The sky had been an oppressive white. The day, a suffocating overcast, was only the latest in a long series as cold winter wearied under spring’s amorous entreaties. Eventually, even this harsh mistress is overcome, and the torrents overflow. It is a ghastly thing, the tedium, the repetition, of nature. I don’t know if the black fissures of the shattering heaven were more of a sudden horror or whether they were a relief to the monotony. I felt each, in due course, but I think it was relief that came first; indeed, the horror did not last long.
The sound was deafening. It corresponded with the murder, of course. I was too much in the heat of things when I drove my dagger into his back to take notice at the time, but on recollection, I am sure that those terrible thunderings were not merely precipitated by the fatal stroke, but the two were actually in concert as if each bloody thrust not only tore into my victim’s flesh—it was as though I was also rending heaven.
I don’t know what possessed me. Possessed? That is a coward’s word. I mean, I don’t know, really, why I acted as I did. Everyone seems to think it an overreaction, and had I known the consequences…but no, I would have done it all the same. He was—what is the word?—there was a quality about him. You would know it if you met him. He seemed sweet and charming, I’m sure, but I could see the truth if no one else could. There was light in his eyes, delight, I might say. He was the sort of pathetic being who loved everything, even me.
I know, in public, he was my harshest critic. I could abide that. I am not a prideful man. It was not his repudiations, public and private, that drove me—it was that look, that compassion, that sad turn of the mouth. At the same moment he railed against me and my supposed heresies, he looked at me with those bright eyes as though he’d as soon as weep over my damnation as proclaim it.
It was in that final meeting I saw how insidious that gross empathy was. For a moment I almost…when he said he would forgive me, I knew he meant it. All throughout our long struggle he had been planting those seeds of—those overtures—to bring me back. He wasn’t satisfied with an enemy. I knew, if it went on any further, he’d win, and my soul would have been lost. I’d have become one of his students, no doubt, and he would have lovingly instructed me.
I had to act fast before I weakened, before I succumbed to his love.
There was a moment, my hands bloody, the body at my feet, that I wondered whether or not I might somehow disguise my impromptu murder. I was staring down at his motionless corpse (I had yet to notice the change in the sky) when I felt the rain, a huge blob of rain fall onto my head. It felt warm. I remembered the thunder, then, and I looked up at the black scars traced across the sky.
Then out of those wounds poured forth blood. The red rain fell upon the city, and I knew nothing could wash out the stains and cover my crime.
Tale Told 