Then the lightning had struck and dazzled him, and he hadn’t seen any more. But there was still one thing that should have been lying on the ground somewhere, that he couldn’t account for. What had happened to it?
“Lost something?” said a voice.
The schoolbag came crashing down on Danny’s head, pitching him forward. He got a mouthful of charred scrub and paddled his hands around, feeling for the bag. It wasn’t there. Sammael hadn’t dropped it on Danny’s head, he’d just swung it, to vent his anger.
He was standing in his shirtsleeves, pearl against the black sky.
“You killed my dog,” he said. “Well done.”
“You’ve lost your coat,” said Danny, pushing himself up and spitting out burnt mud. Without the coat, Sammael looked strangely thin and ordinary.
“I said, you killed my dog,” repeated Sammael.
Danny tried to swallow the spiny lump in his chest. “Yeah? Well, you tried to kill me and you tricked me and you said you’d kill my parents!”
“She was only a dog,” said Sammael. “She never did anything to you.”
“So? You should have looked after her better, shouldn’t you? What are you going to do to me now? Try and make more lightning strike me?”
“You know I couldn’t, without my coat,” said Sammael, frowning. He looked around his feet for a moment and then swiveled his eyes back to Danny. The boy was up on his knees, his face smeared with grime.
“Ha! So the river was right! You’ve lost your coat and you can’t do anything! You can’t call up storms, you can’t make them do what you want, and you can’t use them to kill people! You can’t even do anything to me anymore!”
* * *
Sammael considered the black ground, the burnt spread of ashes where his coat and his great gray dog had been. He looked at Danny once more. The boy’s face was the color of old paper—the exact shade of the Book of Storms’ stiff pages.
So that was what had happened. Sammael dropped the schoolbag at Danny’s feet and took a step backwards. He reached deep into his trouser pocket and pulled out a scant few grains of dirt. Before Danny knew what was happening, Sammael raised his hand to his lips and blew the dirt into the boy’s face.
* * *
Danny closed his eyes, expecting to be blinded, or at least to feel some stinging grit against his cheeks. But nothing happened, on the outside.
Inside, his brain warmed, as though he had pulled on a woolly hat. He thought about marzipan, thick and sweet, sitting like a blanket on top of Christmas cake. He thought about tiny lights sparkling off the waves of the sea, and the sea foam curling around itself in great tumbling streams. He thought, What if I took up surfing, and pictured those waves as exactly, as clearly, as this—I would sit on top of each wave as though it were made of thick marzipan; I would slide along it as though the wave itself were my surfboard. I could do it—I would know how to do it—if I could hold these thoughts in my head. I could learn to sit on the waves, to let them carry me across oceans—
He opened his eyes.
“Coats aren’t everything,” Sammael said softly. “And neither are storms. There are always other ways. The river didn’t tell you that, did it? But I did. You just didn’t want to listen to me.”
And he disappeared into the darkness.
Danny blinked once or twice as the thoughts of oceans drained away. Had he really just stopped Sammael building up a great storm to destroy all the world’s people? It didn’t seem possible. Not Danny, alone there on a hilltop, armed only with a pitchfork.
But was that sand Sammael had blown in his face? Was that what it did?
He was still trying to puzzle this out, turning the stick over in his hands, feeling its smoothness, when the rain dwindled away to a mist. Two tiny birds flew out of the darkness, toward him.
“It’s coming! It’s coming!”
What? Not another storm … but of course. He had summoned one himself, another lifetime ago. The storm that carried his parents.
Above him, the clouds groaned and grumbled. One gave a bellowing yawn. There was a long, satisfied burp, and the sky began to creak and mutter. Danny waited while winds trailed and zoomed around his ears, while specks of rain danced over his skin and cold plucked at his ankles. For long minutes he waited, ignoring his shivers. If only night were shorter. If only dawn would come. At least then he’d be able to see what was approaching, instead of having to stand here on the hilltop listening to the air swirling around him and trying to work out what was going to arrive first, from which direction, and at what speed.
He felt it before he heard it. If only Tom could see him now. Tom, who always prided himself on being able to predict the weather, who’d stick his head outside in the morning and say things like, “Bit of drizzle, but it’ll soon clear up,” or “This one’s set in for the day.” What would he have said if he’d seen Danny sniffing the wind and Danny had turned to him and said, “This one’s a whirlwind, just wait and see”?
Tom wouldn’t have believed it. But then he’d have heard, as Danny now heard, a peculiar stillness and a faint whistling sound. And he’d have been forced to admit, as the wind started raking him horizontally from left to right, that Danny was correct.
Because the whirlwind was upon him almost before he could steady himself. It swept him sideways, pushed him flat to a tree trunk, and pummeled at his clothes. He clutched tight to a branch with one hand and the stick with the other and began the song again. This time he shouted it, for all he was worth, until his lungs were dry and burning and his breath had been completely sucked away.
“The world is deadly, the world is bright,
The creatures that use it are blinded by sight,
But there’s no sense in crying or closing the page,
Sense only battles in fighting and rage.
So come all you soldiers and answer my call,
Together we gather, together we fall!”
And when he’d finished, instead of repeating it and waiting for an answer, he opened his mouth as wide as it would go and screamed, “STOP! PLEASE!”
The winds dropped like withered petals to the ground. There was a soft thud nearby, then another. Still blind in the darkness, Danny stumbled toward them, his hands outstretched.
“Mum?” he said, not daring to hope. “Mum? Dad?”
There was a silence longer than any piece of real time. And then a voice.
“Danny?”
It was his dad.
And then, “Danny?”
Which was his mum.
“Where are you?” he called, but they were closer than he’d thought, and a figure, clambering up off the ground, reached out to him.
He fell at it, hugging his mum tighter than he’d ever hugged before, and then his dad wrapped his arms around them both.
“Oh, Anna,” Danny’s dad said. “Oh, Danny, how did you find us?”
Danny couldn’t speak. His stomach was so full of heat and fear and coats, of swallows and lightning and the belching of clouds, that he thought he might be sick. He looked up at his parents. Even through the dark, he could see that their clothes were torn and their faces gray and exhausted. His mum’s hair stuck out like the fur on an angry cat.
“Why do you go?” he said. “Why do you leave me?”
They looked at each other. “There are things…” said his dad.
“Oh, just tell him,” said his mum, suddenly sounding like it hurt her to speak. She put a hand up to rub her eyes.
“Not here,” said his dad. “Let’s get home first.”
Danny knew they were trying not to mention his sister. But that wasn’t right—she ought to have a name. She ought to be spoken about.
“I know how Emma died,” he said. “I found your notebook. I read about Emma and the storms and all that stuff.”
He saw them flinch when he said her name, as though they’d both trodden on something sharp. Neither of them spoke for a moment, and then his mum said, “It’s very difficult, Danny.
You’re … too young. You’ll understand when you’re older.”
He was about to say that he understood now, but his dad broke in.
“It was the storms, okay?” he said. “Sunday night, we both woke up and we’d had this weird dream, both of us—the same dream. She—Emma—was there, and she was talking about … about…”
His dad didn’t seem able to speak for a long moment, and then he coughed and forced out some words again.
“She was talking about storms. And she said, these days, there’re more and more of them, everyone knows that. And she said she knew why, and if we followed her, she’d tell us. So we followed her. Not her, you know, just … the thought of her. And then we were dragged up in that twister, just spinning and spinning … and we couldn’t get back down. I thought we were done for.… We just spun and spun and spun and tried to hold hands so we wouldn’t lose each other.…”
They trembled and reached out to each other again, reminding themselves that they were safe again, standing on the cold earth together. For a second Danny felt them swaying just out of his reach.
His dad said again, “How did you find us? Did you come out here alone?”
“I came with Tom,” he said. “Tom knew the way. We rode horses.”
“Tom? Your cousin Tom?”
Danny tried to see his dad’s face in the night. The moon broke free from the clouds again, and there he was, the same, familiar Dad.
“Yeah,” he said.
“Where is he now? He didn’t leave you alone up here, did he?”
He did leave me, Danny wanted to say. He left me his pitchfork. If it hadn’t been for Tom, I’d be dead by now.
“His horse ran away,” he said. “I think it just went mad. He couldn’t help it. But he must be around here somewhere.”
His mum opened her mouth, about to say something, then changed her mind and gazed at Danny. She seemed shorter, somehow. They both did. And instead of looking away from him, at his dad, Mum just swallowed and said, “Okay. Where do you think he’s gone?”
Good question. Because the storm had died away, and Tom should have gotten control of Apple and ridden her back by now. That’s definitely what he would have done, if he’d been able to.
But as the moonlight spread over the hilltop, he saw very clearly that it was just the three of them up there, and nobody else was anywhere near.
CHAPTER 19
AN ENCOUNTER
Tom had tried his hardest to pull Apple up, but her terror was stronger than all the combined efforts of the bit in her mouth, the reins on her bit, and Tom’s arms on the reins. She’d pulled him through gaps too narrow for comfort, ducked under low-hanging branches that nearly sent him flying backwards over her tail, and hurdled with huge leaps over shadows as if they were deep black pits. He’d tugged uselessly for a while and then given up, making himself as still and low to her back as possible so as not to further unbalance her desperate, leggy scramble.
What finally stopped her was the river. She arrived at its bank and came to a dead stop, snorting at the inky water. Tom, already crouched forward, was smacked in the face by her neck as she threw her head up. His nose was bleeding freely as he pushed himself upright again.
At least she’d stopped. Tom’s heart began to settle, and he swung his leg over the horse’s back, letting himself slide to the ground.
His legs were not quite steady. Apple was not a good rock; she shifted away from his hand on her shoulder as he tried to lean on her.
“Easy, Apple, easy,” he said.
And the rain slackened off after a while. But soon after that, another raging wind picked up and Apple began to cringe in fear at every waving branch. Tom knew it would be useless trying to coax her back up through the moaning trees—he’d have to wait for the winds to die down before he went up to the hilltop to find Danny again. The best thing to do in the meanwhile would be to find a tree to shelter under and hope that it didn’t get struck by lightning.
* * *
He was standing under a huge old oak when the man came down the path. Apple pricked her ears at the sight of the white shirt, but the moonlight that was starting to break out from occasional gaps in the clouds showed the figure well enough. Just a poor man, without even a coat. He’d been drenched by the rain, and his shirt was clinging to his bony shoulders. His head was down, black hair plastered to his skull. He was so thin that he must have been freezing.
“Hey!” Tom called out. “You okay?”
The man put his head up as if he’d only just noticed Tom. He’d looked pretty lost in his thoughts. Something bad must have happened for him to be out in the middle of a night like this dressed only in his shirtsleeves.
“Yes, thanks,” he called back. “I’m fine. What are you doing out here?”
“Lost my stupid cousin,” said Tom. “Haven’t seen him, have you? Eleven-year-old kid?”
“No, sorry.” The man took a few steps off the path and came to shelter under the oak tree next to Tom. Close up, he had a friendly face. His voice was gentle and low, but despite the wailing treetops around them, Tom didn’t have to strain to hear him. “What’s an eleven-year-old kid doing out here in the middle of the night?”
Tom grinned. “Don’t ask. Between you and me and the horse, I reckon he’s gone bananas. But he’s got these ideas in his head and he won’t let them go.”
“So you’ve come out after him?”
“I came with him! Thought it best not to let him out on his own, and he wasn’t going to stay at home no matter what, so I stuck him on my ancient pony. Reckoned he wouldn’t get anywhere very fast on her back. My mum’ll skin me alive if I’ve lost him.”
“Was it a piebald pony?” said the man. “Maybe I have seen him. I did see a flash of something out on the hilltop. Could that have been them?”
“Yeah, maybe,” said Tom. “Okay, I’ll get back up there once this wind drops a bit. Idiot kid. What a night to choose for it.”
The man inclined his head in a neutral gesture. “It’s the wild at heart who lead us into the places we’d never think to go. If I hadn’t spent the last three hours following a badger, I wouldn’t be here either.”
“Badgers!” Tom said. “I know there used to be badgers in these woods, I remember seeing some when I was a kid. They’re still here, then?”
“They are indeed,” said the man, his voice taking on the tone of a smile. “In fact, there are quite a few setts around here. Are you interested in badgers too?”
“Yeah, definitely. Badgers, foxes, deer—I like all that kind of thing.”
“Oh, yes? Me too, although it’s badgers, mostly. What is it you like about them?”
Tom looked once more at the man’s face. Although he couldn’t quite make it out, it seemed familiar and comfortable.
“I don’t know…” he tried.
The tree’s branches creaked above them. And somehow, in the sound, Tom found his answer.
“I guess I just love the wild bits of the world,” he said. “I just like … I like the way things go on, whether you’re there or not. I don’t like towns, where the buildings look like they make up the whole world. I prefer places where you can see that what people have built is just sitting on top of this massive, living land. I love birds, too—I’m trying to learn all the different bird calls at the moment. I live on a farm, so I hear them all round the place, and even the same birds don’t always sing the same way. It’d be cool to know which birds were singing when you heard them, don’t you reckon?”
“Well, yes,” said the man. “Actually, I have to confess that I do know.”
“You know bird calls? Which ones?” Tom’s broad face swung round to fix on the man’s narrow, still one.
“All of them,” the man said. “It’s a bit of a hobby of mine, actually.”
“That’s amazing!” Tom’s voice couldn’t hide its hope; he forgot about the rain and the wind and his horse. Apple was perfectly calm anyway. Something about the stranger had seemed to settle her; s
he was gazing at him with longing on her face.
“Oh, I’ve studied all sorts of things. I spend most of my time looking at nature,” said the man. “It’s fascinating.”
“It is!” said Tom. How could he befriend this man without seeming weird? It was so hard to learn bird calls from recorded samples—what Tom needed was someone to go walking with who’d be able to say, “Hear that? That’s a jay” or “a goldfinch,” or whatever. This man would be perfect. Soon it would be Tom and not Danny who had swallows clinging to his sweater, called there by a perfect imitation of a swallow’s song. That was how things should be.
“Are you a farmer?” Tom asked. “D’you live round here?”
“Oh, hereabouts,” said the man. “All over the place, really.”
He was obviously some kind of wild man of the woods, an itinerant tramp, the kind you got in old-fashioned storybooks who roasted hedgehogs and wandered the highways and byways, never looking for a home.
“Well, maybe if you’re around for a while we could take a walk sometime? You could teach me some bird calls, maybe?” Tom asked hopefully.
“I can do better than that,” said the man. “I’ve written a book that describes them all perfectly. Here.”
He reached down into his boot and pulled out a thin paperback. It was slightly crumpled and bent in a half-pipe from having been wrapped around the side of his leg.
Tom’s excitement faded. The man was plainly also a bit simple, and he’d probably been making it up when he said how much he knew. You couldn’t learn bird calls from a book.
“Oh, you can,” said the man. “Try it.”
Tom started. He must have spoken his thoughts aloud without realizing. He took the book out of politeness and opened it, knowing full well it was too dark to read a word anyway. But the pages seemed to emit a light all their own—he could see the printed words quite clearly.
BIRD CALLS, it read, across the top of a page, AND THEIR USES.
That was an odd title for a start. What uses did bird calls have, other than to talk to other birds? Maybe that was just what it meant.
The Book of Storms Page 21
