The Book of Storms (14 page)

*   *   *

What he meant was that he would take his big brown mare, Apple, and stick Danny on the ancient black-and-white pony that both Tom and Sophie had learned to ride on. It was so old that no one remembered its real name and just called it the piebald, after its color.

“Quick way or long way?” asked Tom. “Forest or road?”

The forest was dark and gloomy, but Danny didn't care. “Let's go through the forest.”

“Hangman's Wood?” said Tom, reaching up his hand to pull an imaginary noose up from his neck.

Danny nodded. “Yeah. There.”

He tried not to think about what Tom had just done, or how the forest had come by its name.

“Okay.” Tom grinned. His face was suddenly shining with the thrill of unexpected wildness.

They turned the horses toward the forest and trotted out of the yard.

*   *   *

Hangman's Wood was full of oak and beech trees. By night the shadows piled on top of each other, leaf upon leaf, branch upon branch, until what existed in the spaces between the trees wasn't clear night air but towers of shifting shadow-bricks. Night birds whistled, and insects retreated from shafts of moonlight as the horses padded along the soft earth.

After ten minutes, when the trail began to widen and the trees thinned, Tom thought, There's light enough from the moon, so why not? Waving his arm to catch Danny's attention, he put his heels to Apple's flanks so that she sprang into a gallop.

Together they ran, the horses dreaming of fire in the wind. Old friends that they were, they put their shoulders side by side and dispatched the distance as though they were not earthly horses but ghosts running toward freedom, their tails streaming out behind them.

CHAPTER 9

PUDDLETON LANE ENDED

Danny had never seen dawn break before. The first he noticed of it was that he began to think he'd developed an extraordinary ability to see in the dark. Then he caught the movement of Tom's arm as it swept up to point at something, and saw that the horizon over a distant field was shining royal blue.

They ambled down a long, straight road in the rising twilight, keeping tucked into the verge in case a speeding car came along and spotted them only at the last second. Danny caught a faint scent on the air. He sniffed.

“Can you smell that?” he asked Tom.

“The burning? Someone's had a bonfire in one of these fields, I'd guess. It's an old smoke smell.”

Something pinched at Danny's skin.

“Are we near Hopfield?” he asked.

“Yeah,” said Tom, not really in the mood for a chat. “It's at the end of this road. Another half a mile.”

“And are we near Puddleton?”

“Yeah, that was the last village, where we came off the bridleway. Didn't you see the sign?”

So they must be approaching from the opposite direction. They'd get to the Korsakofs' house before they reached the village. The old piebald pony stumbled over a pothole in the road. She wasn't shod; her hooves made a soft scrapy thud as they hit the tarmac. If anyone was awake nearby, they probably thought that only one horse was clip-clopping by: sleek brown Apple with her sturdy iron feet.

A skeleton reached up from one of the hedgerows ahead, dark and spidery.

“What's that?” Danny pointed at it.

“Dead tree.”

Danny couldn't recall having seen any dead trees around Abel Korsakof's cottage when he'd been there before, but then, he hadn't come this far out of Hopfield. Puddleton Lane End had been on the left coming out of the village, so this time it would be to their right, which was where the dead tree was.

Was the smell of burning getting stronger, just a little?

*   *   *

There was no need to look for the road sign in the thicket this time. Neither road sign nor thicket existed. Puddleton Lane End was a scorched streak across a blackened waste, roped off by yards of blue-and-white police tape.

It seemed much smaller than before. Danny was sure he'd wandered quite a way down the lane before he'd seen the sign for Storm Cottage, but as they reined in the horses and stood at the end of the lane, a charred timber frame was almost the first thing they saw. It was surrounded by twisted totem poles that had once been trees. The riot of colorful flowers had shriveled and dropped away into ashes; the emerald lawn between Storm Cottage and Korsakof's shed had withered into a patch of soot. The shed itself might never have existed, save for the mound of charcoal and ash that rose slightly higher than the black detritus around it.

The stick! How would the stick ever have survived that? It must have been an inferno, the fire that had devastated this place. And Danny had left the stick on Abel Korsakof's shed floor, which looked like it had been right in the middle of the blaze.

“Crikey,” said Tom. “Was that his house?”

Danny wanted to say, Do you believe me now? But he was too worried about the stick. Should he be cautious about approaching the pile where the shed had been? Was this some kind of a warning?

“Yeah, it was,” he said instead. His voice didn't seem to be working properly.

Tom jumped off Apple's back and untied the police tape, but the horses weren't keen on going near the ashes. They snorted, threw up their heads, and planted their hooves in the earth, refusing to budge. Tom looped the reins over Apple's head and tied them around one of the less-singed trees. The grass verge was only brownish, rather than sooty black; it seemed this fire had been intense but had burned out before it spread too far.

Danny slid off the piebald and his legs turned to jelly. He wasn't used to horse riding like Tom was. It made your muscles feel like they'd been wrung out.

Using the pony's shoulder to steady himself for a moment, he watched Tom stamping off to explore the burnt cottage. When finally he managed to stand properly and rejoin Tom, his cousin was kicking at a lump of twisted metal just inside one of the rooms.

“That's iron,” Tom said. “How can a house fire have gotten this hot? I wonder what happened.”

Sammael, thought Danny. This was probably his punishment for Abel Korsakof not killing me. Even though the old man was already dead when he got here, Sammael probably just destroyed everything else in revenge.

But what was the use of saying that to Tom?

*   *   *

Danny went out the gap where the back door had been, across the scorched garden, and toward the shed-mound. He could see clearly in his mind's eye what had been around him when he'd taken the same path yesterday. Whitewashed cottage, pink flowers, green grass, rust-brown shed. How could they no longer exist? How, in the space of a single night, could they all have become black and made of powder? Even if the stick had survived, which was possible—after all, it had survived the lightning—Danny would have to dig through a mountain of ash to find it. And if Abel Korsakof's charred old bones were still in there, too …

But they wouldn't be. The ambulance would have come along and taken him away. There would definitely be nothing left of Abel Korsakof here.

And when Danny stood by the mound, he knew exactly where the stick was. He could feel it, as if he had buried his own hand in there, still attached to his arm. All he had to do was pull it out.

He pushed his hand into the still-warm ashes and found it quickly. It wanted to stay with him. It wanted to nestle into the curve of his palm, to have his fingers around it. It was his, much more than a loyal dog or a favorite sweater: somehow, it was just his.

As he stood brushing the ash off its bark, he heard a small mewling cry and a whining close by. It was a voice he knew well.

“Mitz!” he said. “Mitz, are you here?”

The mewling stopped. “Danny?” came a tiny voice.

“Mitz!” he said again. “Where are you?”

“I'm stuck,” she said. “It's dark. I don't know where.”

*   *   *

She'd been trapped by a tree that had fallen over the mouth of a burrow, where she must have fled for shelter. He found her after five minutes' search, following the sound of her cries. Digging her out with a bit of branch was easy, but when he pulled her body from the burrow, he was sure he'd found a different cat.

Mitz no longer had a long, fluffy coat or a plush tail. Her fur was burnt and matted into clumps. She was coated with a thick paste of soot, ash flakes clung to her back like white spots on a black leopard, and her fine whiskers had all gone. One of her eyes was half closed and oozing something sticky. The other glared angrily at Danny, then began to swivel around.

Danny cradled her in his arms, not knowing what to do to help her. She struggled to leap free, but her strength seemed to have gone.

“Hey…” he said, “what happened to you? How did you get down there?”

Mitz wriggled and then lay limp. “Put me on the ground,” she whispered. “I don't like being held like a baby.”

He turned her the right way up and placed her gently on the earth. Her grimy legs crumpled and she lay on her side, resting her head against the soil.

“Mitz?” said Danny. “Are you okay? You're not going to die, are you?”

“Not if I can help it,” said Mitz, swallowing.

“What happened here? Did you see it?”

Mitz closed her eyes. For a terrible moment Danny thought she'd stopped breathing, but her belly gave a little jerk.

“Was it Sammael?”

A shudder ran down the cat's body.

“It was, wasn't it? I knew it! He was probably trying to burn—” Danny stopped himself, remembering that he hadn't told Mitz about the stick. “He was probably trying to burn everything the old man had, after you stopped him from killing me.”

The little creature, who had flung herself so boldly through the air to push the striking knife away from Danny, now tried to gasp but choked on her own breath.

“He didn't burn everything,” she said. “There's something in that hole. Not a tree root, not a rabbit. It stopped me going farther down, where I wanted to be.”

The fur around her neck was still long, sticking out like a ruff. Danny smoothed it down with his finger. Her skull was tiny without all the hair. She didn't respond to his touch. Reluctantly, he took his hand away.

He reached down into the hole and felt around, hoping that nothing had died in there recently. He found something wrapped in a piece of cloth, rectangular and thin.

Danny sat beside Mitz and unwrapped the cloth. Inside, there was a collection of scraps of paper, stapled together between two pieces of cardboard. It felt as fragile as a kite.

Another notebook. Did everyone leave their lives in notebooks?

CHAPTER 10

THE LIFE & WORKS OF ABEL SEBASTIEN KORSAKOF

Danny opened the notebook. It was much smaller than the spiral-bound book from his parents' bedroom, and some of the pages weren't even made of writing paper. Brown and thin and badly trimmed, they'd been salvaged from parcel wrapping or bags of greengrocers' fruit. He tried not to bend the cardboard covers, for fear the whole thing might fall apart in his hands.

The Life and Works of Abel Sebastien Korsakof
, the book declared in a shaky, age-cramped hand.

Abel Sebastien Korsakof, the subject and author of this work (who shall henceforth be referred to as ASK), was born in Poland, of parents who had fled Russia in the winter of 1917 (the year of revolution). His early childhood was a hard one, poor and frugal, the ordinary hardships of life exacerbated by the cruel and inclement weather prevalent in the area in which he grew up. Being the ninth child of parents who earned a pittance laboring on their impoverished farm, ASK learned early in his life of the devastating effects that shock weather events such as floods, freezes, and storms can have on the ability of a family to survive. In his twelfth year, two of his elder sisters were drowned by the rising of the Orsat, the local river, and in his fourteenth year he watched his younger brother Torwek being struck by lightning. Although Torwek survived, he suffered afterward from terrible headaches that he said felt like an axe trying to cleave his skull apart.