The Man Who Rained by Ali Shaw Read Free Book Online

let go. There, now you know. I let go. Then I heard you calling to me and that made me come back.’
    The drip on his chin fell free and dashed off the broken lip of one of his shoes. In the distance of the sky behind him, a flake of cloud was blowing north, towards the saw-toothed heights of
the Devil’s Diadem. A moment ago, she thought, you were a cloud just like that .
    ‘I don’t understand,’ she said.
    He bit his lip. ‘I’m not sure we should be having this conversation. You shouldn’t be talking to me. We should be frightened of each other.’
    She pressed her hands over her worried heart. ‘I am frightened!’
    He deflated. Now he sounded crestfallen. ‘Really? For a moment I thought that you weren’t. I’m sorry I frightened you. Am I really frightening?’
    She felt dizzy and had to sit down and stare at the grass, where a little golden ant was nibbling through a leaf. She felt as if, in that instant, the world had grown as limitless as it must
appear to an insect. ‘I’m going crazy, aren’t I?’
    ‘No. I explained. I let go.’ He waited for a moment, and then he began to fidget. When he spoke again he sounded alarmed. ‘Please don’t tell anyone in Thunderstown that
you’ve met me.’
    She rubbed her eyes. ‘It was as if I saw you turn into a cloud.’
    ‘Yes. Yes, that’s exactly what you did see. And you have to promise never to tell a soul.’
    ‘I don’t think anybody would believe me.’
    ‘They might. In Thunderstown, they might. And they might try to get me.’ Again he became worried. ‘I should go now.’ He hesitated, then began to walk away from her.
    ‘Wait!’
    He looked back.
    She stood up. ‘You can’t just go . Not after that!’
    He looked at her sadly, opened his mouth as if he wanted to say something else, then turned and kept on walking across the meadow.
    ‘Hey! Wait! Hey!’ She stomped after him. ‘What am I supposed to do now?’
    ‘Just ... leave me alone, okay? Pretend you never met me. Go back to doing, I don’t know, whatever you were doing up here in the first place.’
    She stood there, stupefied in the sunlight, watching him walk downhill towards a stretch of the mountain full of furrows and knotted boulders. Three times, lately, life had so surprised her that
she felt as if the planet itself had stopped spinning. First the news of her dad’s death, then Peter’s unexpected proposal, then – perhaps strangest of all – a startled
minute during which she had watched a man become a cloud.
    When, at the bottom of the meadow, the bald man reached the place where the path veered out of sight, he paused for a second and looked back at her over his shoulder. Then he vanished around a
stack of boulders.
    No sooner had he gone than she felt the urge to run, although she didn’t know whether she should bolt for the safety of Kenneth’s house or chase the man to get some answers. For a
long minute she stood on the spot, held perfectly taut by two opposing forces. But she did not want to wonder about him forever. She set off in pursuit, the soft ground putting a spring into each
pace. Past the boulders the path dropped into a gully, in which there were a great many squares and triangles of slate, but no sign of the man. Then she spotted a wet blot on one of the stones,
then another, and since the sky was bare she reasoned that these must have come from his soaked clothes. She followed their direction until their clues dried up, then pressed on until she came out
on to smoother slopes that were scattered with lonely trees and heads of rock. Here she stopped with her hands on her hips, surveying the mountain for some sign of him.
    As she paused she saw a little house built from uneven stacks of slate and tiles, camouflaged by the shadow of a gnarly old bluff it backed up against. It was a bothy, a tiny bungalow, with just
one door and one window, a wilderness shelter similar to the ones she had seen in the Ouchita Mountains, which provided