The Book of Storms by Ruth Hatfield

Author:Ruth Hatfield
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780805099997
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co. (BYR)

CHAPTER 12

WORM

Danny found the rusted lid of a biscuit tin and began to dig. Somewhere in the distance a dog barked and then another answered. He shuddered.

I want a normal life, he thought as he dug, stabbing the lid into the ground so fiercely that pieces of it began to break off. I want a normal life where you don’t have to find out about things that shouldn’t exist by talking to things that shouldn’t talk. I want to talk about normal things, with normal people. And to have them believe me. Maybe Tom was right not to believe me about all this. If I heard me saying it, I wouldn’t want to believe it.

* * *

The worm paused with a sinking feeling as the earth around her shook with the pounding of some object from above. It didn’t automatically mean death—she had survived being dug up once before—but you could never tell. There was the hot sun to kill you if you got flicked out onto a hard surface. There were human tools that sliced you in half, and hands that burned your blood. Birds were always waiting to eat you up, and a worm was powerless against them. It had nowhere to hide now.

* * *

Danny tried to pick the worm up, and it screamed at the touch of his fiery fingers. He dropped it back into the soil, and it tried to slink back underneath.

“Hey!” he said. “Please stay. I need to talk to you.”

The worm stopped its slither and wriggled so it was just below the crumbly soil, away from the sunshine.

“How can you talk to me?” it asked in surprise.

“Don’t you know? I thought earthworms knew everything. At least that’s what I was told.” Danny settled himself down on the leaf mold. He had a good feeling about this worm.

“Oh no,” it said. “That’s not true at all. Whoever told you that is probably confusing what we know with what we sing.”

“So you sing about things you don’t know about? How’s that?”

“It’s the sand that sings, really,” said the worm. “The sand that we swallow tells us of the lives it’s been, the world it’s seen, and we sing its songs as we work. It isn’t like the legends that other creatures have, explaining how the world came to be created and suchlike. We just sing what the sand is telling us.”

Danny looked at the soil around the worm. Dark, damp earth and grit, small rocks and sand. The closer he watched, the more movement he could see: a beetle marching over a familiar trail; some tiny creature shifting fragments twice the size of its body. Which lives had he known that had ended? His sister’s, and of course Abel Korsakof’s. Were they both underneath him in the soil, singing through worms?

“Could you ask the sand something for me?” he asked the worm.

“I don’t know,” it said, dubious. “We don’t pick what the sand knows, to sing of. We just sing of what it says. I’ve never tried asking it anything … and I don’t think I could.

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