The Book of Storms (28 page)

Danny swam from oak green gloom up toward where the light seemed strongest. The weeds were holding his feet down, tugging at his ankles to keep him anchored to the bottom. He wanted to break the surface. Although he could breathe, this wasn't his world, where creatures that weren't fish swam and pond weed oozed along the plush silt. It was safe, but too dark for him; the water was thick with tiny particles, and only a few strands of light penetrated down, so he could hardly see.

The world of the dead is a pond, he was surprised to find as he rose higher. But there was nobody here that he recognized: no old man, no horse. Perhaps they were the shapes of the swimming things that weren't fish. Perhaps that's what he was now too.

But no—he still had feet and ankles like a boy. He wrenched them free of the weeds and felt the air in his body lift him up to the light. There was a voice calling him.

“Danny, what are you doing? Get up, get up!”

The voice was pulling him toward the sun. It wasn't the sun speaking, though—from its pure, silver tone Danny knew that it must be Death herself, watching over him. Was she calling him to join her? No—she was
whistling
to him. Notes glided through the water and coiled themselves softly around his ears. His chest began to warm, repelling the cold depths.

For one final second he felt regret at leaving this womblike place, and then, as the light grew nearer, he saw that it was shining and golden and stabbed straight into his heart. He was powerless to do anything but close his eyes against the screaming, stinging pain as his head broke the surface of the pond and he was thrust back once more into the world of the living.

*   *   *

He was lying on a shelf of rock. Above him, low black rain clouds trundled across the night sky. The rock was cool underneath his head but sharp in places; an uncomfortable lump was digging into his left shoulder blade. His mouth was choked with something soggy: he tried to gather up enough saliva to spit it out but swallowed instead. Whatever it was went down easily, as if it hadn't been made of anything particularly solid. Perhaps it was just a bit of blood from a cut in his mouth—it had that same metallic taste.

He wriggled to relieve the pain in his shoulder and stopped in surprise. Because once he'd dislodged the lump, nothing much hurt. He ought to hurt, surely? Whatever he was doing lying here, he must have fallen somehow—he was halfway down a vast slope that stretched away, both above and below, farther than the darkness allowed him to see.

He'd fallen. Yes, that was it. He'd fallen, together with Shimny, a tangle of legs and snakes and flailing hooves. He'd been galloping away from somewhere—someone—but who was it?

The moon slid out from behind a cloud.

Sammael. Sammael had tricked him. He'd been running from Sammael, and Sammael knew where his parents were.

Danny scrambled to his feet. How did he feel so unbruised, so strong? No matter—he had to get back up to the top of the hill while there was a chance Sammael might still be there.

Where was Shimny? There—lying a few feet away. The ledge was wider than he'd thought—it must be some kind of path, winding its way up the rock face. But it would take too long to follow it. He'd have to scramble up the slope the direct way.

Could Shimny do that? Was she even alive?

“Shimny! Shimny!” He pushed his hand into his pocket and yelled silently at her. She didn't move.

“Shimny!” he tried again. “I've got to go back up. Now! Meet me up there—there's a kind of path, I think. But I've got to go!”

He should have touched her, but he didn't want to, just in case she was cold under his hand. She couldn't be dead, not Shimny, not after everything. Enough death had happened already. She would come after him as soon as she got her breath back.

He put his hands to the rock face and leaned forward against it. It was too steep to try walking, so he crawled. His knees sank onto sharp ridges, his shins scraped along jagged outcrops of blasted stone. His palms were soon ripped; as the clouds rolled away and moonlight began to let him see where he was going, he saw that he was leaving spots of dark blood glistening on the scree.

But the top was ahead of him. The wind had dropped, the rain and hail had fled. The ridge stood out black against a sky finally shining with moonlight. It wasn't too far for him to scramble now. It couldn't be too far.

He put his hand on a clump of spines and forced himself just in time to bite down hard on his lip and squash the yell of pain. When his knee came down in the same place, even his double layer of pajama and school trousers couldn't protect him. It was like crawling across a lake of broken glass.

But other people did that, didn't they? They sat on beds of nails and walked across burning coconut shells, and they still kept going. They took themselves away in their minds to other places and tried to imagine that the pain they were feeling was a good sensation instead of a terrible one. What if he could do that too? What if he could turn the world on its head and convince himself that it was his parents at the top of this slope, his parents and his own home, instead of the frightening, hard figure of Sammael?

What if Tom was up there, waiting with his strong arms to help Danny, having already vanquished Sammael? Tom would be laughing fit to bust, watching him crawl so slowly up this slope. No, Tom would come down and carry him.

So he imagined arms around him—his parents' arms, Tom's arms—carrying him forward and upward, and he imagined that at the top of the slope, they were all there, lined up and waiting for him.

He put his head down and crawled.

*   *   *

And then there it was, the ridge, so close that he could almost reach out and touch it, and there was the gap in the fence, and he was crawling along soft, springy grass again, so gentle under his knees that it felt like he was sliding along a silk mattress.

There was no need to crawl anymore. He got to his feet and ran along the fence line, keeping low like a monkey. But the fence was no cover at all—he'd be seen a mile off now, with the moonlight so bright. He made for the trees and kept to the shadows, amazed at the silence of his own feet. Something must be helping him—he wasn't breaking twigs as he ran or treading on crunching shrubs. He could hear nothing of himself except his own breathing, which he tried to keep as slow and light as possible.

His foot nudged something hard on the ground. He'd have thought it was a tree root and run over it, if it hadn't moved just a fraction when he kicked it.

Tom's pitchfork! This must be the place where Apple had thrown in the towel and Tom had dropped the pitchfork as he tried to cling on.

Danny picked it up. Sammael wouldn't be fought off with a pitchfork, he was sure of that, but the feel of the solid handle gave him heart. He wrapped both hands around it, not caring that the old wood was rough and splintery. What were a few tiny splinters after that scree?

He could try and run Sammael through with it, although who knew what might happen? Would it just go right into him and out the other side, as if he were a ghost?

There was only one way to find out: to do it and face whatever happened afterward.

*   *   *

He almost didn't see Sammael. The huddled lump, still crouched over the dog, was lower than Danny had expected. But the moonlight flashed, and there he was, absorbed in his task.

Danny couldn't see what he was doing, but he knew that waiting would mean he would miss whatever small opportunity he had. So he gripped the handle of the pitchfork and charged.

Sammael looked up at the rush. In a second he stepped over the lump on the ground and threw the entire contents of his pockets at Danny: a hail of acorns, twigs, beechnuts, and dried-out fragments of wood hit Danny's face and bounced back onto the earth between them.

Lightning began to fall in a great, white sheet. Danny saw the first spears and threw the pitchfork before any could catch him. Eyes closed, hair standing on end, he heaved it forward with nothing more in his arm than blind hope.

The pitchfork glanced off Sammael's shoulder and pierced the dark bundle on the earth behind him. Danny leapt onto the handle, driving it into the ground. Of course! The coat! Sammael's power lay in his coat—if he could only keep that coat pinned down—but was the coat made of air too? Would it just disappear from the prongs of the pitchfork?

Sammael began screaming up to the storm.

“Strike the boy! Strike him down! I COMMAND YOU!”

But the lightning wouldn't touch Danny. It crackled into every blade of grass at his feet, it set fire to the trees, it made the metal fence blaze and spark, but it wouldn't touch him.

“STRIKE HIM!” yelled Sammael, his face burning with black fire.

And the lightning, confused, struck the pitchfork.

Danny was thrown back as the pitchfork burst into flames. He staggered and tried to keep his feet but ended up flat on the ground a few yards away, looking up at the flashing, howling sky. Rain poured onto his face.

He lifted his head to see what had happened to Sammael, but the night was too black to make out anything, now that the moon had again been covered by storm clouds. As fast as he wiped the rain from his eyes, water ran back into them again, blurring his vision.

The lightning had stopped. Nothing could control the storm, nothing could command it to fight. It had raged for only a few turbulent seconds and then blown gently over. Whatever power had called it together, the various parts of the storm had clearly been reluctant to come.

Those bits of wood Sammael had thrown at Danny—had he emptied his pocket of taros and left himself unprotected against the lightning? Had he
died
on that pile of flame?

No—that wasn't possible. Sammael wasn't made of flesh and bone, to burn away. Danny rolled over onto his stomach and crawled in the direction he thought he'd come from. His knees smarted, and his hands bled again.

He tried to play that last vision over in his mind. There had been a lump on the ground—he couldn't be sure, but it might have been that great, thin dog. Had he driven the pitchfork into the dog, too? He hoped not.

Then the lightning had struck and dazzled him, and he hadn't seen any more. But there was still one thing that should have been lying on the ground somewhere, that he couldn't account for. What had happened to it?

“Lost something?” said a voice.

The schoolbag came crashing down on Danny's head, pitching him forward. He got a mouthful of charred scrub and paddled his hands around, feeling for the bag. It wasn't there. Sammael hadn't dropped it on Danny's head, he'd just swung it, to vent his anger.

He was standing in his shirtsleeves, pearl against the black sky.

“You killed my dog,” he said. “Well done.”

“You've lost your coat,” said Danny, pushing himself up and spitting out burnt mud. Without the coat, Sammael looked strangely thin and ordinary.

“I said, you killed my dog,” repeated Sammael.

Danny tried to swallow the spiny lump in his chest. “Yeah? Well, you tried to kill me and you tricked me and you said you'd kill my parents!”

“She was only a dog,” said Sammael. “She never did anything to you.”

“So? You should have looked after her better, shouldn't you? What are you going to do to me now? Try and make more lightning strike me?”

“You know I couldn't, without my coat,” said Sammael, frowning. He looked around his feet for a moment and then swiveled his eyes back to Danny. The boy was up on his knees, his face smeared with grime.

“Ha! So the river was right! You've lost your coat and you can't do anything! You can't call up storms, you can't make them do what you want, and you can't use them to kill people! You can't even do anything to me anymore!”

*   *   *

Sammael considered the black ground, the burnt spread of ashes where his coat and his great gray dog had been. He looked at Danny once more. The boy's face was the color of old paper—the exact shade of the Book of Storms' stiff pages.

So that was what had happened. Sammael dropped the schoolbag at Danny's feet and took a step backwards. He reached deep into his trouser pocket and pulled out a scant few grains of dirt. Before Danny knew what was happening, Sammael raised his hand to his lips and blew the dirt into the boy's face.

*   *   *

Danny closed his eyes, expecting to be blinded, or at least to feel some stinging grit against his cheeks. But nothing happened, on the outside.

Inside, his brain warmed, as though he had pulled on a woolly hat. He thought about marzipan, thick and sweet, sitting like a blanket on top of Christmas cake. He thought about tiny lights sparkling off the waves of the sea, and the sea foam curling around itself in great tumbling streams. He thought, What if I took up surfing, and pictured those waves as exactly, as clearly, as this—I would sit on top of each wave as though it were made of thick marzipan; I would slide along it as though the wave itself were my surfboard. I could do it—I would
know
how to do it—if I could hold these thoughts in my head. I could learn to sit on the waves, to let them carry me across oceans—

He opened his eyes.

“Coats aren't everything,” Sammael said softly. “And neither are storms. There are always other ways. The river didn't tell you
that
, did it? But
I
did. You just didn't want to listen to me.”

And he disappeared into the darkness.

Danny blinked once or twice as the thoughts of oceans drained away. Had he really just stopped Sammael building up a great storm to destroy all the world's people? It didn't seem possible. Not Danny, alone there on a hilltop, armed only with a pitchfork.

But was that
sand
Sammael had blown in his face? Was
that
what it did?

He was still trying to puzzle this out, turning the stick over in his hands, feeling its smoothness, when the rain dwindled away to a mist. Two tiny birds flew out of the darkness, toward him.