The Book of Storms (20 page)

Tom swore and took a hand away from Apple's leg to put the phone back in his pocket. He didn't look at Danny. Apple pranced.

Danny didn't want to ask about what Tom had promised and obviously failed to do. He didn't think the answer would be friendly. Instead he asked, “Is this Butford woods?”

“Yeah. I said keep her still. I need to get this leg cleaned up. Talk to her, just any old rubbish. She's a fusspot.”

Danny looked at Apple's rolling eye. He put his hand in his pocket.

“Stand still,” he said. “Tom's trying to wash your cuts.”

“It hurts!” whined the horse, snatching a leg away.

Tom swore. Normally he was infinitely patient with wounded animals.

“For crying out loud, Danny, I don't think she's in the mood for an intellectual conversation. Just use the sound of your voice to soothe her.”

Danny said, “There, there,” and patted Apple's neck. It didn't seem to work any better to keep the horse still, but at least it didn't annoy Tom.

*   *   *

Tom went to chuck the last of the rags in the river. The afternoon sun was darkening from clear yellow to pale orange. No sign of a storm in the air, no black threat hanging over them in the—what was it the river had called it?—the ether. Danny looked up into the sky. Just blue sky. No tiny creature watching them from the high heavens.

Perhaps it really was all a dream, some kind of fantasy he'd imagined. Now everything in the woods was so peaceful that it seemed impossible anything could be wrong.

He closed his eyes for a second, one hand still clenched around Apple's reins just under her throat, the other in his pocket, and listened to the sounds around him. The breeze in the treetops, the sweet chattering of the river, the twittering birdsong. Only it wasn't birdsong. The birds were bellowing out obscenities to one another.

“Yeah! Yeah! Come on, then! Come on, you petal-spleened excuse for a worm's bum! I'd like to see you twitch one atom of a pinkie toward this tree! You call yourself a robin? A robin? I call you the blacky purple bit of my poo! Gaaargh! Graagh! Come on! I'll 'ave yer! I'll 'ave yer!”

The sparrow near Danny's right ear almost fell off its branch in indignant rage. An apoplectic robin ten feet away began to spit furiously back.

“And what kind of bird are you? A cow-dung bird, that's what! You eat the grain that other animals eject out of their back ends! Nobody's ever put you on a Christmas card, have they? You take your pathetic excuse for a lady and get out of my tree, or I'll pull out every feather on your pale little pigeon chest! You hear me! You hear me! I'm not telling you twice, you sack of ear wax! Out! Out!”

Danny laughed, taking his hand off the stick. The sound flew into the air and sent the birds shrieking away to continue their argument in another tree. It felt like a long time since he'd laughed. But once the laugh started, it woke him up like a glass of lemonade on a stifling day.

“What's so funny?” said Tom, coming back from the river.

Danny shook his head. “You wouldn't get it,” he said.

“You're nuts,” said Tom. “Well, let's go, then. It isn't far now.”

“I don't have the map anymore. It got soaked. And I can't remember all the little lines and stuff on it.”

Tom shrugged. “Doesn't matter,” he said. “I know where we're going.”

“
You
remember it? You only saw it once.”

“Course I do!” said Tom. “I'd be a poor excuse for a country boy if I didn't know every inch of the land like the back of my own hand, now, wouldn't I?”

He grinned and tapped the side of his nose.

Danny said, “Show-off,” and went to take the piebald's reins. Then he stopped. “Where's Mitz?”

“Did she go in the river? Cats and water aren't exactly best mates, you know.”

“Of course I know,” said Danny. “But she got out. I spoke— I saw her.”

Tom shrugged. “Probably crawled off into a bush somewhere to lick herself dry. She'll find us again if she wants to be found.”

Would she? Danny remembered Mitz's sharp little face hissing at him, the fury in her eyes. But of course she would. It wasn't his fault they'd gone in the river. Going in there had saved their lives, and Mitz would surely understand that. She was probably just lying low for a bit, recovering and watching them from the bushes.

Tom gave Danny a leg up onto Shimny's back, and Danny peered into the undergrowth as they set off, but all the sparkles that could have been yellow eyes were just sunlight catching on shiny leaves.

CHAPTER 13

THE BOOK OF STORMS

The bird blind was tucked away in a close thicket of trees. Tom seemed to know exactly where it would be: he led them up to a path, they padded along it for twenty minutes or so, and then he steered Apple between a beech tree and a huge clump of yellow thorny shrubs and jumped off her back as soon as he could safely avoid the thorns. When his feet touched the ground, he winced but said nothing about it.

“There you go.”

Danny tried to see where he was pointing. It just looked like more overgrown bushes. But, yes—there in the middle of them were a few planks of dark, rough wood, and a low roof covered in moss, underneath a thatch of thorny branches. Danny slid off his pony.

“I'll go in first,” he said.

Tom must have caught the reluctance on his face, because he looped Apple's reins around a branch and said, “I'll come with you. D'you think something's happened to them in there?”

Danny shook his head, his mouth dry. He let go of Shimny—she wouldn't leave Apple—and brushed past Tom to find an entrance to the little hut.

*   *   *

Inside, it was dark and damp. Things were growing over the walls, or through them—soft leaves and scratchy little twigs reached out to stroke and claw at Danny's skin as he ducked his head through the doorway.

At first he couldn't see anything in the blackness, but as his eyes adjusted he made out a small bench and a tiny shelf. On the shelf was a single hardback book.

“Anyone in there?” Tom stuck his head inside. In the few seconds it took for his eyes to widen and start picking up the thin light, Danny had taken a step toward the shelf and was reaching out for the book.

“What's that?” asked Tom.

Danny stopped his hand. He didn't want to share the Book of Storms with Tom. Tom would laugh at it, tell him it was just a silly old book, and then he'd make Danny go home. But what choice did he have?

“No parents here,” said Tom, as if he'd known there wouldn't be. “No parents, just a book. Is this some kind of treasure hunt? Is that what you've dragged me all the way out here for?”

The book wasn't big. No gold lettering, no leather binding. Just a flat black shape in the darkness, full of some kind of promise.

Tom tried to reach over his shoulder and take the book, but Danny grabbed it first. As soon as his hand closed around it, he knew he was right to keep his cousin away.

For it didn't feel like a book. The cover had the dry, papery texture of snakeskin, but it yielded slightly to the touch, as though still wrapped around a snake. Not quite firm, not quite dead. The secret that lay inside this book was breathing.

Danny clutched it to his chest so that Tom wouldn't get it. It was like holding a coiled python. Every nerve in his stomach knotted itself into a tiny ball.

“Let's have a look,” said Tom. His voice was harsh in the darkness.

“No,” said Danny. “You mustn't touch it. It'd … it'd hurt you.”

He knew it could kill Tom. Or bind him to something far beyond understanding. But explaining either of those things was too complicated, and Tom wouldn't believe him anyway.

He pushed past Tom and took the book outside into the bright air. The golden light made him blink for a few moments; he held the book more tightly to his chest, afraid, for the most fleeting of seconds, of himself and this strange new power.

Then he took a few steps away from the ponies, sat down against a tree, and rested the book on his knees.

Tom came out of the bird blind. “What is it?” he asked.

“Don't try to take it,” said Danny. “Just don't. You don't believe me, but it's Sammael's book.”

“But your folks aren't here. Did you know they wouldn't be?”

Danny nodded. “I was looking for this.”

“That book?”

“The Book of Storms.” Abel Korsakof's voice hissed out from Danny's throat and stained the dusty air. He'd given up his
soul
for this small, dark book. What, inside it, could be worth giving up an entire soul for?

“Can I look?” asked Tom. “If I don't touch it?”

Danny didn't know. But there must be so many things that you just happened to see in your life. If you didn't try to take them, could they really hurt you?

He shrugged. Maybe at least it might mean that Tom believed him a bit more.

Tom came to sit beside him, and Danny put his fingers once again on the snakeskin cover, then opened the book.

The Book Of Storms

By Danny O'Neill

Danny stared. The print was old and uneven, and he'd never written a book in his life. He'd certainly never written
this
book.

On the title page was an engraving of a low range of hills under a stormy black sky. Through the clouds a single bolt of lightning had been thrown; it forked toward the ground.

As Danny looked at the picture, he saw in his mind's eye exactly what that fork of lightning had struck. The hills were those that rose up behind his own town. His house lay just below the hill with the smooth, egg-shaped top, and the fork of lightning was the very same one that had struck the old sycamore tree in his garden. Which was, of course, impossible—this book was much older than that.

He turned the page. There wasn't a list of contents—the book launched straight in at the first page.

The house is falling in.

He read this and stopped his eyes. His heart began to quicken. Was this the proof that everything he'd been telling Tom was true?

“Look!” he said, putting his finger by the words. “It's the storm! It's the storm they went away in, just like I told you!”

Something crackled on his fingertip.

“What are you on about?” said Tom. “It's in some foreign language, isn't it? All jumbled up—looks a bit like Polish. What's the point of staring at it? You won't understand a word it says.”

The Book of Storms, thought Danny. Written by … himself? Was this a book that only he could read?

Danny took his finger from the page as it grew uncomfortably warm, and read on.

The house is falling and Danny is falling, knees and elbows crumpling onto the floor, and an earsplitting crash is tearing through the air—that's surely the roof, breaking in two, about to come pelting down on top of him.

He knew this bit. And it was all there: the meeting with Abel Korsakof, Aunt Kathleen's axe, the big black dogs, the frenzied dash into the woods. He skimmed the book, faster and faster, galloping toward the river, pulling himself out, finding the worm, finding Tom, watching Mitz creep away behind his back, finding the bird blind.… He tried to skip forward a few more pages, but he couldn't understand the words until he'd gone back to throw his eyes over the previous ones.

“What are you on about?” said Tom. “It's in some foreign language, isn't it? All jumbled up—looks a bit like Polish. What's the point of staring at it? You won't understand a word it says.”

The Book of Storms, thought Danny. Written by … himself? Was this a book that only he could read?

Danny took his finger from the page as it grew uncomfortably warm, and read on.

The page ended. So that was the whole story: Sammael had done something to a couple of people he'd called “idiots,” who had lived in the same house as Danny. He'd shown them “a little bit of what they were up against.” And what, exactly, that must have been, Danny didn't want to imagine. Tell me how to get them back, he urged the book. Please tell me.

He turned over the page, holding his breath. A cloud puffed up, covering his face in freezing mist and making his eyes sting. Tom didn't seem to notice it at all.

As the cloud cleared, he read,

Don't start asking questions. The Book of Storms exists to give answers to those who are prepared to pay for them. If you will not make your own bargain and pay, you must take what it chooses to give.

This book was made from the first taro ever left by a storm: the first bolt of lightning that ever fell onto the steaming earth was captured in a single crumb of bark, from which the cover of this book was hammered out by Sammael, the Master of the Air.

The process of leaving taros was devised by this first-ever storm, in order that after every storm, a token would be left on the earth, inside of which would remain the song used by storms as a gathering call. This, it was hoped, would prove a safeguard against any force or creature who managed to devise a method of supressing storms as they manifested themselves. Storms well know how devastating and unnecessary they are perceived to be, and they are aware of the measures they must take to protect themselves and their futures. Indeed, one might think of the taro as an imperishable seed from which a particular flower might always grow again, even should all the currently flowering examples be put to the sword and the bonfire.