Rainbows After Midnight

The scream left Violet's body before her mind had authorised its release — a sound that began in her diaphragm and tore upward through her chest and throat and out into the hallway with a force that shattered the house's sleeping silence the way a stone thrown through a window shatters the illusion that glass is solid.

Doors opened. The sound of her parents' bedroom door striking the wall was followed immediately by footsteps — heavy, urgent, Robert's boots finding the floorboards with the authority of a man whose body responded to alarm sounds before his mind had finished waking. Evelyn's lighter tread followed half a second behind, her voice already calling Violet's name.

In the fraction of time between the scream and the arrival of her parents, Violet's bedroom erupted.

Colour filled the space. Not the ordinary colour of lamplight or moonlight or any spectrum the visible world produced through mechanisms Violet understood. This was something else — vivid, impossible, a maelstrom of purple and green and electric blue that writhed and pulsed with an energy that seemed to originate from the air itself, as though the atmosphere within the room had been torn open and the tear was bleeding light from somewhere that was not here.

The colours moved. They spiralled and contracted and expanded with a rhythm that suggested intention rather than randomness, the visual equivalent of breathing, as though whatever produced them was alive and the light was its respiration made visible.

And in the centre of the maelstrom, sharp against the chaos, stood a silhouette. Tall. Male. Motionless. The figure occupied the exact position where the voice had originated — the corner near the wardrobe — its stillness within the chromatic storm communicating the same thing the voice had communicated minutes earlier: control.

The colours collapsed. The transition was instantaneous — a contraction of light into a point that winked out of existence like a candle flame pinched between fingers. The room returned to darkness with a violence that struck the senses as forcefully as the eruption itself.

Violet's bedroom was dark. Still. Silent. The posters. The books. The unmade bed. Everything as it had been, as though the colours and the silhouette had never existed.

By the time Robert's hand found the light switch, there was nothing to find.

The bulb hummed to life, casting its pale glow over four familiar walls. No figure. No colours. No evidence of intrusion. Only Violet trembling in the hallway, her fingernails leaving crescents in her palms, her eyes fixed on a patch of empty air.

Robert's gaze swept the room, then found his daughter. She was dressed — jeans, trainers, the clothing of someone who had been outside. The bedroom window stood open, its curtain stirring in a breeze that should not have been admitted at this hour. His jaw tightened. Something moved behind his eyes that was not yet readable.

He asked her where she had been. The question carried more edge than he intended, the anger of a father confronting evidence of disobedience arriving before the concern of a father confronting evidence of terror. His voice teetered between the two registers without settling on either.

Evelyn reached Violet first. Her arms closed around her daughter with the fierce encompassing warmth of a woman whose maternal instincts operated independently of explanation. She did not need to know what had frightened Violet before she could respond to the fact that Violet was frightened. Her hands moved across Violet's shoulders and hair with the diagnostic attention of a mother checking for damage. Her whispered reassurances reached Violet beneath Robert's sharper questions, providing counterpoint.

Violet's throat closed around everything she could not say. The car. The voice. The colours. The man who had been in her room and departed through a mechanism that left no door open and no window disturbed. She said nothing. Her muteness was received by Evelyn as shock and by Robert as evasion.

The creak of a door down the hallway introduced the final element.

Jasmine appeared in the light's margin with the tousled hair and heavy-lidded eyes of a child pulled from sleep. She rubbed her face with one fist, blinking at the scene — her sister trembling, her mother's arms wrapped around her, her father standing in the doorway of a room that appeared entirely ordinary.

She spoke to Violet directly. Her voice was soft, blurred with sleep, carrying the cadence of someone offering reassurance about something she considered familiar rather than frightening.

The man who walks through rainbows, she said. He would not hurt her.

The words arrived in the charged hallway with the devastating innocence of a child identifying something that the adults around her had agreed did not exist. Jasmine's expression carried no fear — only the calm specificity of a girl reporting what she understood, the same way she might have identified a bird by its call or a cloud by its shape. She had seen this before. She had drawn her own conclusions. The conclusions did not align with terror.

Robert's reaction was immediate.

His voice struck the hallway with a force that shocked the air from the space. He addressed Jasmine with a firmness that crossed the boundary between parental authority and something rawer — not anger exactly, though anger was the vehicle. They had discussed this. The rainbow man was not real. The word nonsense landed with the particular violence of a term chosen to obliterate rather than correct.

Evelyn's eyes moved to her husband's face. She had lived with Robert for eighteen years. She knew his registers — the quiet frustration of a long shift, the weary patience of a father managing teenage defiance, the rare genuine anger that surfaced when something threatened the family's stability. This was none of those. This was something she had seen only once before — the last time Jasmine had mentioned the rainbow man — and she recognised it now as she had recognised it then. Not anger. Fear. Fear wearing anger's mask because Robert Dallow did not possess a vocabulary for expressing fear directly.

Jasmine's face registered the impact. The openness contracted into something smaller and more guarded — the withdrawal of a child who has offered truth and received punishment. She lowered her eyes. She retreated down the hallway without protest, her slight figure diminishing toward her bedroom door, her compliance communicating acceptance without agreement.

Evelyn guided Violet toward the kitchen. The kettle and the stove and the familiar ritual of tea would provide the framework for a conversation that would address the surface of what had happened without approaching its depths. Violet moved with the mechanical compliance of someone whose body was following instructions her mind had ceased to issue. The hallway passed around her — photographs, clock, the scent of home — and none of it reached her.

Robert did not follow them to the kitchen.

He stood in the hallway for a moment after Evelyn and Violet turned the corner, his hand still resting on the light switch of a bedroom that the bulb had confirmed was empty.

He turned back toward the master bedroom. His footsteps were slower than they had been when he came the other direction — the urgency of response replaced by the heaviness of a man carrying something he could not set down. The hallway, which he had traversed thousands of times across eighteen years of marriage and sixteen years of fatherhood, seemed longer than it had ever been.

He had heard things underground.

Not recently — or not only recently. The hearing had accumulated across thirty-three years of descending into the earth each morning and ascending from it each evening, the way silt accumulated in a riverbed: gradually, imperceptibly, until the accumulation itself became a feature of the landscape. Conversations between miners conducted in the particular register that men employed when discussing subjects they had tacitly agreed were not suitable for repetition above ground. Observations offered as jokes and received as jokes and filed, by everyone present, in the category of things that were funny because the alternative was that they were true.

Sealed levels. Sections of the mine that had been closed off for reasons the official documentation attributed to structural instability but that the men who had worked those sections — before the closures, before the reassignments, before the retirements that came too early and too suddenly — described in terms that structural instability could not accommodate. Materials that behaved in ways their mineral composition did not predict. Sounds that originated from rock faces where no work was being conducted. Lights in shafts where no electrical supply had been connected.

Robert had dismissed these accounts with the professional scepticism of a man whose livelihood depended on the earth behaving according to physical laws. Mines were dangerous places. Danger produced stress. Stress produced perceptions that rational minds, under calmer conditions, would recognise as the artefacts of exhaustion and fear and the particular claustrophobia that came from spending one's working life in tunnels carved from stone.

He had heard about Project Ironsand. Not by name — or not consistently by name — but as a reference that surfaced occasionally in the way that myths surfaced in communities that had maintained oral traditions for longer than their written ones. Something about materials moved through the mine's infrastructure on schedules that did not correspond to the extraction operations he participated in. Something about government involvement at levels that exceeded what a mining operation, however significant, should warrant. Something about the sealed levels and what they contained and why the people who knew what they contained were not the people who talked about what they contained.

He had not pursued this knowledge. The decision had been deliberate, practical, and — he understood now, standing in the hallway of his own home with his daughter's scream still echoing in his memory — ultimately inadequate. He had chosen not to know because not knowing permitted him to continue the life he had built: the house on Chloride Street, the marriage, the daughters, the sewing machine's murmur and the smell of Evelyn's cooking and the ordinary rhythms that constituted the infrastructure of a family that functioned because its foundations were not examined too closely.

Jasmine's rainbow man had cracked those foundations the first time she mentioned him. She had been ten — earnest, observant, describing with the calm specificity of a child reporting empirical observation a figure that appeared and disappeared accompanied by colours she said came from everywhere and nowhere. She was not frightened. She was interested. She wanted to understand what she had seen, the way she wanted to understand everything she encountered, with the methodical attention she brought to every new piece of information the world supplied.

Robert had shut it down. His fury had surprised Evelyn and frightened Jasmine and had surprised Robert himself with its intensity. The force of his denial was not proportional to a child's fantasy. It was proportional to the possibility that the fantasy was not a fantasy — that the colours Jasmine described matched the phenomena the miners whispered about, that whatever operated in the sealed levels of the mine had manifested on the surface, in his home, in proximity to his children.

He had chosen denial enforced through authority. The rainbow man was not real. The subject was closed. Jasmine had accepted the ruling. Robert had filed his fear in the compartment where he stored everything the mines had shown him that he preferred not to examine, and the family had continued its routines, and the foundations had held.

Tonight the foundations had not held.

His daughter had seen something in her bedroom that had produced a scream capable of waking every person under this roof. The room was empty when he reached it. Violet was dressed for the outdoors and terrified beyond speech. And Jasmine — Jasmine, who should have been asleep, who should have known nothing about what had occurred — had walked into the light and named it with the serene confidence of someone identifying an old acquaintance.

The man who walks through rainbows.