The Man Who Rained Read Free

Brooklyn bedroom. She sensed all the tenements, all the nearby shops and offices and the distant skyscrapers of Manhattan packing in close around them. Every
window of New York City straining to eavesdrop.
    She opened her eyes. The traffic had vanished and Kenneth’s was the only car on the road. The only visible part of the world was locked inside the yellow wedge of the headlights. The road
had no boundaries, no walls or hedgerows, and the car rocking and bouncing over potholes and scatterings of slate kept her awake. A forever road, as if there were nothing more in the universe than
car and broken tarmac. Then it turned a sudden bend and for a half-moment she could see a steep drop of scree, and sensed that they were at a great height.
    The road straightened and the surface evened. Her head lolled.
    She opened her eyes. The headlights shimmered across nests of boulders and trunks of stone on either side. No grass, only slates splitting under the weight of the car, each time with a noise
like a handclap. Eyes closing, opening. The clock moved on in leaps, not ticks. Either side of the road were trees bent so close to the earth they were barely the height of the car, growing almost
parallel to the shingly ground. A wind whistled higher than the engine noise.
    ‘Awake again,’ said Kenneth jovially. But she was asleep once more.
    Awake again. The moon lonely in a starless sky. Swollen night clouds crowded around it. And beneath those the silhouettes of other giants.
    ‘Mountains,’ she whispered.
    ‘Yes,’ said Kenneth with reverence. ‘Mountains.’
    Even at this distance, and although they looked as flat as black paper, she had a sense of their bulk and grandeur. They lifted the horizon into the night sky. Each had its own shape: one curved
as perfectly as an upturned bowl, one had a dented summit, and another a craggy legion of peaks like the outline of a crown.
    She lost sight of them as the car turned down an anonymous track. The only signpost she had seen in these last few awakenings was a rusting frame with its board punched out, an empty direction
to nowhere.
    They had followed that signpost.
    ‘One more hour to go,’ Kenneth said.
    Saying anything in reply took more effort than waking up a hundred times. She drifted off again.
    When she came to, the car had stopped and Kenneth had turned off the headlights. ‘What happened?’ she asked, rubbing sleep dust from her eyes.
    He pointed past her, out of the window. She turned and straightened in her seat, suddenly wide awake. She could no longer see the mountains in the distance. Stars were brightly visible, but only
in the zenith of the night. She could not see the mountains in the distance because now she was amongst them.
    Through gaps in the clouds moonlight glistened like snowfall, brightening mountain peaks where it landed and illuminating their bald caps of notched rock. Elsa could feel the mountains’
gravity in her skeleton, each of them pinching her bones in its direction. Yet they were not what Kenneth had parked to show her. Ahead of them the road descended dramatically into a deep bowl
between the peaks, so steep that she felt they were hovering high in the sky.
    At the bottom of that natural pit shone the lights of Thunderstown.
    The first time she had seen those lights had been from a plane a few years back, a passenger aircraft like the one she’d disembarked from tonight. She’d been sitting beside Peter on
a second-leg flight, en route to what would prove to be a crappy holiday. He and the other passengers had slept while she leaned her head against the window and watched the night-time world drift
by beneath her. And then she’d seen Thunderstown.
    Viewed from the black sky, the glowing dots of Thunderstown’s lights formed the same pattern as a hurricane seen from space: a network of interlocked spirals glimmering through the dark.
And at the heart of the town an unlit blot – an ominous void like the eye of a hurricane.