The Tornado Chasers (18 page)

‘Callum?’

His eyes were fixed onto the tornado that roared towards us. He was breathing in and out, in and out, and he was trembling. I had never seen him so frightened. I reached out and took his shoulder.

‘Callum.’

His eyes shot back to me, desperate, terrified.

‘You don’t have to come with us,’ I said. ‘We won’t make you. You’re one of us. You can go if you want to.’

He looked back at me, his chest heaving, his eyes torn. They darted backwards and forwards between me and the tornado. Then he turned and ran, until the grey haze of the rain around us swallowed him completely.

And then there were four of us.

I turned to the others.

‘Well,’ I said. ‘Shall we?’

We took each other’s hands. Me, Pete, Ceri and Orlaith, in a line, facing the tornado. We walked slowly, step by step, towards the wall of wind that bore towards us. Trees plummeted around us, splintering into twigs against the rocks. The storm howled. The camera around Ceri’s neck ripped free of its strap and flew into the distance. We didn’t need it – not where we were going.

We came to the valley floor, and there it was before us. The tornado crushed us down, buckling our legs, driving us to the ground. We looked at each other. I clutched Orlaith’s hand, and she clutched mine, and we all faced forwards.

‘We are the Tornado Chasers,’ we shouted, ‘and we are terrified!’

The wind became a frenzy, thrashing and flailing against us, as if it was the one who was afraid and not us. We clutched onto each other and grit our teeth, weighing ourselves down. The tornado pounded, heaved, screamed, and then it became even worse somehow, the strength of
it unbelievable, the pain greater than anything I’d ever experienced, until I couldn’t bear it any longer and –

And then, there was nothing.

It was as if it had all just stopped. There was absolute silence and stillness and warmth, where just before there had been cold.

I opened my eyes, and looked around me. We were sat in the centre of a clearing. A wall of wind surrounded us, a perfect circle. We could see nothing outside of it.

‘It’s the eye of the storm,’ I whispered.

We slowly got to our feet. It was like we were standing in the centre of a clouded glass. The tornado stood frozen around us.

‘It means it’s not over,’ I said. ‘It means there’s more to come.’

And at that moment the four of us were lifted off our feet. I gasped. We were being carried up, as if by hands. Then we started to spin. Slowly at first, and then faster, turning with the wind in our square of four. We clung to each other and held our breaths. We spun faster and faster, until the blood raged in our heads and we couldn’t hold on to each other any more, and still we kept climbing.

The walls of wind fell away beside us. The valleys lay far below. We could see Barrow, and Skirting, and the Caves, and the quarry, and everywhere that we had been to together,
twisting and disappearing away from us. It all seemed so small now, so far away. We watched as the tornado trailed to the North and faded out into nothingness below, its path scrawled onto the world like a pencil mark on paper.

‘OWEN!’

The clouds parted, and we emerged into glorious sunlight. Four planes were circling us. They were bi-planes, faded and cracked and cast in black and white, a photo come to life. On the wings, emblazoned across a picture of a spiralling tornado, were the initials: T.C.

The planes immediately froze, like an old film stopped mid-frame. They held in the air before us, as easily as if they were suspended on strings. We had stopped moving, too, floating on our fronts like we were underwater. Two people inside the nearest plane leant out to face us.

‘We’ve been waiting for you,’ said my grandparents.

They climbed out onto the wings of their planes, and clutched me to their chests. They were completely black and white, their faces faded and bleached with age.

‘We’re so proud of you,’ they said. ‘You did so well. All of you.’

The other Tornado Chaser pilots had climbed out onto the wings of their planes to shake hands with Orlaith and Ceri and Pete, congratulating them in clipped accents.

‘Superb work!’ said one. ‘Very impressive to have made it
this side of the portal at your age.’

I glanced up. ‘Portal? A portal to where?’

My grandparents laughed. My granddad reached out and took my hand.

‘Have a look,’ he said.

I looked down at the valleys below. The whole map lay before me, the tornado’s path still scrawled across the hills and valleys. And then suddenly, the map began to change – hundreds more paths emerged, different ones, winding their way across the valleys in front of me like they were being drawn by a hundred hands at once. Each path was a different tornado from the past, leaving its mark on the valleys like a brushstroke.

‘Keep watching, Owen,’ said Grandma, holding my head. ‘Don’t look away.’

The paths kept adding up, piling and piling on top of one another, generation after generation of storms marked out on a single valley. At first it was little more than a scribble on paper, but then I realised that, bit by bit, the lines were adding up to something greater – they were gradually making a picture. Or a word, a sentence maybe, one that kept changing its mind again and again. Or even more than that – a story written and rewritten across the landscape, one that couldn’t be read yet, not until it was finished. They were innumerable now, crossing and criss-crossing each
other like a mesh of words and half-words, an entire history of storms written on the ground.

And then, the towns and hills and rivers suddenly slipped out of focus in front of me. They split and separated in endless versions of the same landscape, one for each of the different paths the tornado had taken, layered on top of each other like a pad of tracing paper.

‘You see?’ said Grandma. ‘You can see them all now. They’re all here.’

I looked at her in confusion. ‘I don’t understand.’

Granddad nodded, and took my hand. ‘Of course you don’t. Let’s go take a look at Skirting, shall we?’

In an instant we were above the church in the main square. I could see myself down there on the day we passed through, charging around the corner in a wedding dress as the bride and groom emerged from the church doors in the distance. But that wasn’t all. Waves upon waves of other people flowed out the church doors beside them – endless brides and endless grooms, troops of parents with young babies in long white christening gowns, mourners by the thousands, fleets of coffins, all passing younger versions of themselves in the streets without knowing or noticing.

‘And there’s us!’ said Granddad excitedly. ‘Right there, in the middle!’

I tried to look through the heaving mass of people below
me, but I couldn’t. It was almost too much to take in at once.

‘I … I can’t see,’ I said.

Grandma waved her hands in front of her, and at once the different layers separated and dissolved until there was only one left. It was a summer’s day. A young couple was stepping out the church doors to a small crowd of friends and family, cheering and clapping. Grandma held Granddad’s arm tight.

‘I never get tired of it,’ she said.

I looked down. The whole scene played and replayed in front of me, again and again. It felt new every time. It didn’t grow old, and it never would.

Granddad waved his arms, and the layers came back immediately, a thousand years of different lives. The different versions flickered in front of us, generations moving and shifting like leaves on water.

‘All you have to do,’ he said, ‘is decide which one you want to go to.’

The pilots suddenly leapt back into their planes and adjusted their goggles, looking at us expectantly.

‘But …’ my eyes flickered between the others. ‘Does that mean we can’t go together? What if some of us want to home, and some of us don’t? What if we don’t see each other again?’

Orlaith placed a hand on my shoulder.

‘I don’t think it works like that, Owen.’

She was already disappearing in front of my eyes. I looked around for the others. I wanted to talk to them, to ask them what they thought, to hear their ideas, but I couldn’t. They weren’t there any more. At least, I couldn’t see them. But I could still feel them. It was like their hands were still in mine, and they were still out there, right beside me, in another layer that I couldn’t quite see.

I looked up. The sun was getting closer towards me now, and it warmed me through like happiness, glowing through my hands as I held them against it. I knew that up here there would be no pain, or unhappiness, or fear. There would be nothing that you couldn’t fix or take back. Nothing would ever get old or change or die. Everything would be beautiful. And everything would be perfect.

‘So,’ said my grandparents, ‘where do you want to go?’

Ross Montgomery started writing stories as a teenager, when he really should have been doing homework, and continued doing so at university. After graduating, he experimented with working as a pig farmer and a postman before deciding to channel these skills into teaching at a primary school. He wrote his debut
Alex, the Dog and the Unopenable Door
when he really should have been marking homework. It was shortlisted for the Costa Book Award and nominated for the 2014 Branford Boase Award.
The Tornado Chasers
is his second book. He lives in Brixton, London, with his girlfriend, a cat and many, many dead plants.