“Maybe,” said Danny. He asked the others.
“A hare I loved was taken from me,” said Barshin. “And Cath?”
Cath scowled. “I ain’t lost nobody,” she said. “Nobody I needed.”
“Ori didn’t say you had to need what you lost,” said Danny. “She just said that you’ve lost it and you know you’ll probably never find it again. It’s a family for you, isn’t it?”
“No,” said Cath. “I never lost one. I never had one.”
Danny raised an eyebrow at her. “Now who’s not listening?” he said.
Cath clenched her fists and shook her head.
Danny turned back to Ori. “What have you lost, then?”
“Tennis balls,” said Ori. “Owners. Bones. Trails of scent.”
“Anything serious?”
She put her head on one side, gazing at him, unblinking.
“My home,” she said.
For once, her tone wasn’t soft and merry. Danny felt it blame him, and he didn’t want to know why.
Ori carried on. “And you have lost your cousin. So that makes all of us, doesn’t it?”
“I guess so,” Danny agreed. “But do you really think that four small lost things are enough to make the Book of Shadows? It doesn’t seem much.”
“Try it,” said Ori.
Danny looked at the notebook. There were a few pages left—six, exactly—and a thin pencil tucked down inside the spine. He tore out the blank pages and rested them on the book.
“Go on, then,” he said to Barshin. “Tell me yours. I’ll write.”
Barshin closed his eyes. “I will find her on a summer’s morning,” he said. “At the foot of the old beech tree in the land by the lazy-flowing stream. She will have our young with her, the young that she was to have had that spring—and they will be fine young leverets, only partly grown, but bold enough to roam from her side. She will wait in the morning mist, and I will know from the curve of her crouched back that it can be no other hare. And when she sees me, she will lay back her ears and spring up into a boxing stance, and we will fly at each other, our hind feet punching the earth, and we will fight and cuff and lunge at each other’s necks until our legs and paws are so tangled that we can do nothing but fall onto the earth in a wrestle. And I will be a creature with my own life, and nothing else will ever matter to me.”
The hare opened his eyes.
“That it?” asked Danny. “That’s all?”
“Do the dreams of another creature seem small to you?” asked Barshin. “It isn’t the time to scorn me for my lack of ambition, you know.”
“No, I wasn’t,” said Danny, hastily. “It just doesn’t sound like great magic.”
“Well, it’s an impossible dream,” snapped Barshin. “I’ve just described the happening of something impossible. If that doesn’t fit in with your definition of magic, I suggest you come up with a better idea yourself.”
“Sorry,” said Danny.
But Barshin crouched down in the boat and stared off into space, ignoring him.
“Ori?” Danny turned to his dog, wanting comfort. “What do you want to put in the book?”
Ori cocked her head first to one side and then the other. Even with the strengthening morning light filtering in through the cracks in the walls of the shed, her golden coat seemed dull and dark.
“The old man is walking under the railway bridge next to the canal, calling my name. I can hear him from a long way off, even though his voice is quiet and old. And I leave everything behind—the rabbit holes, the day-old chicken bones, the voices in the air, and I rush back to him and fall into step by his side, and we go home.”
Danny waited, sure that there must be more. But Ori’s tone was quiet and bland, and no other words came.
“Is that it?” he said, before he could stop himself.
“That,” said the dog, “is it.”
Danny felt a pang of jealousy. Wasn’t she his dog? Now she seemed to want some other master, some old man.
Ori looked up at him. “I will always stay with you,” she said. “We are bound together, you and I. But I had another home once, and I will never see it again. It is impossible now.”
“You can go back if you like,” said Danny, a spiny lump rising in his throat. “After this is over.”
“No,” said Ori. “You needn’t worry. I can’t go back; none of us can. Even if we manage to open the world of Mab for you, we will all still live in Xur’s world, and these things will never come true for us. There is only one direction in this world: forward.”
She said it with such finality that Danny didn’t dare ask any more. He turned away from the huge gap that suddenly lay between them, not wanting to look into its darkness.
I wish I’d never asked, he thought. I wish she’d been born into my arms and knew nothing else.
And as he looked at Cath, he heard Ori stand and move her bulk over to his side, and he felt her soft fur against the skin of his ankle, where his sock had fallen down.
“Go on, then,” he said to Cath.
“I ain’t got nothing to put in there,” said Cath. “You’re wrong. I ain’t lost nothing.”
“But you have,” said Danny, irritation picking at him like a nettle barb. Why couldn’t she just get it done, like the other two?
“No way,” said Cath. “I never had a mum. Same as I never had a dad, just some fat git who couldn’t be bothered with me. I ain’t gonna tell you some story about how in my dreams we’re all living together in one happy little family. My dad was horrible. My mum didn’t want him or me. I don’t want her or him.”
“But don’t you wish you had a family?” said Danny. “One who looked after you, and made you happy?”
Cath shook her head. “Families don’t make you happy. I’m fine without one.”
“You’re lying,” said Danny. “Everybody wants a family. A good family, I mean.”
“What, like yours?” Cath curled her lip. “Nah, you can keep ’em.”
Danny looked at her. More shadows would be up in the skies, rolling. They needed to get going.
Cath stared back. Her jaw was clenched tight, her gray eyes sunken into the dark sockets of her gray face. She was silent.
“Oh, for God’s sake!” Danny thrust the paper at her. “You do it, then. Write anything. Whatever you like. You can still write, can’t you?”
Cath took the pencil from his hand and flexed her fingers around it. “You have to promise not to read it. Ever.”
“I promise,” said Danny.
“Put your hands where I can see them.”
He spread his hands in front of him, so that she could see none of his fingers were crossed.
“I promise,” he said, flexing his fingers in the gloom. “I promise I won’t ever read what you write. Just write it.”
She wrote for a couple of minutes, her hand slow and labored, the paper curling around her knee. Once or twice she looked up at Danny to check he wasn’t peeking. Danny pretended to find the crumbling shed walls as interesting as Barshin and Ori clearly thought they were.
It was strange, what Cath had said about them all fitting together. The more time they all spent together, the more Danny realized how little he knew about any of them.
At last Cath handed back the paper to him. She’d covered the page with a blank piece.
“If you read it, I’ll kill you,” she said.
He wondered if it was anything to do with him, but Cath wasn’t going red or avoiding his gaze, so it probably wasn’t. She just didn’t want him to know her secrets.
He wanted to know them.
Swallowing, he forced his thoughts back to his own story. What was he going to put into the Book of Shadows? So far, it had a dead hare, a lost old man, and a complete unknown. He didn’t have to come up with anything grand to compete with that.
But as he tried to think about the worst thing he’d ever lost, the light seemed to recede from the cracks and the boat shed grew duller and gloomier.
&n
bsp; His heart snatched at his ribs. Could it be more shadows? Was another lot coming over, stifling out the last of the natural sky along this beach?
Cath was watching him. Barshin was watching him. Ori was watching him.
“I think the shadows are coming,” he said, his throat dry.
“No, they’re not,” said Barshin. “You just don’t want to write, that’s all.”
“No, they’re not,” said Ori. “It’s just hard to think of the impossible. You have to fight the bit of you that says there’s no point.”
And that, thought Danny, was the difference between them. Barshin thought Danny was weak, and had no patience with him. Ori wanted to help, and be gentle.
He pushed himself to his feet and went outside. Barshin and Ori were right—the clouds were still pale, drifting thickly over the sea. The sea itself was cold and gray, with a hard shine to it, lapping at the gritty beach with dirty tongues of foam. A breeze trailed faintly through the air, but nothing much else was moving apart from a flock of gulls farther up the shore.
They had walked a fair distance in the storm. Danny saw the mushroom of shadow-cloud over the house was a good way off now. He was safe here. But as more and more clouds came, the unshadowed land would grow smaller and smaller, until it was impossible to escape.
He turned his back on the clouds and the shadows and looked out to sea. It came upon him very strongly that the sea, one day, would be the place where he died. He wouldn’t go in his bed like an old man, or come to a lingering end in a hospital ward. For him it would be the rolling waves of the sea, rising up to claim him for their own.
But I’ll be old by then, he told himself. And it seemed like such a good thing—a natural thing—a thing to look forward to, almost—that his heart glowed warm and happy at the thought of it. I’ll live all my life, he thought. Each bit of it, right to the end, will be interesting and strange and worth living. All sorts of things might happen to me, but I’ll never be bored.
Danny found himself smiling. It was hard to think of the impossible, because this was the impossible, and it was happening. Most of the time he hated it. But sometimes the clouds came apart, and he forgot Tom and Sammael, and he was just himself. And the impossible things came alive in his hands.
He thought about what he’d lost. It was obvious, really. Tom. And, temporarily, his parents. But he’d lost other things too. Shimny. His security. He’d even lost a sister once, long ago.
Should his story be about Emma? No, the loss that had brought him to the boathouse was specifically the loss of Tom. Tom’s story—Tom’s death—was his purpose. Emma was just a lurking shadow, too big for him to look at.
He began the story of Tom. Once, I had a cousin, he wrote. He lived on a farm at Sopper’s Edge, and he liked badgers and birds and cows and Hangman’s Wood and the horses Apple and Shimny.…
He paused. He hadn’t words to express his longing for Tom—the knowledge that he’d spent all those days hanging around with him on the farm, a bit bored, not appreciating any of it, and just too late he’d come to understand how much fun he’d actually been having. How many other boys had galloped horses over the hill in the silver moonlight? How many others had been taken to watch kestrels, or fought battles with log-sized fence posts, or been thrown headfirst into slimy ponds?
He nearly choked at the thought that it was all gone and would never happen again. He couldn’t write another word.
So he drew Tom. Tom on the farm, and all the things he had loved around him—horses, calves, sheep, fields, beetles, weasels, buzzards, rye grass and timothy, coltsfoot and clover, Aunt Kathleen and Sophie and the fences and the tractor and the cowshed, and as he drew them, he realized how much Tom had shown him of the world that he would never otherwise have known.
I need him back, thought Danny. He was my cousin. I let him die.
It was a good drawing. Anyone looking at it would have said, “Is that all? That’s not so impossible, surely?”
But it would never happen again.
* * *
Cath sawed off a length of her tangled hair with a piece of rusty metal lying in the corner of the shed and made a long, thin plait of it, feeding in strands at a time. Danny used the pencil to punch two holes in the pages and found a scrap of sailcloth to wrap around the outside. Ancient and stiff with salt, it was just about the right size and shape for a cover.
“Here.”
Cath found a better awl—a thick sail needle, blunted with rust, and Danny managed to push it through the sailcloth until the holes were big enough for the hair string.
And so it was bound together. It looked a mess—a small, scruffy bit of yellow-brown cloth, hanging stiffly over a few pieces of raggedly torn paper—but it was a book; they had made the Book of Shadows, and on this deserted beach, it seemed only right that it appeared as a thing just washed up by the sea.
CHAPTER 14
THE FIRST SHADOW
They gathered around the book and watched it expectantly, but it was still nothing more than a few scraps of paper.
“What do we do now?” asked Danny. “We’ve made it. It’s got all our hopes in it. Do I just write, and things come true?”
“Remember the story,” said Barshin. “We need to take it back to the place where it all began: the shadow that Xur threw Mab’s world into. Only then will it come alive.”
“But how are we supposed to find that? It must have disappeared thousands of years ago. Millions of years ago.”
“Ah, but this is a new book. And shadows move.”
Danny rolled his eyes. “Stop being cryptic. If you want to tell me something, just say it in words I’ll understand. We haven’t got much time.”
“Yeah,” said Cath. “Don’t leave it to him to work out. We’ll be here till the sun turns into a Christmas tree.”
Barshin let their comments fly away into silence. “Well, Cath was right—stories are stories, not the truth. But even so, there’s usually some truth lurking somewhere. In the story of Mab and Xur, there’s a moment when the world could have become one thing and instead became another. Without knowing anything about where Mab and Xur stood, we can still know that our own lives are full of such moments. Mine is. Yours is. And you made this Book of Shadows. There must have been a moment when something huge happened to you, which shaped your entire life. I’d think that is the place you need to find. Where did your road fork?”
“Well, it does that all the time,” said Danny. “Every time I do anything, I could always have done something else, couldn’t I?”
“I’m not talking about the small things,” said Barshin. “I mean the ones that completely shape your life.”
Danny ran through what he could remember of his entire life in his head. He didn’t remember anything from the first three years. What if something had happened then that no one had told him about? He’d never know where his road had forked in the time that he couldn’t remember.
“Come on, get on with it,” said Cath. “We’ve got to go.”
She coughed, a harsh wheeze of breath rattling at her chest.
“Why?” For a second Danny let himself be distracted.
“They’ll come back. They are coming back. I can feel it.”
Danny didn’t question this. She was so gray now that she could probably hear all the clouds, wherever they were.
He stood in the doorway of the boat shed. Shimny was still in the same position: head down, nose grazing the sand. Shimny, who’d raced along a hilltop, who’d fallen down a quarry side with him, standing in hopeless despair. She’d probably been like that all through the storm.
Storms. Trees waving wildly in the gale. Trees falling.
Trees being struck by lightning. Breaking, cleaving in two, right down to the smoking earth.
Trees dying.
People dying.
Children dying, and other children being born. To replace them.
Of course. Emma. He couldn’t remember the accident, because it had happened before he’d
even been born, but without it his parents would never have had him. His first fork had been Emma’s death.
“Emma,” he said abruptly.
“Who?”
“Emma. My older sister. She died in a storm, before I was born. That’s where my shadow would be—with Emma. But I don’t know where she’s buried. We never go there.”
“Your parents never told you?” said Cath.
“Nope. They don’t like to talk about her,” said Danny.
“Jeez,” said Cath. “Your perfect little family.” She looked at him, her face set. She was as gray as she’d been when he’d pulled her out of the house.
“You need the yellow flowers,” he said. “The gorse. Wait, I’ll get you some.”
“I need to get out of here,” said Cath.
He ran back to the dunes to get some gorse, then pushed some of the spiny plant into Cath’s hands. She didn’t throw it away, but stood, waiting for his next action. They were all waiting for him to tell them what he was going to do. How he was going to find Emma’s grave.
He had no idea.
Go into Chromos and wish to find it? But he couldn’t. Cath couldn’t. Barshin couldn’t. If they tried to go again in their current states, Chromos would be gray and unbearable.
“I can go,” said Ori. “I can get up on Shimny and go in and find out for you.”
Danny was dubious. “Are you sure? How will you know what to see? You don’t know anything about Emma.”
“I know enough about your heart,” said Ori. “I’ll find a way.”
Danny looked at her gazing back up at him with her deep brown eyes. Had anyone ever had such a loyal dog? He smiled, and realized that he hadn’t smiled for a long time.
“Thanks,” he said. “Thanks for trying. I don’t think it’ll work, but thanks.”
“It might,” said Ori. “Help me up onto Shimny’s back and tell her where to go.”
Shimny’s back was cold and narrow, and her ribs were as hard as the struts of the broken boat. Danny boosted Ori up, and the dog perched across the horse’s bony spine.
“I thought she was supposed to be a ghost,” muttered Cath. “Not a blooming xylophone.”
Shimny didn’t hear, or, if she heard, her misery was so deep that nothing could add to it. She barely acknowledged Danny’s promises of a home, of rest, of a sanctuary, but agreed to go without any gladness.
The Book of Shadows Page 10
