The Man Who Rained (33 page)

He walked slowly towards the altar. He paused at the front pew where he himself had sat every Sunday for years. He stroked the cold wood, removed his soaked leather hat, and laid it on the seat.
Then he crossed to the side door and climbed the spiral staircase to the belfry. The stairwell was full of the din of falling water.

When he emerged on to the belfry he at once felt the electricity humming in the stones beneath him, hissing in the tumbling rain. The masonry zinged with energy. And there was the storm in an
indigo expanse.

This high up, he felt almost intimately close to the thunder. He was convinced that if he reached for the cloud – which he did now, raising himself on his tiptoes – he would be able
to stroke his fingers through it. He touched nothing and retracted his hand, feeling foolish, but the sky had seemed too small for such a monstrous cloud. It puzzled him that something so enormous
could not be grasped. Hail rattled on the belfry like thrown dice, and stung the skin of his upturned face. Rain made the old stone sizzle. A sheet of lightning flashed. In the half-second that it
lasted for, that which had seemed limitless became clarified. If time could have paused in that moment, he thought he would be able to take in every detail of the thundercloud, for every wisp and
fold of steam became defined in a photojournalist’s black and white. When, in the next instant, the world plunged back into darkness, he felt as blind inside as out. He wiped the rain from
his eyes and groped around for the lightning rod. His hands were shaking when he seized hold of it. The sense of purpose that had driven him up here had been lost to the darkness like words to
spilled ink. He was afraid, he realized. He had never been more afraid.

There was a white light.

And then there was nothing.

Come morning the storm had died out. It would be a fine day of sunshine, with a pleasant south-westerly breeze tempering the heat.

In Thunderstown, men and women stood dumbfounded in their doorways, staring at the cyan sky reflected in the floodwater. Otherwise they used buckets and tubs to bail out their houses, shaking
their heads and cursing Old Man Thunder. Canaries alighted on the weathervanes, or were yellow blurs chasing each other between the chimneys.

On the belfry of the Church of Saint Erasmus, a body lay face down on the stone. It was a man’s body, burly and black-bearded. The sunshine had dried off its flesh and hair, but had not
yet evaporated the puddle in which it had lain since the storm faded. Every so often the body would give a meek cough or a judder of its shoulder blades, then lapse into another hour of stillness.
Now, finally, it groaned and tried to prop itself up. It raised itself an inch before it flopped back into the puddle. It lay there for a little while more, occasionally dribbling up a mouthful of
water. Then, finally, with a moan, it rolled on to its back. Sometime later it pulled itself up and sat against the wall. Fluid drooled from its mouth and nostrils.

It tilted its head to drain water from its ears. It rubbed its eyes. After a while more it managed to stand up, as shakily as a newborn calf. When it got the better of its balance it squinted
around at the bright rooftops and the dazzling sunshine on the windowpanes of the town. It looked down at itself and sneezed. It rubbed its bearded face.

It stopped very still.

It rubbed its face some more, plying its cheeks and groping at its neck.

‘Uhh ...’ it murmured, then shook its head. ‘I ... huhh ...’ It felt again across its cheeks. It twisted its fingers through its drenched black locks.

‘I have hair,’ it said.

But when it tugged on it, clumps came out on its fingers. It looked at the black scraps in its hands, then tugged experimentally at a part of its beard. This came loose too, pulled free as
easily as moss off a stone.

It got down on its knees and leaned over the puddle to view its dim reflection. It reached out a tentative, pointing finger for the face it saw there, then jumped in alarm when the reflection
broke into circles.

It kept pulling at its hair. It scruffed it up with both hands and it came free everywhere. It splashed water over its scalp and washed away the last of it until its head was totally bald. It
did the same thing to its beard, spitting and slurping when it got a clump of it on its tongue. It rubbed its head, exploring its smooth jaw and crown. Now that the puddle had settled, it inspected
its reflection for a second time. It had missed something. Its eyebrows, which rubbed free as easily as chalk off a blackboard.

‘Who am I?’ it asked of the water. It waited for an answer and when none came it screwed up its eyes and rubbed its head and looked vulnerable and confused.

It got up and staggered to the door. It tripped and nearly tumbled several times as it made its way down the spiral staircase. In the empty church below it paused, because on a pew lay an object
it recognized, although it could not tell from where. It picked it up and punched it into shape, then plied for a moment the brim, which was still damp from the storm.

After a minute it remembered. Daniel Fossiter’s rain cap. All that had happened came crashing back.

It had begun with a dream of falling, but instead of sleep’s darkness everything had been white-hot. Falling for a long time, head over heels, long past the point when the rush of
plummeting jerks the dreamer awake. Down and down it had fallen, with a sickening sense of its own weight, until heaviness itself had been the thing to slow its fall. Heaviness had become a kind of
gravity, and it had no longer felt as if it were falling but compacting into a nucleus. Eventually it had simply hung, paralyzed by its own solidity. And then it had not been hanging but lying, and
it was a prone man on a church belfry.

After a while, the man folded the hat and tucked it into the pocket of his trousers. At one point, during his sensation of falling, he’d sensed another presence, travelling in the opposite
direction.

‘I will miss you,’ he said.

When Elsa woke to the sunlit morning and its postcard-blue sky, she pulled the sheet up over her head. She lay in the narrow bed in the nunnery cell, with the smell of pollen
drifting in through the window, and she longed for rain to replace the honeyed burblings of songbirds. She had already cried until her tear ducts were dried out, and she knew she would cry again
once they were rehydrated.

She slept the first half of the day away. Daniel was nowhere to be seen. She missed him and began to think he had given up on her. Probably he was holed away in depression in his homestead.

In the afternoon she was able to leave the bed for the first time. Her muscles tightened with each step and she managed only a single lap of the room before she collapsed back on to the
mattress.

Sleep gave no relief. She dreamed of rain pouring from the heavens.

When she woke next it was evening. Through the high window of the cell she could see stars emerging, so she turned on the bedside lamp. She didn’t want stars. She wanted black skies
venting water.

All she had to distract her was a cloud atlas borrowed from Dot. The old nun had warned against it, but reluctantly loaned it to her when Elsa insisted. Now she wished she’d taken
Dot’s advice, for the moment she opened it and saw the black prow of a cumulonimbus she felt strangled, and threw the book across the room.

She rested her head on the pillow and stared at the ceiling, thinking of her dad, and how ceilings had to be very sturdy things to survive all of the prayers and pleas directed at them.

The moth who had become her cellmate was still up there with its brown wings flattened across the plaster. Now that the bedside lamp was aglow it came alive, dropped from its resting place and
zoomed around the aura of the light. When it started throwing itself against the lampshade, it cast elastic shadows across the ceiling and she thought of Finn’s mobiles, which would be
circling abandoned in his bothy, and she wished she had the paper goose he had made her, or even the paper skyscraper. She had to turn the lamp off and suffer the stars, just to stop the moth from
reminding her of them.

A breeze passed by the window.

She sat bolt upright and was rewarded with jarring pains in both sides. This time, however, she had strength to bear them. The wind passed again, with a noise like a tuneless note from a flute,
and then died away. She waited impatiently for it to come back, listening to the moth’s clicking wings in the interval. When the wind returned it sounded as if it were panting, then faded
away into the distance.

When she got out of bed her legs stiffened with pain and she walked as if on stilts to the window. The stars and a sliver of moon made the mountainside light, but at the bottom of the slopes it
was as if Thunderstown had vanished, for Finn’s storm had cut the power to the streets and they were lost in the gloom.

This time she saw the wind before she heard it. It was patrolling along the length of the nunnery wall, pausing here and there to sniff the mortar before trotting on with its silver tail wagging
behind it. She knocked on the window and it looked up at the noise.

‘Hey,’ she said.

It yapped at her, once, then sprang away as if she had thrown a stick. When it came running back it barked more aggressively, as if it were frustrated that she hadn’t followed.

At that she felt as if the lethargy in her bones had run off into the night. She dressed in impatient silence, pulled on her sneakers and her jacket, then slipped out of the door, turning the
handle and gripping it on the other side before closing it gently, so that the mechanism lowered silently into the latch and did not cause a sound. She did not want to be stopped by a well-meaning
nun.

She padded along the corridor, down the stairs and out into the cloister. The moon was only a crescent, but still it seemed especially bright, glazing the stone walls white.

It was impossible to open the big cloister doors without their beams clunking, but their sounds did not seem to disturb anyone and she swiftly closed them behind her. She was in the antechamber
that kept the weather at bay, and only the outer door remained between her and the mountainside. She paused there, wondering whether this was such a good idea. She was in no fit state to wander off
on the Devil’s Diadem at night.

No sooner had she doubted herself than the wind thumped against the door. Another blustered past, and then another, and then one that whined and one that howled and she listened with her hands
around the door handle as the noises built into a great, hollow, gale-force roar. A charm hammered into the wall beside her began to jingle on its hook, until it worked itself loose and smashed
against the antechamber floor.

She took a deep breath and opened the door.

Outside, the world lay motionless. She’d thought she’d be immediately overwhelmed by the in-rushing winds, but the air hung still and delicate. More stars than she had ever seen
shimmered in the blue night. Together with the moon they paled the dusty mountainside, making boulders into alabaster and the grass into etched silver. And, all down the slope before her, they
shone on the fur of at least a hundred wild dogs.

The beasts stood or sat on their haunches as far as the eye could see. Their alert poses made them look more like sculpted statues than flesh and blood creatures. They watched her expectantly.
The moon reflected as a white arc in each canine eye.

She waited, unsure of what they required from her. Then, as one, they turned their heads and gazed down the slope.

She had to take a few steps forwards to see what they saw.

A man, toiling up the uneven path to the nunnery.

He had not yet seen her, for all his focus was on his struggle with the steep ascent. Her heartbeat trebled when the moonlight told her he was bald and big-framed, but she would not believe her
eyes, since it was impossible for him to be the one she wanted.

Her feet believed them. She stumbled down the slope towards him.

He looked up. He seemed different. Details had altered. He had worry lines on his forehead and crow’s feet around his eyes. His physique had become more precise and more world-worn. Yet
who else, she thought as she stumbled over the last few paces and halted an arm’s reach from him, could have irises that looked like hurricanes? She would recognize him even if half a century
had passed between them. He was like a cherished soldier coming home from a long war.

He smiled at her. She threw her arms around him so hard he lost his balance and they fell with an
oof
to the dusty ground.

They were laughing. She was poking his face and pulling at his cheek to confirm it was real. He was grinning. He was nuzzling his face close to hers.

The winds took off in unison and yipped beneath the gleaming stars.

She gave him her lips. They kissed.

And she was in love with the thunder.