The Man Who Rained (5 page)

His eyebrows knotted. ‘Elsa ... Elsa, I love you.’

She wept. When they had first started dating they had agreed with cool cynicism that love was just chemical flushes and electrical signals flowing through the brain, something tacky that
belonged in souvenir shops. ‘Love,’ she had declared once to Peter, ‘is just the heart on an I Heart NYC baseball cap.’ And he had agreed with her.

Yet here and now he was deadly serious about it, down on his knees and looking up at her.

And she did not love him, even if she cared for him deeply, and she did not know whether she even believed in love, and she had lost her father, and she wanted to go like he had, up with the
tornado to see him in whichever place he had left the earth for, and she could not explain that to Peter and could not explain why she was falling apart like this, and she did not know anything
about herself any more.

The next morning, in the scorched front yard, Elsa found Kenneth Olivier hard at work digging out weeds with a trowel. He stood up straight when he saw her, dusting the
bleached soil from his fingertips.

‘Off exploring again?’

She nodded. She had her sunglasses and a thick layer of sunscreen on, as well as a water bottle in a bag hanging against her hip. ‘I’m going up to the mountains.’

He looked reflective. ‘Which one?’

She paused, then pointed. ‘That one.’ Three of the four peaks were visible from here. The fourth, the Merrow Wold, was hidden behind a low cloud in the south. The rest of the sky
remained an unbroken blue, but that cloud above the Merrow Wold was bleached like ash. In the north the broken pinnacles of the Devil’s Diadem glimmered in the sunlight, while to the east the
face of Drum Head was slowly emerging. Elsa, however, pointed to the western mountain, the hump-backed rise with slopes as dark as soot.

‘Old Colp,’ said Kenneth.

‘Yeah, that’s the one. On your map it says there’s a viewpoint. Near to a windmill, if my map-reading’s any good.’

‘Hmm. That windmill’s not there any more. The wind it was milling saw to that.’ He chuckled uneasily. ‘Be careful up there. These mountains are full of old mine
entrances. Some of them are only half-sealed.’

‘Don’t worry. I might look like a city girl, but I grew up in a spot even more remote than this.’

He nodded, although she could tell she hadn’t convinced him. He looked embarrassed. ‘I beg your pardon, Elsa, I’m just an old man, fretting. I’ve been fretting a lot ever
since Michael went away.’

She put a finger to her lips. ‘Don’t worry about it.’ She moved towards the street then paused. ‘Where did he go? Your son, Michael?’

He smiled. It was an awkward, unhappy smile. ‘I wish I knew the answer to that question. All I know is he went out for a walk in the mountains.’ He cleared his throat. ‘There
is a bit of local folklore about how these mountains come to be here. It is said that, long ago, four storms became weary from whipping and raging through the air. So they came to settle on the
earth, right here, to rest for a while. They soon fell asleep, and while they slept they began to crust over and calcify. By the time they awoke, the four storms of the sky were rock, welded solid
to the ground. It’s a superstitious way of explaining that there are places up in the mountains that aren’t as stable as they look. Places, as the story would have it, that have kept
something of their stormy origins. We found Michael’s clothes folded on the bank of a mountain lake. That was the last we knew of him. We dived and dived to try to find his body, but he had
just ... vanished.’ He sighed and rubbed his brow. ‘I am sorry, Elsa. Now I have made it tough for you to go up there. But you must because you want to and the views are magnificent.
And you will be perfectly safe, of course.’

‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘to hear all of that.’ She had hoped to offer more sympathy, but no sooner did she think about her own loss than a lump filled her throat.

Kenneth chuckled sadly and retrieved his trowel. ‘Thank you. Now you enjoy your walk, and don’t worry about any of these things.’

The lower reaches of Old Colp were covered in tussocks of grey grass or knotted heather in coarse carpets. Blossoms flowered in the tangle, and Elsa assumed they must be
poisonous because the mountain goats had left them alone.

Halfway up the foothills she stopped to admire the view of the town below. The sun found the metal of the manifold weathervanes and lit them up like a bay of prayer candles. Still the windows of
the Church of Saint Erasmus remained indomitably dark. The sky had sullied, thanks to the dusty cloud she had seen earlier above the Merrow Wold, which had now smeared itself northwards across the
heavens.

Further uphill, the path led around a shoulder of the mountain that obscured the town. All signs of civilization were erased. Dark slates sat up like rabbits between the parched grasses and
occasional contorted tree. Several times she glimpsed real hares, or rodents she didn’t quite recognize, hopping after shady burrows. Then later she saw her first Thunderstown goat, a stony
white creature with horns that doubled its height, peering down at her from a natural turret of boulders. It brayed as she passed, and the noise was like the echoes of long-gone landslides.

From this height she could see the rest of the mountain range, running in a jutting line of yellow and brown like an animal jawbone still full of sharp teeth. Caught between some of those peaks
were twists of grey and white cloud, and when at one point she passed along a valley top, she saw a puff of mist climbing the far slopes, as sprightly as one of the goats.

When she came to the windmill it was indeed ruined. A piebald cylinder of bleached plaster and blackened stone, prized open in places by the weather. Between the path and the ruin stretched a
meadow of springy brown grass, across which it looked as if a storm had blown apart the mill as if with dynamite. Some thirty feet from the main structure a broken-off sail arm had been fastened to
the ground by the grass. A layer of something covered it, as dried out and leathery as a gourd. The stained canvas of the sail itself stuck hard and dark to the frame.

As a viewpoint it was everything she’d hoped it would be, offering an unparalleled panorama of Thunderstown and the surrounding mountains. They leaned in above the roofs below like card
players around a table. She inhaled, and the air going into her was so clarified compared to that of the city that she burst out laughing. What relief, that her plan had come good like this. Not
since she first moved to New York had a change of place so delighted her. Back then she had felt drunk at the sheer sight of Manhattan, its chaos and its possibility. This time she had feared that
relocating was what her mum had warned it was: escapism. She had never been good at knowing the difference between running away and running forwards and she reckoned that with her they were
probably one and the same thing. When faced with any challenge or fear she knew only to run, and only in retrospect could she tell whether she had charged in headlong or fled for her life. She
wondered if this was what her dad had really meant when he described himself as weather-powered. To be in constant upheaval. Finally, she turned away from the view to investigate the ruin. An
assortment of cogs and ratchets poked out of its snapped top, growing red dreadlocks of rust. She walked its circumference and found, covered in mosses that brushed loose with the lightest motion,
a door so small it came up only to her breastbone. She tried the handle, assuming it would be locked, but it budged an inch before wedging against its own frame. Age and water had bent it out of
shape, but she shoved it hard and it lurched open.

She ducked through the door and forced it closed behind her, its woodwork groaning as she did so. Inside the ruin it was cool, and beautifully lit by beams of sunlight bouncing between the
rusted gears and splintered timbers above her. It felt like entering a shipwreck. Brighter light shone in thin shafts through chinks in the wall, drawing glowing threads in the air. Knobs of fungus
protruded from bricks and beams, steeped in the orange pigment of the rust that fed them.

She stood there enjoying the noise of the fluting breeze in the decrepit mechanisms above her. She soaked up the atmosphere. She lost track of time.

Then she heard a voice.

When she got over her surprise, she tiptoed to the wall and peeked out through one of the chinks in the masonry.

A man was standing there on the grass, taking in the view of Thunderstown.

The first striking thing about him was that he was there at all. The second was that he was not only bald but entirely hairless. He had a bony, wary face without any eyebrows, eyelashes or any
indication of stubble. Despite this lack of hair he still looked young, and she guessed he was several years her junior, probably twenty-three or twenty-four. He stood firmly over six feet tall and
was broadly built, but his size came from neither muscle nor fat. She had the impression that his body was more like that of a sea lion, as if it were a design from a different habitat in which, if
it were to return there, its shapelessness would be its grace.

He wore a shirt with the cuffs rolled up, jeans worn through at the knees and a pair of shoes so battered that his toes poked out through open lips. She had no idea how long he’d been
standing there. He was all alone and talking to himself. ‘I wonder what would happen to me,’ he said, ‘if I just let go?’

His voice was slow and nasal and deep. He looked at the windmill for a second and she caught a full view of his face and drew back from her spyhole. His eyes were close together, deep and dark.
His nose was smooth and straight like a piece of folded paper. She hoped he couldn’t see her through the tiny crack in the wall.

He began to pace around on the grass, moving with light grace despite his size. He stopped for a moment to gaze down at the town made miniature beneath the mountain and as he did so he looked
forlorn, as if he were marooned on a desert island and staring out to sea. ‘There’s only one way,’ he said, ‘to find out.’

He took a deep steadying breath and ran his hands back over his bald scalp. He bent his back and stared up at the sky. His evident distress made Elsa feel guilty about spying. She wondered if
she could sneak out of the mill and away down the mountain path, so as to allow him the privacy he must surely have come up here to find.

Then the man began to undress. Elsa looked away out of instinctive politeness, but after a moment looked back.

He disrobed methodically. With light fingers he unbuttoned his shirt and tossed it to the grass. He tugged undone the buckle of his belt, then the zipper of his fly, then kicked off his
trousers. He pulled down and stepped out of his underwear.

His body was as smooth as a weathered pebble on the sea shore. He had very little complexion: he was not so much a white man as a grey one. He had a flat pair of buttocks and skin as hairless as
that of his head.

He stood on the ridge between her viewpoint and the sun. His tall body was an eclipse and the light was a corona behind it. He spread his arms to strike a pose of dejected surrender.

Then, very gradually, he began to dissolve.

Like chalk washed into a blur by the rain, his outline began to distort, and almost imperceptibly he lost his form. One minute he was a man and the next he was a blurry grey silhouette. His skin
became a coat of mist. The sun shining from behind him lit him up and edged him with its brilliance, wherein he stopped looking man-shaped and instead resembled a cloud formed by chance into the
posture of a human being.

He broke up. His head caved in, becoming nothing more than a dented sphere of fog. His chest tore apart and the blue sky and bright sun shone through the place where his heart should have been.
He disintegrated, every second less like a man and more like a cloud.

She yelled wordlessly. She fought the windmill door for a panicked, precious second, then rushed out across the meadow. She slowed to a halt only a few paces from the cloud. She had no idea what
she was doing; she was only aware of her heart pounding in her ears.

‘Please wait,’ she whispered.

The cloud flickered with light. She jumped backwards in alarm. A fine filigree of electricity shivered through the vapour. For a second she thought it made up the shapes of arteries, the network
of a person’s veins. Then in a shimmer the lightning was gone.

She reached up to her cheek because something cool and moist had touched it.

Rain. It was scattering out of the cloud in a drizzle.

In her bewilderment she had forgotten to breathe. She gulped for air and in doing so let out a pent-up cry.

Then the cloud began to contract. It puckered backwards into shape. Its ragged outline either dispersed in the air or else smoothed down into flesh, covering once again a frame of arms and legs.
It rebuilt the man she had spied on, and when he returned into definition he coughed and screwed up his eyes. He teetered off balance before doubling up to spew crystal-clear water on to the
grass.