Free The Man Who Rained by Ali Shaw Page A

sharp angles from the rooftops and chimneys. It filled the distance with its dust, and of all the mountains only Old Colp was dark enough to show through it.
    She gazed across the street. A weathervane creaked and turned west. In a gutter a crow jabbed at something yellow-feathered. Further off, a wind tugged at washing strung between two rooftops. It
pulled loose one sleeve of a shirt and flapped it about as if it were signalling to her.
    She clutched her hands to her face. All of a sudden she was raging inside for the magic of yesterday. A man had turned to cloud and rained before her very eyes. She should have knocked that
bothy door down to get answers, but instead she had run back to Thunderstown and photocopied reports for eight hours. She had to go back. She had to know.
    She set off at an impassioned pace, out of town and up the broken slopes of Old Colp. She thought of all the questions she would ask the man. She wondered if he would transform
into a cloud again. Then, abruptly, she was lost.
    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