The sky was black. The buildings were grey. The streets ran with water and dirty street lamps flickered. It was bitingly cold, and no coat could stay the downpour. Icy droplets beat upon my neck, slid under my collar, and ran down my back. The wind chewed through my jacket, my suit, and my shirt. My hair hung over my face in a dripping mop, and I shook it out of my eyes, in vain trying to see where I ran. No trees, no bus stops, no awnings offered shelter. No shops stood open to welcome me in. The city was empty. The late night had taken everyone. Not a light shone behind dark windows. I was alone in an endless alley, splashing through rivers stinking of refuse and neglect.

Until I saw him.

He was standing across the street, in the dim light of a lamp. I skidded to a stop, and nearly lost my balance. I stood there looking across at him, and he stood there looking back.

He was dressed in a peculiar fashion: a white suit jacket, unblemished by a blotch of moisture, and dark pants and shirt that blended into the surrounding gloam, making him look like shoulders, neck, and head suspended in the blackness. Around his neck was a long scarf of dull crimson. He stood as still as a statue as the tempest raged about him. His left arm was raised at his side and held aloft a wide umbrella which shielded him from the deluge, and from the light of a nearby lamp, which cast a strange shadow upon the ground at his feet. By its light, his jacket seemed to glow, obscuring his environment like a candle after dusk. By its light, a shadow lay across his face, hiding it from view.

A flash of lightning nearly blinded me as I stood stock still in the rain. Its pink hue seared my retinas, obscuring any glimpse I would have had beneath his cowl. The stranger did not beckon, but his umbrella was held wide, not close to the body, as if in invitation. He stood in its latter half, with ample room at his side. On the ground by his feet, clad in shiny, gleaming boots, the circle of rain stretched wide, wide enough for me.

It was late at night. The street was dark and empty. The rain obscured all vision. We were as alone together as two could ever be. But the showers battered my beleaguered head and soaked my shivering form. All I could think of, as I clutched the front of my coat about my neck in a futile attempt to stay the drenching of my undergarments, my breath misting out from the collar only for the cloud to be sliced apart by the torrents, standing ankle deep in fetid flood, was reprieve. And lo, it stood before me.

I stepped out into the rapids that had once been a street and splashed my way towards him. He did not move an inch, did not shrug, or even turn his head as far as I could see. I struggled towards the curb, keeping my eyes turned down for what little good it did me to mark my careful footsteps, until I stood before him. I lifted my foot to the curb to step up to the walk before him, looking up into the dark where his face would be as I did.

Perhaps he wore a hat, a fedora as dark as the black of night that the shadow of his umbrella had also blotted out. Now, standing just below him, I looked up toward his face and saw that which I had sought before: the gaze of his eyes. But this was no normal gaze: shining out of the impenetrable dark, glowing like twin embers amidst the ash, two burning slits like tears in a canvas thrown over a fiery inferno.

A crash of thunder shook me to the core, but nowhere near as much as it shook me to be held captive by such a gaze. Yet captive I was. I looked into those burning eyes and was seized at once by such a sense of destiny, of purpose, of awe, and of terror that I could scarcely blink, even as the rain pelted my face and showered my eyelids. I felt them calling to me, like the inexorable pull of passion, and I was filled with dread, terrible and familiar, like wandering the house alone late at night in the dark.

The fiery glow stared at me, and around them the darkness seemed to shift. It seemed condensed, heavier, thicker, almost corporeal. Maybe it was the rain, falling in sheets around him, or maybe something was moving there beside him, hanging down from beneath his umbrella. In stupefied fascination, I looked closer. It was not one, but many things, emerging from the blackness of the hollow of the umbrella like the tentacles of some horrid creature reaching out of the darkness of the deep. They contorted about his head, twisting, curling, and uncurling, winding splinters and spikes protruding from them as they grasped at thin air, the fingers of the night itself.

He looked at me with those flaming eyes, still as lifeless stone, one pallid arm held fixed at his hip, the fierce patter of the rain on the umbrella above him, the strange, otherworldly tendrils like smoke flailing gently in empty space.

My voice was dead to me. My throat was closed. My heart beat ferociously in my neck while my hands trembled with the cold, and the wet, and the fear that had consumed me. All thought of shelter abandoned me. All hope of dryness and warmth fled from my heart. I turned my tail and ran, staggering up the street, my feet slipping on potholes and drainage lids while I looked back over my shoulder, never letting my gaze leave him for a second. Yet still, he did not move. He remained rigid as a mast, though his eyes followed my flight until they winked out beneath the brim of his unseen headcover.

I tripped, on a pebble or slick patch or something. I stumbled, lost my balance, and fell face first to the ground. My hands flew out to save my head from smashing against the curb, but the water roaring down the road hit me full on, saturating every part of me that had yet to be wetted. Spluttering and gasping, I clambered to all fours and wheeled around.

He was gone.

The sidewalk was empty. The light of the lamp cast unbroken on the pavement. The street was vacant. He had vanished in a moment.

 I scrambled to my feet, staring in disbelief at the hollow space where the apparition had disappeared…so suddenly, and so completely…it was like he had never been at all. Had he been?

I scarcely even felt the rain. I looked left and right, scanning the darkness as though I could suddenly see. It seemed altogether more complete, the buildings blotted out, the lights somehow dimmer. And from every shadow, every hollow, even the tiniest glint of light was those eyes, peering out at me again.

But it wasn’t. He was gone. I was alone again in the dark and the rain. It wasn’t him, I kept saying to myself. I repeated the mantra in my head, as if it could bolster me against the terror. Running, tripping, and slipping through the pouring rain, I kept telling myself he was gone, he was a dream, he was a trick of the light.

The great puddles I splashed through shone like black pearls in the ghostly light. Strange shapes swirled within them as I passed, illusions of the pelting droplets and the forlorn lamps. But these shapes were no reflections. They rose out of the water to wave in midair, as high as I stood tall and higher. I turned my head away, refusing to acknowledge them, but they appeared everywhere I looked. They twisted and curled in the air as they had twisted and curled beneath the umbrella, waving to me. But I looked away, looked straight ahead, turned this way and that to avoid them. It wasn’t him…it wasn’t him…

Until it was.

There he stood, directly ahead of me, as though he had appeared out of thin air, as real and as corporeal as I was. I stopped at a bench, bracing myself against the arm, heaving and gasping for air, inhaling as much rain as oxygen. He just watched me, just stood and watched. His eyes bore into me, right into my soul. The nightmarish entity beneath his umbrella quivered as though agitated, and so did the black tendrils rising up all around me.

I turned and ran again, but soon found him facing me once more. I dashed down a dark alley and met him at the other end. I kept to the darkest shadows I could find, doing everything to hide myself, but always he found me. Always, he was there. As surely as I was soaked through by the freezing rain, I could not escape him.

I ran through an empty park, past a rusty old carousel and a swing set with the seats dangling by broken chains. I zigged and zagged through the gnarled trees, each of which looked like the curled, clawed fingers of some terrible monster reaching up out of the earth. Then I found myself in a wide-open field beside a great, dark lake and stopped dead, my mouth hanging in horror.

The surface of the lake writhed with tendrils, as though the kraken itself lay at the bottom. Tentacles rose up stories high, thick as cars, ready to crush buildings to pieces. Others reached for the sky, wiry thin, but impossibly long, swaying gracefully in midair against all laws of physics and nature, unchallenged by gravity. The water frothed and boiled, spilling out over the banks to flood the rest of the field, and everywhere it spread the ghoulish limbs reached forth. Water had been remade into a portal to the depths, and as ever it fell from the sky that portal spread out to cover the park…to cover the city…to cover the whole earth.

And there he was again, standing by the lakeside. His eyes blazed red. His coat gleamed white. His scarf shined scarlet. From beneath his umbrella now poured forth a great mass of tendrils, impossibly numerous. There was a finality in his posture, though he was unchanged as if he had not moved at all. I could feel it in his eyes. He knew that I knew now.

Through mud and sod, I squelched towards him, waving my hands in the air like a madman. If tears fell from my eyes, they were washed away by the heavy rain so instantly that I could not feel them. I could scarcely hear myself think, let alone cry out or shout over the din. I stood before him so that one step would have taken me close enough to seize the umbrella and strike him about the head with it. His face was still hidden. His eyes turned down to mine as I shook my fist against him.

“Come out with it then!” I screamed into the night. “What do you want from me?!”

He gave me no answer, but the tentacles writhed all the more. He lifted his free hand to his head where it vanished into the shadow around his face. Then he raised it up, as though tipping his hat to me.

His eyes remained right where they were, but the shadow billowed out from his neck like a dam broken. Black smoke gathered into a great cloud around him, yet his clothes and his eyes were not obscured in the slightest. As that cloud rushed towards me, I fled with a cry of horror, but I only fell flat, my face splattering into the mud. The great tendrils from the umbrella wrapped themselves around my ankles and snaked their way up my legs, binding them tight. From the puddles all around me, more sprang forth, engulfing my arms, my body, my head. My screaming was cut off in a choked gurgle as they slid into my mouth and down my throat. They ran into my ears and slithered about my brain.

They covered me completely and slid into my eyes. Then they pulled taut, and I felt myself give, as though I’d been pulled through a gelatinous membrane. I flew out of myself in a million directions, a million pieces, fragmented and distributed, a piece to each tendril. The last thing I saw before I was pulled down into the abyss was the man with the umbrella standing right above me. Somehow, I saw my body, as though from above, watched myself writhing before it, helpless and emptied. He lifted his boot and smashed it down upon my head, crushing my skull down into the mud with a sickening crunch. Then the tendrils pulled me down and I saw no more, felt no more, was no more.