Night Time Mistery

Every night at midnight, the purple clouds came out to dance with the blushing sky. There were rare occasions where, instead of purple, the clouds gloomed with a white luminescence, but that was always related to a coming night storm, or something darker, as I learned in the proper moment.

I used to watch these swirling lights dance spreading over the black sky, like a perennial aurora, a northern light for men and women who hadn't enough money to take a trip to the farther north to see them. These were the northern lights for the poor.

So, all my life, I had been going to bed and slept with this subtle mantle of colours crawling gently into my room and then moving slowly over it, disappearing just before the coming of the sunshine. For some strange motive, I always felt protected and cuddled under the night clouds.

Maybe I was a strange kid after all.

Maybe my akwardness made me notice the man in the rain coming down the street that night. He wore a trench coat and a wide fedora hat, and from my point of view he gave me the impression that he felt comfortable under the rain, and I have to say that it was not a gentle rain that night, au contraire.

His figure, as the whole street and every space touched by the skylight, changed from white to purple, coming and going in a dance of colours, a routine broken only by a randomly burst of intense light followed by the roaring sound of thunder. And softly, every time, the dance of colours begun all over again.

If you ask me why I was awake in that time of the night, I don’t know. Maybe a feeling, a tingle running through the skin of my neck or something else. I can’t tell. The fact is I was not only awake, but I was watching through the window and saw what happened.

That intriguing figure stopped in front of my building, exactly below my window. I saw him lighting a cigarette, inhaling smoke deeply and releasing it calmly. And then, I swear, he looked up at me. I am almost completely sure that he gave me a look from under his hat. I remember this detail because my heart bounced inside my chest as I felt completely captured, amazed for a penetrating but invisible gaze.

A lightning followed by strong thunder spread a brief darkness over the city, giving me a moment to recover the air. And then, when the light returned to the world, there was no one in the street. No one, nothing, nothing at all. Just the empty street under the rain.

I remember the feeling of unbelief of that moment. My jaw dropped as I felt a rising fear coming up from my feet to my neck. Pure and cold fear, the one that people feel in the presence of the unbelievable. I was so amazed and shocked that I didn’t hear the sound of the sirens until they were extremly loud. Three police cars passed at full speed in front of me, running through the place where the hypothetical, the phantasmagorical figure of the man on the rain was a few seconds ago. The man that never was.

It took me years and a forthcoming disaster to met him again, under a very different circumstance.