Paul Durham - The Luck Uglies

“Stay here, Shady,” she said again and pointed a finger at him. “Don’t you dare wake up Lottie.”

Rye carefully closed the door and slipped behind her house. Their goat and hens were asleep in their pens. In the distance, the bogs came to life as vapour rose off the water like ghosts. Her mother wasn’t back there either.

Rye was about to climb the ladder to her pigeon coop to see if she had any messages. Rye and Folly had taught the pigeons to fly back and forth between their houses and sometimes they wrote messages and tied them to the birds’ feet. But something stopped her in her tracks. Her heart nearly jumped out of her chest. Someone was already on the roof.

She stepped off the bottom rung of the ladder and pressed herself against the side of the house. She looked up again. The figure was in a cloak like hers. It was her mother. She was staring at the forest Beyond the Shale. She was perfectly still. It was like she was watching … waiting for something.

Abby didn’t seem to see her. Rye held her breath as she tiptoed back towards the house, slow and easy. Then there was a loud, terrible sound. Rye jumped and looked for a place to hide. The sound was far away but not far enough. It was a cross between the shriek of a wild animal and the wail of a baby. She looked up. Her mother had heard it too. Abby leaned forward ever so slightly, looking through the mist, but remained in place.

The sound again. It felt like a thousand insects running up Rye’s spine. She scrambled inside as fast as she could and slammed the door behind her.

RYE AND QUINN sat on the split-rail fence in front of the O’Chanters’ house and watched the commotion on Mud Puddle Lane.

“Have you ever seen anything like it?” Rye asked, carefully wrapping her arms and legs round the rail.

“Not since they spotted that school of sharks in the river a few years back.”

The village had woken up that morning to find the streets filled with wild turkeys. Hundreds of them, at least six flocks, had come out of the bogs during the night. Mud Puddle Lane buzzed with villagers. Armed with nets and axes, some using only their bare hands, they chased the lumbering, feathered creatures up and down the roads and alleys. Nobody on Mud Puddle Lane was about to let a free meal run away.

The neighbourhood rooks perched on a cottage roof and watched in disapproval, almost as if they were embarrassed by the whole unseemly affair.

“Do you think anyone will catch one?” Quinn asked.

“I’d think someone will. Sooner or later,” Rye said. She flipped herself upside down, now dangling by her arms and legs from the fence like an exotic pet she’d once seen by the docks. The sailor who owned it called it a sloth.

“Shall we try?”

“My mother said not to bother. She left for The Willow’s Wares early this morning. Brought Lottie with her. She seemed a little distracted.”

Rye wondered how many nights her mother had spent sitting up on their roof. Had the terrible wail from the bogs rattled her the same way it had Rye? Rye found it easy enough to push the sound out of her head this morning, with the light of day and the routine of her regular chores, but her mother’s nervous energy and the commotion in the streets had her thinking about the eerie noise again.

“Did you hear anything strange outside last night?” Rye asked.

“With my father’s snoring?” Quinn said. “I can’t even hear the roosters crow. Why, did you?”

“I thought I heard something screaming. Or crying. Hard to say.”

“It wasn’t Lottie?”

“Not this time.”

One of Rye’s neighbours leaped for a turkey and fell chestfirst in the mud. The big, clumsy bird flapped its wings and landed on the man’s roof. Rye and Quinn laughed. Rye’s laughter broke her grip, her flailing legs found Quinn’s ribs, and they both crashed to the ground.

“Are you OK?” Quinn said, rubbing his side.

Rye rolled over and struggled to catch her breath. “Fine,” she wheezed.

They both looked at each other, then back to the turkey chasers, and began laughing again.

Rye’s laughter trailed off as she considered what might have inspired the turkeys to leave the bogs and take their chances with the villagers’ carving forks.

“They’re hopeless,” Quinn said. “Let’s go and read – I brought a surprise.”

Paintings of mermaids, adventurers and monsters covered a wall by the O’Chanters’ fireplace. As proud as Abby was of her daughters’ talent, she hung the girls’ paintings for another purpose. The artwork covered a hidden door that slid open if you pushed it in the right way. The door led to a few shallow steps and Abby O’Chanter’s secret workshop. At least Rye assumed it was secret, because her mother never mentioned it to her and she had never, ever, seen her mother go in. Then again, Abby had never told Rye to stay out of the workshop, so technically Rye wasn’t breaking any House Rules. Regardless, Rye certainly wouldn’t be telling Lottie about it any time soon; her sister ruined all the best hiding places.

Rye and Quinn sat at the heavy wooden table that nearly filled the small, sunken room, careful not to disturb the tools, beads and half-finished jewellery. Shady was curled up in a big black ball underneath it. If it hadn’t been for him, Rye would never have known about the workshop in the first place. One day she had seen Shady sniffing the floor and pawing at Lottie’s sketch of Mona Monster in a princess dress. Then, right in front of her eyes, he disappeared into the wall as if it had swallowed him up. It was amazing what kinds of surprises your own house could hold.

Rye and Quinn huddled round a lantern and a thick book – Tam’s Tome of Drowning Mouth Fibs, Volume II . Quinn said that the angry poet had collected Tam’s Tome after Rye had dropped it, but he’d been forced to stash it in a chimney before climbing down to answer the Constable’s questions. Quinn had taken it upon himself to save Tam’s Tome from nesting birds and chimney fires. Rye was impressed. That was like something she or Folly might try.

“What do you think the poet will do when he finds out it’s missing?” Quinn asked.

“No idea,” Rye said. “He didn’t get a good look at us, so he can’t just come knocking on our doors. It wouldn’t be safe to report it missing, so I doubt he’ll risk telling anyone.”

“Probably not,” Quinn said, chewing his lip.

“We should keep it safe,” Rye said. And read as much of it as we can , she thought.

“I guess so …” Quinn said.

“Good,” Rye said, before he could change his mind. “We’ll keep it at your house,” she added quickly.

Quinn and his father lived just three cottages down from the O’Chanters. Their walls were already bursting with Quinn’s books and his father’s cluttered assortment of weapons that could crush your bones or separate you from your limbs. Angus Quartermast was a blacksmith with hammer-forged arms and a brow that seemed permanently furrowed, but he always had kind words for Rye and her mother. Quinn had lost his own mother to the Shivers years before and neither Quinn nor his father had turned out to be much of a housekeeper. At the Quartermasts’ house, there was always a fine line between hidden and lost.