The Book of Storms (30 page)

“Oh, hereabouts,” said the man. “All over the place, really.”

He was obviously some kind of wild man of the woods, an itinerant tramp, the kind you got in old-fashioned storybooks who roasted hedgehogs and wandered the highways and byways, never looking for a home.

“Well, maybe if you're around for a while we could take a walk sometime? You could teach me some bird calls, maybe?” Tom asked hopefully.

“I can do better than that,” said the man. “I've written a book that describes them all perfectly. Here.”

He reached down into his boot and pulled out a thin paperback. It was slightly crumpled and bent in a half-pipe from having been wrapped around the side of his leg.

Tom's excitement faded. The man was plainly also a bit simple, and he'd probably been making it up when he said how much he knew. You couldn't learn bird calls from a book.

“Oh, you can,” said the man. “Try it.”

Tom started. He must have spoken his thoughts aloud without realizing. He took the book out of politeness and opened it, knowing full well it was too dark to read a word anyway. But the pages seemed to emit a light all their own—he could see the printed words quite clearly.

BIRD CALLS
, it read, across the top of a page,
AND THEIR USES
.

That was an odd title for a start. What uses did bird calls have, other than to talk to other birds? Maybe that was just what it meant.

He read on.

SPARROWS
, the page said. And then there was a space. Nothing written at all. Yes, the strange man was mad.

Tom closed the book and handed it back. “Thanks,” he said, smiling. “Great book.”

“How do you know, when you haven't read it?” said the man.

“Well…” How to placate him without having to spend ages staring at a blank book? More important, how could Tom extricate himself and go back up through the woods to find Danny? The winds were dying down now, and Apple would soon be happy to move.

He decided to be gentle but honest. Who knew, but he might even be doing this man a favor if he pointed out that he was delusional. “It doesn't really … say a lot, does it?”

“Of course it does,” said the man. He opened the book again and held it out to Tom on the Sparrows page. “Read it.”

Tom looked. Nothing.

“It's blank,” he said. “It really is blank.”

“Oh, to your
eyes
, of course,” said the man. “Put your hand on it. Read it properly.”

He must mean that there was something written in Braille. Tom couldn't read Braille, but he'd feel it if it was there. He put his fingertips on the page, just next to the printed words.

It wasn't Braille. Under his fingers he felt the soft contours of a sparrow's tiny, feathery throat. He traced it as gently as he could, and it began to sing. One sound, a single twitter. Tom was sure it hadn't broken the air around his ears—he hadn't exactly heard it, as such, but it had entered his head as if he'd seen the sound written on a page. It was the call of a dominant sparrow shrieking that it had seen the wings of a sparrow hawk.

What was this book? He stroked the page a little farther down and another sound, a different kind of tweet, stuttered out. A female's chirruping that she was in a tree, quite lonely, and was there any company around?

The man took the book away. “Good, isn't it?” he said. “It tells you all kinds of things. Not just about birds, about other animals too—it's got the full range of their languages. Why, you could use it to learn the language of badgers, if you wished.”

Talking to badgers? Was that really possible? But Danny had talked to animals somehow, hadn't he? Or he'd found a way to communicate with them, at least. Had he also met this man, gotten his own copy of this book, and not wanted to share it with Tom?

“You
wrote
this?” asked Tom. “How?”

“Well, that's a long story, and it did take me a long time to learn how to do it. I should introduce myself. I didn't, did I?”

Tom found himself staring at the thin white hand held out for a handshake. The fingers were long and deft. When he put his own hand up to it, the man's skin was rough and warm.

“Sammael,” said the man.

A touch of blood leapt in Tom's heart. Sammael? But that was the name Danny had talked about. The name of the creature he'd been running from and toward at the same time. He'd talked about something fearsome, terrifying—unreal, even. Not this tall, warm man who loved nature and knew about bird calls.

And Tom understood it all. Danny had been terrified of this man because Danny was scared of the world. Danny didn't want to know about badgers and birds and the wild, whispering woods in the dead of night. Danny wanted to be safely tucked away indoors, protected from whatever he couldn't control. Danny didn't love freedom or adventure—it was Tom who loved those things, Tom who wanted to feel other life around him, untameable and glorious. And Sammael was just like him, only further along the path, closer to the wilderness.

“I've heard of you!” Tom said, eagerly. “You've met my cousin, the one I'm looking for! Or he knows you, at least. But he's scared of you. He's just a kid.” He laughed, feeling his body flush with excitement. “He's made up this wild story all about you. I wondered what on earth he was talking about!”

“Wild?” Sammael's voice had a dry humor about it. “Well, he wouldn't be the first.”

“Go on, then, tell me about the book,” urged Tom. “You've got some kind of”—he searched for the word—“
way
with nature, haven't you? Something … special?”

“You could say that,” said Sammael. “It's more to do with impossibility, actually. For example—we all imagine things. Some we feel sure about—we see them around us or watch videos of them, and so we call them reality. Others we don't see evidence of, or they seem fantastical and dreamlike, so we dismiss them under the name of impossible. But when I wrote that book, I chose to think in a different way about birds and animals. I thought, What if the impossible was in fact reality? What if
everything
I heard was just another form of word? Well, I'd be able to write them all down, wouldn't I? So how? Well, that's even simpler. Everything you hear is just vibrations in your ear, isn't it? So everything you hear is actually movement. And everything you touch is the same—a movement of the nerves in your fingers that tells you what's underneath them. So what if you could touch the same movement that you hear? You'd be able to hear sounds through your fingertips. And so I pulled that feeling of hearing and that feeling of touching closer and closer together, until they came into contact with each other, and here is the result. Not impossible at all. Humans might tell you otherwise, but most of them can't see farther than their own eyeballs.”

“But … what did you use? I mean
how
did you do it? And they aren't just sounds, are they? Because I understand what they mean.…”

“I used sand. Your cousin knows about me, you say? Well, then he must have told you about sand. You think of sand as being souls, in your terms—it's the essence of life. Every living creature has sand inside it, which sustains its life and returns into the earth when it dies. But there's more to life than just living. There're all the things you
could
do—all those are in your sand as well. And the things you know you can never do—they're there. So I used sand. I took the impossible, the unfulfilled, and I made something beautiful out of it. That's my job.”

Tom ran his hand over the page in front of him again. It felt as if it had been made only for him.

“I want this,” he said. “I really want it. I'd make the most of it, I really would. It's everything I've ever wanted.”

“Not everything, surely?” said Sammael. “If I believed that, I'd never have shown it to you.”

“No. No, of course, not everything,” said Tom. “But I could use it to learn how to call like birds, couldn't I? And to talk like animals. I could live together with them, not just have to be some stupid human, blind and deaf to them all. Please let me have it. Or at least borrow it for a while.”

“Of course,” said Sammael. “I made it to be used. But if you want to take it, you'll have to understand one thing.”

“Anything,” said Tom, turning over a page and bringing up another sound, the gentle mewing of a kite.

“You can't read a book like that without becoming a part of it. It will change your fingertips, your ears, your blood and heart. The sand in the book will become mixed with your own sand.
Your
sand will belong to the book. One day, when you reach the end of your own adventures in the world, your sand won't go back into the earth like all the rest. It'll go with the book, wherever the book goes. If you take the book, you are stepping out of the normal run of the world, forever. You have to do that willingly, with your eyes open. Do you understand?”

Tom frowned. “Are you saying that when I die, I'll … what? Become a
book
? That's daft.”

“No,” said Sammael. “I'm saying you won't become worm food like everybody else. Not every bit of you, anyway.”

“Well, that's fine,” said Tom. “I don't think I'll care much by then.”

“It's yours, then,” said Sammael. “Here. Sign for it.”

He fished a slim black notebook out from inside his shirt. “Write ‘I,' and then your name, ‘give freely my sand in exchange for possession of the book Nature at Your Fingertips,' and the book shall be mine for as long as I live.”

Tom wrote it down on the offered page. “Tom Fletcher,” he said. “That's my name. We live up at Sopper's Edge, the other side of the county. Drop by if you're ever up that way.”

“Sign it,” said the man.

Tom signed his name.

“The wind's pretty much gone,” he said, handing the notebook back and pointing out at the path. “I'd better get on trying to hunt down this cousin of mine. Thanks for the book.”

He clicked his tongue to Apple. She followed him out from the shelter of the tree and began plodding up the path, with one last backwards glance under the oak tree to where the man still stood.

When Tom had gone only a few steps, he couldn't resist taking the book from his pocket again. He turned to a page about owls and stroked his fingers over it.

The hoot of a tawny owl rang out in his head, soft and mellow. It was calling for its mate, telling her it had caught a field mouse.

Tom smiled to himself and put the book away. He cupped his hands to his mouth and blew gently into them, making a dry, echoing note. Then he clasped his hands more tightly together and blew slightly harder. A little more like it. Just a little, but with some practice, he'd get there.

*   *   *

Behind him, Sammael slipped away from under the oak tree. He was about to snap his fingers together when he stopped himself and set his cold, terrible jaw hard against the night.

CHAPTER 20

ENDGAME

“He might still be in the woods,” said Danny. “We can't leave without Tom. We should wait here till he finds us.” His teeth began to chatter. Even his bones were complaining of being soaked through.

Danny's mum took her coat off and draped it around his shoulders, but he didn't seem to have anything left in his body that might produce warmth. Heat would have to come from somewhere else—a fire or a radiator or a hot bath.

“We need to get you home, my love,” said his mum. “You're freezing. We'll go down to the nearest road. Where did you say we are?”

“S-S-S-Sentry Hill,” stuttered Danny through his rattling teeth. “Near Great Butford. But … Tom? And Shimny?”

“Shimny?”

“Tom's pony. She fell down the edge of the quarry.…”

He stumbled over to the quarry fence and yelled for her through the darkness. His voice ran into the air and leapt away, down into the black, rocky cutting. Nothing else stirred: no noise, no hoofbeats, no snorting whinny as the pony trotted her way up the quarry path.

“We won't find her now, son,” Danny's dad said, coming to take hold of him. “We'll come back tomorrow and look, I promise. First thing, we'll all come back. You'll be able to show us the way, won't you?”

“She saved me,” said Danny. “She brought me all this way, and I wouldn't have found you otherwise. You'd be dead.…”

“We're not dead,” said his dad. “But unless we all get warm and dry soon, we might have to rethink that. Come on, we'll go down. And we'll call out for Tom. If he's anywhere about, he'll hear us.”

*   *   *

Together they stumbled down the hillside, skirting the woods, yelling for Tom. It would have been quicker to go through them, but Danny saw Sammael in every shadow. He refused all suggestions of cutting through the trees.