The Book of Storms (27 page)

He reached into his inside pocket and pulled out a small, thin object. At first Danny thought it might be another stick: it was about the right size and shape. But then something flashed on the end of it—a sharp point of lead. It was a pencil.

Sammael flicked the book on a handful of pages. “It always amazes me,” he said, “this human thing about opposites. I say, ‘If you don't do this, I'll kill you.' And you just assume that if you
do
do it, then I
won't
kill you. But my rule is, Assume nothing. Take nothing for granted. Or you've only got yourself to blame when the thing you refuse to imagine turns out to be the thing that
happens
.”

He began to write in the book, reading aloud as he did so.

“Danny faced Sammael. In his hands, the horse's wet reins felt slippery, like water snakes. Nothing at all like the cover of the Book of Storms.”

Danny's hands itched, then burned, then couldn't decide whether to itch or burn. The reins felt like snakes in his hands. Water snakes? No! No, he told himself, they definitely didn't feel like that. A bit snakelike, maybe … What was like water snakes but not water snakes? Nothing! They were two thin, slippery water snakes. Nothing at all like the cover of the Book of Storms.

“There was nothing left for him here. Nothing to be gained by fruitless arguments that he was too stupid to understand. He turned back to the fat old pony that was still standing dumbly behind him. The gray lurcher let go of the horse's reins, which she'd been holding between her teeth.”

Kalia let go of the reins. Danny hadn't even seen her standing at Shimny's head. From what he could make out, she was huge but skinny, with a pointy face. She didn't look dangerous. Was she Sammael's dog? Surely he'd have a big, black, slavering thing, like those Dogs of War?

“Danny suddenly found that he'd developed the ability to jump onto his pony's back from the ground. Just like his cousin Tom. Well, that was one good thing to come out of all this, wasn't it?”

And then Danny was on Shimny's back, gripping tight to her wet flanks. Her tufty mane scratched at his wrists. Should he get off?
Could
he get off?

“And the pony began to gallop. Fortunately, they were on a nice, smooth hilltop and could get up quite a speed.…”

Shimny's legs began to move. They were too far away to hear Sammael now; the pony was galloping with renewed vigor in her tired old legs. Danny wanted to pick up the reins, hold them properly, control her. But the speed was fine, the speed was definitely fine, because of course she knew where she was going, of course she could keep her feet safely. The quarry was fenced off—no need to worry about that. Everything would still be fine if he didn't pick up the reins. The reins were snakes, after all. You couldn't control a pony using snakes.

He put his hand to his pocket, felt for the stick.

“Hi ho, old fruit,” he said. “Topping speed, eh?”

Had he really said that?

“I'm enjoying it,” puffed Shimny. “I do like a nighttime jaunt, myself.”

“Good thing we got away from Sammael, wasn't it?” said Danny.

“Rather,” said Shimny. “Bit of a blighter, that one.”

What on earth were they saying? These weren't his words. Or Shimny's. This wasn't the way either of them spoke. This was a script being written for them, the words slithering out from their minds in unhesitating black streams.

“Tricky devil,” said Danny.

“Oh, quite.” The pony put her head down and careered against the fence. Danny wasn't scared—of course he wasn't scared. Nice fence. Good fence. Strong fence.

Fence that had been cut by a helpful gang of kids the week before.

The ground vanished from underneath them. Shimny had no chance to claw it back and fell, sliding down the side of the old quarry with Danny clinging onto her mane for his dear life until even his slight weight pulled her too far sideways. She lost her footing and began to roll, faster and faster, in a whirling blur of legs, hooves, tangled mane, flying tail, jackknifing neck, and blood red nostrils gasping for breath.

Danny let go and was thrown clear onto the craggy rock face, where he tumbled for a few wild seconds and then struck his head on a jagged projection.

His neck broke, and the world disappeared.

CHAPTER 18

DEATH

“The story of Danny O'Neill. The End,” Sammael wrote, then closed the Book of Storms.

“Right,” he said to Kalia. “Home time, I think.”

Kalia was lying down, waiting for him. She didn't move.

“Kalia!” Sammael snapped his fingers.

The lurcher whimpered.

“Come on,” he said. “We need to get on back.”

“I'm caught,” said the lurcher in a voice so faint that even Sammael could barely hear it.

“Caught? How caught?”

“I don't know.… It's wire or something, and then the horse trod on me.… It hurts.…”

Sammael chucked the book down and crouched by the dog's long body, feeling it with his hands. She was lying flat—her head, shoulders, and ribs were all fine. Then, as he reached her hind legs, he encountered a sticky mass. She was caught in the wire of a rabbit snare.

“Leave me,” she said. “I'm dying—there's nothing you can do. Leave me.”

Sammael's jaw clenched. The dog hadn't asked for eternal life. All she'd asked was to be his dog and for him to be her master. That was the only bargain they'd ever made. Her paw print was in his notebook as a witness to it. He owed her nothing, could demand her safety from no one.

Her skull under his palm was narrow and frail.

“You stupid, idiot animal,” he said. “Why didn't you make me give you a long life?”

“But then I'd have known how long I had with you,” said Kalia. “I'd have known when it was going to end. It would have broken my heart.”

“Better your stupid heart than your legs,” said Sammael.

“No,” whispered Kalia. “My legs are mine to break. But my heart—that's yours.…”

She fell into a faint, her eye closing. Sammael put a hand on her ribs: still something beating in there. Still a pulse. She was shivering faintly. He shrugged his bony shoulders out of the sleeves of his coat and laid it on top of her. Only two creatures had inhabited that coat—its original owner and himself. Neither had belonged to the solid earth. Could the coat's mysterious power do anything for a dog?

He felt for the wire of the snare again. Slowly, with infinite patience, he began to untwist it, trying not to hurt her further.

*   *   *

Shimny lay on the slope, not caring to check how many of her legs were broken. She couldn't breathe, at any rate, so soon it wouldn't matter. The end would be quick enough.

She looked up at the moon, unaware that little by little the air was seeping back into her winded lungs. She wondered why she could still see when she ought to be dead. Perhaps death slows time, she thought. For death was surely coming. She felt it in the unsettled throb of the night air, heard it whispering out from the lumps of flesh and bone that had once held both her own and Danny's heartbeats. This short interlude was probably just a last gift to her from the living world, a last chance to taste its sharpness and feel its strong warmth.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw a woman approaching up the slope of the quarry. The woman must have seen her, but as she drew closer she didn't hurry, her short legs dragging a little as if she was used to taking her time.

The woman crouched and put out a hand to touch Shimny's neck just behind the ears. Her hair was white, and she had a steady, sad face.

She smiled and took her hand away.

“You're not mine,” she said. “Not yet.”

Then she rose to her feet and made her way over to the corpse of the boy, whose neck was twisted back at an angle. The woman stooped, spreading out her arms to gather his body up and cradle him. Her hands were under Danny's knees and shoulders when she cast her eyes down to his face, and then she stopped.

For a full minute she didn't move but stared into his lifeless eyes, then she began to slide her arms out from underneath him.

“I won't do it,” Shimny heard the woman say. “I won't be a pawn in Sammael's Machiavellian little spats. How did he
do
this?”

And the whispering shadows began to creep from the rocks, curling up around Death's neck and ears. Lying in a land between death and life, Shimny's walleye saw them too—to her they were black and green and the darkest shade of purple, half spreading into leaves as they flattened themselves out with explanations.

*   *   *

Death listened. When the shadows finally died away, she stood up straight and looked down at the boy's corpse. She was bound to take it—too much of him had been lost already, pulled away into the Book of Storms.

For a moment she clenched her fist, preparing herself. Wishing, not for the first time, that she could kick a stone or punch the ground or scream any one of the millions of screams she'd been saving up since the dawn of life. But Death's job was not to scream. It was to tidy.

Then she caught sight of the horse again, looking at her. That horse—it had seen her. It had seen her shadows. There would never be anything tidy about that horse now—it would spend the rest of its life telling crazy stories about Death and her red eyes to anyhorse who would listen. Sometimes things couldn't be tidy, no matter how hard you tried. And sometimes they shouldn't be.

Death walked away from the dead boy, her hand still clenched into a fist, heading for the top of the slope.

*   *   *

When she returned, she was carrying a small black book. Shimny had seen it before—it was the book that Danny had found in that wooden hut. Death didn't seem to like it much: she sat down on a rock beside Danny and began tearing the pages out, cracking the spine and yanking at the stitching with her teeth. As the pages fell, she crumpled them up, sandwiching them between her knees.

She caught sight of Shimny watching her. “He was seeing to his dog,” she said, a touch defensive. “He'd just chucked it on the ground. Didn't notice me taking it. Finders keepers, isn't it?”

Shimny blinked.

“I'm not going to spend my time cleaning up Sammael's corpses,” said Death. “I'm part of the natural order of things. It's time he learned that. He might be natural, but he certainly isn't order. Let's see what he says to this, eh?”

With this, she tore the last few pages from the cover and reached out for Danny's limp head. She took his face in her hands, opened his mouth, and began stuffing the crumpled pages, one by one, inside it. Even after she'd pushed a good handful inside, more than ought to have fit into a human's mouth, she kept on going. When the pages threatened to spill out from between Danny's teeth, she began to pack them more tightly, pushing them down into his throat with her bony fingers.

“It's a question, isn't it?” Death said to Shimny as she twisted up the last few pages and crushed them after the others. “Can you eat your words? Does it make any difference if you do? What if someone else eats them for you?”

Shimny had no idea what the mad silver-haired woman was talking about. But she did know that, although paper might find its way through Danny's guts eventually, there was no way he could eat those stiff black covers from the outside of the book. She eyed them.

Death smiled at her. “Don't worry,” she said. “I wouldn't even put these on a dung heap. Poisonous things.” And she tucked them away inside her waistcoat.

She crouched over Danny for a moment, kissed the boy's forehead, and then, with a grin, stood back up and dusted off her hands.

“That'll really needle him,” she remarked to Shimny as she set off the way she had come. “Might make him think for a couple of minutes next time.”

She said this as if she didn't really have much hope of it, but her walk as she departed had a slightly cocky jaunt. Shimny would have sworn to herself, had she not been dazed and broken, that as she watched the receding back, a slight breeze picked up toward her and she heard the figure of Death whistle.

Don't go, Shimny found herself thinking. Please don't go. Turn around and come back to me.

There was definitely a tune coming from somewhere—it drifted sweetly into her ears, soothing her. But it must have been Death who was carrying the tune—the notes became fainter with every moment. Pain began to bite at Shimny's body with sharper teeth, and she closed her eyes again. What I'd like more than anything, she thought, is to keep hearing that tune.

As soon as she had enough strength, she resolved, she would scramble to her feet and follow it.

*   *   *

“Danny, Danny, why are you lying here? Danny! Danny!”