH

  ‘What will we do, Milo?’ Shane asked on our way home from school next day. ‘Poor dead man with no home. Couldn’t he hide at your place?’

  I stopped and looked at him. ‘Are you serious? My mum would freak out and run screaming down the road in her pyjamas, and my dad would sling him in jail for scaring folks with his corpse-coloured face and creepy old hat. Couldn’t he live with you and Big Ella? After all, she knows him well and she isn’t spooked.’

  Shane’s lip curled downwards. ‘We’ve only two bedrooms,’ he muttered.
/>   ‘You could share,’ I put in. ‘He could sleep under your bed.’

  ‘No way,’ snapped Shane. ‘All my precious stuff is under there.’

  ‘Like what?’ I asked.

  ‘Old stuff,’ he muttered.

  ‘What old stuff, Shane?’

  ‘Just stuff, OK?’ he grumped.

  ‘Your old toys?’ I laughed. ‘It’s where you keep your old toys!’

  ‘Mind your own business,’ Shane muttered and headed off down the road like a gigantic soccer ball in motion. I watched him for a few moments. This wasn’t right. Good pals shouldn’t be like this. But before I could call him, two familiar guys came around the bend. I groaned out loud. They were our old enemies, Wedge and Crunch from sixth class – like, whenever they actually came to school. Wedge grabbed Shane’s jacket and Crunch was already searching the pockets. Well, you don’t stand around and watch your best mate being mauled by a couple of low-lifes. So I ran to help him.

  ‘Hey!’ I shouted – well, to be honest, it was really more of a shaky croak. ‘You guys leave my buddy alone.’ I nearly added ‘please’, but they would just laugh. These two guys don’t do polite.

  ‘Ha,’ grinned Wedge. ‘The skinny weasel has come to rescue his roly-poly pal.’

  ‘Aww,’ sneered Crunch as he grabbed my jacket and pulled me so close to his skinny nose I could see snot getting ready to dribble.

  ‘Hey,’ he laughed. ‘Ain’t you the little gentleman?’

  ‘Hey,’ said another voice, a voice we knew so well – Mister Lewis! He came around the corner wheeling a supermarket trolley, filled high with his stuff. On top of the lot was a large, decorative paper bag.

  ‘Good day to you, boys,’ he said. ‘Having a nice chat together?’

  ‘None of your business, old man,’ sneered Wedge.

  ‘What’s in the fancy bag?’ asked Crunch, reaching towards it.

  ‘I don’t think you should touch …’ began Mister Lewis. Before he could finish, Crunch snatched the bag, laughing as he ran down the road shaking it.

  ‘Wait for me!’ shouted Wedge, running after his greedy mate.

  Mister Lewis shook his head. ‘Oh dear,’ he whispered.

  The screams came first, followed by a blurry cloud of bees that buzzed angrily over Wedge and Crunch – mostly Crunch, because Wedge had pulled his hoodie over his head. They turned and ran back towards us, flapping their hands and shouting at Mister Lewis for help as they passed.

  ‘But what about your bees, Mister Lewis?’ asked Shane. ‘Those guys will stamp them into the ground!’

  ‘Not at all, boy,’ said Mister Lewis. ‘My buzzing friends will come back to me when I get to our new dwelling place.’

  ‘Where?’ I asked. ‘The castle is out of bounds now, and there are no other places where a ghost could live.’

  Mister Lewis stopped and tapped his nose (gently, because bits fall off if he’s not careful). ‘Well,’ he began, ‘thanks to an old history of the town that I found on one of my nightly visits to the castle library, I think I have found the solution to my, eh, situation. I hope both of you, my two best friends – indeed, along with Big Ella, you are my only living friends – will help me. It’s not very far.’

  ‘Of course we will,’ we said together.

  ‘We’ll give you any help we can,’ I said.

  ‘Any help at all,’ added Shane, just to get in the last word.

  CHAPTER THREE

  WONKY TROLLEY

  ‘Where did you get the trolley?’ asked Shane, as we walked towards the town.

  ‘I borrowed it,’ Mister Lewis chuckled.

  ‘You nicked it?’ I exclaimed. ‘If you’re caught—!’

  ‘Oh, I won’t be caught,’ he said. ‘But you boys make sure you’re not caught.’

  ‘Us?’ put in Shane. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, you have offered to help,’ said Mister Lewis.

  ‘Why can’t you just go invisible and push the trolley?’ I asked.

  ‘How do you think that would look, Milo?’ Mister Lewis went on. ‘A full trolley steering its way through the town all by itself?’

  Well, he had a point. There was no answer to that.

  ‘So will you help me, boys? We’re close to town and I have to go invisible in case old ladies faint or cars crash, or my nose wobbles or I accidentally waft off the ground, or—’

  ‘All right, Mister Lewis,’ I interrupted. ‘We’ll do it. But you’d better stick around.’

  ‘No worries,’ said Mister Lewis.

  ‘I wish I could go invisible too,’ Shane whispered. ‘Especially if someone squeals to Big Ella that I was up to no good with a supermarket trolley full of stuff.’

  ‘What about me?’ I hissed into Shane’s ear.

  You see, my dad is a Garda. Imagine having to haul your own son before some judge with a face like broken granite. My dad says judges have to have granite faces before they can qualify to wear those woolly wigs made from sheep’s ringlets.

  So Mister Lewis did go invisible, which made good sense: how would me and Shane explain why we were walking along the busy street with a waxy-faced man wearing a long, dusty old coat and crooked hat, wheeling a supermarket trolley full of junk? The only scare was when we took a short-cut past the old abandoned knickers factory. The wee-waw of a speeding Garda car caused me and Shane to duck, but luckily my dad wasn’t in it – the Garda car, I mean, not the knickers factory. When we’d left the town, Mister Lewis appeared again, sitting on top of the stuff in the trolley. He yawned and stretched his skinny arms.

  ‘Ah, that was a grand sleep. Thanks, lads.’

  ‘You mean we’ve been pushing you all the way?’ spluttered Shane. ‘Cheek!’

  ‘But I weigh nothing at all,’ laughed Mister Lewis as he wafted off the trolley.

  ‘Cool,’ Shane laughed. ‘I wish I could weigh nothing at all.’

  ‘And miss Big Ella’s awesome cakes and buns?’ I put in.

  Shane patted his roundy tummy. ‘Hmm. Maybe not,’ he grinned.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE

  Beyond the town, we stopped just before the bridge across the river.

  ‘Here we are,’ said Mister Lewis.

  ‘Is this it?’ asked Shane. ‘You’re going to live in the river? I know you’re a kinda ghost, Mister Lewis, but you shouldn’t need to live with fishes.’

  ‘Fishes, Shane? Look over there,’ Mister Lewis went on, pointing farther up the river.

  ‘The old mill? I exclaimed. ‘It’s a bit …’ I couldn’t think of a single comforting word.

  ‘It’s a dump.’ Trust Shane to be upfront about it. ‘A total dump, Mister Lewis. And scary,’ he added. ‘Nobody goes there, ever.’

  He was right. From here the mill looked derelict. The big wheel was falling apart and there were slates missing from the roof.

  Mister Lewis sighed and shook his head. ‘This was built after my, eh, sudden death,’ he said. ‘How very strange that it’s already in ruins. Mills were built to last a long time. I saw it for the first time only yesterday. See, it has decent walls and some of the roof looks quite OK.’

  ‘Did you go inside?’ I asked.

  ‘No, Milo,’ he replied. ‘I figured that if the outside is sound, the inside will be dry. And the scenery is quite picturesque,’ he went on, pointing to the distant trees and a bunch of horses munching grass in a field.

  ‘Yeah, all very pretty if it was a picture hanging on a wall, Mister Lewis,’ I said. ‘But as a place to live in? No way.’

  ‘It will do, Milo,’ he sighed. ‘At least I’ll have a roof of some sort over my head.’

  ‘And hopefully over your toes,’ said Shane. ‘Big Ella goes mental about wet feet. It’s to do with when we lived in Africa. She says people can get deadly diseases from dirty water.’

  ‘I haven’t actually seen my feet for well over a hundred years,’ laughed Mister Lewis.

  ‘That’s gross,’ I said. ‘Don’t they smell?’r />
  ‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘I’ve never had a reason to take off my boots – even if I could bend down that far.’

  ‘You mean you haven’t washed your feet since you died?’ I exclaimed.

  ‘Well, I hate having a bath too,’ Shane put in. ‘No matter what way I sit I nearly always get stuck. They make baths far too small,’ he grunted.

  ‘And perhaps they make crisps and chocolate far too big,’ said Mister Lewis.

  We all laughed at that.

  We pushed the trolley down the road towards the bridge.

  Mister Lewis stopped halfway across. ‘See, boys,’ he said, ‘the mill’s not so bad, looking at it from here. Some of those windows are not even broken.’

  When we went along the track through the field towards the mill, Mister Lewis had to stop and sit down beside the trolley. ‘I’m pooped,’ he wheezed. ‘Just give me a minute to crank up the old lungs.’

  Shane and I ran over to where there were horses corralled and climbed onto the wooden gate. We were totally thrilled when the horses galloped over to us and let us pat their noses and ruffle their manes.

  ‘This is so cool, Milo,’ laughed Shane. ‘I’ve never touched a horse’s nose before. It feels like velvet.’

  We patted each of them in turn as they jumped in front of one another to get our attention.

  ‘This must be what a king feels like when his subjects dance all around him.’ Shane beamed. ‘I’d like to be a king. Where could you learn how to be a king, Milo?’

  I laughed and shook my head. Sometimes Shane has the most amazingly mad ideas.

  ‘Mister Lewis,’ he called out, ‘come and see the horses. They’re so tame and friendly and their noses are made of velvet.’

  Mister Lewis eased himself up and half walked and half wafted over. When he leaned on the gate, the strangest, creepiest thing happened. All the horses backed away in a sort of stomping panic. They jostled one another to get as far away as possible. Their shrill, screechy screams were so loud that we had to put our hands over our ears. They thundered away across the field, still snorting and kicking up grass and mud.