“Kalia!” Sammael snapped his fingers.
The lurcher whimpered.
“Come on,” he said. “We need to get on back.”
“I’m caught,” said the lurcher in a voice so faint that even Sammael could barely hear it.
“Caught? How caught?”
“I don’t know.… It’s wire or something, and then the horse trod on me.… It hurts.…”
Sammael chucked the book down and crouched by the dog’s long body, feeling it with his hands. She was lying flat—her head, shoulders, and ribs were all fine. Then, as he reached her hind legs, he encountered a sticky mass. She was caught in the wire of a rabbit snare.
“Leave me,” she said. “I’m dying—there’s nothing you can do. Leave me.”
Sammael’s jaw clenched. The dog hadn’t asked for eternal life. All she’d asked was to be his dog and for him to be her master. That was the only bargain they’d ever made. Her paw print was in his notebook as a witness to it. He owed her nothing, could demand her safety from no one.
Her skull under his palm was narrow and frail.
“You stupid, idiot animal,” he said. “Why didn’t you make me give you a long life?”
“But then I’d have known how long I had with you,” said Kalia. “I’d have known when it was going to end. It would have broken my heart.”
“Better your stupid heart than your legs,” said Sammael.
“No,” whispered Kalia. “My legs are mine to break. But my heart—that’s yours.…”
She fell into a faint, her eye closing. Sammael put a hand on her ribs: still something beating in there. Still a pulse. She was shivering faintly. He shrugged his bony shoulders out of the sleeves of his coat and laid it on top of her. Only two creatures had inhabited that coat—its original owner and himself. Neither had belonged to the solid earth. Could the coat’s mysterious power do anything for a dog?
He felt for the wire of the snare again. Slowly, with infinite patience, he began to untwist it, trying not to hurt her further.
* * *
Shimny lay on the slope, not caring to check how many of her legs were broken. She couldn’t breathe, at any rate, so soon it wouldn’t matter. The end would be quick enough.
She looked up at the moon, unaware that little by little the air was seeping back into her winded lungs. She wondered why she could still see when she ought to be dead. Perhaps death slows time, she thought. For death was surely coming. She felt it in the unsettled throb of the night air, heard it whispering out from the lumps of flesh and bone that had once held both her own and Danny’s heartbeats. This short interlude was probably just a last gift to her from the living world, a last chance to taste its sharpness and feel its strong warmth.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw a woman approaching up the slope of the quarry. The woman must have seen her, but as she drew closer she didn’t hurry, her short legs dragging a little as if she was used to taking her time.
The woman crouched and put out a hand to touch Shimny’s neck just behind the ears. Her hair was white, and she had a steady, sad face.
She smiled and took her hand away.
“You’re not mine,” she said. “Not yet.”
Then she rose to her feet and made her way over to the corpse of the boy, whose neck was twisted back at an angle. The woman stooped, spreading out her arms to gather his body up and cradle him. Her hands were under Danny’s knees and shoulders when she cast her eyes down to his face, and then she stopped.
For a full minute she didn’t move but stared into his lifeless eyes, then she began to slide her arms out from underneath him.
“I won’t do it,” Shimny heard the woman say. “I won’t be a pawn in Sammael’s Machiavellian little spats. How did he do this?”
And the whispering shadows began to creep from the rocks, curling up around Death’s neck and ears. Lying in a land between death and life, Shimny’s walleye saw them too—to her they were black and green and the darkest shade of purple, half spreading into leaves as they flattened themselves out with explanations.
* * *
Death listened. When the shadows finally died away, she stood up straight and looked down at the boy’s corpse. She was bound to take it—too much of him had been lost already, pulled away into the Book of Storms.
For a moment she clenched her fist, preparing herself. Wishing, not for the first time, that she could kick a stone or punch the ground or scream any one of the millions of screams she’d been saving up since the dawn of life. But Death’s job was not to scream. It was to tidy.
Then she caught sight of the horse again, looking at her. That horse—it had seen her. It had seen her shadows. There would never be anything tidy about that horse now—it would spend the rest of its life telling crazy stories about Death and her red eyes to anyhorse who would listen. Sometimes things couldn’t be tidy, no matter how hard you tried. And sometimes they shouldn’t be.
Death walked away from the dead boy, her hand still clenched into a fist, heading for the top of the slope.
* * *
When she returned, she was carrying a small black book. Shimny had seen it before—it was the book that Danny had found in that wooden hut. Death didn’t seem to like it much: she sat down on a rock beside Danny and began tearing the pages out, cracking the spine and yanking at the stitching with her teeth. As the pages fell, she crumpled them up, sandwiching them between her knees.
She caught sight of Shimny watching her. “He was seeing to his dog,” she said, a touch defensive. “He’d just chucked it on the ground. Didn’t notice me taking it. Finders keepers, isn’t it?”
Shimny blinked.
“I’m not going to spend my time cleaning up Sammael’s corpses,” said Death. “I’m part of the natural order of things. It’s time he learned that. He might be natural, but he certainly isn’t order. Let’s see what he says to this, eh?”
With this, she tore the last few pages from the cover and reached out for Danny’s limp head. She took his face in her hands, opened his mouth, and began stuffing the crumpled pages, one by one, inside it. Even after she’d pushed a good handful inside, more than ought to have fit into a human’s mouth, she kept on going. When the pages threatened to spill out from between Danny’s teeth, she began to pack them more tightly, pushing them down into his throat with her bony fingers.
“It’s a question, isn’t it?” Death said to Shimny as she twisted up the last few pages and crushed them after the others. “Can you eat your words? Does it make any difference if you do? What if someone else eats them for you?”
Shimny had no idea what the mad silver-haired woman was talking about. But she did know that, although paper might find its way through Danny’s guts eventually, there was no way he could eat those stiff black covers from the outside of the book. She eyed them.
Death smiled at her. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I wouldn’t even put these on a dung heap. Poisonous things.” And she tucked them away inside her waistcoat.
She crouched over Danny for a moment, kissed the boy’s forehead, and then, with a grin, stood back up and dusted off her hands.
“That’ll really needle him,” she remarked to Shimny as she set off the way she had come. “Might make him think for a couple of minutes next time.”
She said this as if she didn’t really have much hope of it, but her walk as she departed had a slightly cocky jaunt. Shimny would have sworn to herself, had she not been dazed and broken, that as she watched the receding back, a slight breeze picked up toward her and she heard the figure of Death whistle.
Don’t go, Shimny found herself thinking. Please don’t go. Turn around and come back to me.
There was definitely a tune coming from somewhere—it drifted sweetly into her ears, soothing her. But it must have been Death who was carrying the tune—the notes became fainter with every moment. Pain began to bite at Shimny’s body with sharper teeth, and she closed her eyes again. What I’d like more than anything, she thought, is to keep hearing that tu
ne.
As soon as she had enough strength, she resolved, she would scramble to her feet and follow it.
* * *
“Danny, Danny, why are you lying here? Danny! Danny!”
Danny swam from oak green gloom up toward where the light seemed strongest. The weeds were holding his feet down, tugging at his ankles to keep him anchored to the bottom. He wanted to break the surface. Although he could breathe, this wasn’t his world, where creatures that weren’t fish swam and pond weed oozed along the plush silt. It was safe, but too dark for him; the water was thick with tiny particles, and only a few strands of light penetrated down, so he could hardly see.
The world of the dead is a pond, he was surprised to find as he rose higher. But there was nobody here that he recognized: no old man, no horse. Perhaps they were the shapes of the swimming things that weren’t fish. Perhaps that’s what he was now too.
But no—he still had feet and ankles like a boy. He wrenched them free of the weeds and felt the air in his body lift him up to the light. There was a voice calling him.
“Danny, what are you doing? Get up, get up!”
The voice was pulling him toward the sun. It wasn’t the sun speaking, though—from its pure, silver tone Danny knew that it must be Death herself, watching over him. Was she calling him to join her? No—she was whistling to him. Notes glided through the water and coiled themselves softly around his ears. His chest began to warm, repelling the cold depths.
For one final second he felt regret at leaving this womblike place, and then, as the light grew nearer, he saw that it was shining and golden and stabbed straight into his heart. He was powerless to do anything but close his eyes against the screaming, stinging pain as his head broke the surface of the pond and he was thrust back once more into the world of the living.
* * *
He was lying on a shelf of rock. Above him, low black rain clouds trundled across the night sky. The rock was cool underneath his head but sharp in places; an uncomfortable lump was digging into his left shoulder blade. His mouth was choked with something soggy: he tried to gather up enough saliva to spit it out but swallowed instead. Whatever it was went down easily, as if it hadn’t been made of anything particularly solid. Perhaps it was just a bit of blood from a cut in his mouth—it had that same metallic taste.
He wriggled to relieve the pain in his shoulder and stopped in surprise. Because once he’d dislodged the lump, nothing much hurt. He ought to hurt, surely? Whatever he was doing lying here, he must have fallen somehow—he was halfway down a vast slope that stretched away, both above and below, farther than the darkness allowed him to see.
He’d fallen. Yes, that was it. He’d fallen, together with Shimny, a tangle of legs and snakes and flailing hooves. He’d been galloping away from somewhere—someone—but who was it?
The moon slid out from behind a cloud.
Sammael. Sammael had tricked him. He’d been running from Sammael, and Sammael knew where his parents were.
Danny scrambled to his feet. How did he feel so unbruised, so strong? No matter—he had to get back up to the top of the hill while there was a chance Sammael might still be there.
Where was Shimny? There—lying a few feet away. The ledge was wider than he’d thought—it must be some kind of path, winding its way up the rock face. But it would take too long to follow it. He’d have to scramble up the slope the direct way.
Could Shimny do that? Was she even alive?
“Shimny! Shimny!” He pushed his hand into his pocket and yelled silently at her. She didn’t move.
“Shimny!” he tried again. “I’ve got to go back up. Now! Meet me up there—there’s a kind of path, I think. But I’ve got to go!”
He should have touched her, but he didn’t want to, just in case she was cold under his hand. She couldn’t be dead, not Shimny, not after everything. Enough death had happened already. She would come after him as soon as she got her breath back.
He put his hands to the rock face and leaned forward against it. It was too steep to try walking, so he crawled. His knees sank onto sharp ridges, his shins scraped along jagged outcrops of blasted stone. His palms were soon ripped; as the clouds rolled away and moonlight began to let him see where he was going, he saw that he was leaving spots of dark blood glistening on the scree.
But the top was ahead of him. The wind had dropped, the rain and hail had fled. The ridge stood out black against a sky finally shining with moonlight. It wasn’t too far for him to scramble now. It couldn’t be too far.
He put his hand on a clump of spines and forced himself just in time to bite down hard on his lip and squash the yell of pain. When his knee came down in the same place, even his double layer of pajama and school trousers couldn’t protect him. It was like crawling across a lake of broken glass.
But other people did that, didn’t they? They sat on beds of nails and walked across burning coconut shells, and they still kept going. They took themselves away in their minds to other places and tried to imagine that the pain they were feeling was a good sensation instead of a terrible one. What if he could do that too? What if he could turn the world on its head and convince himself that it was his parents at the top of this slope, his parents and his own home, instead of the frightening, hard figure of Sammael?
What if Tom was up there, waiting with his strong arms to help Danny, having already vanquished Sammael? Tom would be laughing fit to bust, watching him crawl so slowly up this slope. No, Tom would come down and carry him.
So he imagined arms around him—his parents’ arms, Tom’s arms—carrying him forward and upward, and he imagined that at the top of the slope, they were all there, lined up and waiting for him.
He put his head down and crawled.
* * *
And then there it was, the ridge, so close that he could almost reach out and touch it, and there was the gap in the fence, and he was crawling along soft, springy grass again, so gentle under his knees that it felt like he was sliding along a silk mattress.
There was no need to crawl anymore. He got to his feet and ran along the fence line, keeping low like a monkey. But the fence was no cover at all—he’d be seen a mile off now, with the moonlight so bright. He made for the trees and kept to the shadows, amazed at the silence of his own feet. Something must be helping him—he wasn’t breaking twigs as he ran or treading on crunching shrubs. He could hear nothing of himself except his own breathing, which he tried to keep as slow and light as possible.
His foot nudged something hard on the ground. He’d have thought it was a tree root and run over it, if it hadn’t moved just a fraction when he kicked it.
Tom’s pitchfork! This must be the place where Apple had thrown in the towel and Tom had dropped the pitchfork as he tried to cling on.
Danny picked it up. Sammael wouldn’t be fought off with a pitchfork, he was sure of that, but the feel of the solid handle gave him heart. He wrapped both hands around it, not caring that the old wood was rough and splintery. What were a few tiny splinters after that scree?
He could try and run Sammael through with it, although who knew what might happen? Would it just go right into him and out the other side, as if he were a ghost?
There was only one way to find out: to do it and face whatever happened afterward.
* * *
He almost didn’t see Sammael. The huddled lump, still crouched over the dog, was lower than Danny had expected. But the moonlight flashed, and there he was, absorbed in his task.
Danny couldn’t see what he was doing, but he knew that waiting would mean he would miss whatever small opportunity he had. So he gripped the handle of the pitchfork and charged.
Sammael looked up at the rush. In a second he stepped over the lump on the ground and threw the entire contents of his pockets at Danny: a hail of acorns, twigs, beechnuts, and dried-out fragments of wood hit Danny’s face and bounced back onto the earth between them.
Lightning began to fall in a great, white sheet. Danny saw the f
irst spears and threw the pitchfork before any could catch him. Eyes closed, hair standing on end, he heaved it forward with nothing more in his arm than blind hope.
The pitchfork glanced off Sammael’s shoulder and pierced the dark bundle on the earth behind him. Danny leapt onto the handle, driving it into the ground. Of course! The coat! Sammael’s power lay in his coat—if he could only keep that coat pinned down—but was the coat made of air too? Would it just disappear from the prongs of the pitchfork?
Sammael began screaming up to the storm.
“Strike the boy! Strike him down! I COMMAND YOU!”
But the lightning wouldn’t touch Danny. It crackled into every blade of grass at his feet, it set fire to the trees, it made the metal fence blaze and spark, but it wouldn’t touch him.
“STRIKE HIM!” yelled Sammael, his face burning with black fire.
And the lightning, confused, struck the pitchfork.
Danny was thrown back as the pitchfork burst into flames. He staggered and tried to keep his feet but ended up flat on the ground a few yards away, looking up at the flashing, howling sky. Rain poured onto his face.
He lifted his head to see what had happened to Sammael, but the night was too black to make out anything, now that the moon had again been covered by storm clouds. As fast as he wiped the rain from his eyes, water ran back into them again, blurring his vision.
The lightning had stopped. Nothing could control the storm, nothing could command it to fight. It had raged for only a few turbulent seconds and then blown gently over. Whatever power had called it together, the various parts of the storm had clearly been reluctant to come.
Those bits of wood Sammael had thrown at Danny—had he emptied his pocket of taros and left himself unprotected against the lightning? Had he died on that pile of flame?
No—that wasn’t possible. Sammael wasn’t made of flesh and bone, to burn away. Danny rolled over onto his stomach and crawled in the direction he thought he’d come from. His knees smarted, and his hands bled again.
He tried to play that last vision over in his mind. There had been a lump on the ground—he couldn’t be sure, but it might have been that great, thin dog. Had he driven the pitchfork into the dog, too? He hoped not.
The Book of Storms Page 20
