The Man Who Rained (17 page)

He closed his eyes. ‘Yes,’ he said in a faint voice. ‘There’s something else.’

‘Then now’s the time to tell me.’

‘I can’t. Not here. I’d have to show you.’

‘Where?’

‘Further up the mountain. You’d have to come with me.’

She hesitated. ‘Is it far?’

‘Not far.’

Given what she had learned, she knew it was unsafe to be near him, although to her frustration she still wanted to see whatever it was he had to show her. As so often seemed the case in her
life, what made sense and what she wanted were opposed. She nodded briskly and they set off, over slopes of whisky-hued soil, banks of black pebbles and spry grass. She hated that the silence
between them, which previously she had so treasured, had turned so quickly into a gulf. On their way uphill he sprang tensely over the new mud and slicked thickets while she stumbled here and
there, her feet slipping in the soil or tripping over roots that seemed to have been washed free of the earth. Then at last they reached the entrance to a tunnel, as tall as her. It looked like an
old entryway to one of Thunderstown’s mines, over which the timber boarding had cracked apart long ago. From its dark mouth she felt a changed air blowing against her cheeks, as if she were
standing in front of an open freezer. He led the way inside and immediately something crunched under his foot: one shattered half of a miner’s lantern, with a cobweb ball where a candle would
once have burned.

‘My torch is inside,’ said Finn. ‘I usually go down there without it. I can feel the way from the air currents. So to start with it will be dark for you.’

‘What’s in there? What if I hit my head on something? What if there are pits or sudden drops?’

‘There aren’t. And the ceiling is high. You’ll have to trust me, although I suppose that will be harder for you now.’

She looked back at the blue sky framed by the lip of the tunnel mouth. ‘Go slowly. I’ll say if it gets too much.’

Further in, the smell of grass and heather that clung to Old Colp’s slopes gave way to lungfuls of cold, mineral air. They quickly reached the edge of vision, where it became too black for
even mosses and moulds to sprout on the walls. Here there was only smooth, blasted rock. A few steps further and the tunnel turned a corner into utter darkness. Each pace became harder than the
last, for no sooner had she imagined an impending underground cliff than she had convinced herself that she was about to plunge over it. She came to a halt. ‘Finn,’ she said, and a long
echo repeated off the F.

‘Here.’ He sounded only an arm’s length away.

She wanted to reach out for him, but she battled back that desire. She would rather show anger than fear. ‘Finn, what the hell is going on? I can’t see a thing in here!’ A
powder of rock dust showered on to her face and tongue.

‘Shh!’ he hissed. ‘Don’t shout! Shouting,’ he whispered, ‘could bring the mountain down on us.’

Elsa bunched her fists. ‘What can be so important that we have to go to all this effort to reach it? Can’t I just wait here while you fetch it for me?’

‘No. It can’t be moved. You have to see it to understand. I can guide you, if you like. But to do that you’d have to take my hand.’

‘I’ll be fine, thank you. Carry on.’

It took great effort to follow him as slowly as she did. Her legs objected with every straining muscle. If he found it difficult to progress at such a nervy speed he said nothing. He was as
silent as he was invisible.

Then a light burst on like a supernova. Elsa slapped her hands to her eyes and shrieked, thinking
lightning
. Rock dust shook in the lit-up air, but there was no thunderbolt. It was only
the glow of a hand torch and she relaxed her guard, although after the total darkness it pained her retinas.

‘We’re here,’ he said.

She blinked and blinked until eventually she saw the expanses of a cavern around them, and Finn offering her the torch by the handle. She snatched it and held it tight. Her eyes slowly
accustomed to the underground and the reluctant colours locked in the rock walls. Stalactites broke the high cave roof into countless archways and winked, milky pink and orange, in the torch beam.
From the ground, stalagmites pushed up to meet them, and in places the two had met and fused into palatial columns. In one instance, a frail stalactite hung like a photo of a lightning bolt, while
out of the ground its nubby counterpart rose, its pearly head stopping only a millimetre beneath. She had once read an article about stalactites, and she knew it could be a century before they at
last fused.

She swung the beam around the cavern. The far wall stretched upwards in a gradual curve. The flinty rock face shimmered green and peach like the skin of a trout.

Finn pointed in that direction, where in the dark a body of water oozed. ‘Shine the torch over there.’

The light hit the water’s surface and diffracted up the wall on the far side.

‘Shine it higher.’

Beyond the water, the rock was coloured with seams of mineral.

‘Higher still.’

Elsa raised the light and it revealed a cave painting.

It was a pattern of shapes painted in dark and sanguinary substances. All the cave paintings she had ever seen in books depicted bison, hounds, huntsmen or mammoths, but this was a painting of
broken triangles and abstract nothings. She tried to imagine Palaeolithic painters reaching at full stretch to daub pigment on the stone. If this water had flowed here then, they would surely have
risked their lives to do so.

She ventured as close as she could without losing her balance and pitching into the arc of the water. The torch trembled in her hand, making the cave painting appear to dance. Then she swung the
light away and shone it at Finn, who screwed up his eyes and raised a hand to shield his face.

She lowered the light a fraction. The painting was not a pattern but a sequence. It progressed from left to right like the frames of a cinema reel. ‘It’s a story,’ she
declared. ‘Each of these shapes follows on from the last.’

As far as she could tell, the story in the cave painting went something like: Once upon a time, there were cottony shapes, indistinct things with indefinable boundaries. Then, for reasons
unknown, the shapes became definite. They morphed from smudges into triangles. None of the triangles were perfect: one had cracks running down it; one had a corner so smoothed away that it was now
almost a half-circle; one had a dent taken out of its top.

‘This one,’ she said, focusing the torch and wishing she could keep her voice as steady as its clean line of light, ‘is the Devil’s Diadem. This one is Old
Colp.’

Finn stared into the tar-black water. ‘Yes, and there’s more. Shine it higher.’

She did so eagerly, and discovered a painted ceiling. All the animals of prehistory were there, horses and hounds and horned goats. Yet no beast was complete. Part of each dissolved into the
stone. A rearing horse had hindquarters that vanished into a craggy overhang. The forepaw of a dog stretched out and became a stalactite.

In the corner of the ceiling were the humans. They too broke down in places into blank nothingness and shadows. And some – these had been painted curled up, or bowed in despair – had
white lines flying out of their hearts.

‘Who are these people?’ she asked. ‘What does this mean?’

‘I don’t know for certain.’

Again she turned the torch on him. ‘What do you mean, you don’t know? I asked if there were any more secrets and you led me here.’

‘I brought you here because I thought the paintings might help you understand.’

‘Understand
what
?’

‘Me. That maybe I’m not so unusual.’

She stepped away, confused. Part of her wanted to shine the torchlight into his every pore. Part of her thought she had already risked enough.

Then she heard a faint noise like the leftover tremble after a cymbal is struck. ‘Finn? What was that?’

‘It was me,’ he said. ‘It’s the thunder I have for a heartbeat, the same sound you listened to when we caught the canaries in the woods. It’s just that, in these
caves, it’s quiet enough to hear it without putting an ear to my chest.’

Elsa felt suddenly claustrophobic. When the thunder whispered out of Finn again, it felt as though all of the weight of the mountain was about to crash down on her. She gripped the torch
tightly, and flashed the light back towards the tunnel they had come from. Stalagmites and stalactites swung shadows through the beam.

‘I can’t stay here, Finn.’

‘Elsa, please ... is there no way we can get past this?’

‘It’s like you said – I just don’t know. For now I need some space.’ She shrugged and struck out towards the lightest part of what was before her, trusting the hard
rock of the tunnel wall to lead out of the cave.

Behind her the thunder sounded louder, slow and melancholy, like a lament. She took a few more faltering steps, then could not help but turn to shine the torch back.

‘Elsa, a week or so after I struck my mother, she tried to tell me that she still loved me. She stood before me one sunny afternoon, and I could see her lips trying to form the words. But
she had become so frightened of me that she couldn’t get them out. That was the worst thing I have ever seen, and I would never risk seeing it again. Soon after that she left Thunderstown.
But when you placed your ear to my chest, I felt like we were safe. I felt like we were too attuned for there to be lightning.’

His body was as still as the stalactites, but he was crying. The beam of light glittered. The air had filled with diamond dust, icy particles dancing in and out of the light. Each of
Finn’s tears, as it emerged from the duct, crystallized at once into a glittering speck that flew forth. The tears swirled and shimmered in the space between Elsa and Finn, and some caught
the light like prisms, filling the cold cave air with rainbow colours.

Elsa stood, enchanted, in the tunnel. She wanted to stride back to Finn and melt through his wintry sorrow with the heat of a kiss. But she had always known not to toy with lightning. She turned
back through an excruciating half-circle, then left him behind her in the darkness.

At the humid close of the afternoon, Daniel walked Mole into Thunderstown. The old dog waddled slowly, pausing every few minutes to regain her wheezing breath, her good eye
shut tight and her blind one fixed on the middle distance. In this stop-start fashion they made their way under the cold shadow of the Church of Saint Erasmus and eventually to the door of the
Thunderstown Miners’ Club. It stood in the mouth of Widdershin Road, where the leaning eaves kept it in constant shade. These days its concave door was hard to budge, and the wood strained
when Daniel held it open for Mole to enter.

Inside, an old lamp hung its broken bulb over an unstaffed desk. Through a door lay the common room, which would smell forever of the generations of pipe smoke that had turned its wallpaper
yellow. Bolted to its walls were pickaxes and rusty hand drills, and black-and-white photos of stiffly posed workmen or of the mines themselves, dark squares charred into the rock face.

Now that there were no miners left in Thunderstown, their club had a ragtag bunch of patrons: tradesmen and clerks and gossiping men like Sidney Moses, Hamel Rhys and Abe Cosser, who sometimes
met in the common room to play chequers or sip broth and who always wore their rain caps, even indoors. Daniel never attended such gatherings, although he was counted among the club’s
members. The head man of the Fossiter family (although none had ever been miners) had always been given a seat at the club.

A ring of hand-me-down armchairs stood in the common room, and Mole curled up at the foot of one of these and tucked her nose into the crook of her foreleg. Daniel watched her for a minute,
thinking how pitiful she was, to have changed from a huntress as lethal as a bullet to a stiff sleeper like a taxidermist’s masterpiece.

He crossed to a smaller adjoining room, where shafts of light slanted down from high windows and bookshelves spanned the walls. He ran his forefinger over the spines of the tomes there. These
were Thunderstown’s family trees, most of which had finished branching decades ago, or else had been left incomplete by the present generation. Only the ten-volume sequence marked
Fossiter
remained dust-free, and it was the final book in this collection that Daniel now selected and took down from the shelf.

The binding still showed the stretched scars of the goat whose skin it had come from, as did the leather clasp he now popped open. The yellowed pages were all unnumbered and scrawled with
handwritten notes. Connections forked down and interconnected from the top of each page to the bottom. Cousins had married second cousins; widows had been passed on to unmarried brothers. The name
Daniel itself was repeated over and over: there had been a time when it occurred once in every generation. Now it was the only remnant of that grand family, a reverse Adam who would leave the final
pages blank.

He returned to the common room and took a seat. Mole whimpered in her sleep, which he was glad to hear since it reassured him that she was still alive. He mimicked her stillness, sitting with
his fists on the arms of the chair and the family tree open on his lap.