He came with the storms.
Whenever lightning streaked across the darkened sky like so many blinding cracks in the Universe, whenever thunder came tumbling down from the misty hills to grunt and bellow its rage, whenever rain cascaded in sheets or in great round pelting drops, he was there.
I would pull aside the thick rippling curtain, rub the vapour from the cold panes of glass, and look out onto the moors. The mountains and the forests beyond were swathed and concealed in grey sepulchral fog.
It was just us, in our house. Our big, solid old house, like a hunched traveller on our lonely heath. The wind tore into its crevices, making it shriek like a man lost and calling for help, in the middle of nowhere. It had been that way forever; just the house and the moors and the mountains, and us, inside.
And yet he found us.
Perhaps he had heard the cries of the lonely stone in the gales. Maybe he wanted to help. Maybe he just wanted to hear it scream.
In the sleet, in the downpours, in the battles of the angry sky and the rolling dark tangles of cloud, he was there. He stood there. I watched from the vapours of the cold glass panes. Watched him watching me.
He looked like one of us. Dressed like an ordinary man, but he wasn't. You could tell by the way he stood. Mystery was etched into every line of his silhouette. The weather seemed to curve around him, the rain sweeping into columns of glorious shimmering waves about his still body. He was always so still. Just watching.
You would think I'd wonder what he was doing there, in the cold and the wet and the loudness of the thunder giants. You would think I'd ask him, invite him in. I never did. Somehow I felt that if I opened the great oak door he would dissolve into the rain like a phantom, and never come back. Or worse – turn into an ordinary man. I wanted to keep the magic. I savoured the moments of wild awful clashing crashing weather, when I could look at him, in the heart of the storm, and marvel at his otherness.
I didn't feel glad or excited. There was just a sort of rising awareness, of something out there. Knowing that there really was a world beyond the house, beyond the moors, beyond the mountains, it settled me. I always slept better on those tumultuous nights, while the others were kept awake by the ancient wind-screech of our building.
I kept him a secret. Nobody else seemed to notice him, and I never pointed him out to them. I just watched him, watching me, from the cold glass panes.
He was living proof that we were not alone in the world.
I dreamed of his eyes that held eternity, an eternity that did not run straight. It looped and fell back on itself and crossed and span in dizzying ways. All of this I saw, in his eyes, in my dreams. His dream eyes looked into me, and told me what I was. But when I woke up, I had always forgotten the answer.
He never knocked on the door, never did anything but stand and watch, taking in the bent back of the house, like a crooked hag wailing, with her many candlelit windows for eyes. I hid my candle in case he saw me too clearly. I wanted to be mysterious, like he was mysterious, and I wanted to avoid the others' attention. He was my secret, and candles would only spoil things.
I am saying all of this because I want you to know what things were, then. What life was. The moor and the house and us inside, and nothing else ever, forever. That was the world.
I am saying all of this because I need to remember it, because everything is so different now. Because it is like a nightmare that haunted you as a child, that follows you invisibly. You are afraid to look behind you, but you cannot let yourself forget. Forget that you once lived in that impossible place with only a faint notion that something was wrong, that something about the loneliness and the peaks of the crags disappearing into the sombre skies was strange and looming and dangerous.
It all changed. He changed it. The night that I was out on the moors, instead of in the house with the others. The night that the storm came, and I was in it.
The night that I met him.