The Book of Storms

by Ruth Hatfield

  “The Book says that bird populations are a big factor,” he said when we were discussing the path of the storm. “The Book says there are various methods of tracking but you have to watch out for the secondary pieces of storm that join up on the way—they can alter the trajectory a great deal,” was another thing he said.

  We asked him, “What book?”

  “The Book of Storms,” he said.

  Neither of us had ever heard of it. We asked if it was some kind of encyclopedia.

  “No,” he said, shaking his head. “The Book of Storms is no mere encyclopedia.”

  He told us it was a book of so many pages that you couldn’t even count them. Each time he read it, he learned something new. It taught him how to watch storms, how to listen to them, how to pull himself into them and start to absorb their knowledge. It taught him, he said, how to “plunge through the maelstrom and seek refuge in the becalmed eye” so he could look at a storm from deep inside its heart.

  “The Book of Storms!” he said with a sigh, in the same way that someone might talk about someone they loved. “Had I known of its existence only a few years earlier, what things I might have done.…”

  We asked instantly where we could buy a copy.

  And then he laughed, a dry, old kind of laugh. He told us no one on earth could buy another copy of the Book of Storms. There was only one copy, and that was his own.

  We asked if we might see it.

  “Well, he gave it to me, of course,” he said. “I’m not at liberty to show it to others. I should not even refer to it, really, but then I think, what more can I lose than I have already lost?”

  At this point he wished us good day, very abruptly, and left. We didn’t even get his address, though we presume he lives near Hopfield—his daughter said she grew up there.

  But what is the Book of Storms? It sounds like a treasure trove of information of a kind undreamed of by scientists. Birds? Other pieces of storm? We must get hold of that book. It will revolutionize the way we think. What could birds have to do with storms? It’s nonsensical, but the idea is … right.

  They hadn’t got hold of the Book of Storms, though. Instead they’d recorded in minute detail the contents of rain gauges, the wind speeds, the number of lightning flashes counted per minute in various storms, and they’d entered every scrap of information that they could find into their blue notebook.

  And then, once more, a few months later, again in his dad’s handwriting:

  We’ve found his address. He lives (where else?) at Storm Cottage, Puddleton Lane End, Hopfield. He used to write the Weatherwatch column for the Hopfield Parish magazine, but he doesn’t do anything now, it seems, apart from study the behavior of storms.

  What can we do? He told us he wouldn’t show the book to anyone. Perhaps we could steal it? But we’ve never done anything like that. How would we explain it to the police if we were caught?

  We’ll have to find a way, though. They tell you that grief lessens with time, but for me it seems to be the other way around. Each day, I realize a little more what we lost when Emma was taken. Each day, I wake up and see her slip away out of the corner of my eye, and no matter how fast I run, I can’t catch up with her.

  I must do all I can to make sure no one else suffers the same fate.

  The Book of Storms wasn’t mentioned again. Danny scoured every entry, all the way to the last, which was followed by a handful of blank pages and then the inside cover of the notebook. They were tidy people, and they’d kept a tidy journal. Nothing was stuck to the back or hidden away under glued-on strips of paper.

  His parents talked about storms like you’d talk about people. Was that normal? Actually, it clearly wasn’t—they’d said so themselves. Danny had never noticed them talking like that, but then all this—the extent of it, the reason for it—had been purposefully hidden from him.

  He hated the thought. Of course, there were loads of thing that his parents tried to hide, like when they had an argument or they were sad or there wasn’t quite enough money for something and they thought that if they didn’t say anything about it, then Danny wouldn’t notice they were twitchy and distracted and full of tight little sighs. He never told them that he knew about these things, but they were obvious. Yet somehow they’d managed to keep this notebook entirely secret from him.

  His chest felt hollow as he stared at the dark blue cover. Could they have gone to find the Book of Storms? In the middle of the night?

  There was only one way to find out. “We’re going to see an old guy called Abe … Abel Kors … Korsakof,” he said, taking hold of the stick so that Mitz could hear him. “Some weird name. He’s got a book that might help me find them, if he’ll let me see it. And if he won’t, then … then I don’t know, I’ll think of something.”

  “Something?” asked Mitz, blinking innocently.

  “I’ll steal it,” said Danny. “I don’t care if it’s bad. I’ll steal it.”

  He got up and made for the door, trampling on purpose over the mess still strewn across the floor. Mitz dropped down from the bed and stalked after him, her fluffy britches carrying her lightly over the mountains of chaos.

  “Stealing isn’t bad,” said Mitz. “Everybody steals. Everybody that I know, anyway. But, then, I suppose we are all cats.”

  Danny remembered what it had felt like, last night, when he’d woken up and thought the roof was falling in. He remembered the bright gold of the night sky as the lightning set fire to the clouds.

  “Not everybody,” he said, “steals the Book of Storms.”

  * * *

  Downstairs, he opened the drawer where his dad kept his wallet and took all the money out of it, then emptied his schoolbag and chucked the single spiral-bound notebook into it. Somehow he doubted that school was going to see him tomorrow, and maybe not even the day after that.

  Forgetting even to change out of his school uniform, he let himself out into the late-afternoon sunshine and pulled the door closed after Mitz had trotted briskly through.

  This time there was no point in looking back.

  CHAPTER 4

  A VISIT

  The only thing in the garden that didn’t feel slightly colder was the sycamore tree, because the sycamore tree was dead. Even the grass shivered, although sunlight still warmed its blades. Roses curled their petals inward, returning half-opened blooms into buds, and bushes tightened their roots in the soil. Birds and mice pulled their heads down into their necks, puffing up feathers and fur. Spiders hung motionless in their webs, and even a trapped fly gave up its struggle against the sticky threads.

  Sammael had walked into the garden. His appearance never changed; his dry, sweatless skin stayed cool, his short black curls unruffled. Things didn’t stick to him if they could avoid it—there were better ways to travel for even the smallest thorn or burr than stuck to his long black coat. Journeys didn’t tire or alter him, no matter how long they took or how fast he traveled.

  The lurcher at his side was a wreck. She staggered to the patio outside the house, swayed for a couple of seconds, then toppled sideways and lay flat on her side, her legs stretched out. Her rib cage pushed up through gray matted curls, each bone distinct from the next like the sleepers of a railway line.

  Sammael ignored her and went straight to the sycamore tree, resting a hand on it. The dead wood stayed mute under his fingers.

  “This is the tree, then,” he said, taking his hand away. “You’d think the lightning could have picked a better specimen.”

  The grass under his feet trembled as the blades reached out to each other. He felt it wriggling and kicked at it.

  “Did you see the human?” he asked.

  The grass was silent.

  “Grass,” he said. “I’m talking to you.”

  A few of the grasses whispered among themselves, trying to keep their voices down.

  “Don’t irritate me,” said Sammael. “Just answer. You, the meadow grass. Trueflax, that’s your name, isn’t it? Tell me what
you heard.”

  The grass was small and thin, only a young shoot. “The human boy came into the garden,” it said, trying to sound bold. Inside, the sap that kept its stem firm had turned into bubbling soup.

  “Yes. And?” Sammael knew there was just a chance that the ant might have got it wrong. Ants were notorious for being focused on their work and only ever had a maximum of half an eye on anything else, which did sometimes make them unreliable witnesses.

  “He went over to the tree, stood—well, just where you are. He stood on top of me as well.…” Trueflax tried to keep his breathing steady. The bubbles inside him were turning into rattling chips of ice.

  “Get on with it!” snapped Sammael. “I’m not asking you to retell The Odyssey!”

  “He picked up the stick and stood for ages, then started to say some stuff—it didn’t make much sense. He said, ‘hello,’ and ‘I’m in the light,’ and … what else? Oh, yes, he said, ‘Work out what?’ That was it, I think … oh, yes, he said ‘hello,’ again. And he put the stick on the tree, then picked it up again, and we heard him speak after that … but why he should suddenly have learned to talk, none of us can tell. We never thought humans could talk, not in that way, though we do hear them make strange sounds sometimes, but you can never be sure that they’re really sentient, can you? It seems so unlikely.…”

  Trueflax gave a gasp and his leaves wilted, unable to keep up with the effort of speech. Sammael thought about flicking him back into life just to terrorize the other grasses, but there were more important things to be done.

  Clearly the boy had found the taro—that was beyond doubt now. Clearly, too, he had no idea what it was or how to use it. He’d be easy to track. He was probably running around somewhere close by, making more noise than a herd of stampeding wildebeest as he tried to discover all the things that could speak, and what each and every one of them had to say.

  Sammael looked about him. No sign of the boy here.

  He stamped on the grass to revive it. “Where did he go?”

  “D-d-don’t know…” tried Trueflax. The other grasses were all too petrified to help him out.

  “Wrong answer!” Sammael crushed his heel into the ground. Trueflax yelped, although any pain he was feeling must have been imaginary. It was amazing what imagination could do.

  “M-maybe … maybe he went into the house, then out the other side, then maybe he came back … and went again … somewhere else.…”

  “Where else? Come on, don’t pretend to me you don’t know. Grass sees everything! It tells each other everything! You could track down a beetle in Outer Mongolia!”

  “B-but that’s because Mongolia’s full of gr-gr-grass!” stuttered Trueflax. “The boy went onto the road, and no grass knows what goes on there, until the cracks start to appear and we can grow through them.”

  “Cretin!” Sammael stamped again, and Trueflax the grass lost his stoutness, fainting from fear. “Kalia!” Sammael bellowed. The lurcher raised her nostrils from the ground but couldn’t lift her head. Even pricking an ear required more energy than she had left. “Kalia!” Sammael said again, snapping his fingers.

  In the end he hooked an arm under her rib cage and carried her in the crook of his elbow round to the front of the house. Her limp legs knocked against each other as they swung in the air.

  The boy wasn’t anywhere to be seen. Sammael dabbed a finger into some grains of sand at the bottom of his pocket and pressed it against the lock.

  “Open!” he commanded, and the lock turned.

  He deposited Kalia in a heap on the hall carpet. It was the sort of color that could only have been produced by a hippopotamus throwing up all over the hallway after eating too many iced cupcakes.

  And then he stopped. In his fury over the missing taro, he hadn’t observed the path he was traveling quite as carefully as he normally would have.

  “Damn!” he said to the comatose dog. “I know this house.”

  “When have you been here before?” Kalia’s voice was so tiny that he barely heard it, but he was already staring through into the kitchen, examining a picture in his mind.

  “Those storm-chasing idiots! This is their house!”

  For a second he floundered, but Kalia was too tired to notice, and he forced his voice quickly back to its usual acidity, knowing that such mistakes could never be admitted to.

  “So he must be their son,” he muttered to himself. “He’ll be looking for them, of course. Where would I go if I were a small human of extremely limited imagination looking for people who were looking for storms?”

  Every creature in the house heard his quiet voice. Every fly, every mite, every last wood louse and woodworm and silverfish. Not all of them could answer him; some had slumbered on all day, unaware that anything peculiar was happening. But upstairs, underneath the bed, the dust mites were stirring. They had been scurrying around when Danny had put his hand to the stick and talked to Mitz the cat. They had heard him speak.

  Through the silence, a small voice muttered a single word, and then a second and a third joined in.

  “Korsakof!” they whispered. The first time, it was a haze of broken sounds, single syllables following half-begun words. The letter K echoed through the house like the rattle of a machine gun.

  And then, the second time, they said it all together.

  “Korsakof!”

  Sammael smiled, bending down to hoist up his dog again. As the evening sun began to dip in the sky, a ray broke through the glass in the back door, streaking the kitchen doorway with orange.

  “Got you now, boy,” he said, tucking Kalia under his arm, apparently unaware of her weight. “Got you, well and truly. It’s all very well running away and throwing yourself on the mercy of strangers, but you can’t always tell who’s been there before you.”

  And as he began to walk, his feet picked up so much speed that even to the fastest cheetah on the planet they would have seemed little more than a blur.

  * * *

  Abel Korsakof was small and ratty looking, with a beard that would have fallen almost to his waist if it hadn’t been tangled and frizzy and sticking out at all angles in yellowing prongs. As a young man he’d been clean shaven, but these days he spent a lot of time muttering to himself, and he’d realized quite quickly that beards were useful for muttering into. None of his family liked his beard, but he told them he didn’t care what they said: he had important things to mutter about, and if they weren’t going to listen to him, then the beard would have to.

  He had cared about his family a long time ago, but something much bigger and better than mere humans had come along and gradually eaten him, bite by bite, until he belonged inside the belly of an obsession so strong that he could hardly breathe unless he was thinking about it. And this obsession was the study of storms.

  Because it was sunny and calm over England, with hardly enough wind to tickle a fly’s wings, that evening saw Abel Korsakof at work in his shed, a huge piece of paper spread over the floor. The paper stretched to all four walls, so Abel had to sit right on top of his work, which gave him a grand feeling. As if somehow he might one day be able to sit in a similar position in the sky itself, watching the real storms gather below.

  Still, for now this was just a dream, for several reasons unlikely to become reality. One of which was framed in the doorway of his shed, blocking out the evening sun.

  “You’re not still going at this, old man, are you? Of all the pointless things…”

  Abel looked up, and his heart dropped like a stone into his knees.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked, his old voice shaking.

  “I’ve got a little job for you,” said Sammael.

  Although Sammael was only standing and watching him, Abel Korsakof could never quite relax while those black points were boring into his own weepy blue eyes. He shifted from knee to knee and then latched his bony knuckles around the table leg to pull himself upright.

  “Not in here,” he said. It was bad enough
when he remembered where all the work in this room had come from and what he owed it to, without having the room further polluted by the actual shades of the creature itself.

  “Suit yourself,” said Sammael. “You useless old bag of rickets.”

  He raised an eyebrow and stood back to let Korsakof out. The old man tried not to brush against Sammael’s coat as he passed, expecting that it would chill him to the marrow, but when he touched it by accident he found it surprisingly warm and soft.

  * * *

  Korsakof’s garden was bursting with flowers. They’d all escaped from their original flower beds and grew now wherever they chose, leaping to waist and neck height, clinging on to their neighbors and climbing toward the sky. Neither Sammael nor Korsakof looked at their bright colors, though: Sammael’s eyes were on the old man, and Korsakof’s were fixed on a garden bench that he’d always hated. It was some fancy of Mrs. Korsakof’s, a twisted affair covered in mangled iron daffodils. Abel never normally sat on it, and he certainly would never sit on it again after it had felt the cold figure of Sammael resting on its squashed flowers.

  “What were you doing in there, anyway?” Sammael leaned back against the bench and nodded his head toward the shed. “What’s with all the paper?”

  Abel noticed a huge dog lying on one of the flower beds, flattening a squat display of pansies. It was a gray lurcher, thin and woolly, and it looked dead. He cleared his throat. “A map.”

  “A map? Of what?”

  Korsakof shrugged. “Of storms.”

  Sammael laughed, his face scornful. “A map of storms? And do you think it’s correct? Have you checked it with one of your ‘satellite pictures’?”

  “Not that kind of map. A chart of how they work. What they do. I have watched their behavior for a long time. I have observed their reactions. I have noticed some patterns in their process of formation. I have seen, over the years, how they are becoming more and more frequent.” He broke off, unwilling to look into Sammael’s eyes, wanting strongly to ask a question that had been playing on his mind for some years.

  “Oh yes?”