The Book of Storms (10 page)

He was rambling now. Danny didn't follow half of what he said.

“The book is his,” went on Korsakof, beginning to mutter rapidly. “I could never keep it by my side for long—it burned corners out of my soul. But I think that with that stick—perhaps—with that stick, you may have some sort of protection, or perhaps you will be able to read every word from the very beginning.… Oh, it is such a sadness.… Had I been the one to find that stick, what could have been.… But the world never fulfills our desires, my boy. It only burns them to ashes before our eyes, at the very moments they seem finally within our reach.…” He pulled himself up short and swallowed. “There is nothing more I can do now, except help you find your parents. Perhaps they will continue my work, with your help. The Book is in my blind in Butford woods. I will draw you a map.”

Grabbing a scrap of paper from the shelf next to him, he scribbled a few lines on it and thrust it at Danny. It was totally incomprehensible.

“Find the Book,” he said, “and stay out of Sammael's way, if you can. The stick! The stick belongs to you—you will never let it go, not now … but while you have it, he will always be after you.… If you want to find your parents, you must go quietly, stay low. Leave as little trail as you can. Only speak when you must. Be wary of the plants, the grasses, the trees, and the wind. Be wary of the rain, the birds, the dogs, and the earth. The world is watching you, Danny—the world is always watching. If you want to escape Sammael, do not let it see who you are!” He finished, his finger pointing toward Danny's heart. His blue eyes had turned a dark shade of purple, and a thin trickle of blood dribbled from his nose.

Danny watched it trail down his lips. His spine tingled. Korsakof must be mad. That must be it. Yes, he
must
be. How could anyone be wary of the earth?

He wanted to close his eyes and push it all away. If he could open them again and be in his living room, watching Abel Korsakof on television ranting at some other skinny boy, someone with quiet courage who would nod and bravely bear his fate, instead of someone whose guts were trying to churn butter and whose heart felt very small and weak like a baby bird, then maybe he'd think about the mystery a bit and enjoy the story. But he was here and this was him. And soon he'd have to step outside the walls of this shed and set off again to find the Book of Storms.

It was impossible. He could never make that journey. He just wasn't brave enough.

“Now give me the stick,” said Abel Korsakof, in a voice that sounded like fingernails on a blackboard.

“What?” Hadn't he just said nobody could take it from Danny?

“The stick.” Abel Korsakof held out his hand, calm and steady.

“But you just said no one could touch it, apart from me.…”

“Give it to me. You will get it back, but I must have a look at it first.”

“No,” said Danny, his heart beginning to quicken. The old man was trying to play a trick on him. He'd been lulling Danny into a false sense of security with all this ranting and rambling, and now he was trying to do something sneaky.

“Trust me,” said Abel Korsakof. Which of course meant that you shouldn't.

Danny gripped the bookshelf behind him. He'd have lots of time to react if Abel Korsakof started doing anything, given how long he'd taken to get up the last time.

But it was the final effort of the old man's life, and he found the last pieces of his strength for it. More than ninety years of laboring and scrambling up hillsides and flinging himself sideways to dodge falling trees brought him to Danny's side in an instant, one skeletal hand snapping tight around the boy's wrist, the other around his neck.

Danny struggled for breath, trying to stab forward with the knife, but Abel Korsakof's wiry old muscles held their own for a few vital seconds, forcing Danny's wrist back so that he had to drop the knife or let his arm be broken.

He dropped the knife. Korsakof let go of his arm but kept hold of his throat. The grip of the bony fingers froze into stone around Danny's neck.

“Remember, Danny,” the old man said, his face so close that his beard tickled Danny's nose, “not everything that hurts you is an enemy. And not everything that helps you is a friend.”

Danny stared at him. Did he mean himself? Which was Abel Korsakof, friend or foe?

“Now give me the stick,” said Korsakof.

Danny pulled it from his pocket. Abel Korsakof released his neck, took a step backwards, and put out his hand.

As soon as his fingers curled around the stick, his body stiffened. For a second Danny thought he was covered in hair—white, fluffy hair wriggling and rippling as it pushed against his skin. But it wasn't hair, it was the same white flame that the old man had seen around the stick, and it was eating him alive. In another moment it brightened into yellow, then orange, then red, and for the briefest of seconds it burned midnight black, then Abel Korsakof flung his arms out and fell onto the spread mess of his life's work. The stick dropped from his hand. Korsakof's legs sprawled over the storm map; he took a last rattling breath and was still.

Blood dribbled from between his blue lips, and the skin of his arms and face took on a mottled crimson color. But in the V of his shirt neck, his chest faded to pale yellow. And as his heart gave its final, faint lurch, his eyes returned to a gentle cornflower blue.

*   *   *

Danny closed his own eyes and covered them with his hands, wanting to shut out the picture. If he couldn't see that slumped body, those streaks of blood, that blotchy skin, maybe it would all go away. Or maybe those flames would come back and eat up the entire corpse, not just whatever it was that they'd already fed on.

The scream waited for a couple of stunned seconds and then burst from his lungs. He screamed in an awful, endless roar that sent the cat flying out of the shed in anguish. If he stopped, the flames might leap out of the stick again and run over the floor toward him, but surely nothing could touch him while he was yelling so loudly. He screamed until his eyes were bleeding with tears and his face was stinging with the pain of his stretched cheek muscles, and even then he couldn't make himself stop.

What ended it was a touch on his wrists, trying to pry his hands away from his face. He tried to twist away, but he was held fast, and then arms were around him, hugging him close, pulling his face into a soft, warm shoulder.

For a second he thought it was his mum. But the smell was wrong, the body too solid and fat. His mum was bony, with tighter-hugging arms.

It was Mrs. Korsakof. When at last Danny stopped screaming and began to breathe again, she stroked his back a couple of times and let him go.

“What happened?” she asked. But Danny couldn't speak.

Mrs. Korsakof bent over her husband's body and knelt by his side. She didn't seem to notice the stick. It lay just beside the hand that had grabbed it from Danny.

Danny didn't want to touch it. He wanted somebody to come and take him away. Where was Mitz? Danny looked around for her. Brave, fearless Mitz—she'd probably gone after another weasel in the hedge. But without picking up the stick, he couldn't talk to her.

A crumpled piece of paper had wedged itself between his fingers—Abel Korsakof's illegible map. Great Butford. He had no idea where that even was, just that it had been drawn by the shaky old hand that had deliberately set fire to itself in front of him.

He shivered until his knees knocked against each other. And he knew that it was all impossible.

*   *   *

Mrs. Korsakof took Danny back to the house, grasping his arm tightly. She told him to sit down and breathe deeply, until he could speak and tell her who he was and where he belonged. Her low-beamed kitchen smelled of bread and sweet cakes, and her hands trembled as she clutched the telephone and called for an ambulance.

She made Danny a cup of hot chocolate by melting a couple of squares of real chocolate into a saucepan of milk, and she put a plateful of lemon cake in front of him. It was coated in syrup that had crystallized into a sugary crust, but Danny couldn't eat it.

He held tight to the straps of his schoolbag. Mitz did not return. He wanted to go outside and call for her, to have her running over the lawn toward him, pushing her soft head into his palm. But he didn't trust himself to speak.

“The ambulance won't be long now, dear. And the police. Are you sure you can't tell me your parents' names?”

Mrs. Korsakof made herself a cup of tea and tried to raise it to her lips. Her hands were shaking so much that she spilled it all down her blouse.

“Oh dear!” she said, dabbing at herself with a dish towel. “Oh dear!”

For a moment her hands slumped to her sides, and she seemed to be about to do what Danny had done—bury her face and scream. But instead she took a deep breath.

“I must go and be with him,” she said, more to herself than to Danny, and then she went out of the room.

He stared at the table for one more second. She had called the police. There would be questions, and he would have to answer them, and he would have to tell the police officers that, yes, his parents sometimes went away at night and, yes, he was eleven, but it wasn't as simple as it seemed because they hadn't meant to stay away, he was sure they hadn't, because now he knew about Sammael and the storms and he was pretty sure that something had been done to them that no policeman on earth could unravel. And the police wouldn't believe a word of it. They would try to be nice and put him in some home somewhere with “responsible” people who weren't his parents and who never would be.

Then he pushed himself to his feet. He didn't want questions, or people trying to be nice. None of that would make anything better. He wanted to crawl away into the night and find a hole somewhere, and wait for things to put themselves right again. And outside, there was Mitz, his friend. She wouldn't ask stupid questions. She would curl up beside him and keep on breathing.

The shadows were drawing long as he slipped from the house and made his way back toward the hedge, calling softly to the cat and peering for her shape in the fading light.

*   *   *

But Mitz had vanished. She wasn't waiting out in the lane, and although Danny stood for five minutes, calling her as loudly as he dared, she didn't come to him. There was nothing to do but stumble back to the railway station and get on a train to somewhere—anywhere—that he knew.

CHAPTER 6

THE FARM

As Danny hurried back toward the railway station through the deserted streets of Hopfield his ears caught the distant sound of police sirens. Without Mitz to look out for, he kept his head down and tried to ignore the warmly lit windows of other people's houses. What would those people behind the windows say if he marched up to one of the doors and knocked on it, explaining that he'd lost his parents and then watched an old man die, both on the same day? And what if he explained too that the old man's death had really been his fault?

He tried to push the thought of Abel Korsakof away, right out of his mind, but that wasn't going to work now; he couldn't imagine his head without that memory inside it playing over and over like a flashing neon sign. He tried to wrap the memory in other thoughts: of Mitz, of the reddening sunset, of his own, quiet bedroom with the shelf of books and computer games, and the pictures he'd drawn stuck up on the walls. That didn't work either. No matter how closely he tried to picture them in his mind's eye, none of those things could be bigger than death.

Because death changed everything. When his Uncle Mick had died, Danny had only been about five or six. He might not even have remembered it if he hadn't been staying at the farm and seen Aunt Kathleen running up the lane, bursting into the house, and grabbing the duvet off the closest bed, which happened to be Danny's. After the ambulance left, he saw his duvet bundled up in the hallway. It looked sort of the same, except that there were smears of blood creeping out of the creases. He still wondered what his uncle had looked like under the turned-over tractor—he'd even tried to draw it once, in the secrecy of his room—but he'd never really been able to picture more than just Uncle Mick with the duvet on top of him, covering all the places that were bleeding.

And then Aunt Kathleen hardly spoke for weeks, even to say things about the cows, and Tom got all obsessed with badgers and spent the rest of the summer dodging around the woods in the middle of the night, with Aunt Kathleen trying not to shout at him when he came home. Danny followed him once and got almost as far as the edge of the woods, but Tom saw him and sent him back to the house, and after that his visit quickly ended.

The farm. It was the closest place to home Danny could think of just then. At the farm, he always stayed in the same room and ate breakfast from the same bowl, and suddenly that was all he wanted—just to see a room he knew and eat from a bowl that was his. He'd never taken a train to get there before, but at Easter they'd caught a bus down to a station called Blackthorn Halt, when he and Tom had gone to see Tom's sister, Sophie, off on holiday. It wasn't far away: it had to be possible.