Cloudland

by Lisa Gorton

  Lucy shivered suddenly, remembering the dark creature in the clouds. She jerked her head sideways and looked down the road. The bus should have been here by now. Her jeans kept sticking to her legs and she could feel water dripping from her hair, making runnels down the back of her neck. As she watched, the rain paled and thickened. She was looking into the shimmering vagueness of mist. The silence was so strange it made a gap in Lucy’s mind. The rain had stopped.

  The boy pointed: ‘Is that your mother?’

  An old woman stepped out of the mist onto the pavement. For a moment, Lucy thought the woman was made of mist. Enormous sunglasses hid most of her face, which was narrow and pale. She was in gumboots, and her dress looked like an old tartan blanket. Her silver hair was tangled in a brown knitted scarf so long it went twice around her neck and still trailed in a puddle.

  Ignoring the boy, the woman stopped in front of Lucy and peered at her down the crooked length of her nose. ‘Hurry up. I can’t hold off this rain forever.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  Thin Air

  ‘What?’ Lucy stared at her.

  ‘I’m January,’ the old woman answered. When she saw Lucy’s blank look she stamped her gumboot in a puddle, splashing water on their shins. ‘Didn’t the Heir explain all this?’

  Lucy shook her head. The boy was gaping at them openly now, a match burning forgotten in his hand.

  ‘The Heir?’ Lucy repeated.

  January jerked her head. ‘I saw him speaking to you. I was following him, watching the plane.’ She drew her head back and stared at Lucy. ‘Ha! So you do know what I’m talking about!’ With another abrupt movement, she thrust a box into Lucy’s hands. ‘Here. Eat these.’

  It was a round box made of some cool material, paler than marble. Lucy pulled off the lid. Inside, like eggs in a nest of tissue paper, she saw a clutch of round white biscuits. It was so quiet she heard rather than saw the boy edge closer.

  The biscuits had the self-contained look of a secret. The mist was making Lucy light-headed, as if she had no will of her own. She watched her hand reach out.

  The first biscuit tasted like mist, it tasted like nothingness. For one moment, Lucy was conscious of all she saw: the rain-glazed pavement and silky-topped water flowing in the gutter. Then nothingness coiled down her throat, cool and pale. The outside world faded while, inside, she felt such radiance she thought her fingers would start trailing colours in air.

  ‘They’re cloud biscuits,’ said January. ‘Eat as many as you can.’

  Already, Lucy was cramming biscuits into her mouth, feeling hungrier every time she swallowed. She could feel the mist’s vague colours curling through her ribs.

  ‘Good,’ nodded January. ‘You’re ready. The mist is rising, dear. Climb as quickly as you can.’

  The mist made January’s voice echo from everywhere and nowhere. Lucy was floating easily – -not as though she was rising, but as though the solid world was dropping away. She remembered once when she was very young watching a balloon bump up into blue absence. How easily that balloon had disappeared!

  Above Lucy, there hung a vast silence. The higher she floated the lighter she felt. Her suitcase, that weird boy, the bus shelter, the airport, the sandbags, the flood – everything dropped from her mind.

  ‘Aren’t you coming?’ she called.

  ‘Oh no!’ January’s voice was as reedy as a voice over the phone. ‘I’m the Gatekeeper. When you get there, wait for two Cloudians: Wist and Jovius. And do be careful. There are dangerous –’

  January’s voice faded out. In front of Lucy, and all around her, everything was white. It was the opposite of night but it was like night, too, the way it held her apart from everything. She had no feeling of fear or loneliness. She had become part of the mist, which seemed to have no end. She lost all idea of movement.

  It was impossible to tell how much time had passed when, with a silent thump, Lucy came up against something that wouldn’t let her through. She twisted around and saw only whiteness above her. It wasn’t mist – it was lumpy to touch – but the mist kept pushing her into it. Soon she was bumping and scraping across the face of it. She had to hold out her hands to fend it off. She was starting to feel she might suffocate when suddenly the mist forced her upwards, feet first, in a strung-out somersault. Her head came up and she broke into a shock of light and air.

  At first, it was too bright to see, but when her eyes got used to the glare she stared around her, dazed. The mist had carried her into the clouds. Now she found herself in a vast, deserted hall, standing by a trapdoor into the mist under her feet. The ceiling was impossibly high. Columns extended in long rows around her. The freezing air bit at her fingers and her feet were so numb she couldn’t feel the floor, but she hardly noticed the cold because the numbness spreading through her body felt the same as astonishment.

  Lucy could not have said how long she stood gazing around her. For as long as she could remember, she had dreamt of visiting the clouds. Now that she was here, she saw what she had never managed to imagine. Everything shone, not as though light fell on it, but as though it was made of light. It was a little like going out into fresh snow, high in the mountains – only there, empty patches revealed the underside of things: the dark struts of branches. Here in the clouds, everything was still and perfect. Lucy had a feeling this hall had been in existence for hundreds, even thousands of years.

  ‘I should feel afraid,’ she whispered aloud. Her breath made white vapours that took a long time to fade. The air was so cold and bright she could almost see it glittering. It hurt to breathe. For a moment, red shadows trembled at the edge of everything she saw. She had to drop her head until her eyes cleared and, even then, she had a queasy impression everything was spinning. She took a cautious step and found herself counting one, two before she touched the floor again.

  Those biscuits filled me with cloud, she realised. For the first time, fear shivered down her back. She thought for a moment she was fading, dissolving into air. Pressing her knuckles against her cheeks, she wondered whether her father was sitting at home in the turret now, looking up at the clouds where she stood. All at once, the thought prompted an exhilarating kind of loneliness – the opposite of that drab, sunken loneliness she had felt on the plane to her mother’s house. She wondered whether her mother was already missing her, worried because she hadn’t arrived. The neighbours would exclaim: In this weather? Cassie! You left her to catch the bus on her own? Her mother would flutter excuses, watching the circle of faces around her twist with disapproval.

  Lucy started and looked around. She could hear a low, slapping sound. Someone – or some thing – was forcing its way after her into the clouds. It was terrible to hear that sound, all the time getting closer, and have no idea what might appear. The columns were so narrow there was nowhere to hide.

  Something like a head poked up through the cloud. Lucy saw, with a surge of relief, that it looked human. The next moment, she saw that it was the boy from the bus stop.

  She started forwards. ‘What are you doing here? Did January send you?’

  ‘What is this place?’ He was slack-mouthed, moving his head slowly from right to left. ‘I was watching. You just –’ he fanned out his fingers, ‘vanished into the mist. What was in those biscuits?’

  ‘Did January send you?’ she repeated.

  He blinked. ‘This is wild. How often do you come up here?’

  ‘We’re in the clouds.’ She stretched out her arm, including in her gesture the still, silent hall.

  He blinked at her without understanding. ‘How do you get hold of those biscuits?’ he was asking. ‘That old weirdo supplies you? Do you have to pay?’

  Lucy was struck by the oddity of him: the only scrap of dark here, with the columns extending in rows behind him into a glare of distance. She turned away, attempting to recapture the radiant shock she had felt, standing alone far from the known world. She took a step and hung in air. One, two, and she landed by the open trapdoor.
>
  The mist was gone.

  In its place there was only glassy distance. Feeling dizzy, almost nauseous, Lucy crouched on her heels and imagined falling, spinning down through that emptiness.

  Her cry startled the boy. He looked down through the trapdoor and his face turned grey. ‘Where’s the mist? How are we supposed to get back?’

  ‘We can’t get back,’ she answered. ‘This is cumulus cloud. We’re three thousand metres in the air.’

  He didn’t seem to understand the words. He tugged his mobile phone from his pocket, clutching it in both hands and staring at the screen.

  ‘We’re completely out of range.’ His face scrunched up. ‘What are we –?’ Catching sight of something over Lucy’s shoulder, he stopped. Lucy swung around. Stepping through the columns were two creatures made of cloud.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Cloudians

  The cloud creatures passed behind columns and stepped into view again. Lucy had the impression they were flickering in and out of existence. They moved in jerky, flying steps, without bending their knees.

  ‘They’ve seen us,’ whispered the boy. ‘They’re looking right at us.’

  Lucy stood without moving. She couldn’t take a step or lift her hand. Her mind was broken machinery. She could feel gaps and edges, parts of thoughts that didn’t fit together. As she watched those creatures stepping towards her, she remembered her father, speaking late one night on the phone: But why wouldn’t there be creatures in the clouds, Stephen? The idea’s no stranger than life in the lightless depths of the sea. We make over a million calculations to come up with a single weather prediction. How much simpler it would be if we could only accept there was some thing, some agency, steering the clouds … No, no, I mean the opposite of religion …

  The two cloud creatures stopped in front of Lucy. She looked into their faces, too stunned to feel afraid. She heard a low, shuddering sound. It took her a moment to realise it was the boy, behind her, trying to breathe.

  One of the cloud creatures was as stretched as an afternoon shadow. He was pale – not so much white as colourless, almost see-through, so it was strange to see him staring. His eyes were round and glassy: marbles in the folded pouch of his eyelids. He didn’t have a nose. Instead, he had a ridge running down the centre of his face. He was barefoot. Lucy saw with a shock that his toes were as long as his fingers. But his ears were the most unearthly thing about him. They were the size of his face, and kept twitching back and forth like featherless wings.

  The other cloud creature was the same height as Lucy but as wide as he was high. His belly hung down to his knees, his neck was lost in a soft concertina of chins. He was bald, with little ears that stuck out from his head. Whenever he took a step, he opened his mouth and closed it again when he landed. This gave him a gulping, eager look, as though he wanted to speak but couldn’t work out what to say.

  The tall cloud creature reached out his arm, stretching his fingers towards Lucy. ‘Friend of January?’ His words made small clouds that touched her cheek and then faded. Shaking off the boy, who was clutching her arm, Lucy stretched out one hand and brushed the very tips of the cloud creature’s fingers. A shock ran up her arm. The cloud creature’s fingers were cool and too soft: they had no fingernails.

  ‘I’m Lucy,’ she said. ‘January sent me –’

  But the cloud creature had snatched his hand away. He was staring at his fingers, seemingly afraid that her touch had left a mark. ‘Wist, I am,’ he said at last, in his drifting voice, and waved a hand at his companion: ‘Jovius.’

  Jovius stepped close to Lucy and inched out a hand to touch her cheek. She saw those pale, squidgy fingers and couldn’t bear it. She shuddered out of reach. Jovius leapt back. They all stared at each other, tensed, watching for the slightest movement.

  ‘And this is?’ asked Jovius, nodding at the boy. His voice surprised Lucy. It was high and wavering, and he stretched the ends of his words into a hiss.

  ‘Daniel,’ answered the boy, too loudly, pulling himself upright and fixing his hands by his sides with the look of someone in trouble at school.

  But the tall creature, Wist, had already turned and started walking – floating in jerks – away from them. When he was some way across the hall he paused. ‘Hurry.’

  Jovius started and pattered after him. For a time, Lucy and Daniel stood in silence, watching the two of them move through the columns.

  ‘What do we do?’ whispered Daniel, shifting from one foot to the other. ‘Shouldn’t we stay by the trapdoor? They won’t force us to follow them, will they? Lucy!’

  She had been watching the cloud creatures in a daze. Already all she could see of them were two shapes dissolving into space and light. At last, she took in what he had said. ‘I’m not staying by the trapdoor!’ she retorted. She pictured the two of them waiting while clouds grew like cobwebs across their faces. She gazed around her at the hall, still and radiant, and felt suddenly light. ‘I’m going with them,’ she said, and started running.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Cloud Palace

  Lucy ran with a sense of freedom she had only felt in dreams of flight. She pushed off and flowed through air. In the long, floating pauses when, instead of landing, she kept on and on, everything seemed possible. The columns flashed past her, stride by stride. She reached the end of the hall, where the cloud creatures stood waiting.

  ‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ murmured Jovius. ‘There’s a column for every hundred years we Cloudians have lived in the clouds.’ He leant towards her, so close she could see the crystals in his skin. ‘They say it was built in a month. The Megaliths worked without stopping. When one of them died the rest kept working . . .’

  Daniel stopped in front of Lucy. He was still holding his phone. He kept flicking glances at Wist and Jovius and then ducking his head to stare at the phone’s bright screen.

  Wist fluttered one hand. ‘Ready?’

  Daniel looked over his shoulder towards the trapdoor. He kept sucking little breaths through his nose; his lips looked stitched together with fishing wire. ‘You’re going with them?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Alright,’ he whispered.

  Wist brushed his fingers against the wall. A line of brightness darted from the floor to the ceiling. Then the wall slid apart, as smoothly as a wave returning to the sea. Where blank wall had been, there was a low arch. Beyond it, a spiral staircase rose out of view. The ceiling was low and the walls and stairs all shone with the same dull light. Bending double, Wist stepped beneath the arch and started climbing the stairs with Jovius close behind.

  ‘You’re sure?’ asked Daniel.

  Lucy tried to smile but her cheeks felt stiff. Watching the cloud creatures pad up the stairs away from her, all the assurance she had felt, running across the hall, drained through her feet. She was held in a strange pause. Some inner mechanism propelled her forwards and, before she was ready, she saw her foot on the first stair. Daniel followed, stepping where she stepped.

  ‘The wall’s closed behind us,’ he breathed.

  The staircase was so narrow Lucy had to run her hand along the wall to keep from falling. A great number of Cloudians must have done the same. There were hollows worn into it: one high enough for Wist, one low enough for Lucy, Daniel and Jovius. The sight of those two cloud creatures, stepping always away around the curve of the stairs, bit into Lucy’s mind. She was not afraid, exactly. Only the strangeness of this place, and so much light, pressed upon her eyes until she felt herself floating a little above her body.

  ‘What is this place?’ she shivered. The silence was so perfect, speaking felt like breaking something.

  ‘You are coming into the Great Palace of the Cloudians.’ Wist’s answer echoed down to her. ‘This palace is the ancient marvel of Cloudland. It would take more than your lifetime to find its many rooms.’

  ‘Then I hope you know where you’re going,’ she snapped.

  The silence settled around them again. Wist led them
past closed doors and empty rooms the size of wheat fields. One room had at its centre a soft form that rose, blossoming like a lung, and then sank back in the space of a single breath. They passed a room where the floor was a grid set over a hole as deep as a well – a white well filled with roars.

  ‘That’s the wind,’ said Jovius, ‘blowing into the palace.’ He told them there were rooms no-one had entered, hidden rooms that no-one had found. They climbed until Lucy was tired of wonder. Their footsteps made no sound on the stairs.

  ‘Is it always deserted?’

  ‘Usually, Weather Makers work in the high rooms. They’re all in hiding now, of course.’

  ‘Hiding from what?’ The silence, the still emptiness of this place, filled her with dread. It was so cold: a damp cold that made her bones ache.

  There was a long pause. ‘We’re nearly there,’ was his only answer.

  The next room they came to made Lucy forget her irritation. It was crowded with partly formed cloud creatures. She saw heads and shoulders, hands and arms, reaching out of the floor. The creatures’ eyes were closed but they kept moving, waving their arms to and fro with the slow sway of seaweed, so she couldn’t tell whether they were alive or caught in some air current.

  ‘The Life Garden,’ said Jovius. The room was filled with small, prickling sounds. ‘That’s the sound of them growing,’ he added.

  ‘Growing from what?’ Looking at those blind, striving creatures, Lucy thought of picking up her half-sister for the first time. Without opening her eyes, Lucy’s half-sister had arched back and wailed, stretching her toothless gob until her face disappeared in folds of skin. Now, looking into the Life Garden, Lucy felt the same twitch of pity and revulsion, the same weird sense that her hands were too big for her body.

  ‘Fragments,’ said Jovius. ‘Every decade, we come here for the Planting. We break off some piece of ourselves and plant it here. We Cumulus, I mean – the Cirrus have a Life Garden high in the palace. Of course, the Stratus plant on their own level.’