For the most part, evening was a pleasant time for Matthias. He would spend the orange hours with his back against an oak tree in the city's central gardens, an assembly of textbooks and folders sprawled out around him and no music save for the chirps and whistles of songbirds in the boughs above him. It was the light that he enjoyed, too; the central gardens covered an unsheltered hilltop that was basked in a russet glow at every sunset, and even when it wasn't, Matthias found stormy greys to be oddly peaceful and refreshing.
His last class of the day had ended at five, and within a quarter of an hour he had hauled his bike up the path to the gardens and set it down against the tree next to him. The wind was vicious—weather reports on the radio that morning had forewarned a violent rainstorm. Yet he did not care. Each day he made sure to laminate his note sheets between classes so he could study even in downpours, and each day he would endure the mockery of his friends who would, on occasion, snatch his papers or glasses and wave them just out of his reach as if he were a playful puppy. Sometimes those memories rose up in him when he was isolated in the gardens and he would laugh, for despite their estrangement he enjoyed the company of his odd-humoured friends, and cared little when they stole away his things or laughed at his ever-so-slight stutter.
That had happened during their first class this morning, and when he settled down amongst the damp tree roots, he wiped the drizzle from his hair and laughed.
Just the same as always.
As per usual he had not bothered with covering the already-sodden ground with a coat—he hadn't even deigned to wear one earlier on—since when he got home nobody would complain or even really care that he'd spoiled his trousers with streaks of slick mud. He noticed that he seemed to do most things alone, now that he had the chance to reflect upon it. Most of the time his friends would be busy with their own clubs or other, better friends, and he would be left alone to nibble cinnamon pastries in the library with a stack of books next to him.
Oh, how he loved that library! An entire corner was packed with weighted, hardback copies of the great classics; Kierkegaard's philosophy papers, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, the collective life works of Tolstoy and even the proses of the old American crime writers like Chandler and Hammet. He had long ago worked his way through Shakespeare's plays and sonnets and even memorised Andersen's fairy tales as a child.
In all honesty, he had finished all of his homework for the day at his lunch hour. Now it was an anthology of crime works from the old American Black Mask magazine that he was buried in, working his way through every line with such profound excitement and interest that he did not notice that the storm was gathering, and only when a deluge of water flecked his book's yellowed pages with heavy grey stains did he notice how late it had become.
And he panicked.
His watch had frozen two days ago and for the evenings since then he had relied on the position of the sun for the time; a sun that was now choked out by a thick fog of black clouds. In a dazed rush he haphazardly stuffed the immense anthology back into his rucksack and made a dash towards the steep stairway down the hill to the streets. Twice on his way he skidded on the slick mud and crashed face-first into the ground; a high tolerance for pain stopped him from yelling at the sharp sting in his cheeks each time. He would be bruised all over by the next dawn.
With the same carelessness he almost leapt down the staircase, his hand hovering over the shining metal rail for guidance more than steadiness against the ravaging winds. Good lord, how late was it?
What he didn't see through the mist gathering on his glasses was a tin drink can that someone had dropped on the stairs, blown up against the back of the step by the wind rather than down and out of his way. What he didn't see was the pool of cola and rainwater that surrounded it, and the bend in the rails on the step above it that his hand was whisking over, and the complete obvious lack of people out in the storm.
What he didn't see was his foot landing on the can – he only felt the sickening surge of horror and adrenaline as he lost balance and went flying forwards down the staircase.
His eyelids snapped shut. He screamed onto a wind that whipped his voice away.
And braced for the impact.
And it never came.
The chain of movements was too swift for him to register; only a weathered passer-by would have seen, and they would have passed it off as a weariness-induced hallucination.
But what his buzzing mind puzzled together as it recovered from the myriad of shock and utter terror was that he had not crashed into the stone steps and broken every valuable bone in his body. Instead he vaguely registered the soft, familiar firmness of tree bark against his back, and a pool of shadows blotting his vision with an intangible ink. Over the course of the long minute it took for his thoughts to assemble themselves that inky blackness became distilled and parted, and a blur of shapes took their place. He could barely make out the silver line of the rail and the mellow green of the grass spread across the hill, and in his central line of sight a blurred figure that seemed to hover, watching—no, observing—him.
To his later frustration he could not find the strength in his trembling limbs to move or speak as the figure slipped off a coat or jacket of some kind and laid it down over his soaked body. Only then, when he was wrapped in the heavy coat's warmth, did he realise how desperately cold he had been.
And it was only then, when the figure turned and began walking down the steps away from him, that he could make out a partly shaven head and a black Christian cross seemingly tattooed onto his now-bare left arm.
Before he could move, the figure was gone.
And, trapped in an unrelenting haze of lingering fear and confusion and bone-biting cold, Matthias gave in to exhaustion and made himself as small as he could beneath the stranger's coat, too shaken and shattered to move and reminding his still-healing mind rather obscurely of a hedgehog balled up and waiting for the fox to figure out where best to strike a killing bite.