The Book of Shadows

by Ruth Hatfield

  He opened it.

  All it contained was a notebook.

  He bit back an exasperated curse. Notebooks had been helpful in the past. Maybe this was the Book of Shadows, even. How convenient would that be, to find it ready-made in a witch’s box?

  He opened the notebook.

  “Herbs to Cure Gout” read the title of the first page. Danny tried again, turning over to the second page. “Herbs to Cure Piles.” Piles of what?

  Third page. “Herbs to Cure Twinges in the Kneecap.”

  He turned them over, page after page, full of lists of herbs, lists of herbs, lists of herbs …

  “Oh, for—!”

  He did swear then, letting the worst words he could think of come out of his mouth in a violent, despairing stream, and flung the book as far away from him as he could.

  All that, for nothing. Lists of herbs.

  Ori trotted off and brought the notebook to him in her soggy jaws, wagging her tail in the dusk. Danny shook his head.

  “I know you’re a retriever and all,” he said, “but that thing’s useless. Let’s go back to the others.”

  He trudged down to the beach. By the time he got there, the wind had blown up into a gale so strong that he could hardly open his eyes enough to see the sea. He could only hear its roar growing in fury as the wind continued to torment it.

  “Cath?” he called.

  “Here!”

  They were close by, finding what shelter they could against the dunes. The dunes didn’t break the wind, but they gave a solid bank to lean on as the gusts battered them backward, and Danny slid down beside Cath, glad to have something to lie against.

  “Any luck?” she asked, raising her voice against the wind.

  “No. Just another useless stupid notebook!”

  “Did you—?” Cath trailed off, but Danny understood that she was asking about the old woman. He shook his head, and the wind roared in his ears.

  “No” was all he could say.

  In the beginning of all this trouble, he’d seen an old man called Abel Korsakof die before his eyes. For a long time, he’d thought that was the worst thing a person could ever witness. Now he knew it wasn’t even close.

  The wind blew sand up, and it filled his eyes. The sounds of the sea were getting harder to place: the wind sent the roaring of the waves dancing all around him, so that his ears could only tell him he was surrounded by water.

  A raindrop fell, fat and cold.

  “Let’s get out of the rain!” he yelled.

  “Boat shed … up the beach.” Cath waved her arms. “Not far.”

  And for a second she was Cath again, scrambling to her feet, holding Barshin, leading the way. Danny reached around for Shimny and dragged her by the mane.

  “Wait!” he called over the wind to Cath.

  Cath’s hand came swooping out toward him, reaching to grab at his sweater.

  “Hold my sleeve,” she said, and set off fast. Danny stumbled trying to keep up with her, Shimny in one hand and Cath’s sleeve in the other. Ori was by his side. He couldn’t look down to see her, but he’d have known if she’d been left behind.

  After a while, they reached the lee of a crumbling wooden wall. With a shrieking of old hinges, Cath yanked the door open against the wind, and then they were in a damp, musty-smelling space, protected from the wind and rain. Despite an occasional drip falling on his hair, Danny felt a bit warmer out of the snarling gale.

  “Now what?” he said, when the stillness reminded him that he had the basic things he needed and should be getting on with his task.

  “You do what you want,” said Cath, letting the door slam behind her and cutting off the daylight. “I’m knackered. I’m going to sleep.”

  He heard her rustling in the darkness, making a nest out of her bundle of rags, then falling silent. As he sat by himself, Ori’s nose pushed up into the crook of his armpit, and he put his arm around her.

  This was the end.

  I wonder if Sammael will appear, thought Danny, and come to crow over me. I wonder if he’ll push me under the shadows, so he can watch me die. Or maybe he’s got a special patch of shadow that he’ll use just for me.

  It’s not Sammael, he reminded himself. This is Tom. The shadows are being controlled by Tom.

  But he knew in his heart that whatever anyone else said—whatever stories they tried to tell him—Sammael was at the heart of all the badness in the world.

  Ori pushed her head against him, and he reached for the stick, and told her his fears.

  “Do you really think so?” she asked. “Mightn’t there be more to it than that?”

  “I don’t think so. I know so.” Danny smoothed his thumb along the crease between her ear and her head. “However dark this night is, it’s nothing compared to Sammael.”

  “But the darkness,” said Ori, “isn’t that where the color lies?”

  Danny’s head began to hurt: a swift, clear pain behind his eyes, as though he’d been staring too long into a bright light. He felt suddenly exhausted, as though there were nowhere to go anymore and he had hit a wall so thick and high that he couldn’t begin to climb it.

  If I had Isbjin al-Orr, he thought, we could leap over it together. That stag could jump as high as the moon.

  * * *

  Ori pushed her head into his ribs.

  Danny snapped awake and opened his eyes. Daylight was shuffling in through the cracks in the walls and a small pane of cobwebbed glass at the back of the shed. He was tucked up against a corner, and the light was strong enough for him to see that in the middle sat an ancient boat, with Cath curled up inside it, Barshin in her arms. He had a moment of panic—Shimny wasn’t there. But when he scrambled to his feet and threw open the door, she was by the edge of the sea, head down, staring into the shallows.

  The storm had gone, leaving the sea a dull gray, its surface shuddering like the skin of a horse against a fly’s tiny legs.

  Danny rubbed his arms to get some warmth into them and wandered down to the edge of the shore. He stood silently beside Shimny and watched as the water bubbled up toward his toes, but stepped back before it reached his shoes. There was no point in having wet feet so far from home.

  His stomach gave an angry rumble, and he went back up the beach to the boat shed to see if Cath was awake.

  She was sitting up in the boat with the small notebook in her hand, reading intently with a finger on the page.

  “That stupid notebook,” said Danny. “I should have chucked it in the sea.”

  “Ssssh,” said Cath.

  “Why? Have you reached the page of ‘Herbs to Cure an Empty Stomach’?”

  As soon as he said it, he heard his cousin. It would be something Tom said—bounding from place to place, job to job, cow to cow, always hungry. Danny had never been that bothered about eating, though Aunt Kathleen’s food was good. But Tom had been obsessed with it. He even knew which plants you could eat in the wild.

  If only Tom were here. If only.

  “Did you read it all?” asked Cath.

  “Didn’t need to. I got the gist.”

  “So you didn’t reach the stuff that wasn’t about herbs, then?”

  “What stuff?”

  “Oh, you know, just stuff. About earth and fire and water and air. That sort of stuff.”

  “Give it!” Danny leaned forward to snatch at the book, but Cath whipped it away.

  “No way. I’m not done.”

  “Give it!” snapped Danny. “I need it!”

  “Should have read it before you chucked it away, then, shouldn’t you?” said Cath, standing up in the boat and holding the book out of Danny’s reach. He swiped at it, but she was taller than he was, even without the extra height from the bench inside the boat, so he couldn’t get near it.

  Cath opened the book again, high above her head, and began to read.

  “Otherwise known as the four classical elements, Earth, Fire, Water, and Air—the things the ancient Greeks thought all other things w
ere made of. The discovery of the chemical elements puts paid to this theory, but it is interesting to look at the classical elements in terms of Abstract Qualities. What’s an abstract quality? She didn’t half talk rubbish sometimes.”

  “Please,” said Danny. “If you’re too thick to understand it, just give it to me.”

  Cath looked down at him, a smirk on her graying face. For a second, he thought she was going to give him the book, but she continued to hold it high.

  “Abstract qualities,” she said. “Not things you can touch or hold or see or feel. Invisible things. Like the characters of people.”

  Danny scrambled up onto the side of the boat, using Cath’s sweater to pull himself up to her height. The rotten wood broke under his feet, and they fell together, landing in a painful heap only slightly cushioned by Cath’s bundle of rags. Danny’s spine shuddered; for a second, he lay stunned as a landed fish and then he grabbed Cath’s wrist before she could whip the notebook out of his reach again.

  Not caring if he was hurting her, he knelt on her arms and twisted it out of her grip.

  He sat back against the broken side of the boat. Cath got up, rubbing her wrists, but Danny ignored her and read.

  “Abstract qualities. Earth—stable, resilient, strong. Grounding. Water—fluid, imaginative, emotional. Escapist. Air—change, energy, yellow. A howling dog. Fire—assertiveness, passion. A roaring lion.

  “All my life I have thought of significance lying in threes. But last night I dreamed of a four-leafed clover, and this morning when I woke, it struck me what a balance there was in fours. Four are the seasons of the year—spring, summer, autumn, and winter. Four are the points of the compass—north, south, east, and west. And four are the corners of a book. Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. These elements are not the building blocks of the world. They are four friends on a celestial journey, each one reliant upon the others. One day, when the four friends split apart, it will signify the end of the world.”

  Danny turned the page. There was a list entitled “Herbs to Cure Twinges in the Cartilage.” The old woman seemed to have run out of ramblings.

  He looked up at Cath. “It’s just a load of rubbish,” he said. “Doesn’t mean anything.”

  “No,” said Cath. “You’d never call us friends, would you?”

  Danny felt his cheeks go red. He tried to wish them pale again, but they burned all the more. Cath sneered.

  “Calm down,” she said. “I ain’t asking you to be my boyfriend. The four of us, I mean. Barshin. Me. That dog. And you.”

  Danny stared at Ori and Barshin in turn. “What about Shimny?” he said, remembering the horse staring miserably at the sea outside.

  “Yeah, I wondered about her. But she’s dead, ain’t she? She’s made of something else now, and we’re just using her to get what we want. Maybe she was your friend once, but that’s just a memory now, ain’t it? She ain’t with you because she wants to help with the shadows.”

  Danny choked. That wasn’t true! Shimny must want to help them—she could run away, if she didn’t want to. He hadn’t tied her up.

  But he had promised to find her a home and give her peace. And that was a hold as tight as any rope, for her.

  Cath must have seen distress on his face and taken pity on him because she said, in an unusually gentle tone, “Maybe think about it this way: the shadows can’t get to her anymore, so they don’t affect her—it’s the rest of us who are alive and who need the shadows to stop. So if we’re making a weapon against them, it’s going to be made from something the four of us can get together. Don’t you reckon?”

  Danny looked at them again—Cath, Barshin, and Ori.

  The wind flipped the door of the boat shed shut with a loud clap, closing them in and Shimny out.

  Inside, the air stopped moving.

  Four, Danny thought. Two animals, two people. Two wild creatures—Cath and Barshin—and two tame ones—Ori and me. Two girls—Ori and Cath—and two boys—Barshin and me. Many colors of fur and hair and skin between us. We’re all so different, and yet we’re together. I bet there isn’t a thing in the world that one of us hasn’t thought or won’t one day think. We are everything it’s possible to be.

  Earth. Air. Fire. Water.

  “Which one is which?” he said.

  “I am the air,” said Ori. “I feel my way through the world by reading the words that the air brings into my nose. I am the yellow dog who howls in the night when I smell the souls of those arriving and departing the world going past me in every direction. The air is my sacred text; I read its every letter and punctuation mark.”

  Barshin sat with his paws together, ears upright. Danny took the stick and directed his thoughts toward the hare.

  “Did you hear me read? What are you?”

  “Of course I heard,” said Barshin. “I can always understand you, you know. I am the earth. I scent the air, and I listen to the water, and I feel the heat of fire. But it is the earth I read; the soil that lies upon it, and the plants that grow from it, and the insects that crawl over it. When I am afraid, I press myself close to the earth. I understand that I am nothing but a piece of earth temporarily separated from it, and one day I will return to it again.”

  “It makes sense,” said Danny. “You’re the right color.”

  And although he couldn’t bring himself to like Barshin, he saw that the hare was not his enemy anymore. Their hearts were just made of different materials, and it would be very hard ever to understand each other simply because of that.

  But I need the earth, Danny thought. We all need the earth. It doesn’t need us in return; it won’t go offering solutions to our stupid mistakes. But we need it.

  He turned to Cath.

  “Ain’t hard, is it?” she said. “I reckon I’m fire. I can’t say stuff like Barshin, and I don’t know what your dog said to you, but all my life I’ve been burning—all the stupid stuff that happens, the stupid people that try to hurt you—I ain’t ever felt like I’d sit down and take it. I burned for Chromos when I went there. I burned for my house. I burned to know everything Ida knew, to go up into the woods and hills and out onto the sea. Nothing in me ever stopped burning. Except—”

  A gray flush, the color of ashes, spread over her cheeks.

  “Except—maybe—I was fire. And maybe when the shadows came—”

  “No,” said Danny. “It’s an element. No shadow can change that.”

  “But fire gets put out, don’t it?” said Cath. “Fire dies.”

  “You’re not dead,” said Danny firmly. “You’re alive and breathing. You’re still alight.”

  Cath’s lips stayed together, and she bent her head a little, neither agreeing nor disagreeing.

  “So I must be water,” said Danny. It made sense: water took his fears away. He had galloped into the sea on Isbjin al-Orr, and he’d thought it had been the stag who had made him feel strong and unafraid. But perhaps it had really been the water. Perhaps that was why Ori was right—he still wasn’t afraid of the sea, even though he’d nearly drowned in it.

  “But … I’m none of these things she said about water.” He gestured to the old woman’s book. “Imaginative. Escapist. I’m none of these things. Maybe I’m not the fourth bit here at all. Maybe it’s you three and someone else.”

  As he said it, he knew it must be true. The real fourth element would have been brave and questing, and made none of the stupid mistakes that he, Danny, had made. There was a bit that was missing, and it was still missing. It wasn’t him.

  “Don’t be stupid,” said Cath. “Of course you’re water. You’re so bloomin’ wet that you’d have to be.”

  Danny looked at her. It was so easy for Cath. She just knew things. He never felt sure about anything. If they were back at home, in real life, at school, he was pretty sure they wouldn’t even look at each other in the corridor.

  For a second, he saw them all from very far away, three other creatures sitting in a boat shed around the wreckage of a broken, rotten ol
d boat, engaged in a desperate quest. Was he even there with them? Or did he belong back in the normal world, eating dinner and watching TV and hanging around on the sidelines of the soccer pitch?

  But where he belonged wasn’t important right now. The only thing that mattered was that he was here, together with the three others. Earth, air, fire. And water.

  “So what do we need to do?” he asked.

  CHAPTER 13

  FOUR STORIES

  Barshin flicked his ears solemnly. “We need to collect ourselves into a book. Any book will do—maybe just make a notebook out of the blank pages left in Ida’s book. And then we need to think—how would we define ourselves?”

  “I’m a boy,” said Danny. “I’m twelve. Er … brown hair—”

  “No, no,” explained Barshin. “We should ask—what is in us that has brought us here together? That bond is what we need to capture. If we can explain how we came to be here, the stories, once bound together, will contain the power to push us into the world of Mab. Don’t you see?”

  Danny swallowed. “Not really.”

  “We think of what we all want,” said Cath. “We put the things together. If the world’s made of four elements and we’re the four elements, then the things we want must be the future hopes of all the world. Get it?”

  Danny thought about it. “Nope.”

  He asked Ori.

  “The most powerful part of us,” said Ori, “is our hope. If we hope for the same things, we can make them happen. We need to find out what we’re hoping for.”

  And Danny got it.

  “Well, then,” said Barshin. “What’s brought us here?”

  They repeated the question among themselves, and to each other.

  “I think,” said Ori, looking around wisely, “that it is loss. We all have the look of creatures who have lost something and who know that it is unlikely that we will ever find those things again. But we know in our hearts that we will keep hoping against hope to find them. Am I correct?”