The Cloud Collector

Chapter 2: Where the sky went

The jar led them to the top of Thistledown Hill, which was the highest point for miles and miles and smelled of wild thyme and cold morning air. And there, sitting at the very top, next to the old stone wall, was the most remarkable thing either of them had ever seen.

It was a hole. Not a hole in the ground a hole in the air. About the size of a door, perfectly round, with edges that shimmered the way a soap bubble does right before it pops. And through the hole, tumbling and swirling in a great soft pile, were all the clouds. Every single one. Bumping into each other, looking thoroughly confused, as if they had fallen through by accident and could not quite work out how to get back.

“Oh,” said Pip.

“Oh,” said Fen.

They stood and looked at it for a moment.

“How do we put them back?” Fen asked.

Pip looked at his jar. The cloud inside was pressing itself very flat against the glass, as if it was trying to show him something. He looked at the hole. He looked at the clouds piling up on the other side of it, fluffy and grey and wispy and every kind of cloud there was, all tangled together.

“I think,” Pip said slowly, “they just need somewhere to go first. Like if you show them the way, they’ll follow.”

He opened the jar.

The little rabbit cloud floated out, slow and careful, and hovered in the air in front of the hole. Then it turned and went through. And on the other side, something extraordinary happened. The little rabbit cloud rose up and up and up, and as it rose, the other clouds began to follow it, one by one and then in great rushing handfuls, pouring back up through the hole and spreading across the blank white sky like ink spreading through water.

Grey ones and white ones and tall ones and tiny ones. The long thin string-cloud and the grumbling thunder-cloud and hundreds of clouds Pip had never collected, clouds from faraway places that had gotten caught up in the confusion and were very glad to be going home.

Within five minutes, the sky was full again better than full, in fact. It was the most magnificent sky either of them had ever seen, clouds of every possible shape piled up from one horizon to the other, lit gold at the edges by the morning sun.

The hole closed with a sound like a soft breath, and was gone.

Pip looked at his empty jar. It was the first time it had been empty in three years. He thought he might feel sad, but he didn’t. He felt something much better than sad he felt the particular happiness of something being exactly where it was supposed to be.

Fen was looking at the sky with an expression he had never seen on her face before. Wide and quiet and a little bit stunned.

“Pip,” she said.

“Yes?”

“The cloud. The rabbit one.” She pointed. High up in the blue, a small fluffy cloud drifted slowly past, shaped exactly like a sleeping rabbit. “It came back.”

Pip smiled. “They always do,” he said. “That’s why you collect them. Not to keep them. Just to know they’re real.”

Fen thought about that for a long moment. Then she reached over and took Pip’s empty jar and held it up to the sky with great seriousness, as if she were looking through a telescope.

“I think,” she said, “I might need my own jar.”

Pip grinned. “I have seventy-two more at home.”

They walked back down Thistledown Hill together, into a morning that smelled of wild thyme and new beginnings, under a sky so full and bright and alive it looked like it had never been anywhere else at all.