The Tornado Chasers

by Ross Montgomery

  I push my head against the bars and look down. There, just beneath my window, lies an enormous mound of scrunched-up paper balls. All of them are mine, each one a different ending that I started, and abandoned, and thrown away. I found the paper any way I could – ripped it out of books, stole it from other cells, made my handwriting tiny and cramped and spidery to fit as much possible onto the page. Anything to get more than one sheet a week. There must be hundreds of them down there. There are so many that the wind has formed them into a drift against the wall.

  The wind.

  I look out over the valley. The sun is beginning to set now, dipping behind the hills. I can see the stormtraps along the valley top, blinking in the dusk. A steady wind is blowing, growing stronger, blowing into my room. It lifts the sheets of paper off the floor beside me, flinging them around the cell like a tornado, taking me to places beyond the mountains.

  This notepaper is kindly provided for the inmates of

  THE COUNTY DETENTION CENTRE

  Use one sheet per week

  No scribbling

  Dear Warden,

  Congratulations! You’ve finally found my last letter. I knew you would.

  You certainly would have had to work hard to look through every single scrunched-up paper ball in the pile outside my cell window. You may find some pages in there about the day of our meeting, and many different endings that I wrote for my story. There are quite a lot of them now. Thousands, in fact. You can do whatever you want with them – I don’t have a use for them any more. Choose whichever you think is best.

  I’d appreciate it if you kept going through the pile. Somewhere in there, you’ll find a letter I have written to the people of Barrow. It’s important that it gets to them. It also explains where I’ve gone to – if you haven’t already worked that out for yourself by now. I’m sure you have.

  Don’t bother sending any search parties after me. It will be too late. I know where I’m going now, and I know why I want to do it. It feels good to say that, and to mean it, for the first time ever. I hope one day you’ll know what I mean.

  Yours s

  Thank you.

  Dear parents and teachers of Barrow,

  As I write this I’m standing on the roof of the County Detention Centre, looking out over the valley around me. Despite all the rubbish that you send here, it can look very beautiful. Now is a very good example. A new tornado landed last night. In the distance I can see the flickering stormtraps along the hilltops, and hear their distant warning cry. Right now, you will all be tucked in safely at home, waiting for the storm to pass. But not me.

  In a moment, I will scrunch this letter up into a ball and throw it off the roof, just as I have thrown out many other pages before it. It will land with the thousands of others that are piled up beneath my cell window. The pile is pretty high now. There are so many that they will easily cushion my fall when I jump off. From there, it is a simple two-day walk across the valley to the Great North Caves. I know I will get there before the tornado does. And then, I will meet it head-on.

  I decided a long time ago that I was going to do this. I decided that I was going to go against everything that I was brought up to believe – that living in fear is better than standing up against what frightens you. It is a lesson that you taught me well, Barrow – one that you still teach your children.

  I’m afraid now. I’m afraid of what lies ahead of me, but unlike you I’m not going to let it stop me. The world is a frightening place, and I don’t want to run from it any longer. I’ve run away from a lot of things. I’ve had enough. I want to see what happens when I stop.

  And I want to see my friends again too, more than anything. I want to see where they went.

  I hope this letter will make you change your minds about what you’ve done. Perhaps you might abandon Barrow altogether and start showing your children how to live with fear rather than how to hide from it. But I think it’s much too late for that now. I don’t think you’ll even listen.

  But your children might.

  Yours sincerely,

  INM

  CALLUM BRENNER

  ‘Callum?’

  His eyes were fixed onto the tornado that roared towards us. He was breathing in and out, in and out, and he was trembling. I had never seen him so frightened. I reached out and took his shoulder.

  ‘Callum.’

  His eyes shot back to me, desperate, terrified.

  ‘You don’t have to come with us,’ I said. ‘We won’t make you. You’re one of us. You can go if you want to.’

  He looked back at me, his chest heaving, his eyes torn. They darted backwards and forwards between me and the tornado. Then he turned and ran, until the grey haze of the rain around us swallowed him completely.

  And then there were four of us.

  I turned to the others.

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘Shall we?’

  We took each other’s hands. Me, Pete, Ceri and Orlaith, in a line, facing the tornado. We walked slowly, step by step, towards the wall of wind that bore towards us. Trees plummeted around us, splintering into twigs against the rocks. The storm howled. The camera around Ceri’s neck ripped free of its strap and flew into the distance. We didn’t need it – not where we were going.

  We came to the valley floor, and there it was before us. The tornado crushed us down, buckling our legs, driving us to the ground. We looked at each other. I clutched Orlaith’s hand, and she clutched mine, and we all faced forwards.

  ‘We are the Tornado Chasers,’ we shouted, ‘and we are terrified!’

  The wind became a frenzy, thrashing and flailing against us, as if it was the one who was afraid and not us. We clutched onto each other and grit our teeth, weighing ourselves down. The tornado pounded, heaved, screamed, and then it became even worse somehow, the strength of it unbelievable, the pain greater than anything I’d ever experienced, until I couldn’t bear it any longer and –

  And then, there was nothing.

  It was as if it had all just stopped. There was absolute silence and stillness and warmth, where just before there had been cold.

  I opened my eyes, and looked around me. We were sat in the centre of a clearing. A wall of wind surrounded us, a perfect circle. We could see nothing outside of it.

  ‘It’s the eye of the storm,’ I whispered.

  We slowly got to our feet. It was like we were standing in the centre of a clouded glass. The tornado stood frozen around us.

  ‘It means it’s not over,’ I said. ‘It means there’s more to come.’

  And at that moment the four of us were lifted off our feet. I gasped. We were being carried up, as if by hands. Then we started to spin. Slowly at first, and then faster, turning with the wind in our square of four. We clung to each other and held our breaths. We spun faster and faster, until the blood raged in our heads and we couldn’t hold on to each other any more, and still we kept climbing.

  The walls of wind fell away beside us. The valleys lay far below. We could see Barrow, and Skirting, and the Caves, and the quarry, and everywhere that we had been to together, twisting and disappearing away from us. It all seemed so small now, so far away. We watched as the tornado trailed to the North and faded out into nothingness below, its path scrawled onto the world like a pencil mark on paper.

  ‘OWEN!’

  The clouds parted, and we emerged into glorious sunlight. Four planes were circling us. They were bi-planes, faded and cracked and cast in black and white, a photo come to life. On the wings, emblazoned across a picture of a spiralling tornado, were the initials: T.C.

  The planes immediately froze, like an old film stopped mid-frame. They held in the air before us, as easily as if they were suspended on strings. We had stopped moving, too, floating on our fronts like we were underwater. Two people inside the nearest plane leant out to face us.

  ‘We’ve been waiting for you,’ said my grandparents.

  They climbed out onto the wings of their planes, and clutched me to their chests. T
hey were completely black and white, their faces faded and bleached with age.

  ‘We’re so proud of you,’ they said. ‘You did so well. All of you.’

  The other Tornado Chaser pilots had climbed out onto the wings of their planes to shake hands with Orlaith and Ceri and Pete, congratulating them in clipped accents.

  ‘Superb work!’ said one. ‘Very impressive to have made it this side of the portal at your age.’

  I glanced up. ‘Portal? A portal to where?’

  My grandparents laughed. My granddad reached out and took my hand.

  ‘Have a look,’ he said.

  I looked down at the valleys below. The whole map lay before me, the tornado’s path still scrawled across the hills and valleys. And then suddenly, the map began to change – hundreds more paths emerged, different ones, winding their way across the valleys in front of me like they were being drawn by a hundred hands at once. Each path was a different tornado from the past, leaving its mark on the valleys like a brushstroke.

  ‘Keep watching, Owen,’ said Grandma, holding my head. ‘Don’t look away.’

  The paths kept adding up, piling and piling on top of one another, generation after generation of storms marked out on a single valley. At first it was little more than a scribble on paper, but then I realised that, bit by bit, the lines were adding up to something greater – they were gradually making a picture. Or a word, a sentence maybe, one that kept changing its mind again and again. Or even more than that – a story written and rewritten across the landscape, one that couldn’t be read yet, not until it was finished. They were innumerable now, crossing and criss-crossing each other like a mesh of words and half-words, an entire history of storms written on the ground.

  And then, the towns and hills and rivers suddenly slipped out of focus in front of me. They split and separated in endless versions of the same landscape, one for each of the different paths the tornado had taken, layered on top of each other like a pad of tracing paper.

  ‘You see?’ said Grandma. ‘You can see them all now. They’re all here.’

  I looked at her in confusion. ‘I don’t understand.’

  Granddad nodded, and took my hand. ‘Of course you don’t. Let’s go take a look at Skirting, shall we?’

  In an instant we were above the church in the main square. I could see myself down there on the day we passed through, charging around the corner in a wedding dress as the bride and groom emerged from the church doors in the distance. But that wasn’t all. Waves upon waves of other people flowed out the church doors beside them – endless brides and endless grooms, troops of parents with young babies in long white christening gowns, mourners by the thousands, fleets of coffins, all passing younger versions of themselves in the streets without knowing or noticing.

  ‘And there’s us!’ said Granddad excitedly. ‘Right there, in the middle!’

  I tried to look through the heaving mass of people below me, but I couldn’t. It was almost too much to take in at once.

  ‘I … I can’t see,’ I said.

  Grandma waved her hands in front of her, and at once the different layers separated and dissolved until there was only one left. It was a summer’s day. A young couple was stepping out the church doors to a small crowd of friends and family, cheering and clapping. Grandma held Granddad’s arm tight.

  ‘I never get tired of it,’ she said.

  I looked down. The whole scene played and replayed in front of me, again and again. It felt new every time. It didn’t grow old, and it never would.

  Granddad waved his arms, and the layers came back immediately, a thousand years of different lives. The different versions flickered in front of us, generations moving and shifting like leaves on water.

  ‘All you have to do,’ he said, ‘is decide which one you want to go to.’

  The pilots suddenly leapt back into their planes and adjusted their goggles, looking at us expectantly.

  ‘But …’ my eyes flickered between the others. ‘Does that mean we can’t go together? What if some of us want to home, and some of us don’t? What if we don’t see each other again?’

  Orlaith placed a hand on my shoulder.

  ‘I don’t think it works like that, Owen.’

  She was already disappearing in front of my eyes. I looked around for the others. I wanted to talk to them, to ask them what they thought, to hear their ideas, but I couldn’t. They weren’t there any more. At least, I couldn’t see them. But I could still feel them. It was like their hands were still in mine, and they were still out there, right beside me, in another layer that I couldn’t quite see.

  I looked up. The sun was getting closer towards me now, and it warmed me through like happiness, glowing through my hands as I held them against it. I knew that up here there would be no pain, or unhappiness, or fear. There would be nothing that you couldn’t fix or take back. Nothing would ever get old or change or die. Everything would be beautiful. And everything would be perfect.

  ‘So,’ said my grandparents, ‘where do you want to go?’

  About the Author

  Ross Montgomery started writing stories as a teenager, when he really should have been doing homework, and continued doing so at university. After graduating, he experimented with working as a pig farmer and a postman before deciding to channel these skills into teaching at a primary school. He wrote his debut Alex, the Dog and the Unopenable Door when he really should have been marking homework. It was shortlisted for the Costa Book Award and nominated for the 2014 Branford Boase Award. The Tornado Chasers is his second book. He lives in Brixton, London, with his girlfriend, a cat and many, many dead plants.

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  First published in 2014

  by Faber & Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  This ebook edition first published in 2014

  All rights reserved

  © Ross Montgomery, 2014

  Cover design by Faber

  Cover illustration © David Tazzyman, 2014

  The right of Ross Montgomery to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571–29843–3