The Man Who Rained (9 page)

Her passion sputtered out. She came to a halt so suddenly that she tripped. She had thought she recognized the track, the boulders and the harrowed trees that leaned like signposts, but she had
no memory of the view that opened before her now: a valley full of weathered rocks and beyond them the horny foothills of the Devil’s Diadem. She looked back the way she had come at a
landscape without milestones. She supposed that dusk was soon due, so she begrudgingly turned to retrace her steps to Thunderstown. Then, to her surprise and horror, the track forked at the base of
a valley and she could not remember which path she had come down.

As if in mockery of the morning, when she had watched the sunrise crown Drum Head then rush through the town in a golden outpouring, the dusk was brief and the sunset as fleeting as a smoke
signal. A few pink bars flared across the sky while she toiled up the path she hoped would lead her back. Then the light blotted out behind Old Colp’s eclipse. She shuddered. She still had no
idea where she was or how to get back. The fierce desire that had driven her up here was gone with the evening light. Nearby an animal yipped, and she couldn’t tell whether it was bird or
beast. She scrambled onwards, pleased that the path had started to ascend, hoping that the higher ground would offer her a view she could use, but when she reached the path’s crest she saw
only expansive black slopes. In the sky vast clouds had spread like ink spills. The only light was a jaundiced smudge where the sun had died out behind the mountain.

She sat down forlornly on a rock. Darkness drained the land. The visible world became small and black; but beyond sight it echoed with the tuneless symphonies of the wind. She wondered when she
had last been so immersed in a night. Not since her last in her childhood home, when she was fifteen and could not sleep because all of her belongings were taped away in boxes, ready to be
relocated in the morning to the new house her mum had bought. Her mother had never really liked living on a ranch in the empty prairie, so when she kicked Elsa’s dad out she headed straight
back to the city of Norman. It was only when they went to visit the new place, a bright wooden house in a leafy suburb, that Elsa realized how much she loved that ranch in the middle of nowhere. On
her final night there, while her mother snored in the adjacent bedroom, she had slipped out of bed and crept downstairs, remembering how she had tiptoed just so as a little girl when she and Dad
escaped for morning storm hunts.

That night she had wandered a long distance from the unlit ranch. As she’d sat down on springy earth, the darkness had felt like a sister. The night was kin to the lightless workings of
her heart and lungs, the pitch-black movement of her blood in her veins. All of her feelings happened in darkness, in emptiness as immeasurable as the expanse of the firmament above her, of which
the stars were but the foreground.

Now, in this night on the mountain, she felt that same darkness inside her again. Without the metropolitan fluorescence of New York she could feel it going into her like a thread through the eye
of a needle. It suffused her and reassured her that, lo and behold, it had been in her all along. She was, at heart, just as empty as the night, and despite being so lost she was grateful for the
rediscovery.

When the animal call sounded again it startled her out of herself. It howled nearer now and there could be no doubt – it was a wild dog. All at once it appeared. It prowled into the cusp
of her vision. Even a few yards away its body was hard to pick out. Its fur was as dark as the night clouds. Its teeth when it bared them were moon-pale. Its eyes were freckled with white like the
zodiac.

It padded to a halt and stood in front of her, panting and staring up along the length of its snout.

‘Hello,’ she whispered pathetically.

Its tongue flickered across its nose. It slinked past her and trotted away a few paces. There it paused and looked back, idly swishing its tail.

She stood up, hesitated for a second, then followed. It loped along at a fast pace, and in her attempts to keep up she stubbed her toes painfully on a stone and tripped through a rut in the
earth. It kept moving, weaving down through pathless valleys and up slopes she had to ascend on all fours. When she reached the top of a peak she shrieked to find the dog lurking in wait for her,
its muzzle point-blank to her face, its breath rancid and meaty. Then she realized that beyond the dog, at the bottom of a long and easy descent, shone the lights of Thunderstown.

She laughed to see their glowing amber spiral, so welcoming after having been so lost. Then for a second she had to shield her eyes because out of nowhere a blast of wind hit her, kicking up
dust from the soil and flapping her hair against her ears. This wind did not smell fresh like an alpine breeze, but grimy like feral fur. Then it was gone and she uncovered her eyes. She turned to
the dog to pat or scratch her thanks, but it had already left her. Surprised, she studied the night in every direction. It must have run off, into the darkness.

The next morning, when she left for work, Elsa found Kenneth Olivier standing on a garden chair in the front yard of his house on Prospect Street, holding a battery-powered
radio up to the sky like an offering. To its aerial he had affixed an extension bent from a coat hanger, which he now reached up to tweak an inch to the left. The adjustment changed the tone of the
static crackling from the radio’s speakers, but still all it would emit was a crackle and a hiss.

‘Oh, hello, Elsa,’ he said upon noticing her. He kept the radio held aloft. ‘It’s the heat we’ve been having, see? It’s playing the devil with the reception
for the test match. The television’s a lost cause and the radio looks to be another.’

She had slept badly, and once she had given in and left the pretence of her sleep, it had taken her five minutes to pluck up the courage to open the curtains, afraid to find another wild dog
crouching there in the courtyard. When she had finally opened them the courtyard had been bare, but her unease had persisted.

‘Elsa?’ Kenneth put down the radio. ‘Are you feeling okay?’

‘Yeah,’ she said. Then, after a pause: ‘I wanted to ask you about something. This might sound crazy, but ... I keep seeing these dogs ...’ And she told him about the
animals, the one who had lurked in the courtyard yesterday morning and the one who had guided her last night. She didn’t tell him about the man she’d seen, although she could tell he
was concerned by her ventures in the mountains after dark.

‘Listen, Elsa, I tried to tell you about these dogs before. They’re not like other dogs. They’re different.’

‘What do you mean?’

He scratched his head and looked wistfully at his useless radio.

‘Come on, Kenneth. You were going to say something more than that.’

He cleared his throat. ‘I don’t expect you to understand. Part of them is weather.’

‘Part of them is
weather
?’

For the first time since she had met him she saw a flash of irritation in his expression, although he quickly buried it. ‘Well, of course you should believe in whatever you want. Perhaps
this is just another superstition from a superstitious town.’

‘Sorry, it’s just ... you can’t be serious?’

‘Look, Elsa, I am just trying to make things clear to you. For my part I have found the world a far more bearable place to live in ever since I stopped trying to assemble a list of things
I believe in and a list of things I don’t. Instead I have resolved to believe in just a single thing: my own ignorance. The world is bigger than the confines of Kenneth Olivier’s
head.’

‘I’m sorry. I bugged you about it and then I overstepped the mark.’

He chuckled. ‘Don’t worry. Because if you stay here worrying, you are going to be late for work ...’

They smiled at each other, then she set off for the office and her thoughts went back to her cloud man from the mountain. At work she became quickly reacquainted with the photocopier, but on her
lunch break she found a bench in the church square and pulled from her bag the map she had used to find Old Colp’s ruined windmill. Tonight she would be better prepared to find the bothy.

No sooner was her afternoon shift over than she had changed into her sneakers and was hurrying up the mountain. Uphill, the world became hushed. The brown mountain grass and the mounds of
heather stood as motionless as the ranks of boulders that crested each ridge. The sky was a tinny blue, and barred in the north with diagonal clouds. When a bird of prey whistled overhead it
sounded loud as a siren. She looked up in time to see it become a plunging black chevron landing death on some unfortunate mammal.

When she reached the wreckage of the windmill she stopped to catch her breath. She found the spot where she had watched the man turn to cloud and rain on the meadow, and she fancied that the
grass was greener there. After her hurried climb it was pleasant to imagine the cool touch of water, but she was too close now to stop and daydream. She set off along the gully she had followed the
man down, the slates grinding beneath her footsteps, and before she knew it she was at the bothy.

She approached the front door and rested her fingertips for a moment on its white-painted wood. She had to calm herself before she could knock, for now that she was here she was nervous at the
thought of seeing him, and perhaps seeing cloud seep out of him again. It took her a moment to take control of her feelings, for her instinct was to either race away downhill or charge on into the
bothy, demanding answer after answer. A measured approach was required, and that had never been her strong point.

She tapped her knuckles lightly off the wood. Her feet were shuffling nervously on the step when the door opened.

His eyes widened when he saw her. A weird pallor of shadow and light rippled across his hairless face, like the shadow of a cloud dappling across a field. She was again struck by his size and
peculiar lack of pigmentation, as if he had no blood to show through his skin.

He looked like he wanted to run and hide, but to her delight she had him cornered. ‘Hey,’ she said.

‘It’s you.’

‘Yes. Me.’

He tried to shut the door, but she stepped quickly forwards to block it. ‘Wait! Please. I’m sorry to ambush you like this.’

‘Then why are you here?’

She liked his voice. Each word was like the dry push of breath that blows out a candle. ‘I suppose ... I just want to know what I saw.’

‘It’s better for you if you don’t.’

She swallowed. ‘Then you’re going to be seeing a lot more of me.’

He sighed and looked past her at the slopes. He was wearing those same broken-lipped shoes he’d worn before, and a pair of jeans whose denim had faded almost to white, and a shirt that had
perhaps been red or orange once, but had turned with time to a bleached yellow. ‘Are you alone?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Okay ... First you have to make me a promise. If I tell you all I can, will you leave me alone?’

‘Sure. I promise.’

‘And will you promise not to tell a soul?’

‘Okay, I promise that too. I only know one person in Thunderstown, anyway.’

He nodded. Then right away he looked puzzled. ‘Wait ... you’re not from Thunderstown?’

‘New York.’

His mouth made an O. ‘I’m sorry, I should have been able to tell that from your accent. But I don’t hear many voices up here, let alone New Yorker ones.’

‘Actually my accent’s kinda Oklahoman. That’s where I grew up.’

He looked confused. ‘Oak-what?’ he asked.

‘La-homa,’ she said, unable to hide her delight that he didn’t know the name. It gave her the spine-tingling assurance that she had come as far away from home as she had hoped
she would all summer.

‘You’d better come in.’ He moved inside the bothy and motioned for her to follow him. She held back for a moment on the hearth, then took a forwards step that felt like a leap
of faith.

The building’s low ceiling and confining walls told of its original function as a simple shelter. The main living space was no bigger than her bedroom in Kenneth’s house, but it
still managed to cram in a sitting area, including a pair of wooden chairs and a small eating table. A door on the opposite wall opened on to a bathroom, and a wooden stepladder fixed to the wall
climbed to a bedroom converted out of a loft.

But it was the man’s paper models that caught her attention. She had noticed the quantity and variety of them when she had peered in through the window, but inside she kept spotting more.
As well as the countless paper birds that hung on mobiles from the ceiling – which now rippled their wings in the breeze flowing from the door as if they were real falcons riding on the
thermals – there were paper animals tucked in every cranny. On shelves where in other houses books or photo frames might have been arranged, proud paper horses and paper dogs posed among
paper trees with leaves twizzled out of paper branches. Unfolded sheets were stacked up on the table, and it seemed that she had caught him at work, for alongside them was a work-in-progress model:
a half-formed animal she could not recognize.