The Book of Storms

by Ruth Hatfield

  CHAPTER 6

  THE FARM

  As Danny hurried back toward the railway station through the deserted streets of Hopfield his ears caught the distant sound of police sirens. Without Mitz to look out for, he kept his head down and tried to ignore the warmly lit windows of other people’s houses. What would those people behind the windows say if he marched up to one of the doors and knocked on it, explaining that he’d lost his parents and then watched an old man die, both on the same day? And what if he explained too that the old man’s death had really been his fault?

  He tried to push the thought of Abel Korsakof away, right out of his mind, but that wasn’t going to work now; he couldn’t imagine his head without that memory inside it playing over and over like a flashing neon sign. He tried to wrap the memory in other thoughts: of Mitz, of the reddening sunset, of his own, quiet bedroom with the shelf of books and computer games, and the pictures he’d drawn stuck up on the walls. That didn’t work either. No matter how closely he tried to picture them in his mind’s eye, none of those things could be bigger than death.

  Because death changed everything. When his Uncle Mick had died, Danny had only been about five or six. He might not even have remembered it if he hadn’t been staying at the farm and seen Aunt Kathleen running up the lane, bursting into the house, and grabbing the duvet off the closest bed, which happened to be Danny’s. After the ambulance left, he saw his duvet bundled up in the hallway. It looked sort of the same, except that there were smears of blood creeping out of the creases. He still wondered what his uncle had looked like under the turned-over tractor—he’d even tried to draw it once, in the secrecy of his room—but he’d never really been able to picture more than just Uncle Mick with the duvet on top of him, covering all the places that were bleeding.

  And then Aunt Kathleen hardly spoke for weeks, even to say things about the cows, and Tom got all obsessed with badgers and spent the rest of the summer dodging around the woods in the middle of the night, with Aunt Kathleen trying not to shout at him when he came home. Danny followed him once and got almost as far as the edge of the woods, but Tom saw him and sent him back to the house, and after that his visit quickly ended.

  The farm. It was the closest place to home Danny could think of just then. At the farm, he always stayed in the same room and ate breakfast from the same bowl, and suddenly that was all he wanted—just to see a room he knew and eat from a bowl that was his. He’d never taken a train to get there before, but at Easter they’d caught a bus down to a station called Blackthorn Halt, when he and Tom had gone to see Tom’s sister, Sophie, off on holiday. It wasn’t far away: it had to be possible.

  He managed to put the thought in the front of his mind, over all the other things. Blackthorn Halt. Blackthorn Halt station, and then a bus up to Sopper’s Edge. Repeating the names to himself, he quickened his pace.

  * * *

  It wasn’t until he was sitting on the bus, grinding up the lanes toward Sopper’s Edge, that the other thoughts forced their way back in: not only had he left Mitz behind, but he’d also left the stick lying there on Abel Korsakof’s shed floor.

  Good. At least without that stick, he might be safe.

  But as soon as the memory came back to him, he couldn’t shift it. The piece of wood had stamped itself across his mind’s eye; the feeling of it curled in his palm began to worry at his blood, like a collie nagging sheep.

  The stick had stuck to him. He closed his eyes, and in the blackness it was still there. Every knot, every splinter.

  * * *

  Night had fallen by the time he trudged up the lane to the farm. The lights of the farmhouse shone ahead: those ones were the living room windows, blazing away, and the one upstairs was Sophie’s bedroom. She didn’t do much around the farm; she wanted to pass her exams and go to university. In the living room, there’d be Aunt Kathleen and Tom, their heads together over feed bills and stock lists and magazine articles advising them how to improve their grassland. They were always trying to get Danny to take an interest in the cows, asking him to help feed them, check them over for cuts and scratches, and clean out the barns, but he preferred cows in computer games to real live ones that stamped their hard feet and swung their heads about, spraying the walls with sticky snot from their huge noses.

  When Aunt Kathleen opened the door, she didn’t see Danny for a second. She was a lot taller than most other women, and she had to peer down to make out the slight figure in the navy blue sweater, his brown hair blending into the darkness.

  “Danny? What are you doing here?”

  “Can I come in?” Danny said. His voice was very small.

  “Yes, of course you can. You look fair done in! But where’re your mum and dad?”

  Danny shrugged hopelessly. Aunt Kathleen looked hard at him for a long second and then stepped back into the hall, letting a cloud of cooking smells waft out into the night air.

  “In,” she said.

  * * *

  Aunt Kathleen knew how to do food. Although her family had already eaten their dinner, there was plenty left for Danny. She put plates in front of him: cold roast lamb and potatoes, thick slices of pork pie, bread and jam and half an iced cherry cake. He found, after forcing himself to eat a mouthful, that his appetite had come back despite all the horrible things that had happened.

  When at last Danny had stopped eating for long enough to draw breath, his aunt stopped putting more food on the table and sat down. Aunt Kathleen looked a bit like his mum—her hair was the same toffee blond—but her face was much wider and flatter and she didn’t smile quite as often. And she was even less of a comfortable motherly sort, tall and broad and a lot like a man, with a voice that seemed to rumble up through gravel stuck in her stomach—but at least he knew her.

  “Right. Where’re your mum and dad?” she asked.

  Should he lie? He’d lied loads of times to his own parents, of course, but he couldn’t remember ever having tried to lie to his aunt. She had quite a big nose, as if she’d be able to sniff out lies before you’d even said them.

  So he took a very deep breath and said, “I don’t know. They’ve … disappeared.”

  “What do you mean ‘disappeared’? Disappeared where?”

  Danny shrugged. Really he wanted to say, If I knew that …

  “They’re not at home?”

  He shook his head.

  “Are you sure?”

  He nodded.

  “When did they go?”

  “Last night.”

  “Last night? In that storm?”

  Danny stared down at his food. Aunt Kathleen narrowed her eyes at him.

  “Danny, I want you to tell me the truth now,” she said. “Have they really gone, or has something else happened? Are you in some kind of trouble?”

  How stupid was it to ask someone to tell you the truth? Like you just assumed that the rest of what they said was a load of rubbish. It was always adults who did it—no one his own age had ever said, Now, Danny, tell me the truth. His friends might say, Yeah, right, when they didn’t believe him. But they waited until he’d spoken before they said it.

  “No, I’m not in trouble,” said Danny, breaking a bit of bread and stabbing it against the plate. “They might be, because they’ve disappeared, like I told you. I went to school and then tried to look for them, but they weren’t anywhere.”

  Aunt Kathleen raised an eyebrow. He could tell she was wondering why he’d gone to school when his parents weren’t around. But she obviously decided to believe him, because all she said was, “You’ve no idea where they went? Did they say anything?”

  Danny shook his head again.

  “I’ll try ringing them,” said Aunt Kathleen. “I’ll try their mobiles. And if they don’t answer, I’ll call the police.”

  “Don’t call the police,” Danny said, before he could stop himself. “Please don’t. Please.”

  Aunt Kathleen narrowed her eyes again. “We’ve got to find them, Danny. Something might have happen
ed to them. Why wouldn’t we call the police?”

  He felt his face go red at the embarrassment of knowing something he wasn’t supposed to know. Now that he was fairly certain they weren’t dead, there was even more reason to find them himself and not get any authorities involved. “Because … well … they aren’t supposed to leave me alone, are they? I don’t mind, it isn’t a bad thing, I don’t care … but the police wouldn’t think that, would they? If you call the police and then they find Mum and Dad, they might … they’d send them to prison, wouldn’t they? They might…”

  “Hmph.” Aunt Kathleen snorted through her long nose, considered him for a moment longer, and then picked up his empty plate. “Of course they won’t send them to prison. Don’t be silly.”

  “But they will! Or they’ll at least get into loads of trouble, and it’ll be all my fault, and I’ll get taken away, and…”

  “Danny!” Aunt Kathleen stopped, plate in midair. “Of course it isn’t your fault. Your mum and dad shouldn’t go off like that—you know they shouldn’t. I’ve told them they shouldn’t. Maybe it is time someone else told them that they shouldn’t, someone they might actually listen to, for a change.”

  Danny felt his heart begin to beat faster. This was what happened when you got stupid adults involved. They did everything wrong.

  “If you call the police, I’ll run away!” he said, half shouting, half getting up from the table. “I will! Don’t call them! I’ll run away right now. You can’t stop me!”

  Aunt Kathleen grabbed his shoulder and then put the plate back on the table with a tight hand that stayed clenched around the white rim. Her fingers dug into Danny’s shoulder, making him wince.

  After a moment, she relaxed and took her hand off the plate but still held on to his shoulder. “All right,” she said. “Calm down. I’ll make a bargain with you. You stay here tonight, safe where I can see you, and I’ll try calling them on their phones, now and in the morning, and if they haven’t come back by then and I still can’t get hold of them, we’ll call the police. Agreed?”

  He was going to say, I’ve tried calling them and they don’t answer, but it was better for her to think she was doing something useful. At least it would keep her mind off calling the police. So he said, “It’s probably nothing, really. I mean, they’re always going off to look at storms. It probably isn’t anything bad at all.”

  She snorted again, quietly this time, and as her hand released his shoulder, a tingling rush of warmth shot down his arm.

  * * *

  Tom came wandering in to keep Danny company while Aunt Kathleen used the phone in the study. He was supposed to be studying for exams but instead had his face buried in a copy of Farmers Weekly.

  “Hiya, Danny,” he said, sitting down and reaching for a cold potato without looking up from the page. “Whatcha doing here?”

  Tom was always eating, although he never seemed to get any fatter. He was tall and broad like Aunt Kathleen, but with much paler blond hair, and his arms were longer than Danny’s legs. He was the kind of powerful big that Danny wanted to grow into, but whatever his parents promised him, Danny had a suspicion that he was never going to be as tall or as strong as Tom. What was nice about Tom, though, was that he wasn’t always trying to prove how great he was. He’d chucked Danny over his shoulder and thrown him into the duck pond a couple of years ago, but he’d never tried it again.

  Danny said, “My mum and dad have gone. No one knows where they are.”

  “Mum’ll find them,” said Tom, taking another potato.

  In about three seconds, thought Danny, he’ll ask me if I want to see the cows. One, two …

  “D’you want to come and see the cows?” asked Tom. “We’ve got some nice calves at the moment.”

  “It’s dark,” said Danny.

  “S’okay, there’s lights in the barn. I’m going to do the last round in a bit. Come round with me.”

  Danny really didn’t care about the cows. He quite liked feeding bottles to the orphaned calves, but there was something about the way cows looked at you that made you think they were plotting something.

  “I’m all right,” he said. “I’m kind of tired, actually.”

  “Okay,” said Tom. He never really talked for the sake of it.

  There was silence for a few moments.

  “Tom?” Danny asked eventually.

  Tom turned a page. “Yep?”

  “What would you do if you woke up and your mum was missing?”

  Tom raised his eyes and looked at Danny. His bangs had grown too long; he had to peer out from underneath them.

  “Dunno,” he said. “Well, I’d get the milking done, obviously.”

  Really? But then, Danny had gone to school, hadn’t he?

  “You wouldn’t, like, have a party or something?”

  Tom grinned. “Yeah, maybe later.”

  “Would you call the police?”

  Tom shrugged. “Dunno. I guess I don’t know what I’d do. What did you do?”

  “I … went to school.…” said Danny.

  “Dork,” said Tom.

  “And then I found this notebook and it said about this old guy, so I went to see him.…” Danny trailed off, no longer sure which bits of his conversation with Abel Korsakof had been unacceptably weird and which ones hadn’t.

  “And he didn’t know anything?”

  “Well, he sort of did.…”

  He could show Tom the map, see if Tom knew where it was and how to get there, and then Tom might come along with him too, just to keep him company.

  It was sort of a plan. He was just trying to work out the best way to introduce the idea when Aunt Kathleen came back into the room.

  “No answer,” she said. “Sounds like their phones are off. And as for you, mister, if you’re not going to help Tom on the evening rounds, I think it’s high time for bed.”

  For once, Danny didn’t wait to be told a second time, or to argue over the hands of the clock. The day had been long enough. He stumbled upstairs to the little yellow guest room where he always stayed at the farm, and Tom found a pair of old striped pajamas that were huge on Danny even though they hadn’t fit Tom for years. Then, too tired even to be haunted by thoughts of Abel Korsakof’s scarlet face or the blood that had dribbled from his leathery nose, Danny sank into bed, closed his eyes, and let sleep overpower him in one huge, snapping gulp.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE ACORN

  “Wrong!” Sammael snapped, striding into the shed. “He’s mine. Put him down!”

  The short woman paused. She had already gathered up the corpse of Abel Korsakof into her arms and was cradling him like a baby, her tangled silver hair falling onto his face.

  “Er … no?” she said, flicking her hair back and double-checking the corpse’s eyes. They had the full amount of soft humanity left in them. He was definitely hers.

  “I bought him fifty years ago,” said Sammael, thrusting an open notebook under her nose and indicating a line with one of his slender fingers. “Abel Korsakof. He’s mine, not yours. You might be Death, but you don’t get them all, not even in the end.”

  Death read the entry, her scarlet eyes hardening to crimson. Sammael didn’t usually get things wrong. In fact, she made more errors than he did, which she blamed on relentless overwork. The entry was all correct, signed by Abel Korsakof himself. He’d received something called the Book of Storms and fifty years to read it in.

  “But the date’s wrong,” she said. “The fifty years aren’t up until next month. He shouldn’t be dead. He shouldn’t be able to be dead. What did you do to him?”

  “Nothing!” spat Sammael, although he had his suspicions as to how Abel Korsakof might have died. “But whatever’s gone wrong, his sand is still mine. He got his bargain.”

  “He almost got it,” said Death. “Except for that final month.” But she was getting ready to put the corpse down and concede defeat. She had too much to do, and she wasn’t altogether sympathetic toward humans who cho
se to sell their souls to Sammael. If they wanted to, that was their own affair. It was hard enough these days finding time to gather up all the ones who’d lived natural lives, and then returning them back to the earth, without having to fight Sammael for the odd one who’d died in an ambiguous way.

  But Abel Korsakof’s eyelids lifelessly lolled open again, and she caught sight of his gentle blue eyes and couldn’t give him over.

  “Give!” Sammael reached out an arm.

  “Don’t touch him!” Death swung the corpse away and closed her eyes. When they opened again, they’d changed from red to the exact blue of Korsakof’s.

  Around them, ghostly shadows began to creep from the shed walls and slide into the air. They didn’t form shapes that could be seen and traced, but they began to eat the air with whispers. It was a language even Sammael didn’t understand: the most ancient tongue of all, formed at the first moment a single cell had slipped from existence into death. To Death herself, who indeed knew everything, the sound of the whispers was as clear as a tune played on a single violin.

  She listened. Sammael watched her. They rarely met, but he was always struck by her ugliness: her shapeless, plain face and drooping mouth. Her red eyes were usually as dull as ancient garnets, dragged from the earth covered in dust. Sammael hated creatures that tried to stand in his way, but he hated dull things even more. Death was both. All work and no play, he’d taunted her once, and she hadn’t argued.

  “I see what went on,” said Death quietly as the shadows began to disperse.

  “I couldn’t care less what went on,” said Sammael. “He’s mine and I want him.”

  He had plans for Korsakof’s sand.

  “He isn’t, though,” said Death. “He laid down his life for that boy, the one you’re after. Who, I’d like to remind you before you get any ideas, you cannot kill.”

  “He shouldn’t have laid down his life for anyone!” roared Sammael. “His life was mine! Either bring him back to life and let him live for another month, or give him to me now! It’s the law of the universe and you can’t change it!”