The Color of Darkness

by Ruth Hatfield

  Danny lifted his eyes and stared at her, and she saw a hardness come over his face, sweeping away the pale uncertainty. Whatever doubts he had battled with, they had been stomped on, for a while.

  “Okay,” he said. “We’ll do it. We will make him listen to us. Sammael is not getting my cousin. I can’t let it happen. Wait here.”

  He stalked off into the woods. Cath threw a piece of grass at him. The wind caught it and batted it back to her. She turned to Barshin, expecting at least a disapproving look, but the hare merely kicked a fly off his ear and waited.

  After a while, there was a loud rustle from the direction Danny had gone, and the sound of light thuds against packed earth, and then the bushes swung themselves aside and an animal with a reddish-brown hide stepped out. It had thin legs that came delicately down to shiny hooves, deep black eyes, and a wide forehead crowned with a pair of businesslike antlers.

  Cath knew it was a deer. But she’d never been close to such a large wild animal in her life. This wasn’t Zadoc, friendly and welcoming, inviting her to climb aboard. The deer was silent and aloof, and although its eyes were calm, they had a look in them that suggested a certain unwillingness to be doing exactly what it was doing.

  Danny was sitting astride its back, his feet dangling below its fawn belly. His hands were on either side of its neck and he looked a bit precarious, but he had a small smile on his face as though he was quite satisfied with the place he’d managed to get to.

  “Meet—” he said. The word was a mess of sounds and Cath didn’t hear any of it.

  “What?”

  “Isbjin al-Orr,” said Danny. “He’s not massive, but he says he can run quite fast.”

  Cath stared. “You what?”

  “Oh, I’ll explain later. Get on, let’s get this over with.”

  The deer came forward another pace. Cath watched as its hoof hit the ground, and suddenly she could feel how it would be underneath her, those hooves beating against the earth, flying across the fields and roads and hillsides. Her heart began to thump inside her ribs, quicker and quicker, until her hands were shaking and she was scrambling toward the animal, desperate to be on its back and soaring away so fast that nothing and no one would ever catch up with her.

  The stag threw up its head and snorted.

  “You’ll have to go on the doe,” said Danny, pointing behind him. “We’ll go faster if they have one of us each.”

  Cath didn’t want to go on the smaller, female deer. She wanted to sit on that stag and see the antlers ahead of her, raking through the air. For a moment she considered kicking up a fuss, but then she saw the wary suspicion in the doe’s eyes, and it cut down into her chest as though she’d inhaled the smoke of burning-hot curry powder.

  “She’s called Teilin,” said Danny. “Isbjin al-Orr says she’s the fastest of all the does, but she’s a bit nervous.”

  The doe shook all over as Cath approached her, but she stood still. How had Danny done it? The deer seemed to be listening to him, obeying all his requests and commands. He was weird, there was no doubt about that. But this kind of weird—it wasn’t a bad thing.

  Cath scrambled onto the doe’s back from the stump of an old fallen tree, and then she could feel all the bunched nerves under the animal’s skin, and hear its racing heartbeat through the nerves of her own legs.

  She reached down a hand to give Barshin something to scramble up onto, but the hare was staying well back from the deer’s shifting legs and he didn’t advance.

  “I will run beside you, thank you very much,” was all he said in a tight voice.

  “Okay?” said Danny, and without waiting for an answer, the stag he was riding shot forward to the edge of the wood.

  Cath almost fell off with the doe’s first leap, but she clutched at its short coat and managed, somehow, to keep one leg on either side of its light, bounding body, so that when they galloped toward the gate she was ready for the fact that they weren’t going to stop—nothing, indeed, could stop them—and she clung with her knees to the doe’s sides and braced her body against the punching kick of hindquarters and the jolt of forelegs crashing onto the road over the other side. She was still on its back.

  This was nothing like riding Zadoc. But the wind was in her ears and her eyes, forcing stinging tears down her cheeks, and the beat of the hooves hitting the solid earth pulled more forcefully at her heart than the loudest drums she’d ever heard.

  If she hadn’t been on the earth—if she hadn’t known at every moment that she was in the real, old world, and that here you could run and run and run but you always got caught in the end—if she hadn’t still thought of that in every second that she breathed, it would have been perfect.

  CHAPTER 17

  HIDING

  The deer were fast but it was well into dusk by the time they stepped out of a wood and looked down on Sopper’s Edge farm, squatting just under the crest of the hill.

  Seeing the farmhouse, the deer stopped dead. Danny slid off Isbjin al-Orr’s back, and Cath copied the way he leaned forward and threw his leg over the deer’s rump. Her knees buckled as she tried to stand and she fell to the ground, sending Teilin skittering away.

  “Seriously, you idiot, I’ve been on your back for hours. I ain’t gonna murder you now, am I?” muttered Cath, but the doe’s eyes stayed watchful.

  Danny stood for a moment with his hand against Isbjin al-Orr’s shoulder. Was he talking through his hands? Was he some kind of animal whisperer? Cath watched as Danny’s hand fell away and he stepped back from the stag, and then she heard a shout from the farmhouse.

  Aunt Kathleen had come out of the back door and was running up the hillside toward them waving her arms. The deer shot into the dark woods but Barshin stayed crouched at Cath’s feet, waiting.

  “Danny! Danny!”

  Then the tatty old woman shouted something that neither Cath nor Danny understood.

  “What?” yelled Danny down the field. Aunt Kathleen shouted again, but all Cath caught was the name “Tom!” until she was standing in front of them, resting her hands on the grubby thighs of her overalls and panting.

  “Have you … seen … Tom? Is he … with you?”

  She breathed in deeply, and Cath saw that she had run all the way up in her socks.

  “No,” said Danny. “Where is he?”

  Aunt Kathleen closed her eyes and her cheeks went all blotchy as though she was crying but there weren’t any tears. Just deep breaths, in and out.

  “He’s gone,” she said.

  “Where?” said Danny.

  Aunt Kathleen straightened up and looked him in the eye.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “You tell me.”

  Danny stared at her, horror in his face. “He can’t have gone already. He can’t be…”

  Aunt Kathleen raised an eyebrow. For a long moment neither of them spoke. And then the woman said, holding back any blame from her voice, “You know Tom. He goes anywhere he wants to. But the cowsheds are filthy. Have you ever seen him forget to clean them out? And it’s long past time for evening milking.”

  Danny shook his head and kept his mouth shut.

  “Where’s he gone, Danny?” said Aunt Kathleen, her voice low and sharp. “This is serious. You kids are your own people, and I’ve always respected that. But this is serious.”

  Danny looked like he might be about to say something, but then Cath saw his lips tighten in a stubborn line of silence.

  Aunt Kathleen grabbed him by the collar. “I’m calling the police,” she said. “You’re going to tell them everything you know.”

  She dragged him down the hill. He slipped and slid around on the muddy path, trying to keep his footing, but stayed with his aunt, feet trotting beside her.

  Why didn’t he try to get away? Cath watched for a few seconds in complete disbelief. Did Danny O’Neill really think he still had to obey adults, just because they were adults? He really did need help.

  “Chaos,” said Barshin, staring after Danny. />
  “What?”

  “Chaos. Make some.”

  “No problem,” said Cath. “I can do chaos.”

  She ran down the path after Aunt Kathleen and Danny, but stayed back a few steps. They didn’t look around; they seemed locked in some kind of old struggle that had nothing to do with her.

  When they’d passed the lowest field gate and were almost at the house, Cath stopped by the gate and lifted off the baling twine that was looped around the gatepost. She swung the gate wide and ran into the field, but Barshin was there ahead of her, leaping and sprinting toward the herd of shaggy black cows.

  The cows didn’t need much encouragement: they knew that the barn where they went to be milked was full of tasty food. They wandered slowly toward the open gateway and tramped through it, mooing for Tom. They pattered along the wet path, tails swinging, hooves squelching into the fresh cowpats left by the leaders.

  Aunt Kathleen heard them and turned around. From her face Cath saw that she’d half expected Tom to be there, and that seeing he wasn’t made everything worse.

  “You stupid girl!”

  But Aunt Kathleen didn’t let go of Danny. The cows weren’t doing anything bad, just mooching down to the barn.

  They needed to get scared. Cath picked up a sharp stone from the gateway and hurled it into the herd. It hit one of the back cows on the rump, and the cow leapt forward, giving an agonized squeal. Cath yelled and ran down after it, grabbing another stone to throw, hitting the same cow, and then the cow was trying to run forward, and the other cows were slipping in the mud, scrambling away from one another, trying to get up speed. For a moment the herd was a writhing mass of legs and clambering bodies, and then the front cows set off at a snorting gallop.

  Cath didn’t stop to watch. She was halfway up the hill before Danny had even gone ten yards from the house and she saw him sliding and slipping over in the slick of mud by the chicken sheds, but she didn’t stop or go back to him. She ran with Barshin through the fading dusk, making for the cover of the trees on the hilltop.

  Rain began to fall just as they reached the place where Tom had begun his new fence. Fat drops the size of coins came tumbling down from the sweating sky. A growl of thunder riddled through the clouds and gave a swollen burp, and suddenly the last of the iron-gray daylight disappeared.

  Great. Rain. That was all they needed. Cath began to shiver as she put the wide trunk of a tree between herself and the farmhouse and stood with Barshin at her feet, waiting for Danny.

  The first fork of lightning came stabbing through the air like a hunting spear, and the storm swung full in front of her across the valley below. It caught at her breath just as the sight of the stag had caught at her heart. She forgot to be cold; she forgot to shiver. She watched the dark sky and willed the lightning to come again.

  “You idiot,” panted Danny, reaching her. “Those cows— Do you have any idea what happens when cows stampede?”

  Cath shrugged. “Got you free, didn’t I?”

  “It’s serious. They’ll damage stuff. Aunt Kathleen’ll go mad. And it’s going to storm.”

  “It’s wicked!” said Cath. “Did you see that lightning?”

  “I don’t like storms,” said Danny. His teeth were chattering, raindrops running down his dirty face.

  Cath thought he was just cold. But he shook and shook, and when she tore her eyes away from the clouds to peer at him through the darkness, she saw that his eyes were closed and his hands clasped around his arms in a tight hug. He looked miserable.

  “Come on,” she said, although she wasn’t sure that she really wanted to leave the hilltop. “Let’s go down the other side. Find somewhere we can hide.”

  The night had come so swiftly that she could hardly see where to tread a path between the trees. She tried to keep an eye on Barshin’s pale shape ahead, but both she and Danny kept stumbling into holes and falling to their knees, then getting their hands pricked and stung as they pushed themselves up again. After five minutes, Cath didn’t even know which direction they were going in—they might have been stumbling back toward the farmhouse again, or they might have been climbing a scrubby slope into the storm clouds themselves. It was impossible to tell.

  She heard a new sound, rattling and brittle, like gravel thrown onto a car roof. At first she wondered if it was just the rain getting harder, but there was some kind of flapping noise too, and she listened to hear where it was coming from. She tried to shut out the thousand spattering smacks of raindrops on leaves and branches and soil, and then it appeared through the darkness in front of her—a shelter made of a tarpaulin stretched across a frame.

  “Danny,” whispered Cath. “There’s some kind of tent thingy. Come on!”

  “No!” said Danny. “What if there’s someone else there?”

  “Who cares?” said Cath. “I’m going in.”

  She ducked to the ground and felt around for an opening, crawling on her knees until she found that half of one side was open to the air. There was a panicked rustling and something furry shot past her, then vanished soundlessly into the forest before she could even guess what it might have been.

  The rest of the shelter was empty. She crawled inside and sat listening to the rain rattling overhead.

  “You coming in?” she said after a moment. “It’s dry, sort of.”

  The shapes of Danny and Barshin came crawling into the little space. Barshin pressed himself close to Cath’s legs for warmth, but Danny sat huddled in the other corner. Cath could hear him sniffing. Was he crying? Or just trying to get the water out of his nose?

  “You okay?” she said.

  “I hate storms.”

  “Why? They’re only storms. They’re not gonna hurt you.”

  “Shows what you know,” said Danny.

  Cath listened to the raindrops again. But suddenly they weren’t the sounds she wanted to hear.

  “Go on,” she said. “Spill. Tell me everything. We’re doing this together, ain’t we?”

  “Are we?” said Danny.

  “Yeah.”

  “Until you go over to his side, you mean?”

  Cath knew that he meant Sammael. But it didn’t matter who he meant, really. The answer was the same.

  “I ain’t on no one’s side,” she said. “Never. Only mine. But we’ve gotta find Tom, ain’t we? So for now, I guess, I’m on yours too. So tell me.”

  “Tell you what?”

  “How you got them rats to chew down my door. How you got them deer to bring us here. It ain’t Chromos, is it? Because you said you didn’t know what that was.”

  “It isn’t Chromos,” said Danny.

  “Go on,” said Cath, shifting around so she could curl up on the earth. She was suddenly very tired.

  “I’ve told you most of it,” said Danny. “But the other bit…” He trailed off.

  “You still reckon I’ll go back to school and tell everyone?” said Cath. “Don’t be stupid. They hate me more than they hate you.”

  “They never used to hate me,” said Danny. “All I did was tell Paul some of the stuff that happened. I mean, it was weird stuff, but it did happen. And he just went all mental, saying I was a freak and making fun of me every time he saw me. Every day. Every stupid minute.”

  “Paul,” said Cath succinctly, “is boring. He’s a boring person and he’s going to be boring all his life, him and all the rest of ’em.”

  “It doesn’t make any difference,” said Danny. “He’s horrible to me now.”

  “Well, I won’t be,” said Cath.

  “Swear?”

  “I swear. I’ll swear on my blood, if you want.”

  “No,” said Danny, but Cath was picking at one of the scabs on her knees.

  “Here.” She trailed her finger through the blood and held it out to him. “I swear on this, I’ll never tell anyone what you tell me. Not even Paul.”

  She was serious but Danny laughed, just a little bit.

  “Okay,” he said. “Can you see this?”<
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  He moved, but the darkness was clambering too thickly around Cath’s eyes.

  “See what?”

  “It’s a stick. It’s got a bit of storm inside it. When I hold it, I can talk to everything that’s alive. I can hear them all, too, if I listen in the right way.”

  Okay. Cath could see why Paul had thought this was weird. It was weird.

  “What, like, animals?” she asked.

  “Everything. Animals. Trees. Plants. Storms, even.”

  “Storms? Then how come you’re scared of them?”

  “Because I know what they are. I know what they can do. What they can be made to do. We think they’re natural and they don’t mean all the bad stuff they do. But they do mean it! They know they’re hurting us! And they still do it.”

  So? Cath wanted to say, but she didn’t want to annoy him now that he’d started talking. Because she believed him. Danny O’Neill wasn’t exactly normal, but he wasn’t making things up to make himself look great. Or at least if he was, it had gone pretty badly wrong.

  “Okay,” she said. “So you can talk to things. Can I try it?”

  “No!” There was a sudden scraping sound as he moved away from her. “No, you can’t touch it! It’s mine!”

  “I won’t nick it,” she said. “But if you want people to believe you, why don’t you prove it?”

  “Because you’ll die,” said Danny flatly. “This old man tried it, right in front of me. He just … burned up. I’d have made Tom use it, if I could, to show him I wasn’t lying. But I couldn’t.”

  “So why don’t you die, then?”

  Danny sighed. “It’s a mistake. It was all a mistake. I picked it up before Sammael could get it, and then it was mine. And Sammael knows that the only way I can not have it anymore is if I’m dead. He can’t kill me—he can’t kill anyone who doesn’t belong to him—so he’s doing all he can to make me go mad, or make me give up my sand to him. That’s it, I guess.”

  “Your sand? That’s your soul, ain’t it? That’s what you said to Tom.”