Storm Horse

by Nick Garlick

  As much as he loved the island and as much as he loved Storm, how could he possibly have forgotten that?

  FLIP WAS STILL thinking about this when he got up the next morning and went out to greet the horses. He was thinking about it so much that he forgot to lock the gate when he went inside for breakfast, and had to run back out and do so before Uncle Andries found out.

  But he was just as forgetful after breakfast, which was probably the reason for what happened later.

  It was a Saturday, and as soon as his chores were done, Flip returned to the field. Renske went with him. When they got there, they found the Ghost Girl sitting on the gate, feeding Storm and Leila pieces of an apple. She appeared every day now—although you could never tell when—and she always had something for the horses to eat. Sometimes she smiled. Sometimes she even laughed. But she still refused to speak.

  To anyone.

  The three of them sat on the gate and watched the horses. It was late summer and a hot, muggy day. The leaves hung limply from the trees, and the sky was a dull, hazy blue. Off in the distance, thunderclouds were piling up over the North Sea but, since there was no breeze to move them, they came no closer to the island.

  Flip had brought a halter out to the field. But that morning he didn’t feel like doing anything. He didn’t want to walk around the field and he didn’t want to walk along the beach. It was far too hot for that.

  “Why don’t you try riding him?” Renske suggested.

  “I don’t think he’ll let me do that,” Flip said.

  “You haven’t tried,” said Renske.

  That was true. He hadn’t. He’d never ridden a horse in his life and the thought of doing it now, for the first time, scared him a little. Especially a horse as big as Storm. He’d always thought that was something for later, after he’d calmed him down. But what if he could do it now? What if learning to ride Storm was the key to getting him to accept the halter? That would be something to show Uncle Andries. And it would really impress his mom.

  All his listlessness vanished in an instant. As soon as he could, he led Storm back to the gate by his mane and positioned him so that the horse’s broad back was right next to it. Flip’s heart was beating fast and he had butterflies in his stomach, but Storm didn’t seem to notice and stood placidly beside the gate, letting Renske scratch behind his ears.

  Taking a deep breath, Flip climbed the bars, took hold of the mane, and slid onto Storm’s back. Or at least, he tried to. Because the moment he lifted his leg off the gate, Storm promptly took two steps sideways and Flip landed with a thump in the grass.

  The Ghost Girl laughed. So did Renske. The ground was soft, so Flip didn’t mind too much. But that morning, in the heat, the girls’ laughter irritated him. He decided to try again. And to get it right this time.

  He waited for Storm to return. When he did, he grabbed his mane and lifted his leg away from the gate. This time, Storm jumped backward and Flip landed with a crash on his stomach.

  This happened again. And again. And again. Not once did Flip so much as manage to get seated on the horse, let alone ride him. After an hour he was covered in grass stains and stiff all over, but he wasn’t about to give up. If anything, all his failures just made him more determined to succeed. And Storm didn’t seem to mind him trying.

  So back to the gate they went, where Storm blew out his breath and stood waiting patiently. Taking yet one more deep breath, Flip wrapped both hands in the mane and slipped smoothly onto the horse’s back.

  Storm didn’t move a muscle.

  Flip grinned. It had finally happened. Renske clapped her hands in delight and the Ghost Girl smiled.

  “Give him a nudge with your heels,” Renske said to Flip when Storm continued to stand still. “That tells him to move.”

  Flip did as she said and Storm took a step forward. Then a second, and then a third. Flip’s grin was now almost as wide as his head. He couldn’t believe he was actually riding! He gave Storm another little nudge and felt the horse break into a trot.

  It lasted for six strides.

  Storm, who obviously knew exactly what he was doing, stopped dead in his tracks and let Flip’s momentum carry him forward. Flip flew through the air over the horse’s shoulders and landed flat on his back in the mud beside the water trough. Over on the gate, Renske and the Ghost Girl were laughing again—Flip could see them trying not to, but having no success. As for Storm, he was all the way at the other end of the field, standing next to Leila and rubbing noses with her.

  Right then, something snapped inside Flip. He was hot and sweaty, his head hurt from where he’d banged it falling down, and now he was covered from his face to his knees in clammy, clinging mud. He pulled himself upright and stood there in the baking sun, staring at the horses at the end of the field.

  He’d been patient and kind. He’d never lost his temper. He’d done everything he could think of to help Storm adjust to his new surroundings. And what had happened? He’d just ended up thrown in the mud.

  Storm had started back toward him again but Flip wasn’t interested.

  “You stupid horse!” he yelled at the top of his voice.

  Startled, Storm galloped away.

  Flip walked to the gate, flung it open, and strode off to the barn without a backward glance. He heard Renske saying something but he didn’t pay her any attention. All he wanted to do right then was leave. He wanted his mother to come and get him and take him away from Mossum and never come back.

  Ever.

  Up in his room in the barn loft, he pulled off his muddy clothes and cleaned his face with a towel. Then he sat on the bed with his face in his hands and stared down at the floor. He could see the handle of the suitcase he’d carried all the way from Amsterdam peeking out from under the bed. At that moment it was more important than anything and he pulled it out and opened it to have a look, hoping it would cheer him up.

  It didn’t. It just made him feel worse, and before he knew it, tears flooded his eyes.

  He didn’t realize Aunt Elly was there until she spoke. The door wasn’t shut and he hadn’t heard her coming up the stairs.

  “Whatever have you got there?” she said.

  Flip sat up straight, wiping away the tears and hoping she hadn’t noticed them.

  “May I see?” She didn’t sound angry. Just curious.

  So he stepped aside to let her see what was inside the case.

  IT WAS A record player. A stereo record player. At first glance it looked like a big brown box, but when he unfastened the catches on the sides, it split into three parts. The bottom half was the turntable, with shiny black dials on the front and a thin silver spindle sticking up in the center. The top half was two boxes: the loudspeakers.

  “Where did you get that?” Aunt Elly asked. Again, she wasn’t annoyed. Just curious.

  “It was Mom’s,” Flip said, trying not to sniff but not succeeding. “She bought it at the shop where she worked. A music shop.”

  “It looks terribly expensive,” said Aunt Elly.

  “It was,” Flip said. “But what happened was, a man who bought it sold it back to the shop a month later because he needed the money. So because it was secondhand, Mom got to buy it much cheaper, and the owner of the shop let her because he knew how much his customers liked her. He said it was a sort of bonus. Otherwise she could never have afforded it.”

  Aunt Elly gazed admiringly at the record player. She touched the dials and picked up the speakers. “I’ve seen pictures of these in the paper. Stereo. Sound from two speakers. It’s all terribly modern, isn’t it?”

  Flip nodded. “Mom was really proud of it. Nobody else we knew had one. The neighbors used to come around specially to listen to it. She was always playing her records on it. Until … ”

  He tried to finish the sentence but couldn’t. Seeing the player hadn’t made him feel better at all—only sadder.

  “Until she left?” Aunt Elly suggested.

  “Until she left,” Flip agreed. Without
thinking, he reached out and traced a cross with a circle around it on the turntable. “That’s when I hid it.”

  “Hid it? From who?”

  “Dad,” Flip said. “He was so angry when she left he started smashing her things and I thought he was going to break that too. So I hid it.”

  “Didn’t he know it was gone?”

  “She’d put it in my room before she went, and he hadn’t noticed. When he did see it was gone, I told him she’d taken it with her. And he believed me.”

  “And you’ve had it ever since?” Aunt Elly asked. “All this time?”

  Flip nodded.

  “None of us saw you bring it with you.”

  Flip felt embarrassed. He didn’t know where to look. “That’s because I hid it from Uncle Andries too.”

  Aunt Elly considered him with a kind but puzzled look in her eyes. “Why did you do that?” she asked.

  Flip took a deep breath. “Because I heard him talking to our landlord when he came to Amsterdam,” he explained. “The landlord said the rent hadn’t been paid and Uncle Andries said he didn’t have any money to pay it. So the landlord said he’d take all the furniture in our apartment as payment and Uncle Andries said that would be fine. So I hid the record player in my suitcase in case Uncle Andries found it and left it behind with everything else.”

  “Well, he certainly never noticed,” Aunt Elly said. “And he wasn’t the only one. How did you get it here?”

  “In the suitcase,” Flip said. “I carried it.”

  “All the way?” Aunt Elly said. “That can’t have been easy. It must weigh a ton.”

  Flip thought of his aching fingers and battered knees on the walk to Amsterdam Central. “It does,” he agreed.

  “Very resourceful of you,” his aunt said. Then she smiled again. “But your uncle wouldn’t have sold it, you know. And besides,” she added, pointing to one of his mom’s singles that Flip had hidden and protected with the player, “he likes that Beatles song. He’d enjoy hearing that.”

  Flip was speechless. The idea that his uncle might actually like pop music—especially the Beatles—was too startling for words. He wasn’t sure he could actually imagine his uncle liking anything.

  Aunt Elly seemed to be able to read his thoughts. “He’s not as bad as you think he is,” she said. “Doesn’t say much, I grant you. And he can look terribly forbidding at times. But if you’d told him about the record player, he’d have let you keep it. And bring it to the house to play it.”

  “Oh, it’s not for me,” Flip said. The words tumbled out of his mouth. “I don’t want to use it. I didn’t keep it for me. It’s for Mom.”

  “For your mother?” Aunt Elly said.

  “For when she comes back. It’s a present. Just for her. I wanted to keep it perfect for her.”

  Again, Flip didn’t know how Aunt Elly would react. But again, she surprised him.

  “What a lovely idea,” she said. “Good for you. After everything you’ve been through, I don’t think many people would have thought to do that. You should be proud of yourself. And if you aren’t proud of that,” she went on, “then you should be for what you’ve done for Storm.”

  “Storm?”

  “Yes,” Aunt Elly said. “Storm. Renske told me what happened out in the field just now, and how annoyed you were.”

  Flip felt embarrassed all over again and started to apologize, but Aunt Elly shook her head.

  “When I think of what Storm was like when he arrived and what he’s like now, I can see you’ve done wonders,” she said. “I know he’s been annoying, but you’ve only been trying to ride him for an hour and that’s hardly any time at all. You keep trying. That’s what I came up here to say. You keep trying the way you have been. Because that’s what makes me proud of you.”

  And with that, she walked back down the steps and across the yard into the farmhouse.

  Flip watched her go, feeling all sorts of strange thoughts and emotions racing around inside his head. He thought about what Aunt Elly had just said, and about Storm and how much he’d grown to love exploring the island. It made him realize that life on Mossum wasn’t turning out at all the way he’d expected.

  But with a sinking heart, he realized something else. That even with the record player to look at, he still couldn’t really remember his mom’s face.

  Then Renske burst into the room and he found out that he had an even bigger problem.

  “STORM’S GONE!” SHE gasped.

  Her hair was a tangled mess, there was mud on her clothes, and her cheeks were wet with tears. The whole story spilled out of her before Flip could even ask one question.

  “When Mama came up here to talk to you, the Mesman Boys went into the field. They said they could teach Storm to behave. They said they knew what to do. But he didn’t like them, so he ran away from them and then they chased him until he ran right out of the field and I tried to stop him but he was too scared and he ran right past me and I fell over.”

  “Wasn’t the gate locked?”

  “No!”

  Flip’s whole body went cold as he realized he’d left the field without locking the gate. He’d forgotten to do the one thing that would at least have kept Storm where he belonged. And he’d forgotten because all he’d been thinking about was impressing Uncle Andries and his mom. He hadn’t considered Storm; he’d only been thinking about himself.

  “We have to get him back,” he said, jumping up. “Did you see where he went?”

  “Along the road. But he won’t come to me.”

  “What about the Mesman Boys?”

  “They ran off when Storm escaped.” Her face crumpled and fresh tears filled her eyes. “I’m sorry, Flip,” she sobbed. “It’s all my fault.”

  “No, it isn’t!” he said. “It’s mine. I forgot to lock the gate. So if anyone’s to blame, it’s me. Now, do you want to help me get him back?”

  Renske’s tears stopped and her eyes brightened at the prospect of helping with the rescue. “Can I really?”

  Flip nodded. “But you can’t tell anyone else what’s happened. If we’re lucky, we can find him and bring him back before anyone knows he’s gone.”

  Side by side they walked casually across the farmyard, careful not to run and attract attention. As he’d expected, the Ghost Girl was nowhere in sight. Nor were the Mesman Boys. Leila was standing just outside the open gate, eating grass at the roadside. They led her back into the field without a problem.

  Storm wasn’t nearly so easy.

  He hadn’t gone much farther down the road than Leila. But every time Flip and Renske got close enough to touch him, he trotted away out of reach, just the way he had the day he ran off to The Eyes. He didn’t want to be caught and Flip didn’t blame him: Flip had shouted at him and then failed to protect him from the Mesman Boys. Well, he’d have to protect him now, by getting him safely home, whatever it took. Without stopping to think about it, he ran back and snatched the rope and the halter from the gate and set off again in pursuit. Renske ran beside him.

  They went past the Hofstra farm, past The Eyes and the camping ground behind the sand dunes on the north of the island. Storm was always in sight, but if they drew near, he just snorted, flicked his tail, and trotted away out of reach.

  And that was how, after half an hour of running, stopping, and almost catching him, the two of them reached the beginning of The Yellow. And when they did that, they stopped and stared ahead of them with sinking hearts.

  The Yellow was what the islanders called the long, flat, empty plain of sand that occupied almost the entire western third of the island. It stretched out as far as Flip and Renske could see, all the way to a dark blurred line on the horizon.

  That line was all that was left of the village of Mossum. The first village of Mossum—not the one he’d ridden through when he’d arrived. He’d heard all about it on his second day on the island because Aunt Elly had sat him down and told him she didn’t ever, ever want him going out there and the sooner he k
new the reason why, the better.

  The Wadden Islands hadn’t always been the shape they were today, she said. The North Sea winds and currents were constantly pushing and pulling and stretching them out like bits of bubble gum, piling new sand up at one end, ripping and tearing it away at the other.

  Two hundred years earlier, Mossum’s first village had been a bustling little community surrounded by fields. But the wind and the sea had gradually pushed the sand right up to its edge and then over and around it. The villagers weren’t there when that happened. They’d seen what was coming and long since departed to build a second village, the one Flip knew. They hadn’t done anything about the old buildings, though. They’d just left them behind, to be reclaimed by the elements. All that remained now were a few crumbling walls and roof beams poking up out of the sand.

  “And you are never to go out there,” Aunt Elly had said, pointing a finger at him, with no trace whatsoever of her customary smile, “because the whole of The Yellow is covered in quicksand. There are pools of it everywhere, and they come and go because that’s what quicksand does. It moves. It drifts. Which is why there isn’t a map of it—because the pools are always shifting position. And if you step into one of them, there’s no telling how long you’ll stay in it. If you’re lucky, someone’ll see you and fetch help. If you’re not, you’ll stay stuck until the tide comes in and drowns you. And it comes in so fast you won’t believe it. Or, if it’s winter, you’ll freeze to death first. Islanders don’t ever go out there, and as long as you’re an islander, you won’t either. Do you understand?”

  Flip nodded. And he never had. Now, he knew, he was going to have to break that promise.

  It was hotter than ever and the sun was burning down on their bare heads from a clear blue sky. But when he looked away to his right and the distant North Sea, he could see the same clouds he’d seen earlier, darker now and higher and wider. A weak gust of warm air brought the faint hiss of waves breaking on the shore to his ears.

  And down below him was Storm, ambling off across the barren sands toward the vague blurred shape of the vanished village in the distance. Flip was afraid that at any moment the horse would step into a pool of quicksand and get stuck. But that didn’t happen. Storm wandered a long looping path that never ran straight for more than a few feet. It was as though he could sense where the quicksand lay and was sticking to solid ground, no matter what direction it took him in.