The Book of Storms

by Ruth Hatfield

  “His coat?” Danny tried to picture what kind of coat Sammael would wear. For a moment he wished he could see him, there in front of his eyes. At least then he’d know what he was running from.

  “Mmm. Long black thing,” said the river. “There’re all sorts of stories about it—legends about how it came to be, what it was made from, all that sort of thing. No one knows whether any of them are true, but each set of creatures has its own. Some say the coat was made from the hide of the Great Ox Xur, who pulled the sun up into the sky on the first-ever morning. Some say the coat’s made of deerskin, from one of the black stags that pull the moon across the sky. I know that its origins are shady and that it was bought at great cost. But whatever the truth, he discovered that when he put that coat on, it gave him the power to control the storms he gathered up. So that’s what he’s planning to do, I think. Collect enough taros to be able to call up a storm so vast, it can destroy a huge area, and then another, and so on.”

  “But … he can’t kill people, can he?” said Danny. “He has to get other creatures to do it for him, doesn’t he? That’s why he’s never tried to, I dunno, strangle me or something. I didn’t believe it at first, but those dogs … Why would you go to all the trouble of trying to get dogs to kill someone if you could just go and do it yourself?”

  “Clever!” said the river. “Not lacking in brain, are you? You’re right: Death’s job is to go around collecting people’s sand—or souls, if you like—and then to return that sand to the earth so it can become part of new lives. If Sammael tries to kill people, then Death won’t take their sand away—she says his job is to create, not to destroy, so she brings them back to life. But if a storm killed them, too much of their sand would go straight into the earth with the lightning. It’d be impossible for Death to get it all back and make them alive, and whole, again. She wouldn’t refuse to take the rest of them, then—she wouldn’t leave people in limbo just to make a point to Sammael. So his plan will work fine, unless something stops him. Frankly, I’m not sure that anything can.”

  Danny pulled the stick from his pocket and looked at it. It still just looked like a stick. But he was talking to a river, and the river had said Sammael’s power to control storms lies in his coat.…

  He slowly twisted the schoolbag off his back, plonked it on the ground between his knees, and opened it. Water had wriggled through the seams. Both notebooks were damp, their pages sticking together, but still readable. When he fished around for the map, though, all he found was a lump of wet mush that had bled blue ink all over itself. It was too wet to fold out.

  So the map had gone. No Tom, no map, no Book of Storms. Would he ever find his parents again? Should he just give them up for lost?

  “I’ve got to go back there.… I’ve got to find Tom. Is there even any point…” he said, not quite knowing what he was trying to say.

  “Any point in what?” The river was still cheerful.

  “Any point … keeping on trying,” he said, finding the thought. “I don’t actually know if my parents are even still alive. I sort of think I’d know if they weren’t, but maybe I wouldn’t. Maybe they have just gone, forever, and I’ll never see them again. And now Tom…” He didn’t have to fight back tears; he was past crying.

  The sun eased round in the sky, and a thin ray hit the side of his face. The river was silent for a moment and then said, “But you still need to find the answer, don’t you? And there’re always places you can find answers if you keep looking long enough. It’s just that looking is sometimes harder than you want it to be, that’s all.”

  “There aren’t any answers,” said Danny. “Every time I get near one, Sammael kills it.”

  “That’s because he’s only interested in posing questions,” said the river. “He’s interested in ideas that take you somewhere else, instead of just returning you back to the place you started from. You’ll understand when you meet him. But here in the world, there are answers.”

  “Where?” challenged Danny.

  “Everywhere,” said the river. “In the sand, for a start, if you’re looking for human-type answers. Try talking to earthworms—they sing about the sand. They know a lot, the earthworms—all day, every day, they eat earth. It’s what everything on the planet has been and one day will be again, and they eat it!”

  Everything on earth. That meant his sister, too. If nothing else, maybe he could at least find out more about Emma. Then he’d have something. Because, of course, worms wouldn’t know about anything aboveground, so there was no use in hoping that they’d help him find his parents, unless his parents were already dead. And the same went for Tom.

  “Questions work like water,” continued the river. “There’s little bits of them everywhere, spread around. The answer is just a matter of gathering all the bits together. Even the secret of Sammael is probably lying around the world in little fragments. One day, some creature will find all the fragments and unite them—maybe they’ll even find out how to destroy him. But perhaps whoever finds out his secret won’t want to destroy him in the end. You never know.”

  “I’d destroy him,” said Danny. “I’d do it now if I could. But I don’t know how to find him. Perhaps the worms could tell me that.”

  “They couldn’t,” said the river immediately. “Sammael isn’t a creature of the earth. He’s made of ether. Do you know what that is?”

  “No,” said Danny.

  “It’s the upper air,” said the river. “It’s where the gods traveled in ancient times. It holds more than we earthly creatures could ever dream of. It’s where Sammael lives, and you couldn’t go there unless you sold your soul to him. And something tells me you’re unlikely to do that.”

  “It tells you right,” said Danny.

  Whatever his soul was worth, he was certainly keeping it.

  * * *

  Danny left the riverbank, trying to peer through the trees and see back up the hill. Had the dogs gone? He should go back up there now and find Tom. But then there were the worms—could he maybe find something out from them that might help him call off the dogs? If he’d been brave, he’d just have gone up there anyway. But he wasn’t brave. Or at least, not brave enough.

  He dragged his eyes away from the woods and walked a few paces along the river, scanning the ground. The earth looked moist and crumbly: surely there would be worms down here.

  * * *

  Behind him, Mitz the cat stopped washing and looked up. She’d been listening to every word he’d just said. What could he have been talking to? All she’d heard besides Danny had been the sighing of the wind through the treetops, the chattering life of the woodland, and the hideous burble of that hateful river. But he’d claimed to be able to talk to everything, hadn’t he?

  He’d claimed. But then, he’d claimed he was just looking for his parents and instead had dumped her in a river and tried to drown her. Why should she trust him?

  She got to her feet and slunk away between the dark tree trunks. Her paws didn’t disturb even the tiniest leaf as she went.

  CHAPTER 12

  WORM

  Danny found the rusted lid of a biscuit tin and began to dig. Somewhere in the distance a dog barked and then another answered. He shuddered.

  I want a normal life, he thought as he dug, stabbing the lid into the ground so fiercely that pieces of it began to break off. I want a normal life where you don’t have to find out about things that shouldn’t exist by talking to things that shouldn’t talk. I want to talk about normal things, with normal people. And to have them believe me. Maybe Tom was right not to believe me about all this. If I heard me saying it, I wouldn’t want to believe it.

  * * *

  The worm paused with a sinking feeling as the earth around her shook with the pounding of some object from above. It didn’t automatically mean death—she had survived being dug up once before—but you could never tell. There was the hot sun to kill you if you got flicked out onto a hard surface. There were human tools that sliced you in h
alf, and hands that burned your blood. Birds were always waiting to eat you up, and a worm was powerless against them. It had nowhere to hide now.

  * * *

  Danny tried to pick the worm up, and it screamed at the touch of his fiery fingers. He dropped it back into the soil, and it tried to slink back underneath.

  “Hey!” he said. “Please stay. I need to talk to you.”

  The worm stopped its slither and wriggled so it was just below the crumbly soil, away from the sunshine.

  “How can you talk to me?” it asked in surprise.

  “Don’t you know? I thought earthworms knew everything. At least that’s what I was told.” Danny settled himself down on the leaf mold. He had a good feeling about this worm.

  “Oh no,” it said. “That’s not true at all. Whoever told you that is probably confusing what we know with what we sing.”

  “So you sing about things you don’t know about? How’s that?”

  “It’s the sand that sings, really,” said the worm. “The sand that we swallow tells us of the lives it’s been, the world it’s seen, and we sing its songs as we work. It isn’t like the legends that other creatures have, explaining how the world came to be created and suchlike. We just sing what the sand is telling us.”

  Danny looked at the soil around the worm. Dark, damp earth and grit, small rocks and sand. The closer he watched, the more movement he could see: a beetle marching over a familiar trail; some tiny creature shifting fragments twice the size of its body. Which lives had he known that had ended? His sister’s, and of course Abel Korsakof’s. Were they both underneath him in the soil, singing through worms?

  “Could you ask the sand something for me?” he asked the worm.

  “I don’t know,” it said, dubious. “We don’t pick what the sand knows, to sing of. We just sing of what it says. I’ve never tried asking it anything … and I don’t think I could.”

  “But will you just sing anyway? I’d like to hear it.”

  “I will,” agreed the worm. Its voice echoed a little, slinking away to the edges of Danny’s ears.

  It took a mouthful of earth and began.

  “In Dublin’s fair city, where the girls are so pretty,

  I first set my eyes on sweet Molly Malone,

  She wheels her wheelbarrow, through streets broad and narrow,

  Singing, ‘Cockles and mussels, alive alive O!’

  ‘Alive alive O! Alive alive O!’

  ‘Cockles and mussels, alive alive O!’”

  This was not what Danny had expected. The secrets of the worms couldn’t be that pointless, surely? But then, he’d only asked the worm to sing whatever it normally sang. He needed information about specific things, not just ramblings from random grains of earth. But if he couldn’t ask anything …

  Then he had it. He could find out about the things within his own grasp. Himself. The stick. Where had the stick come from? And was owning it changing him into somebody—something—else?

  He pulled a hardened piece of his own skin from his fingernail, flaked off a tiny fragment of bark from the stick, and dropped both of these just in front of the worm.

  It chanced upon the grain of skin first and vacuumed it up. At first no song came out. Perhaps it wouldn’t work—skin wasn’t sand, after all. But Danny waited, and a small, whining voice began to croak from the worm.

  “Somehow the future’s more than us, and somehow the past is less.

  And somehow, somewhere, there’s a peaceful place and where I am is a mess.

  But if I close my eyes and ask enough times, maybe someone will tell me the way,

  And I won’t have to think about storms anymore.…”

  The skin evidently wasn’t up to much, because this trailed off. If it was a reflection of his life, it was pretty rubbish. Just a bit of doggerel … Was that really all he was made of? Then the worm inhaled the piece of stick, and her voice changed again.

  “The world is deadly, the world is bright,

  The creatures that use it are blinded by sight,

  But there’s no sense in crying or closing my page,

  Sense only battles in fighting and rage.

  So come all you soldiers and answer my call,

  Together we gather, together we fall!”

  Danny had never heard the voice before, but he knew at once whose voice it was. The words settled over his shoulders in a freezing cloud, and a thin crackle of static rushed through his head. It was nothing like what he would have expected—surely lightning should have spoken with great, sharp speed? But this was certainly the voice of lightning—it prickled through his blood until his skin was crawling with spines.

  So the storms were inside the stick. The storms, whose anger everyone feared so much—he was carrying a part of them around with him, in his trouser pocket. What would they do to him if they knew? Reclaim it, surely, with gales and hail and fire. It wouldn’t be just his parents who got killed then, it would be him, fried right down to the last fingernail. The only person who’d survived the lash of a storm had been Abel Korsakof, but then, he’d already sold his soul to Sammael for it. If Danny knew one thing, beyond how large the lump was that choked his guts, it was that he wouldn’t be seeking out Sammael’s protection against anything.

  Danny stared at the disturbed earth, watching the worm burrow her way slowly back into it. She was strangely perfect and unblemished, next to his own grubby and scratched hands. For a long moment he wished he was the worm, tunneling his way underground into darkness. Worms didn’t have these problems. Worms didn’t have parents to do stupid things. Worms looked after themselves.

  But then, worms had no one to take care of them either. And Tom had looked after him. He hadn’t needed to—he could have gone home and told the police to find Danny. But he’d come along and known the way. All those twists and turns, the paths and villages—Danny would never have found the route alone.

  He tried to push away that last, horrible memory of the dogs sweeping over Tom, the arm thrown into the air like it was waving. What had happened to him? Was his body lying back where he’d fallen, next to those trees, bleeding itself out onto the ground?

  Without knowing, Danny couldn’t go on. Whatever the stick was, Tom was real and normal, and the idea of him being dead was terrible. Danny had to face it—he had to go back up there and find out.

  What if the dogs were still there? What if they were standing guard, waiting for the other half of the pack to return?

  Danny’s heart began to patter, but he refused to listen to it. He forced himself up onto his feet, feeling like a very small person inside a huge, reluctant body.

  Mitz was nowhere to be seen, and Shimny was still lying on her side, her coat sticking up in wet bristles. He would leave her be—he’d have a much better chance of going unnoticed without her.

  “I’m going back,” he whispered to her, unsure if she was asleep.

  The pony gave no indication that she’d heard. Her eyes were closed.

  I suppose I must be a coward, thought Danny. Doing frightening things is so hard. And as he looked back along the rows of pines, he could see that the edge of the wood was bright and stark. He’d be exposed out there. He’d be seen for miles.

  But Tom was out there too. He would just have to take his chances.

  * * *

  He could see quite clearly from the edge of the wood that the dogs were still up by the copse, patrolling like beetles around the spot where Tom had fallen. Of Tom he could see no sign, but the grasses and plants were tall and the shrubby undergrowth crowded around the bottom of the copse.

  Between Danny and the dogs was a huge field. He hadn’t taken proper notice of it before, but it stretched, rough and tufty, crossed by the ditch that Shimny had jumped, and then sloped upward. How on earth had they escaped those dogs? There was no cover anywhere, nothing that would have hampered their pursuers. Shimny must simply have managed to outrun that black, baying mass, stride for stride. That was all.

  Danny lay
on his front, watching the dogs. A couple of them were nuzzling at something hidden behind a bush. He craned his neck to try and catch a better glimpse of it, then wriggled forward, pushing against the earth with his knees. For the moment the dogs didn’t seem to have noticed him. Maybe if he kept low, they wouldn’t pick up his scent on the wind.

  He wriggled on, inch by inch. But the grass around him wasn’t tall. Soon, the dogs would be bound to see him.

  His knee came down on a sharp stone, and he bit his lip to hold back the yelp. The dogs must have sensed something, though, because their ears pricked up. Muzzles went into the air, nostrils twitching.

  Danny buried his face into the earth, spread himself as flat as he could, and stopped breathing.

  He knew that when he put his head up again, he would see them bounding toward him. Or even just walking calmly on their thin black legs, knowing he hadn’t a snail’s chance of outrunning them this time. Just his own two legs against their many sets of four—they’d be on him in an instant. He eased his hand into his pocket to find the stick, although he knew there was no way he’d be able to find words once the dogs were slavering down his neck. He would rather just keep pressing himself against the ground, feeling it solid beneath him, trying to believe for a tiny bit longer that nothing too awful would happen.

  When the first whiskers touched his ear, he screwed his eyes tightly shut, clenched his fists, and braced himself. What did his parents’ faces look like, exactly? He tried to summon them up, to hold them one last time in his mind, but all he could picture was the tufty mane on Shimny’s neck, tangling in the breeze as she galloped. If only there could have been one more morning back at home, one more normal breakfast, one more call from his mum as he left the house.

  The nuzzling stopped, then moved around to Danny’s cheek. This must be the smallest of the dogs—its nose was tiny. Its teeth were probably even sharper, to make up for its lack of size.

  Soon it would bite him, and he would find out.

  A small weight thudded onto his back. That must be a paw, ready to hold him down. And then it moved, lightly, up to his shoulders.