Cloudland (3 page)

Those biscuits filled me with cloud
, she realised. For the first time, fear shivered down her back. She thought for a moment she was fading, dissolving into air. Pressing her knuckles against her cheeks, she wondered whether her father was sitting at home in the turret now, looking up at the clouds where she stood. All at once, the thought prompted an exhilarating kind of loneliness – the opposite of that drab, sunken loneliness she had felt on the plane to her mother's house. She wondered whether
her mother was already missing her, worried because she hadn't arrived. The neighbours would exclaim:
In this weather? Cassie! You left her to catch the bus on her own?
Her mother would flutter excuses, watching the circle of faces around her twist with disapproval.

Lucy started and looked around. She could hear a low, slapping sound. Someone – or some
thing
– was forcing its way after her into the clouds. It was terrible to hear that sound, all the time getting closer, and have no idea what might appear. The columns were so narrow there was nowhere to hide.

Something like a head poked up through the cloud. Lucy saw, with a surge of relief, that it looked human. The next moment, she saw that it was the boy from the bus stop.

She started forwards. ‘What are you doing here? Did January send you?'

‘What is this place?' He was slack-mouthed, moving his head slowly from right to left. ‘I was watching. You just –' he fanned out his fingers, ‘vanished into the mist. What was in those biscuits?'

‘Did January send you?' she repeated.

He blinked. ‘This is wild. How often do you come up here?'

‘We're in the
clouds
.' She stretched out her arm, including in her gesture the still, silent hall.

He blinked at her without understanding. ‘How do you get hold of those biscuits?' he was asking. ‘That old weirdo supplies you? Do you have to pay?'

Lucy was struck by the oddity of him: the only scrap of dark here, with the columns extending in rows behind him into a glare of distance. She turned away, attempting to recapture the radiant shock she had felt, standing alone far from the known world. She took a step and hung in air.
One, two
, and she landed by the open trapdoor.

The mist was gone.

In its place there was only glassy distance. Feeling dizzy, almost nauseous, Lucy crouched on her heels and imagined falling, spinning down through that emptiness.

Her cry startled the boy. He looked down through the trapdoor and his face turned grey. ‘Where's the mist? How are we supposed to get back?'

‘We can't get back,' she answered. ‘This is cumulus cloud. We're three thousand metres in the air.'

He didn't seem to understand the words. He tugged his mobile phone from his pocket, clutching it in both hands and staring at the screen.

‘We're completely out of range.' His face scrunched
up. ‘What are we –?' Catching sight of something over Lucy's shoulder, he stopped. Lucy swung around. Stepping through the columns were two creatures made of cloud.

The cloud creatures passed behind columns and stepped into view again. Lucy had the impression they were flickering in and out of existence. They moved in jerky, flying steps, without bending their knees.

‘They've seen us,' whispered the boy. ‘They're looking right at us.'

Lucy stood without moving. She couldn't take a step or lift her hand. Her mind was broken machinery. She could feel gaps and edges, parts of thoughts that didn't fit together. As she watched those creatures stepping towards her, she remembered her
father, speaking late one night on the phone:
But why wouldn't there be creatures in the clouds, Stephen? The idea's no stranger than life in the lightless depths of the sea. We make over a million calculations to come up with a single weather prediction. How much simpler it would be if we could only accept there was some thing, some agency, steering the clouds … No, no, I mean the opposite of religion …

The two cloud creatures stopped in front of Lucy. She looked into their faces, too stunned to feel afraid. She heard a low, shuddering sound. It took her a moment to realise it was the boy, behind her, trying to breathe.

One of the cloud creatures was as stretched as an afternoon shadow. He was pale – not so much white as colourless, almost see-through, so it was strange to see him staring. His eyes were round and glassy: marbles in the folded pouch of his eyelids. He didn't have a nose. Instead, he had a ridge running down the centre of his face. He was barefoot. Lucy saw with a shock that his toes were as long as his fingers. But his ears were the most unearthly thing about him. They were the size of his face, and kept twitching back and forth like featherless wings.

The other cloud creature was the same height as Lucy but as wide as he was high. His belly hung down to his knees, his neck was lost in a soft concertina
of chins. He was bald, with little ears that stuck out from his head. Whenever he took a step, he opened his mouth and closed it again when he landed. This gave him a gulping, eager look, as though he wanted to speak but couldn't work out what to say.

The tall cloud creature reached out his arm, stretching his fingers towards Lucy. ‘Friend of January?' His words made small clouds that touched her cheek and then faded. Shaking off the boy, who was clutching her arm, Lucy stretched out one hand and brushed the very tips of the cloud creature's fingers. A shock ran up her arm. The cloud creature's fingers were cool and too soft: they had no fingernails.

‘I'm Lucy,' she said. ‘January sent me –'

But the cloud creature had snatched his hand away. He was staring at his fingers, seemingly afraid that her touch had left a mark. ‘Wist, I am,' he said at last, in his drifting voice, and waved a hand at his companion: ‘Jovius.'

Jovius stepped close to Lucy and inched out a hand to touch her cheek. She saw those pale, squidgy fingers and couldn't bear it. She shuddered out of reach. Jovius leapt back. They all stared at each other, tensed, watching for the slightest movement.

‘And this is?' asked Jovius, nodding at the boy.
His voice surprised Lucy. It was high and wavering, and he stretched the ends of his words into a hiss.

‘Daniel,' answered the boy, too loudly, pulling himself upright and fixing his hands by his sides with the look of someone in trouble at school.

But the tall creature, Wist, had already turned and started walking – floating in jerks – away from them. When he was some way across the hall he paused. ‘Hurry.'

Jovius started and pattered after him. For a time, Lucy and Daniel stood in silence, watching the two of them move through the columns.

‘What do we do?' whispered Daniel, shifting from one foot to the other. ‘Shouldn't we stay by the trapdoor? They won't force us to follow them, will they? Lucy!'

She had been watching the cloud creatures in a daze. Already all she could see of them were two shapes dissolving into space and light. At last, she took in what he had said. ‘I'm not staying by the trapdoor!' she retorted. She pictured the two of them waiting while clouds grew like cobwebs across their faces. She gazed around her at the hall, still and radiant, and felt suddenly light. ‘I'm going with them,' she said, and started running.

Lucy ran with a sense of freedom she had only felt in dreams of flight. She pushed off and flowed through air. In the long, floating pauses when, instead of landing, she kept on and on, everything seemed possible. The columns flashed past her, stride by stride. She reached the end of the hall, where the cloud creatures stood waiting.

‘Beautiful, isn't it?' murmured Jovius. ‘There's a column for every hundred years we Cloudians have lived in the clouds.' He leant towards her, so close she could see the crystals in his skin. ‘They say it was built in a month. The Megaliths worked without stopping. When one of them died the rest kept working . . .'

Daniel stopped in front of Lucy. He was still holding his phone. He kept flicking glances at Wist and Jovius and then ducking his head to stare at the phone's bright screen.

Wist fluttered one hand. ‘Ready?'

Daniel looked over his shoulder towards the trapdoor. He kept sucking little breaths through his nose; his lips looked stitched together with fishing wire. ‘You're going with them?'

She nodded.

‘Alright,' he whispered.

Wist brushed his fingers against the wall. A line of brightness darted from the floor to the ceiling. Then the wall slid apart, as smoothly as a wave returning to the sea. Where blank wall had been, there was a low arch. Beyond it, a spiral staircase rose out of view. The ceiling was low and the walls and stairs all shone with the same dull light. Bending double, Wist stepped beneath the arch and started climbing the stairs with Jovius close behind.

‘You're sure?' asked Daniel.

Lucy tried to smile but her cheeks felt stiff. Watching the cloud creatures pad up the stairs away from her, all the assurance she had felt, running across the hall, drained through her feet. She was held in a strange pause. Some inner mechanism propelled her
forwards and, before she was ready, she saw her foot on the first stair. Daniel followed, stepping where she stepped.

‘The wall's closed behind us,' he breathed.

The staircase was so narrow Lucy had to run her hand along the wall to keep from falling. A great number of Cloudians must have done the same. There were hollows worn into it: one high enough for Wist, one low enough for Lucy, Daniel and Jovius. The sight of those two cloud creatures, stepping always away around the curve of the stairs, bit into Lucy's mind. She was not afraid, exactly. Only the strangeness of this place, and so much light, pressed upon her eyes until she felt herself floating a little above her body.

‘What is this place?' she shivered. The silence was so perfect, speaking felt like breaking something.

‘You are coming into the Great Palace of the Cloudians.' Wist's answer echoed down to her. ‘This palace is the ancient marvel of Cloudland. It would take more than your lifetime to find its many rooms.'

‘Then I hope you know where you're going,' she snapped.

The silence settled around them again. Wist led them past closed doors and empty rooms the size of wheat fields. One room had at its centre a soft form
that rose, blossoming like a lung, and then sank back in the space of a single breath. They passed a room where the floor was a grid set over a hole as deep as a well – a white well filled with roars.

‘That's the wind,' said Jovius, ‘blowing into the palace.' He told them there were rooms no-one had entered, hidden rooms that no-one had found. They climbed until Lucy was tired of wonder. Their footsteps made no sound on the stairs.

‘Is it always deserted?'

‘Usually, Weather Makers work in the high rooms. They're all in hiding now, of course.'

‘Hiding from
what
?' The silence, the still emptiness of this place, filled her with dread. It was so cold: a damp cold that made her bones ache.

There was a long pause. ‘We're nearly there,' was his only answer.

The next room they came to made Lucy forget her irritation. It was crowded with partly formed cloud creatures. She saw heads and shoulders, hands and arms, reaching out of the floor. The creatures' eyes were closed but they kept moving, waving their arms to and fro with the slow sway of seaweed, so she couldn't tell whether they were alive or caught in some air current.

‘The Life Garden,' said Jovius. The room was
filled with small, prickling sounds. ‘That's the sound of them growing,' he added.

‘Growing from what?' Looking at those blind, striving creatures, Lucy thought of picking up her half-sister for the first time. Without opening her eyes, Lucy's half-sister had arched back and wailed, stretching her toothless gob until her face disappeared in folds of skin. Now, looking into the Life Garden, Lucy felt the same twitch of pity and revulsion, the same weird sense that her hands were too big for her body.

‘Fragments,' said Jovius. ‘Every decade, we come here for the Planting. We break off some piece of ourselves and plant it here. We Cumulus, I mean – the Cirrus have a Life Garden high in the palace. Of course, the Stratus plant on their own level.'

He pulled off his cloud boot and showed them the rough-edged stumps of three toes.

‘But doesn't it hurt?' asked Daniel, craning over Lucy's shoulder.

‘Oh yes – yes, of course. It hurts dreadfully.' Jovius looked almost curiously at his toes and pulled on his boot again.

‘Which of them did you . . .' Lucy couldn't think of the word. She pointed into the room. ‘Which are yours?'

‘Oh! We can't know! It wouldn't do to feel attached! The Cumulus belong equally to each other, you understand.' Jovius nodded into the room. ‘These are half-grown.'

‘Aren't they cold?' whispered Lucy, unable to look away. Something in the creatures' helplessness made her queasy. She was almost relieved when Wist ordered them on.

‘Disgusting,' muttered Daniel, gesturing at the room. ‘What's he talking about, anyway – Cumulus and Cirrus?' He pronounced Cumulus and Cirrus with the hiss that Jovius added to the end of every word, so Lucy knew he'd never heard the cloud names before.

‘They're different kinds of cloud,' she answered. ‘Cirrus are those thin clouds you see high up, before a change in weather. Cumulus are fat –' She stopped. Daniel was watching her with one side of his mouth pulled back in a sneer.

‘So you got an A for that project?'

‘Have you ever even looked at clouds?'

He shrugged. ‘They all look the same.'

She opened her mouth to argue.

‘Enough talking,' called Wist. ‘Leave those rooms alone.'