The Man Who Rained (29 page)

He nodded groggily. Wild-eyed, she spun around to confront the townsfolk, but Sidney Moses looked as surprised as her. Somebody else had thrown it.

Finn had still not stood upright, and now there was a deeper noise behind the hiss from his cut, a noise like a distant train passing. Layers of dark, heavy gas opened out of the cut like the
petals of a flower. The cat who had hissed at them sprang down from its wall and fled as fast as its four legs could carry it.

Elsa railed at the townspeople. ‘You should be ashamed of yourselves!’

They all ignored her, enraptured by the dusky cloud growing out of Finn’s gashed scalp. It grew fat and puffy, a gaseous tumour expanding by the second.

Elsa crouched beside him, supporting his shoulder and whispering his name. He was staring, dazed, at the floor, with his face beaded by drops of clear water. Every now and then one of them
welled big enough to fall and splash against the road. The cloud kept swelling, now the size of his head, now twice the size. Then it skewed and distended, and broke open across his back so that he
was crouched under a fleecy heap. Elsa tried to think of what to do, but her heartbeat was a din in her ears. All she could think was to squeeze his arm and whisper his name. Beneath the cloud his
shirt had become damp.

The townsfolk edged closer, until she snapped at them, ‘Get away from him!’ and all bar Sidney Moses took a step back.

‘Elsa ...’ whispered Finn, and when he spoke a patter of rainwater dribbled over his lips. She whimpered to see it, and clung to him tighter.

‘Finn? How badly are you hurt? Do you think you can stand? Here, I’ll help you.’ She steadied herself to support his big frame and helped him, although she was a very shaky
prop, back to his feet. The cloud spilled to either side as he stood, so that he was framed in an oval of fog. It kept coming from him, pouring out grey filaments so that he looked like a
smouldering effigy.

‘Who ...’ he began, and more water dribbled over his chin and fell in a sheet to the road, ‘threw ...’ He swooned for a second and she had to throw her whole weight
against him to help him regain his balance. At the same time the cloud mushroomed and a shadowy cap rose out of its highest point. A raindrop formed and plinked off the flagstones. Her own clothes
were becoming speckled by them. Her breathing had become sharp, each inhalation like a slap to her lungs.

‘Who did this?’ Elsa hissed at the crowd. ‘Show yourself.’

Heads turned to quiz one another, and then the crowd parted and left little Abe Cosser isolated, clutching another pebble of slate in his shaking fist.

‘You ...’ said Finn, then spat out water again, ‘don’t need to be frightened. The weather is just like you.’

Abe looked from Finn to Elsa to Sidney to his peers, but all seemed to have cut him loose. He looked down at the slate in his hand. ‘Lord have mercy,’ he muttered, and threw the
stone at Finn.

Elsa shrieked when it struck Finn in the jaw and his head snapped sideways with a gargle. She had to catch him again, grabbing hold of him and leaning into him to help him steady his balance.
She wished she was bigger and stronger: she had never felt so slight in all her life. He pawed at the cut the stone had made, which immediately began to fizz with gas. His jawline became bandaged
with it, a second outpouring that pushed the cloud to new heights. In no time at all its dense cap had bulged some ten feet into the air, while to the left and right it unfurled like a wingspan. A
chill trickle condensed on the back of her neck and raced down beneath her collar.

‘Finn,’ she gasped, holding him up, ‘do you think you can walk? Do you think we can get out of here? I’ll help you, Finn.’

She threw one of his arms over her shoulders, but she did not have the strength to pull him along with her. She looked back through the cloud that was now swirling tightly around them, and saw
Abe Cosser still stranded from his fellows, trembling and clutching one more stone.

‘Please, Mr Cosser,’ she cried, ‘please stop this!’

Abe looked at her with rabbit-in-the-headlights eyes but, before he could respond, Sidney Moses stepped up beside him and put a hand on his shoulder. ‘You’re a good man, Abe. Whereas
this is not even a man at all.’

‘Please,’ Elsa implored them, ‘
please
leave us alone! We’re going away! We’re going anyway! You don’t need to do this!’

Sidney shrugged. ‘This does not concern you, nor your plans. This is saving our town from the weather. Best to step away from it now, Miss Beletti. It’s a cloud that has duped you
into thinking it’s a man, but as you can see its disguise is easily removed.’

‘He’s
both
!’ Elsa tried to get Finn to take a groggy step towards Old Colp. She did her best to guide him, but with each plod she feared they’d both tip over.

‘Step away from him, Miss Beletti.’

She ignored him. It was going to be difficult to get Finn up the mountain in this state, but once they reached the bothy she would look after him and not leave his side until he had recovered.
Now the cloud had become too large to see its extremities: it had filled the street from eave to eave and shut out the sky. She squeezed Finn’s hand, and much to her relief, he said,
‘Thank you, Elsa,’ amid a patter of drooled water.

Abe Cosser threw the stone.

It scuffed off the top of Finn’s head and clattered away somewhere against the wall. Finn went down, pawing at his scalp, and an instant spout of soot-black cloud gushed up into the greyer
stuff that fogged the road. Elsa shrieked and knelt beside him, but the cloud wrapped them up too opaquely for her to even see her outstretched hands. People were shouting and someone grabbed her
beneath the shoulders and she was dragged across the rough paving screeching and thrashing. She kicked someone but it made no difference. She could see nothing in the fog, save for gloomy outlines
closing in on Finn.

But he lit up.

For a split second, lines of white fire branched through his body. It was as if his entire nervous system had turned to light. She heard Sidney screech and smelled burned meat. Then the light
fizzed away into the stone and the flagstones reeked of coal and the townspeople erupted into shrieks and yells. Elsa was dropped roughly on to the floor, and she heard people fleeing in every
direction, and somebody mewling like a baby while they hoisted him away.

When she stood, she was too frightened to straighten her spine. Nor could she close her mouth, since her lips were seized back in a grimace.

She staggered through the fog with her arms out in front of her, and nearly tripped over Finn when she found him lying on the road. He was on his back with his arms and legs outstretched. His
eyes were open but unblinking.

‘Finn!’

She grabbed his hand and clenched it between hers. His fingers felt more brittle and thinner than she remembered them being.

‘What did they do to you, Finn?’

Still the cloud thickened, and now it steamed so dense that even when she bent her face down to touch his it made a veil between them. She held on tightly to his hand, but it felt light now like
something he had made from paper. Through such fog it was impossible to tell how badly they had hurt him in those last moments, so all she could do was throw her other arm across him and cling to
his torso. ‘Hold on,’ she whispered, not knowing what else to say. ‘Please hold on.’

Yet the issuing cloud did not hold on. It became a blindfold. She clung to him as he became fragile and frail. His chest seemed to shrink and harden. She pushed her lips against his, hoping that
to kiss him might save him, but his head felt skeletal in the murk and his lips were like the wrinkled skin of a deflating balloon. She kissed them regardless, and they were limp and rubbery
between hers. She heard something barking above her, and something howling in the sky. His soaked shirt sagged over his accentuating ribs. His fingers, when she groped for them in the fog, were as
thin and cold as icicles. Then for a moment she thought she felt warmth return to them and she yelped with joy, but it was just her own fingers, for his had melted away . She clawed around to try
to find them again, but they had vanished and her fingernails scraped on the stone of the street. His ribcage sank and was flat. Panic filled her. She chased her lips after his, but they only
kissed wet stone where his head should have been, and she was lying face down in the thickest fog of her life, with only Finn’s soaked and emptied clothes between her and the cracked surface
of the road.

She lay on the floor, convulsing with sobs. The cloud fumed around her until, eventually, it began to rise into the air. The rain knocked on her back, but she did not move. It
pulsed across the road and rang off the walls. After a while she found the strength to roll over and feel the water scattering her face and making her clothes weigh heavy.

The cloud had lifted off the ground and formed a charcoal ceiling for the street. Because she did not know what else she could do, she groped around her until she had bundled up Finn’s
empty shirt, drenched jeans, underwear and the new shoes she had bought him for his impromptu birthday.

She lay there until his cloud heaved itself off the rooftops and took to the air, rising with unstoppable buoyancy. As it lifted, the sun slipped in beneath it and she remembered that it still
had not set. For a minute the light turned the rain shafts to harp strings, then was put out again by the expanding cloud.

It kept ascending until it shuddered with a light of its own and gave a shout of thunder so human that she sat up and cried out to him. He did not reply, but the rain redoubled and hissed as it
hit the stone.

A second sheet of lightning floodlit the street and for a moment made every drenched surface shine white. Elsa found herself praying to whatever remnant of her mother’s God she still
believed in, asking to have this all turned around, but still the rain fell in harder blows until an opening salvo of hail rattled off the masonry and nipped at her skin. She let it sting her. She
had no desire to take shelter. If she wanted to go anywhere it was up, to follow Finn into the air.

The street was deserted now. Elsa pictured the townsfolk locking themselves indoors, terrified of what they had unleashed. She hated them and hoped Finn’s storm would break down their
doors and smash their lives apart.

The cloud kept growing. It was a slow black vortex coiling around itself. It swelled up like a lung inhaling. A line of lightning throbbed across it like a brilliant white artery and she could
feel the electricity accumulating in the earth in response, attracted from the deep places by the magnetism of the storm.

Her eyes widened. She stood up and covered her mouth with her hands. She’d had an idea, so dangerous it might just work.

She set off at a run, racing down Candle Street with rain and hail exploding around her and lightning testing its range across the blackened sky. When she swerved into Auger Lane, a forked bolt
jagged into life and whipped down to blast apart a chimney. She skidded to a halt in time to dodge the avalanche of broken bricks, then skipped over them and pelted onwards until she reached Saint
Erasmus Square. There the storm cloud floated like an ark above the town. Around it the last of the evening light ducked away, and then there was only the cumulonimbus.

The entire plaza fizzled with jumping raindrops. The gutters gurgled as they tried to drain the deepening water. Behind the rain the church was a defeated giant, its dark dominance laid low by
the storm. With an ear-splitting crash, lightning slammed into the church’s belfry. The strike rang a warped echo out of each and every windowpane in the square. Then, in its aftermath, all
seemed to fall silent and a residual tremor tingled underfoot. Elsa swallowed. That was where she was going, up there where the church bell resonated with a brassy hum.

She splashed across the square and up the church steps, heaved open the door, bundled through it and shoved it closed behind her.

Being in the church was like being inside a drum. The storm’s noises boomed between the pillars and made her ears pop. The panicked pigeons in the rafters threw themselves about, flying
into each other or the stone walls. One lay dead where it had collided with the pulpit. With her hands over her ears, and leaving a trail of wet footprints along the aisle, she made her way to the
door that accessed the belfry. It opened on to a spiral staircase leading upwards into darkness. Up she went, her soaked sneakers slapping against the steps, round and round until the dim light
from below could reach her no longer and everywhere was pitch black. The weather howling against the stone compelled her on, until she was dizzied and felt as if she were ascending a tornado.

Just when she thought her legs would take her no further she realized she could see the stairs. Light had stirred into the darkness. She could see moisture shining off the stone walls, and then
– so alien after the countless steps that she had to press her body against the rough surface to be sure of it – a door.

The moment she lifted the latch, the wind flung it open for her. She staggered out on to the balcony and was nearly bowled over by it. It screamed as it flew around her, and Finn’s storm
heaved with thunder in reply. The sky was as black and unstable as a lake of boiling tar.

Pressing herself against the wall for support, she edged her way along a narrow balcony. Beside her in the belfry the great Thunderstown bell vibrated with a bass tone. She looked down and saw
the streets and houses made miniature, the weathervanes twitching and spinning like whirligigs, and the plaza bulging with water. She looked up and saw only roiling darkness.

‘Finn,’ she whispered. Raising her voice would be pointless, even if she had the breath left after her rushed climb. ‘Finn, can you hear me?’ She felt her way further
along the wall until she found what she had come up here for: the lightning conductor. She gripped it as tight as her freezing hands would allow.

‘Lightning doesn’t
strike
,’ her dad had told her for the umpteenth time, on the last day she had seen him alive. She had looked down at her fingers in her lap and felt
empty that their relationship had descended into this single repeated conversation. ‘The earth and the storm make a connection, Elsa, and the lightning is that connection on fire.’