Free Milo and One Dead Angry Druid by Mary Arrigan

CHAPTER ONE
SOMETHING OLD
    O n that Tuesday, when our teacher Miss Lee said that we were all to bring something old to school and talk about it, Shane stood up and said that he’d bring something totally amazing. The class laughed and said, ‘Oh, yeah?’
    And he said, ‘Sure. Just you wait.’
    So everyone laughed again. Well, everyone except me. That was because Shane was mybest mate. He lived at the end of my road with his gran, Big Ella, who painted big splashy paintings in mad colours. She said Ireland needed sunshiny colours on account of all the grey rain.
    Shane’s clothes were way too small for him because he was a bit of a roly-poly, addicted to jammy donuts, squishy marshmallows and crisps. And yes, he did munch them all together.
    Whenever anyone sniggered at his wobbly tummy, he’d just say that his chest had slipped a bit – like Obelix in my dad’s old
Asterix
comics that Shane and I shared.
    Nobody could make Shane angry. If his dark skin was pointed at by some idiot, he’d say he was ‘well done’ and not a ‘half-baked porridge-face’. Everything was a laugh. Except if anyone made fun of his gran. That’swhen he’d roar like a bull and flatten them and then sit on them until they screamed. If they were smaller than him, that is.
    Big Ella was the sort of person who made you feel glad to be with her. She was fun too, and I liked to visit her house because she was always either baking brilliant African lime cakes or painting big pictures, which she exhibited in the local art gallery.
    Nobody knew what the pictures were about, not even if you looked sideways or stood on your head. So she didn’t sell many, except maybe to someone who wanted to hide a damp wall or scare away intruders.
    Sometimes Big Ella and Shane went away for days when she’d get a notion to paint some foggy mountain or windy lake. So, when they disappeared after the taking-something-old-to-school day, people justsaid what a nutter she was to take a young lad away from school. Nobody was worried. Except me. You see, I knew. And I was really scared.

CHAPTER TWO
A VERY WEIRD STONE
    T his is how it happened. On our way home from school that Tuesday afternoon, I asked Shane what was the amazing thing he was going to bring to the history class.
    ‘You don’t have anything at all,’ I said. ‘I know everything you have in your room, Shane, and you don’t have anythinginteresting. It’s all junk.’
    ‘It’s not in my room, Milo,’ he grinned. ‘I’ll show you where it is. But if you tell anyone I’ll drown you in sloppy cow-dung .’
    I followed him through his gran’s wild garden, to a bumpy area with piles of stones that were half hidden in the long grass.
    ‘What are we coming here for?’ I asked. ‘There’s nothing only grass and stones.’
    ‘Not just
any
stones, Milo,’ said Shane, stooping to pick one up. ‘These were collected by Mister Lewis.’
    ‘Who’s Mister Lewis?’ I asked.
    ‘He lived in our house back in eighteen something-or-other,’ explained Shane. ‘He used to collect stones. Hundreds of them. He is supposed to have said that there was something special about the stones aroundhere, so Gran says.’
    ‘That’s mental,’ I laughed. ‘Who’d want to collect stones?’
    Shane shrugged. ‘Well, he did. That’s what Gran was told when she bought the house. I suppose people didn’t have much to do back then.’
    ‘What a saddo he was,’ I hooted. ‘Imagine − collecting stones!’
    Shane pointed to the ground. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘They were all buried here.’
    ‘But these aren’t buried,’ I said, pointing to a pile of stones.
    ‘They once were,’ said Shane. ‘Gran has been digging them up. She’s going to build a studio here, and says she’s damned if she’s going to pay a builder to clear the site when she can do it herself. And me, of course,’ he added. ‘I get roped in to help.You can help too, Milo.’
    ‘So what’s that got to do with the history stuff?’