The Man Who Rained

by Ali Shaw

  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.’

  She felt the earth’s deep electricity filling up the church below her, just as the floodwater filled the streets. It flushed up from ancient rocks and secret subterranean caverns, from the gyro of the great globe itself, up into the foundations and the vaults, rising through the stone walls, surging up the church’s pillars, playing over buttresses and arches, adding its whine to the bell’s hum. It filled every cell of her body. Billions of particles of the earth’s electricity channelled into her, a mountain of energy of which she was the peak. Her jaw fell heavily open. Her mouth tasted full of lead.

  ‘Finn,’ she managed to croak. She couldn’t move. She could sense the energy rising out from the top of her head, lifting her hair with it, reaching up for the storm. She closed her eyes and imagined Finn’s face was only an inch away from hers.

  A pillar of white. Everything in freeze-frame. Raindrops suspended like perfect pearls. And everything getting whiter and whiter until it was all so searing and bright that it was as if her eyes had been replaced with stars. She heard a scream from somewhere. She guessed it was her own.

  The lightning didn’t strike. It set their connection on fire.

  20

  AS DREAMS ARE MADE ON

  Elsa came to. She thought she had opened her eyes because she could see lights twinkling in their hundreds. After a moment she realized she wasn’t blinking. The lights were inside her head and her eyelids were closed.

  Somebody said something. Her body felt like a bottle bobbing on an ocean. She drifted back into unconsciousness.

  She came to again, slower this time. She was lying on a firm but comfortable mattress. There were no lights, only the blotched darkness of her closed eyelids. With great effort, she opened them. Looking at anything felt like staring into the sun, so she quickly shut them again.

  Somebody spoke, but the words were just fuzz in her ears. She tried once more to open her eyes and found the bright world a fraction more bearable. She could make out surfaces, although they all seemed aglow. A shape loomed over her. ‘Try to focus, Elsa.’

  Slowly the shape took on colours, hundreds of them dancing a scintillating jig. Her eyes rolled out of concert with each other.

  ‘Elsa, it’s okay.’

  She took a deep breath. The colours kaleidoscoped across her vision. She choked her need to cry out. At last the colours settled into rows of diamonds, each a different shade and each sickeningly vivid. Together they made a pattern.

  One of Kenneth Olivier’s jumpers.

  She shielded her eyes.

  ‘Elsa!’ Kenneth cried out with relief. ‘Thank God! How are you feeling?’

  She nodded and looked away, at anything but his clothing. This strange bare room she was lying in had grey stone walls, a grey stone floor and a grey stone ceiling, although her blurry vision added green hues to everything she saw, as if the room were lit by gaslight.

  ‘Where am I?’ Her words tasted bitter.

  ‘Drink some water.’

  She sipped from the glass he
offered her, unable to look at him. The water felt like molten metal in her throat.

  ‘You’re in the nunnery of Saint Catherine. It’s where we take all people who are struck by lightning.’

  Of course, she remembered it now. She had been on the belfry with the wind tearing at her clothes and the rain crackling in her ears. She had looked up at the pitch black underside of the storm and whispered Finn’s name.

  The lightning strike had lasted under a second, but she had experienced it as if in slow motion. It started with the air constricting, pressing bluntly at her jugular and the pulses in her wrists. Then her hair had lifted as if she were underwater. She had stood very straight, her spine like a taut rope, and felt the connection her dad had described so many times. A line of electrified air that had joined her to Finn’s storm. She’d stared upwards, awaiting the bolt, but it had not come down from the cloud. It had begun in her, her vision blazing with more light than it felt possible for her eyeballs to contain. Then white fire had ascended in time with her whisper. ‘Finn.’

  For a moment she’d felt so interconnected with him that it was as if they were inside each other’s minds. Her thoughts had boiled with things he remembered and things he felt, carried on the lightning to the root of her imagination, so that they became as lucid as scenes of her own life flashing before her eyes. Betty turning out the light after kissing him goodnight; a canary materializing out of sunlight on to his cupped palms; a mouse creeping over the doorstep of the bothy; a broken vase; a winter’s day when icicles hung as long as swords; Daniel demonstrating how to fold paper birds; Betty laying out cakes and sandwiches for a picnic; starting a campfire by rubbing two logs together and feeling immeasurably pleased at the first fizzling spark; the shockwave of lightning that had flicked Betty away from him; the self-hatred that followed; and at last her, on the day when he first saw her outside the ruined windmill.

  Then, like a fire stamped out, all of it had been over and gone and she had tipped backwards into darkness.

  Kenneth tried to stop her from sitting up. He needn’t have worried because a pain in her ribcage nailed her back to the mattress. She grunted as she hit the pillow.

  ‘Elsa, please go slowly. You need rest.’

  ‘Kenneth ...’ She tried to wet her dry lips, but her tongue was like a pebble. ‘He’s up there! I saw him ... in the lightning!’

  She tried to sit up again, but hot tears of pain rolled from her eyes. She wheezed and screwed up the bed sheet in her fists. ‘What’s wrong with me?’

  ‘Nothing a good rest won’t heal, but all of your muscles seized up when the lightning struck. It will be a while before you can get out of bed.’

  She shook her head. ‘That’s no good. I have to get back to him.’ Again she tried to sit up and again her muscles mutinied. She flopped back in stiff pain.

  ‘You can’t go anywhere,’ lulled Kenneth. ‘You simply need to rest.’

  She began to sob, and her strained muscles doubled her hurt. She had connected with Finn, but she did not know what it meant to have done so. Even if, as it had seemed in the lightning strike, he was up there somehow, disembodied in the chaos of the storm, how could she reach him if she were stuck in this bed?

  Although the cell walls were built from thick stone, she thought she could hear a hushed rumble beyond. ‘Is he still there, Kenneth?’ she sniffed. ‘Please look out of the window for me.’

  The cell had a window that overlooked Thunderstown. With some reservation, Kenneth got up and peered out of it. After a moment he came back to her bedside. ‘It’s a strange thing. Up here the night is so calm, but down there the storm is still raging, yes.’

  She gasped with relief. She grabbed Kenneth’s hand and squeezed it fearfully. ‘How long do you think he can last for?’

  ‘Elsa, what do you mean?’

  ‘How much longer do you think he can rain for?’

  ‘I ... I don’t know what to say, Elsa. I think you should save your energy. It’s a terrible thing to lose a person. Preserve your strength.’

  An appeal of thunder penetrated the cell. She could feel it in the springs of the mattress beneath her.

  ‘Don’t say I’ve lost him. How could you say I’ve lost him when you’ve seen for yourself he’s still up in the sky?’

  He sighed. ‘I don’t know, Elsa. I just don’t know.’

  When once again she tried to sit up she could barely even budge an inch. The bed felt like a coffin and she grunted in frustration.

  ‘Elsa, Elsa,’ soothed Kenneth. ‘Rest. Things are going to be tough for you. You need to look after yourself. You can’t leave this bed until tomorrow.’

  Stuck like this, any hope that she’d woken with deserted her. Back came the powerlessness that she’d felt in Candle Street, and a red-hot hatred for Sidney Moses and Abe Cosser, and a sense that love – in which she had banked her trust – had betrayed her.

  Her dad, too, had let her down. His old story about the lightning’s path to connection – she had been sure that would be her rescue. But what good did it do to connect with Finn for only a fraction of a second? All it did was demonstrate how helpless she was.

  ‘Elsa,’ Kenneth mopped her mouth with a handkerchief, ‘you are very unwell. Perhaps you should go back to sleep.’

  ‘How can I sleep when he’s right there? When the next time I wake he might have rained himself away?’

  ‘Just know that you are among friends and we will do all we can. Dot will be back soon. And Daniel, I expect.’

  ‘Daniel?’

  ‘Yes. He was here for a while after he brought you in. He waited by your bedside and fussed about you and argued with the nuns over what was best for you. Then, when you almost came to earlier, he panicked. He said he’d be the last person you’d want to see, and headed off to hide in the chapel. As for me, I’m just glad he found you. If he hadn’t thought to check the church was secured against the storm ... I dread to think what would have happened.’

  Eventually Elsa managed to drink some more water, but that used up all her energy. After that Kenneth wished her well and said he should go and fetch Dot, who would want to check in on her now she was awake. He hesitated, then kissed her, father-like, on the forehead. He nodded after doing this, embarrassed but satisfied, and shuffled out of the room.

  She exhaled, taking in the stony shade of her surroundings. Her eyes were still hypersensitive from the lightning, making her bed seem to stretch forever, a nightmare of perspective headed for her distant feet. A moth flew in silence around the ceiling, and she wished she could share in its fluttering freedom. There was a chair and a low bedside table, but there was not so much as a vase of flowers or a Bible occupying it. The room was as bereft of distractions as she was of ways to get to Finn.

  The door opened and somebody cleared their throat to request entry.

  ‘Come in.’

  Not Dot but Daniel, who stopped just inside the doorway and bobbed there in an agitated manner that she wasn’t used to seeing in him. ‘Elsa, it is good to see you awake. Um ... I’ll go away again if you would prefer.’

  ‘No, it’s okay.’ Anything to take her mind off itself. ‘I’m just surprised to see you. Kenneth said you were holed up in the chapel.’

  He looked unkempt, as if he had slept there, but he sat down urgently at her side and bent his bearded head close to hers. ‘Elsa, I ... I have come to apologize. I have been a fool beyond reckoning. I never should have tried to get in the way of you and Finn. I hope there is something, someday, that I can do to make it up to you.’

  She sighed. His interferences seemed like years ago now. ‘Unless you can turn clouds back into men, I doubt there’s anything you can do.’

  He ran his hands back through his hair. ‘I will see to Sidney Moses.’

  She grimaced. ‘I don’t want to know. I can’t bear to think about him.’

  He nodded, and bunched his fists together between his knees. After he had heard what the townsfolk had done, he had been full of the need fo
r justice. He had considered taking his rifle to the Moses residence, but he had been needed elsewhere. He knew, from bitter experience, what unfulfilled love could do to a life, and he longed somehow to save Elsa from the agony of it.

  ‘Is it true,’ she asked, ‘that you apologized to Finn?’

  ‘Yes. Although now my promise is as good as broken. I would have made it mean something with deeds, but I never got the chance.’

  ‘Do you ... do you think he’s gone, then? Kenneth was talking as if he had.’

  ‘I don’t know. There is a storm above Thunderstown, so in a sense he is still there. Elsa ... what possessed you to go up to the belfry?’

  She told him about her dad’s lightning mantra, and how on its advice she had climbed the church tower. Daniel listened gloomily, and after she had finished he could see no more hope than her.

  He chewed his lip. ‘Elsa, you know I have never been good at letting things go. Heaven knows I have spent my whole life clinging on to things that I should have left behind me. Only lately have I learned that sometimes you have to let the past leave you. You cannot return to it, and if you cling to it life marches on without you.’

  She covered her eyes. ‘It’s just that ... when the lightning struck me, I saw him there. I can’t give up on him after that. But I don’t know what I can do now.’

  ‘You misunderstand me. I meant to say that I will not let go of him, even if every last raindrop falls out of the sky. Even if every last trace of him evaporates and the sun shines through. They will say I am mad, no doubt, and that this particular madness of mine has held me back my whole life. But that will only make me well practised.’

  ‘Thank you. That means something to me.’ Elsa stared up at the ceiling. She took a deep breath and it made a dry rasping noise like the call of a crow. Daniel steepled his big blunt fingers and pressed them to his forehead, tapping them against his brow while he thought. Far past the nunnery walls, the thunder moaned once more, but now the noise just made her hurt. There would have been a time when she would have enjoyed the hard light enforced on the world by the death of a thundercloud, when the sun knocked down the storm wall and bored a rainbow through air it had turned violet. Now she dreaded that spectacle more than anything else.