The Book of Storms (18 page)

“There aren't any answers,” said Danny. “Every time I get near one, Sammael kills it.”

“That's because
he
's only interested in posing questions,” said the river. “He's interested in ideas that take you somewhere else, instead of just returning you back to the place you started from. You'll understand when you meet him. But here in the world, there
are
answers.”

“Where?” challenged Danny.

“Everywhere,” said the river. “In the sand, for a start, if you're looking for human-type answers. Try talking to earthworms—they sing about the sand. They know a lot, the earthworms—all day, every day, they eat earth. It's what everything on the planet has been and one day will be again, and they
eat
it!”

Everything on earth. That meant his sister, too. If nothing else, maybe he could at least find out more about Emma. Then he'd have
something
. Because, of course, worms wouldn't know about anything aboveground, so there was no use in hoping that they'd help him find his parents, unless his parents were already dead. And the same went for Tom.

“Questions work like water,” continued the river. “There's little bits of them everywhere, spread around. The answer is just a matter of gathering all the bits together. Even the secret of Sammael is probably lying around the world in little fragments. One day, some creature will find all the fragments and unite them—maybe they'll even find out how to destroy him. But perhaps whoever finds out his secret won't want to destroy him in the end. You never know.”

“I'd destroy him,” said Danny. “I'd do it now if I could. But I don't know how to find him. Perhaps the worms could tell me that.”

“They couldn't,” said the river immediately. “Sammael isn't a creature of the earth. He's made of ether. Do you know what that is?”

“No,” said Danny.

“It's the upper air,” said the river. “It's where the gods traveled in ancient times. It holds more than we earthly creatures could ever dream of. It's where Sammael lives, and
you
couldn't go there unless you sold your soul to him. And something tells me you're unlikely to do that.”

“It tells you right,” said Danny.

Whatever his soul was worth, he was certainly keeping it.

*   *   *

Danny left the riverbank, trying to peer through the trees and see back up the hill. Had the dogs gone? He should go back up there now and find Tom. But then there were the worms—could he maybe find something out from them that might help him call off the dogs? If he'd been brave, he'd just have gone up there anyway. But he wasn't brave. Or at least, not brave enough.

He dragged his eyes away from the woods and walked a few paces along the river, scanning the ground. The earth looked moist and crumbly: surely there would be worms down here.

*   *   *

Behind him, Mitz the cat stopped washing and looked up. She'd been listening to every word he'd just said. What could he have been talking to? All she'd heard besides Danny had been the sighing of the wind through the treetops, the chattering life of the woodland, and the hideous burble of that hateful river. But he'd claimed to be able to talk to everything, hadn't he?

He'd claimed. But then, he'd claimed he was just looking for his parents and instead had dumped her in a river and tried to drown her. Why should she trust him?

She got to her feet and slunk away between the dark tree trunks. Her paws didn't disturb even the tiniest leaf as she went.

CHAPTER 12

WORM

Danny found the rusted lid of a biscuit tin and began to dig. Somewhere in the distance a dog barked and then another answered. He shuddered.

I want a normal life, he thought as he dug, stabbing the lid into the ground so fiercely that pieces of it began to break off. I want a normal life where you don't have to find out about things that shouldn't exist by talking to things that shouldn't talk. I want to talk about normal things, with normal
people
. And to have them believe me. Maybe Tom was right not to believe me about all this. If I heard me saying it, I wouldn't want to believe it.

*   *   *

The worm paused with a sinking feeling as the earth around her shook with the pounding of some object from above. It didn't automatically mean death—she had survived being dug up once before—but you could never tell. There was the hot sun to kill you if you got flicked out onto a hard surface. There were human tools that sliced you in half, and hands that burned your blood. Birds were always waiting to eat you up, and a worm was powerless against them. It had nowhere to hide now.

*   *   *

Danny tried to pick the worm up, and it screamed at the touch of his fiery fingers. He dropped it back into the soil, and it tried to slink back underneath.

“Hey!” he said. “Please stay. I need to talk to you.”

The worm stopped its slither and wriggled so it was just below the crumbly soil, away from the sunshine.

“How can you talk to me?” it asked in surprise.

“Don't you know? I thought earthworms knew everything. At least that's what I was told.” Danny settled himself down on the leaf mold. He had a good feeling about this worm.

“Oh no,” it said. “That's not true at all. Whoever told you that is probably confusing what we
know
with what we
sing
.”

“So you sing about things you don't know about? How's that?”

“It's the sand that sings, really,” said the worm. “The sand that we swallow tells us of the lives it's been, the world it's seen, and we sing its songs as we work. It isn't like the legends that other creatures have, explaining how the world came to be created and suchlike. We just sing what the sand is telling us.”

Danny looked at the soil around the worm. Dark, damp earth and grit, small rocks and sand. The closer he watched, the more movement he could see: a beetle marching over a familiar trail; some tiny creature shifting fragments twice the size of its body. Which lives had he known that had ended? His sister's, and of course Abel Korsakof's. Were they both underneath him in the soil, singing through worms?

“Could you ask the sand something for me?” he asked the worm.

“I don't know,” it said, dubious. “We don't pick what the sand knows, to sing of. We just sing of what it says. I've never tried asking it anything … and I don't think I could.”

“But will you just sing anyway? I'd like to hear it.”

“I will,” agreed the worm. Its voice echoed a little, slinking away to the edges of Danny's ears.

It took a mouthful of earth and began.

“In Dublin's fair city, where the girls are so pretty,

I first set my eyes on sweet Molly Malone,

She wheels her wheelbarrow, through streets broad and narrow,

Singing, ‘Cockles and mussels, alive alive O!'

‘Alive alive O! Alive alive O!'

‘Cockles and mussels, alive alive O!'”

This was not what Danny had expected. The secrets of the worms couldn't be that pointless, surely? But then, he'd only asked the worm to sing whatever it normally sang. He needed information about specific things, not just ramblings from random grains of earth. But if he couldn't ask anything …

Then he had it. He could find out about the things within his own grasp. Himself. The stick. Where had the stick come from? And was owning it changing him into somebody—some
thing
—else?

He pulled a hardened piece of his own skin from his fingernail, flaked off a tiny fragment of bark from the stick, and dropped both of these just in front of the worm.

It chanced upon the grain of skin first and vacuumed it up. At first no song came out. Perhaps it wouldn't work—skin wasn't sand, after all. But Danny waited, and a small, whining voice began to croak from the worm.

“Somehow the future's more than us, and somehow the past is less.

And somehow, somewhere, there's a peaceful place and where I am is a mess.

But if I close my eyes and ask enough times, maybe someone will tell me the way,

And I won't have to think about storms anymore.…”

The skin evidently wasn't up to much, because this trailed off. If it was a reflection of his life, it was pretty rubbish. Just a bit of doggerel … Was that really all he was made of? Then the worm inhaled the piece of stick, and her voice changed again.

“The world is deadly, the world is bright,

The creatures that use it are blinded by sight,

But there's no sense in crying or closing my page,

Sense only battles in fighting and rage.

So come all you soldiers and answer my call,

Together we gather, together we fall!”

Danny had never heard the voice before, but he knew at once whose voice it was. The words settled over his shoulders in a freezing cloud, and a thin crackle of static rushed through his head. It was nothing like what he would have expected—surely lightning should have spoken with great, sharp speed? But this was certainly the voice of lightning—it prickled through his blood until his skin was crawling with spines.

So the storms were inside the stick. The storms, whose anger everyone feared so much—he was carrying a part of them around with him, in his trouser pocket. What would they do to him if they knew? Reclaim it, surely, with gales and hail and fire. It wouldn't be just his parents who got killed then, it would be him, fried right down to the last fingernail. The only person who'd survived the lash of a storm had been Abel Korsakof, but then, he'd already sold his soul to Sammael for it. If Danny knew one thing, beyond how large the lump was that choked his guts, it was that he wouldn't be seeking out Sammael's protection against anything.

Danny stared at the disturbed earth, watching the worm burrow her way slowly back into it. She was strangely perfect and unblemished, next to his own grubby and scratched hands. For a long moment he wished he was the worm, tunneling his way underground into darkness. Worms didn't have these problems. Worms didn't have parents to do stupid things. Worms looked after themselves.

But then, worms had no one to take care of them either. And Tom had looked after him. He hadn't needed to—he could have gone home and told the police to find Danny. But he'd come along and known the way. All those twists and turns, the paths and villages—Danny would never have found the route alone.

He tried to push away that last, horrible memory of the dogs sweeping over Tom, the arm thrown into the air like it was waving. What had happened to him? Was his body lying back where he'd fallen, next to those trees, bleeding itself out onto the ground?

Without knowing, Danny couldn't go on. Whatever the stick was, Tom was real and normal, and the idea of him being dead was terrible. Danny had to face it—he had to go back up there and find out.

What if the dogs were still there? What if they were standing guard, waiting for the other half of the pack to return?

Danny's heart began to patter, but he refused to listen to it. He forced himself up onto his feet, feeling like a very small person inside a huge, reluctant body.

Mitz was nowhere to be seen, and Shimny was still lying on her side, her coat sticking up in wet bristles. He would leave her be—he'd have a much better chance of going unnoticed without her.

“I'm going back,” he whispered to her, unsure if she was asleep.

The pony gave no indication that she'd heard. Her eyes were closed.

I suppose I must be a coward, thought Danny. Doing frightening things is so hard. And as he looked back along the rows of pines, he could see that the edge of the wood was bright and stark. He'd be exposed out there. He'd be seen for miles.

But Tom was out there too. He would just have to take his chances.

*   *   *

He could see quite clearly from the edge of the wood that the dogs were still up by the copse, patrolling like beetles around the spot where Tom had fallen. Of Tom he could see no sign, but the grasses and plants were tall and the shrubby undergrowth crowded around the bottom of the copse.

Between Danny and the dogs was a huge field. He hadn't taken proper notice of it before, but it stretched, rough and tufty, crossed by the ditch that Shimny had jumped, and then sloped upward. How on earth had they escaped those dogs? There was no cover anywhere, nothing that would have hampered their pursuers. Shimny must simply have managed to outrun that black, baying mass, stride for stride. That was all.

Danny lay on his front, watching the dogs. A couple of them were nuzzling at something hidden behind a bush. He craned his neck to try and catch a better glimpse of it, then wriggled forward, pushing against the earth with his knees. For the moment the dogs didn't seem to have noticed him. Maybe if he kept low, they wouldn't pick up his scent on the wind.