The Book of Shadows

by Ruth Hatfield

  “Okay, then,” he said, feeling his heart quicken with a nameless thrill. “Go home, Shimny. Step up into Chromos, and fly there!”

  CHAPTER 8

  THE HOUSE ON THE BEACH

  The air around them began to shake. If there was a magic in getting to Chromos, then Danny knew he had found it now—it had grown in his blood and soaked him through. There was the great plain stretching out in front of him, vast and wide and green, with no fences or roads—a free expanse of world, waiting for the visions of those who journeyed through. Chromos was no longer a mysterious land of dreams: it was Danny’s own country.

  He imagined medieval knights, and there they were, thundering past him on their chargers, colored banners streaming. He imagined eagles and hawks, and they flew above him, their wings cutting cleanly through the air. He imagined elephants and giraffes, and they stalked along beside him, their eyes bright.

  If only I could just bring the whole world up here, he thought. It would sparkle.

  Ori had her eyes closed.

  “You can look,” he said. “Think of all the good things you want, and look!”

  But the dog kept her eyes tightly shut. She leaned back into him, pressing her fur against his chest, and he felt suddenly that all the positions of things had been reversed. In here, he was stronger than she was.

  He brought to mind a vision of Cath. He painted the picture of the little house beyond the sand dunes, the wide, windswept beach, and he felt it hovering in the distant air in front of him. There was a road that led there, and he was on that road, being drawn irresistibly along it.

  But—wait! He was in Chromos! Why didn’t he just bring Tom back to life in here? He could explain to him how sorry he was, how much he missed him, how he was going to try to make sure that everyone back home began to remember him.…

  At once, the sky in Chromos began to darken. And then the silence came.

  He looked over his shoulder. Behind him, the great green plain of Chromos was turning gray, and the blue sky was turning gray. Nothing was safe from the shadows.

  Danny pushed Shimny into a gallop. Don’t think about Tom. Don’t think about Tom—and the shadows gained on him, deadly and silent. He heard the silence falling and the colors dying, and grief pounded in his heart as strongly as the pounding of Shimny’s hooves. These shadows were inside him; they were made of sorrow. He could not escape them by coming to Chromos.

  Shimny galloped over mountains so high, she had to skate across snowdrifts, and through rivers so deep that she had to swim, and the miles and miles passed by in a blur. The grass changed to rocks, the rocks to ice and snow and water, then back to rocks again, and finally to sand.

  They galloped up a beach. It was a place that Danny had seen only once before, but he would never forget the bleakness of it—the white sands and stone-gray sea, and the dunes with their coarse grasses shivering in the wind.

  “Go back to earth!” he shouted, tugging at Shimny’s mane.

  “But we’re not home!” she shouted back. “We’re going home! It’s up here, I know it is!”

  “No, it’s not!” said Danny, yanking at the mane and trying to shed the desire to be in Chromos from the inside of his mind.

  “You said it was!”

  “I lied!”

  He tore a handful of Shimny’s mane out, but it vanished in his hand and was back on her neck in an instant. Of course. She was a ghost.

  “You lied?” The horse slowed for a moment, veering toward the choppy sea.

  “Yeah,” said Danny. “You can’t get home through here. This is just where I needed to go. I needed you to bring me.”

  His heart felt like a little lump of rotten bread—squashed and crumbling. It was worse than anything he had ever done, giving poor Shimny false hope.

  Shimny came to an abrupt halt. “My home isn’t here?”

  Her head hung low, the wind snatching at her mane. Danny hated himself.

  He thought harder about falling through the air, dissolving the whole world around him, wrapping up the pieces of it and putting them away.

  And it worked. Shimny’s knees began to bend: she walked down a slope that Danny couldn’t see, her hooves heavier with every step. Ori sat like a rock in Danny’s arms.

  He felt nothing of the triumph he had felt going into Chromos as they landed again, back on Earth. The victory seemed hollow when he looked down at Shimny’s neck.

  Without looking around him, he kicked her on, and they trudged up the beach toward the place where the dunes parted and the path began. In the dreary winter morning, the sand was a pale yellowy-gray, pitted with the prints of animals and birds.

  When they reached the dunes, Ori jumped down from Shimny’s back and shook herself out, golden fur flying. Then she put her muzzle up to the wind and sniffed, standing with one paw raised in the direction of the path.

  Danny looked up. The path wasn’t long, only a couple of hundred meters. A cold coastal sunshine drifted along most of it until it stopped at the front of a small garden, which sat around a low, whitewashed cottage.

  Whitewash, Danny thought. That’s new. Cath’s tidied the place up. That’s the most unlikely thing I’ve ever seen.

  But the dog wasn’t pointing at the whitewashed house. She was pointing at the sky behind, around, and above it.

  And the sky was filled with gray cloud.

  “What do we do?” asked Danny.

  “Go closer?” suggested Ori. “See if there’s a clear way in?”

  Danny swung his leg over Shimny and jumped to the ground. “We’ll get shadowed,” he said. “We’ll go gray and lose all hope, same as back home.”

  The shadow over the house looked old and settled, as though it had long since done its job and afterward fallen into a deep sleep. But Danny didn’t believe that the shadows were weaker. They felt just as strong, and they called out to him to come closer, so they could smother him, too. He didn’t want to take a single step toward them.

  “We have to go up to it,” said Ori. “What other choice do we have? Come, just to the edge. The stick will help you a little, won’t it?”

  Danny left Shimny standing at the gap between the dunes and kept a hand on Ori’s warm fur as they walked up the sandy path together. That silence. How he hated it. Near the sea, the air should be full of hissing waves, calling birds, and wind rustling through the grasses.

  Here there was nothing.

  He tried not to look too hard at the shadow, but he couldn’t avoid it once they reached the gate of the little garden: the shadow covered the house and stopped straight across the garden path, about a meter from the front door.

  Danny stood for a second, then opened his mouth and cleared his throat.

  “Cath?” he called. “Cath, are you there?”

  There was no answer from the house.

  Danny opened the gate and took another step forward. “Cath? Barshin?”

  Again, nothing.

  He looked around at the neat little garden. Someone had been growing vegetables: dark green leaves flourished in tidy rows. The front of the garden was still clear of shadow, bathing in the cold light. Behind him, Shimny stood, a distant figure on the beach, lost in misery.

  Danny fought the rational voice in his head that told him nothing could have survived here. He turned back to the house and looked into the shadowy doorway.

  The door was slightly ajar. If he could get something to push it with, he could stand just at the edge of the shadows and shove it open. It needn’t even be very long—in fact, if he shuffled forward so that his toes were just touching the dark line of shadow, he could almost reach with his fingertips.…

  Pushing his arm into the shadowed doorway was like plunging it into an icy sea. Perhaps the shadows cooled down as they sat still. Perhaps if he went home now, he’d find it frozen into icebergs, gray and gleaming.

  No, Danny thought. Ice looks alive. This cold isn’t due to temperature—I bet if I stuck a thermometer under it, it would read just the same a
s out here. This cold is due to lack of color.

  And what that was he understood more and more each time he looked into the shadows. The colors were hot and tiring; they demanded you keep thinking, keep fighting. The gray asked nothing of you and gave you nothing in return. There was a strong pull in the gray, but once it had sucked you in, you were lost.

  His fingers began to feel heavy, and he pulled his arm out of the shadows.

  Ori was looking up at him. “What are you waiting for?”

  Danny glared at her.

  “I’m not mocking you,” said Ori. “I just think you could be a bit more impulsive. You’ve got that bit of stick, haven’t you? Push open the door with it.”

  “Yes, thanks,” said Danny. “I had thought of that.”

  He shoved the taro forward. This time, his hand and arm didn’t feel cold. The stick stayed tight in his fingers as he poked the door open.

  It swung inward. Danny peered into the gloom. The interior of the house, snug and small, was too dark to make out. He opened his eyes as wide as possible, but it was no use, he was still standing in the light. If he wanted to see in the dark, he would have to be in the dark.

  “Cath?” he tried again. “Cath? Barshin? Are you there? It’s me, Danny.”

  He thought he heard a slight sound inside the house—a shuffling, or a scraping.

  The stick felt solid in his hand. He had never truly known the extent of its power—it let him talk to every creature on earth, and it protected him from being killed by storms. But could it really help keep his heart alive if he stepped into the shadows?

  “Can you hear anything?” he asked Ori, who was hanging back at his heels.

  “Yes,” said Ori. “There’s something moving in there. But you shouldn’t go in.”

  “I thought you told me to?”

  “I’ve changed my mind. Don’t risk it. It could be just a rat, and if you were pulled in by the shadows, you’d be gray for nothing.”

  She was shuffling backward, shrinking away.

  Danny frowned. “What about being brave?”

  “The shadows are … colder than I thought they’d be,” said Ori. “I don’t want you to come to any harm.”

  “Well, neither do I,” said Danny. “But I reckon I’m going to have to risk it. Unless you can smell what’s in there?”

  Ori sniffed at the air. “I smell the sea, and a hundred scents of green leaves and grasses and sand. A very complex map, actually.… Some kind of fox has been around here, and an old lady who washes in water from deep underground, not salty water, and her clothes are hung about with the scents of hedgehog poo and mouse wee, and she herself wees on the vegetables in the garden—”

  “I don’t really need to know about that,” said Danny hastily. “It would be more helpful if you could smell anything inside the house.”

  “No, I can’t,” said Ori. “It is as scentless as—as—as scentless as if somebody had kicked me on the back of my head and turned my nose off. Which did happen to a dog I knew once, when I was a puppy.”

  As if someone had turned your nose off.

  Danny stared into the dark room. That was it—under the shadows, it was as though someone had kicked you on the head and turned down all your senses. You forgot you were a living, hearing, smelling, dreaming human with the power to imagine up worlds inside your own head, and you saw only gray.

  He thought of the strong colors of Chromos. If he could hold Chromos in his head, surely that, together with the stick, would give him enough protection to run quickly in and out of the shadows. If only he’d been able to bring a fragment of Chromos down to earth with him.

  But Chromos was only half real. It was a land of imagination—and he still had his own imagination here. If he picked a few things on earth that had color and memorized them, maybe that would do just as well.

  He did not let himself look back at Shimny or the beach, or the white sky. Instead, he took a long glance at the garden and counted five things in it—a twisted brown tree, the green leafy plants, a thorny yellow bush, a tuft of pale blue-gray sea grasses, and a black bird sitting on a fence.

  Five alive, colorful things. Brown tree. Green plants. Yellow bush. Blue grasses. Black bird.

  “Okay, then,” he said. “Wish me luck.”

  And then he stepped forward into the doorway of the house, and into the shadow.

  CHAPTER 9

  INSIDE

  It was cold, but the heat from the stick kept flowing down Danny’s arm, warming his shoulder. He felt it reaching his heart, just about. That was the key.

  Danny walked into the house and let his eyes adjust to the darkness. In seconds, his feet became heavier, as though the floor were trying to cling to the soles of his shoes.

  The room was sparsely furnished, and every piece of furniture was made of chunks of wood. Driftwood, Danny guessed, although there was no smell of the sea to confirm it. There was no smell of anything at all, only a damp, dark prickling at the back of his neck that told him not to linger here.

  He felt the shadows pressing down at the prickles. Why fight us? We are easy to live with. Just forget the color. Give in to us. Stay.

  Brown tree. Green plants. Yellow bush. Blue grasses. Black bird. Danny chanted the words under his breath, and each one reminded him of the colors outside, the warmth of the stick in his hand.

  But the warmth was struggling to reach his heart now. He cast his eyes around quickly for Cath, or any sign of a living creature.

  She was lying in a corner, clutching a bundle of rags. Her head was slumped against another lump of driftwood, and her body was sprawled as though she’d tripped over something and not bothered to move. She was completely still.

  Danny took three steps toward her. She didn’t seem to hear him, or know he was there.

  He didn’t think twice before grabbing her. He expected her to strike out at him, to push him away, but she did nothing at all when he yanked her arm. Her body hung like a rag doll from his grip, and she wasn’t heavy, but all of her weight was dead.

  In the end, it was easier for Danny with his one spare hand to pull her out leg-first. He dragged her through the doorway, into the little garden, and out of the shadows.

  His heart threw itself about his chest, as panicked as a bird in a chimney. The stark daylight forced him to close his eyes, and he sank to his knees.

  Ori stood over Cath, sniffing uncertainly at her.

  “She’s alive,” the dog said. “I think.”

  “Of course she’s alive,” snapped Danny, opening his eyes again. “Nothing could kill Cath.”

  But as he looked at her, he was afraid for a second that his heart might fly into his mouth and escape through his teeth.

  Cath was gray. Her skin was gray. Her once-black hair was gray. The clothes she wore, the bundle of rags she clutched, the tattered shoes on her feet—they were all gray.

  He checked himself. The soccer uniform was still dark red. The five colored things had worked for him.

  Brown tree. Green plants. Yellow bush. Blue grasses. Black bird.

  The words rattling around his head came to him again as he knelt over Cath’s body. She lay unmoving, the sea breeze playing with her gray hair, and the sea grasses scratching at her gray skin.

  The colors of the five things had all jumped out at him. What if he brought them to her? Might they banish her grayness too?

  A piece of the brown tree did nothing. Leaves from the dark green plants lay for a moment on her chest before the wind picked them up and whisked them away. Danny had pretty much lost hope by the time he got to the yellow bush—Cath was already lying in the blue-gray grass, and he doubted he would be able to persuade a bird to jump onto her gray body.

  “What are you?” he asked the bush, before he took a piece. “Have you got any magical powers?”

  “None that I know of,” said the bush. “I am a gorse bush. When I flower, I smell—so they say—of coconuts. I personally think coconuts may well smell of gorse, but I have ne
ver met one, so I can’t be entirely sure.”

  “Can I break a bit off you?” asked Danny.

  “By all means,” said the gorse bush. “I’m hard as nails. You won’t hurt me.”

  Danny took a piece of spiky twig to Cath and lifted her hand off the bundle of rags. He curled her fingers around the spines. Even if she hurt herself on the thorns, it could be a good thing for her just to feel pain.

  Nothing happened. He turned away to see if he could spot a bird to talk to.

  “Danny!” Ori’s voice barked out behind him, hot and excited.

  Danny turned. Cath’s hair had begun to darken, creeping back toward the ebony black of a midnight sky. Her skin was warming; her clothes and the bundle of rags were taking on hints of color.

  His eyes went to the gorse twig in her hand.

  The back of her hand was covered in yellow flowers. They grew up her skin, over her wrist, and halfway up her arm.

  Now he remembered—he’d seen them on her hand before. He’d asked her what they were, a lifetime ago in the farmhouse kitchen, and she told him they were flowers she’d touched in Chromos—yellow flowers she liked, and they’d grown up her hand, dyeing her skin with a tattoo of twining plants.

  Without even thinking about it, he must have had that in the back of his mind when he’d chosen the gorse as one of his five colors to remember. And the flowers had blown on a glowing ember inside Cath, raising flames strong enough to reawaken her color.

  Cath lay on the grass, her eyes closed. Then her lips moved, and a single word came out. Danny didn’t even have to hear it to know what it would be.

  “Barshin,” Cath said.

  Cath and the hare were inseparable. Without bothering to protest, Danny readjusted his grip on the stick, turned his back on Ori, Cath, and the free, open world, and ducked into the shadows again.