The Book of Storms (6 page)

“Did you see the human?” he asked.

The grass was silent.

“Grass,” he said. “I'm talking to you.”

A few of the grasses whispered among themselves, trying to keep their voices down.

“Don't irritate me,” said Sammael. “Just answer. You, the meadow grass. Trueflax, that's your name, isn't it? Tell me what you heard.”

The grass was small and thin, only a young shoot. “The human boy came into the garden,” it said, trying to sound bold. Inside, the sap that kept its stem firm had turned into bubbling soup.

“Yes. And?” Sammael knew there was just a chance that the ant might have got it wrong. Ants were notorious for being focused on their work and only ever had a maximum of half an eye on anything else, which did sometimes make them unreliable witnesses.

“He went over to the tree, stood—well, just where you are. He stood on top of me as well.…” Trueflax tried to keep his breathing steady. The bubbles inside him were turning into rattling chips of ice.

“Get on with it!” snapped Sammael. “I'm not asking you to retell
The Odyssey
!”

“He picked up the stick and stood for ages, then started to say some stuff—it didn't make much sense. He said, ‘hello,' and ‘I'm in the light,' and … what else? Oh, yes, he said, ‘Work out what?' That was it, I think … oh, yes, he said ‘hello,' again. And he put the stick on the tree, then picked it up again, and we heard him speak after that … but why he should suddenly have learned to talk, none of us can tell. We never thought humans could talk, not in that way, though we do hear them make strange sounds sometimes, but you can never be sure that they're really sentient, can you? It seems so unlikely.…”

Trueflax gave a gasp and his leaves wilted, unable to keep up with the effort of speech. Sammael thought about flicking him back into life just to terrorize the other grasses, but there were more important things to be done.

Clearly the boy had found the taro—that was beyond doubt now. Clearly, too, he had no idea what it was or how to use it. He'd be easy to track. He was probably running around somewhere close by, making more noise than a herd of stampeding wildebeest as he tried to discover all the things that could speak, and what each and every one of them had to say.

Sammael looked about him. No sign of the boy here.

He stamped on the grass to revive it. “Where did he go?”

“D-d-don't know…” tried Trueflax. The other grasses were all too petrified to help him out.

“Wrong answer!” Sammael crushed his heel into the ground. Trueflax yelped, although any pain he was feeling must have been imaginary. It was amazing what imagination could do.

“M-maybe … maybe he went into the house, then out the other side, then maybe he came back … and went again … somewhere else.…”

“Where else? Come on, don't pretend to me you don't know. Grass sees everything! It tells each other everything! You could track down a beetle in Outer Mongolia!”

“B-but that's because Mongolia's full of gr-gr-grass!” stuttered Trueflax. “The boy went onto the road, and no grass knows what goes on there, until the cracks start to appear and we can grow through them.”

“Cretin!” Sammael stamped again, and Trueflax the grass lost his stoutness, fainting from fear. “Kalia!” Sammael bellowed. The lurcher raised her nostrils from the ground but couldn't lift her head. Even pricking an ear required more energy than she had left. “Kalia!” Sammael said again, snapping his fingers.

In the end he hooked an arm under her rib cage and carried her in the crook of his elbow round to the front of the house. Her limp legs knocked against each other as they swung in the air.

The boy wasn't anywhere to be seen. Sammael dabbed a finger into some grains of sand at the bottom of his pocket and pressed it against the lock.

“Open!” he commanded, and the lock turned.

He deposited Kalia in a heap on the hall carpet. It was the sort of color that could only have been produced by a hippopotamus throwing up all over the hallway after eating too many iced cupcakes.

And then he stopped. In his fury over the missing taro, he hadn't observed the path he was traveling quite as carefully as he normally would have.

“Damn!” he said to the comatose dog. “I
know
this house.”

“When have you been here before?” Kalia's voice was so tiny that he barely heard it, but he was already staring through into the kitchen, examining a picture in his mind.

“Those storm-chasing idiots! This is
their
house!”

For a second he floundered, but Kalia was too tired to notice, and he forced his voice quickly back to its usual acidity, knowing that such mistakes could never be admitted to.

“So he must be their son,” he muttered to himself. “He'll be looking for them, of course. Where would I go if I were a small human of extremely limited imagination looking for people who were looking for storms?”

Every creature in the house heard his quiet voice. Every fly, every mite, every last wood louse and woodworm and silverfish. Not all of them could answer him; some had slumbered on all day, unaware that anything peculiar was happening. But upstairs, underneath the bed, the dust mites were stirring. They had been scurrying around when Danny had put his hand to the stick and talked to Mitz the cat. They had heard him speak.

Through the silence, a small voice muttered a single word, and then a second and a third joined in.

“Korsakof!” they whispered. The first time, it was a haze of broken sounds, single syllables following half-begun words. The letter
K
echoed through the house like the rattle of a machine gun.

And then, the second time, they said it all together.

“Korsakof!”

Sammael smiled, bending down to hoist up his dog again. As the evening sun began to dip in the sky, a ray broke through the glass in the back door, streaking the kitchen doorway with orange.

“Got you now, boy,” he said, tucking Kalia under his arm, apparently unaware of her weight. “Got you, well and truly. It's all very well running away and throwing yourself on the mercy of strangers, but you can't always tell who's been there before you.”

And as he began to walk, his feet picked up so much speed that even to the fastest cheetah on the planet they would have seemed little more than a blur.

*   *   *

Abel Korsakof was small and ratty looking, with a beard that would have fallen almost to his waist if it hadn't been tangled and frizzy and sticking out at all angles in yellowing prongs. As a young man he'd been clean shaven, but these days he spent a lot of time muttering to himself, and he'd realized quite quickly that beards were useful for muttering into. None of his family liked his beard, but he told them he didn't care what they said: he had important things to mutter about, and if
they
weren't going to listen to him, then the beard would have to.

He had cared about his family a long time ago, but something much bigger and better than mere humans had come along and gradually eaten him, bite by bite, until he belonged inside the belly of an obsession so strong that he could hardly breathe unless he was thinking about it. And this obsession was the study of storms.

Because it was sunny and calm over England, with hardly enough wind to tickle a fly's wings, that evening saw Abel Korsakof at work in his shed, a huge piece of paper spread over the floor. The paper stretched to all four walls, so Abel had to sit right on top of his work, which gave him a grand feeling. As if somehow he might one day be able to sit in a similar position in the sky itself, watching the real storms gather below.

Still, for now this was just a dream, for several reasons unlikely to become reality. One of which was framed in the doorway of his shed, blocking out the evening sun.

“You're not still going at this, old man, are you? Of all the pointless things…”

Abel looked up, and his heart dropped like a stone into his knees.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, his old voice shaking.

“I've got a little job for you,” said Sammael.

Although Sammael was only standing and watching him, Abel Korsakof could never quite relax while those black points were boring into his own weepy blue eyes. He shifted from knee to knee and then latched his bony knuckles around the table leg to pull himself upright.

“Not in here,” he said. It was bad enough when he remembered where all the work in this room had come from and what he owed it to, without having the room further polluted by the actual shades of the creature itself.

“Suit yourself,” said Sammael. “You useless old bag of rickets.”

He raised an eyebrow and stood back to let Korsakof out. The old man tried not to brush against Sammael's coat as he passed, expecting that it would chill him to the marrow, but when he touched it by accident he found it surprisingly warm and soft.

*   *   *

Korsakof's garden was bursting with flowers. They'd all escaped from their original flower beds and grew now wherever they chose, leaping to waist and neck height, clinging on to their neighbors and climbing toward the sky. Neither Sammael nor Korsakof looked at their bright colors, though: Sammael's eyes were on the old man, and Korsakof's were fixed on a garden bench that he'd always hated. It was some fancy of Mrs. Korsakof's, a twisted affair covered in mangled iron daffodils. Abel never normally sat on it, and he certainly would never sit on it again after it had felt the cold figure of Sammael resting on its squashed flowers.

“What were you doing in there, anyway?” Sammael leaned back against the bench and nodded his head toward the shed. “What's with all the paper?”

Abel noticed a huge dog lying on one of the flower beds, flattening a squat display of pansies. It was a gray lurcher, thin and woolly, and it looked dead. He cleared his throat. “A map.”

“A map? Of what?”

Korsakof shrugged. “Of storms.”

Sammael laughed, his face scornful. “A map of storms? And do you think it's correct? Have you checked it with one of your ‘satellite pictures'?”

“Not that kind of map. A chart of how they work. What they do. I have watched their behavior for a long time. I have observed their reactions. I have noticed some patterns in their process of formation. I have seen, over the years, how they are becoming more and more frequent.” He broke off, unwilling to look into Sammael's eyes, wanting strongly to ask a question that had been playing on his mind for some years.

“Oh yes?”

“I have wanted … I have wanted to know, is this a natural phenomenon? Or something…”

“Or ‘something' what?”

Korsakof swallowed. “Or something … controlled … dictated … persuaded … by other, er, influences…”

“Such as?”

“Well, er, yes, quite. Other influences. So I have made a map, to see if there is a logical answer.…”

“Such as myself,” said Sammael. “You want to know if I am controlling storms, and you don't have the guts to ask. That's right, isn't it?”

A fear paralyzed Korsakof's throat, and he looked away at the garden. There was no reason to be so terrified. They had made a bargain years ago, and Sammael never went back on his word. But how could anyone trust such a black-eyed, inside-out creature? His thin, dark shape sat just inside the periphery of Korsakof's vision, as still as a vulture.

The old man could see his wife through the kitchen window, her head and shoulders swaying. She must be making bread. He wondered what would happen to her once his years were up. Strange that he'd never thought of it before. “What are you here for, anyway?” he asked.

“You're to kill someone,” said Sammael.

“No,” said Korsakof immediately with a staunchness he didn't feel.

“… Isn't a word you can say to me, not anymore.” Sammael stretched his legs out. “Remember, the fifty years I gave you when we made our bargain—the time
you
agreed on—are nearly up. Your soul's mine to do what I like with after that.”

“You can't make me kill someone,” said the old man. “I would never do that. And you told me yourself, you can't kill people. Death won't take them if you try to.”

“
I
can't. But if
you
decide to, who knows what Death will think? If she's having a busy day, she might overlook it.”

“No,” said Korsakof again. “No matter who it was, I wouldn't do it. I couldn't.”

“All right.” Sammael got to his feet and pulled his coat straight. It was a shame the lurcher was still so exhausted; being able to click his fingers and have Kalia come running up always made the threat of departure look so much more impressive.

Korsakof should have stayed silent and let him go. He knew he should. But the only thing worse than knowing what Sammael was going to do was
not
knowing what he was going to do.

“Is that it?” he asked.

“You've refused. Next month, your fifty years will be up. You'll die on the first second after that. I'll take your sand, as we agreed.” Sammael paused.

Korsakof watched his face. The skin had a translucence about it that shimmered, as though it wasn't quite at ease in the ruddy sunlight.

“And I'll take everything else as well,” Sammael went on. “Every memory of you. Every paper you've ever written on. Every word you've ever said to anybody else. I can, you know. It's in the nature of things—all that you've ever created is a part of you, and I can remove any of it that I want to. The world will carry on just as if you'd
never been born
.”

“But my studies,” said Korsakof. “You couldn't take that knowledge out of the world. The things I discovered, the papers I've written—they exist, whether I'm here or not.”