The Book of Storms

by Ruth Hatfield

  He read on.

  SPARROWS, the page said. And then there was a space. Nothing written at all. Yes, the strange man was mad.

  Tom closed the book and handed it back. “Thanks,” he said, smiling. “Great book.”

  “How do you know, when you haven’t read it?” said the man.

  “Well…” How to placate him without having to spend ages staring at a blank book? More important, how could Tom extricate himself and go back up through the woods to find Danny? The winds were dying down now, and Apple would soon be happy to move.

  He decided to be gentle but honest. Who knew, but he might even be doing this man a favor if he pointed out that he was delusional. “It doesn’t really … say a lot, does it?”

  “Of course it does,” said the man. He opened the book again and held it out to Tom on the Sparrows page. “Read it.”

  Tom looked. Nothing.

  “It’s blank,” he said. “It really is blank.”

  “Oh, to your eyes, of course,” said the man. “Put your hand on it. Read it properly.”

  He must mean that there was something written in Braille. Tom couldn’t read Braille, but he’d feel it if it was there. He put his fingertips on the page, just next to the printed words.

  It wasn’t Braille. Under his fingers he felt the soft contours of a sparrow’s tiny, feathery throat. He traced it as gently as he could, and it began to sing. One sound, a single twitter. Tom was sure it hadn’t broken the air around his ears—he hadn’t exactly heard it, as such, but it had entered his head as if he’d seen the sound written on a page. It was the call of a dominant sparrow shrieking that it had seen the wings of a sparrow hawk.

  What was this book? He stroked the page a little farther down and another sound, a different kind of tweet, stuttered out. A female’s chirruping that she was in a tree, quite lonely, and was there any company around?

  The man took the book away. “Good, isn’t it?” he said. “It tells you all kinds of things. Not just about birds, about other animals too—it’s got the full range of their languages. Why, you could use it to learn the language of badgers, if you wished.”

  Talking to badgers? Was that really possible? But Danny had talked to animals somehow, hadn’t he? Or he’d found a way to communicate with them, at least. Had he also met this man, gotten his own copy of this book, and not wanted to share it with Tom?

  “You wrote this?” asked Tom. “How?”

  “Well, that’s a long story, and it did take me a long time to learn how to do it. I should introduce myself. I didn’t, did I?”

  Tom found himself staring at the thin white hand held out for a handshake. The fingers were long and deft. When he put his own hand up to it, the man’s skin was rough and warm.

  “Sammael,” said the man.

  A touch of blood leapt in Tom’s heart. Sammael? But that was the name Danny had talked about. The name of the creature he’d been running from and toward at the same time. He’d talked about something fearsome, terrifying—unreal, even. Not this tall, warm man who loved nature and knew about bird calls.

  And Tom understood it all. Danny had been terrified of this man because Danny was scared of the world. Danny didn’t want to know about badgers and birds and the wild, whispering woods in the dead of night. Danny wanted to be safely tucked away indoors, protected from whatever he couldn’t control. Danny didn’t love freedom or adventure—it was Tom who loved those things, Tom who wanted to feel other life around him, untameable and glorious. And Sammael was just like him, only further along the path, closer to the wilderness.

  “I’ve heard of you!” Tom said, eagerly. “You’ve met my cousin, the one I’m looking for! Or he knows you, at least. But he’s scared of you. He’s just a kid.” He laughed, feeling his body flush with excitement. “He’s made up this wild story all about you. I wondered what on earth he was talking about!”

  “Wild?” Sammael’s voice had a dry humor about it. “Well, he wouldn’t be the first.”

  “Go on, then, tell me about the book,” urged Tom. “You’ve got some kind of”—he searched for the word—“way with nature, haven’t you? Something … special?”

  “You could say that,” said Sammael. “It’s more to do with impossibility, actually. For example—we all imagine things. Some we feel sure about—we see them around us or watch videos of them, and so we call them reality. Others we don’t see evidence of, or they seem fantastical and dreamlike, so we dismiss them under the name of impossible. But when I wrote that book, I chose to think in a different way about birds and animals. I thought, What if the impossible was in fact reality? What if everything I heard was just another form of word? Well, I’d be able to write them all down, wouldn’t I? So how? Well, that’s even simpler. Everything you hear is just vibrations in your ear, isn’t it? So everything you hear is actually movement. And everything you touch is the same—a movement of the nerves in your fingers that tells you what’s underneath them. So what if you could touch the same movement that you hear? You’d be able to hear sounds through your fingertips. And so I pulled that feeling of hearing and that feeling of touching closer and closer together, until they came into contact with each other, and here is the result. Not impossible at all. Humans might tell you otherwise, but most of them can’t see farther than their own eyeballs.”

  “But … what did you use? I mean how did you do it? And they aren’t just sounds, are they? Because I understand what they mean.…”

  “I used sand. Your cousin knows about me, you say? Well, then he must have told you about sand. You think of sand as being souls, in your terms—it’s the essence of life. Every living creature has sand inside it, which sustains its life and returns into the earth when it dies. But there’s more to life than just living. There’re all the things you could do—all those are in your sand as well. And the things you know you can never do—they’re there. So I used sand. I took the impossible, the unfulfilled, and I made something beautiful out of it. That’s my job.”

  Tom ran his hand over the page in front of him again. It felt as if it had been made only for him.

  “I want this,” he said. “I really want it. I’d make the most of it, I really would. It’s everything I’ve ever wanted.”

  “Not everything, surely?” said Sammael. “If I believed that, I’d never have shown it to you.”

  “No. No, of course, not everything,” said Tom. “But I could use it to learn how to call like birds, couldn’t I? And to talk like animals. I could live together with them, not just have to be some stupid human, blind and deaf to them all. Please let me have it. Or at least borrow it for a while.”

  “Of course,” said Sammael. “I made it to be used. But if you want to take it, you’ll have to understand one thing.”

  “Anything,” said Tom, turning over a page and bringing up another sound, the gentle mewing of a kite.

  “You can’t read a book like that without becoming a part of it. It will change your fingertips, your ears, your blood and heart. The sand in the book will become mixed with your own sand. Your sand will belong to the book. One day, when you reach the end of your own adventures in the world, your sand won’t go back into the earth like all the rest. It’ll go with the book, wherever the book goes. If you take the book, you are stepping out of the normal run of the world, forever. You have to do that willingly, with your eyes open. Do you understand?”

  Tom frowned. “Are you saying that when I die, I’ll … what? Become a book? That’s daft.”

  “No,” said Sammael. “I’m saying you won’t become worm food like everybody else. Not every bit of you, anyway.”

  “Well, that’s fine,” said Tom. “I don’t think I’ll care much by then.”

  “It’s yours, then,” said Sammael. “Here. Sign for it.”

  He fished a slim black notebook out from inside his shirt. “Write ‘I,’ and then your name, ‘give freely my sand in exchange for possession of the book Nature at Your Fingertips,’ and the book shall be mine fo
r as long as I live.”

  Tom wrote it down on the offered page. “Tom Fletcher,” he said. “That’s my name. We live up at Sopper’s Edge, the other side of the county. Drop by if you’re ever up that way.”

  “Sign it,” said the man.

  Tom signed his name.

  “The wind’s pretty much gone,” he said, handing the notebook back and pointing out at the path. “I’d better get on trying to hunt down this cousin of mine. Thanks for the book.”

  He clicked his tongue to Apple. She followed him out from the shelter of the tree and began plodding up the path, with one last backwards glance under the oak tree to where the man still stood.

  When Tom had gone only a few steps, he couldn’t resist taking the book from his pocket again. He turned to a page about owls and stroked his fingers over it.

  The hoot of a tawny owl rang out in his head, soft and mellow. It was calling for its mate, telling her it had caught a field mouse.

  Tom smiled to himself and put the book away. He cupped his hands to his mouth and blew gently into them, making a dry, echoing note. Then he clasped his hands more tightly together and blew slightly harder. A little more like it. Just a little, but with some practice, he’d get there.

  * * *

  Behind him, Sammael slipped away from under the oak tree. He was about to snap his fingers together when he stopped himself and set his cold, terrible jaw hard against the night.

  CHAPTER 20

  ENDGAME

  “He might still be in the woods,” said Danny. “We can’t leave without Tom. We should wait here till he finds us.” His teeth began to chatter. Even his bones were complaining of being soaked through.

  Danny’s mum took her coat off and draped it around his shoulders, but he didn’t seem to have anything left in his body that might produce warmth. Heat would have to come from somewhere else—a fire or a radiator or a hot bath.

  “We need to get you home, my love,” said his mum. “You’re freezing. We’ll go down to the nearest road. Where did you say we are?”

  “S-S-S-Sentry Hill,” stuttered Danny through his rattling teeth. “Near Great Butford. But … Tom? And Shimny?”

  “Shimny?”

  “Tom’s pony. She fell down the edge of the quarry.…”

  He stumbled over to the quarry fence and yelled for her through the darkness. His voice ran into the air and leapt away, down into the black, rocky cutting. Nothing else stirred: no noise, no hoofbeats, no snorting whinny as the pony trotted her way up the quarry path.

  “We won’t find her now, son,” Danny’s dad said, coming to take hold of him. “We’ll come back tomorrow and look, I promise. First thing, we’ll all come back. You’ll be able to show us the way, won’t you?”

  “She saved me,” said Danny. “She brought me all this way, and I wouldn’t have found you otherwise. You’d be dead.…”

  “We’re not dead,” said his dad. “But unless we all get warm and dry soon, we might have to rethink that. Come on, we’ll go down. And we’ll call out for Tom. If he’s anywhere about, he’ll hear us.”

  * * *

  Together they stumbled down the hillside, skirting the woods, yelling for Tom. It would have been quicker to go through them, but Danny saw Sammael in every shadow. He refused all suggestions of cutting through the trees.

  And then dawn was breaking, just as they reached the bottom of the hill and came out onto the Great Butford road. Dawn, painting the sky with promise, streaming royal blue across the horizon. A whole night—how had it been a whole night since Danny and Tom had stood outside the old barn and watched the swallows dive? It seemed like minutes.

  He raised his voice again, although his throat was sore from shouting. “Tom! Tom!”

  There was an answering shout. He’d grown so used to everything going wrong that he didn’t believe it, almost didn’t hear it. But then it came again.

  “Danny! Hie! Danny!”

  From far away behind them came the thundering sound of hooves, and then Tom appeared through a break in the trees. In two minutes he was galloping down the trail behind them and bursting out onto Great Butford village green like a raiding cowboy.

  He slid to a halt, dropped off Apple’s back, and came to stand beside them. Tall, cheerful Tom, as normal and as solid as ever.

  Danny looked up at him. He wouldn’t quite meet Danny’s eye—maybe he was still embarrassed about Apple having run off with him.

  “What happened to you guys?” Tom asked. “Danny was saying all this weird stuff—I thought he’d gone properly bonkers!”

  Danny’s parents looked at Danny. He looked at them. But even if they didn’t understand yet, they wouldn’t betray him.

  “We got trapped,” said Danny’s dad. “In the old quarry. We couldn’t get out.”

  “So how did he find you?”

  Danny’s dad shrugged. “Lucky guess, I suppose. We’d mentioned about going there before. But we’ve lost your pony, I’m afraid. Danny says she ran over the side of the quarry.”

  “Oh.” Tom, who had been about to ask more questions, was suddenly quiet. He stared down at his feet for a long moment and didn’t say anything else.

  “It’s been a bad couple of days,” said Danny’s mum gently, reaching out to touch his shoulder. “For everyone. I’m so sorry, Tom. But thanks for looking after Danny. You obviously did a wonderful job. We really owe you.”

  “We owe you several,” said Danny’s dad. “Can you leave your horse somewhere here and come back with us?”

  Tom shook his head. “Mum’s coming here—I phoned her. She’s bringing the lorry. There’s room for all of you in there. I’m sure she’ll take you back. Although she might want to look a bit for the piebald.…”

  And then, behind them, a shrill neigh flew out from halfway up the hillside. Through the half-light, a white, patchy shape was racketing down the trail, its ancient, unshod hooves thudding over the trodden earth. Its back was as dipped as a bowl, but its head was high and its black nostrils flared.

  “Shimny!” yelled Danny.

  But it was to Tom she went: to the boy she’d known all his life, who’d learned to ride on her swaying back and who’d never bothered to give her a name because he knew exactly who she was. Death had turned her back on Shimny, but Tom had always looked after her.

  She scrambled to a halt in front of him and put her head down, panting heavily. Tom reached out a hand to pull at her ear and winked at Danny. “You did good, kid,” he said. “You’re a braver man than most of us. We all thought it was time to go home ages ago.”

  * * *

  Danny watched as Tom loaded Shimny and Apple into the horse trailer. Aunt Kathleen was standing by the ramp, talking to his mum and dad. She looked entirely normal, dressed in tattered jeans and her shredded old farm coat. And she wasn’t holding an axe. Of course she wasn’t holding an axe.

  His parents were talking slowly. His mum’s hair was tangled, and both of them had scratches across their faces. He hadn’t noticed the scratches earlier.

  Three adults, two ponies, and one Tom. But there was someone missing, still. Did there always have to be someone missing?

  * * *

  They got into the back seat of the horse-trailer cab. It was dark and cozy, and the seat was full of springs. Danny’s mum put her arm around his shoulders and he leant against her.

  “Mum…” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “About Emma…”

  “Yes.” She hugged him a little tighter.

  “Will you tell me about her?”

  His mum was silent for a moment, then Aunt Kathleen turned the key and the horse-trailer engine shook itself awake.

  “Please,” said Danny. “I really want to know.”

  “Oh, Danny…” said his mum. “Oh … Emma. It still hurts too much, even to think about her.… After she died, it wasn’t— You can’t know about that sort of thing. You’re still too young.”

  “I’m not,” said Danny, shaking his head. “I
’m really not. You think I’m just a kid and I don’t understand anything, but I always knew something had happened. It feels like you’ve got two families and I’m not in one of them.”

  “Love, you can’t think that. We wanted you to just be yourself. One day—but I hope beyond hope you’ll never have to know what it’s like to lose a child. That’s the best thing I can wish for you, really it is.”

  “But she’s always there, isn’t she? She always will be. She’s been hanging over everything, always. It’s just that, before, I didn’t know what the hanging thing was, that’s all. And now I do know. There’s no point in pretending.”

  He wanted to say, I know a lot more than you think, and I always have. But she wouldn’t believe it.

  “Oh—we’ll tell you about everything,” said his mum. “Just … let’s get home first. And you can tell us exactly how you managed to find us too. It must have been some journey.”

  Danny put his hand in his pocket. The stick was still there. When had he last used it? To talk to that tornado, and then he’d been so overwhelmed by finding his parents again that he’d thought of nothing else.

  He still had it, though. He could use it for fun things now, like talking to Mitz, who was probably finding her own way home, like those cats you read about in the papers. He’d explain everything to her, apologize for taking her into the river, and they’d be friends again. And he could talk to the horses when he next went to visit the farm. But he could see quite well that if he told his parents about the stick, they might want him to go back to talking to storms. Which was, frankly, scary.

  Then again, when he thought about what he’d done, most of it involved the stick. Or Sammael. Or the Book of Storms—and he certainly wasn’t going after that again. All of those things were best forgotten. Especially Sammael’s last words to him: There are always other ways. Whatever he’d been referring to, Danny wasn’t going to think about Sammael any more than he had to, ever again.

  But what would he tell his parents?

  It was time to make up a story.

  He settled back into the crook of his mum’s elbow. I’ll begin with the storm, he thought. Because that’s when they went. And after that—after that, I’ll go anywhere. I’ll go wherever my wildest dreams take me. It doesn’t matter if no one believes me—it’ll be my story. And I’ll stick to it.