Let me just address this first. After my last post (if you’re new and want to catch up, this might help), I got some questions about why I didn’t go somewhere else for college. The truth is… I can’t. I didn’t get accepted anywhere else and believe me, I sent out a lot of applications. I’m not exactly college material. I didn’t even know what AP classes were until my college counselor was helping me figure out my first semester’s schedule. (for those not in the US, AP classes are advanced placement classes that can count as college credit, which I guess is a thing in other highschools, but certainly not ones like mine where no one plans on going to college after graduation)
Maybe after my first year I can like… transfer? or something, but even then I kind of need the scholarship I’m on. It’s either that or take on massive debt with predatory interest rates and like I just feel I’d rather take my chances than be still paying off loans when I’m in my 40’s.
There’s no guarantee it’s safer anywhere else, either. Old land is everywhere. Most people are just blissfully unaware of it.
Also, sorry for not replying to comments last time, I read them all but I was just so stressed and maybe having an emotional breakdown.
But back to the matter at hand.
I didn’t know what to do after Chicken Tendie’s last message. What I wanted to do was find Chicken Tendie and punch him in the face but that was just an angry wish, I’m not really a confrontational person. I grew up with the more subtle art of being mad at someone. Snide remarks and the silent treatment. That sort of thing.
Though I did super glue someone’s locker shut in middle school once, does that count as being confrontational?
My anger at Chicken Tendie wasn’t productive, though. As much as I want to stay out of the weirdness going on around here, I still felt like I was responsible for sweater girl’s predicament. Sure, sure, I didn’t know, but I was raised around inhuman things. It doesn’t mean that I’m going to be able to somehow deduce when I’m dealing with something unnatural right away. I don’t feel guilty for not figuring out what the laundry lady was until it was too late.
It’s more that I know there’s a balance to dealing with the inhuman. There’s rules. Broad, unspoken rules that govern interactions and the fulfillment of debt between people and unnatural things.
If you are the one that causes harm to come to someone, then you must also be the one to make it right.
Sometimes you’re the only one that can make it right.
I got my jacket and hurried from the dorm room. Cassie wouldn’t be back for a while as she had two classes back-to-back and I didn’t know the other girls in my dorm well enough to ask them for help. Besides, there was a much more mundane means of getting help for this situation. One that anyone would take, given my situation.
I went to campus security.
Their office was located in an unobtrusive one-story building that I only knew how to find because it was attached to the on-campus grocery. It sat near the middle of campus, next to a tiny parking lot. The building was functional and that is about all that could be said of it. Like they built it out of necessity because they had to put these miscellaneous administrative departments somewhere and didn’t want to sully the main administrative building with their presence.
I told the person at the front desk that someone broke into my room and they eventually got me to a bored looking middle-aged man that reluctantly pulled out some paperwork to fill out as I talked. I started to get the feeling that since the only crime was entering my dorm room and no real harm was done, he didn’t care all that much.
I wish I understood what the heck campus security is even for. At first I figured they functioned much like the police back home did - an extra layer of bureaucracy to protect the town from real consequences. Which I suppose they are, but it wasn’t in the way I was hoping for. The police back home at least knew when to get Kate’s family involved to sort things out. This guy just wrote some stuff down, sighed deeply, and shoved it in among the other papers on his desk with a promise to look into it.
“That lady is not - normal!” I exploded when I realized I was going to be sent on my way without a thing happening.
“Sure, sure,” he said. “We’ll take care of it.”
It struck me then. I was the outsider here. If they were protecting anyone, they were protecting the campus, and this time I was on the outside. I was the person they wanted to keep in the dark.
I decided to clue him in to the fact that I wasn’t nearly as naïve as the other students.
“Do you know anything about monsters?” I asked grimly. “Because I sure do.”
His expression went slack. It was like someone flipped the ‘off’ switch in his brain. His eyes stared vacantly past me and his jaw swung open. This wasn’t an expression of disbelief or surprise - I think if I had gently prodded him, he simply would have fallen limply out of the chair. It was like a puppet’s strings had been cut in front of my face and I could only sit there, staring in shock, my heart hammering in my chest.
Then his gaze cleared and he came around with a slow roll of his head, his eyes rolling up and around before finally settling on where I sat across from him once again. He gave a long, lazy smile, and he looked at me without really seeing me.
“Monsters,” he slurred. “Oh surrreee. Monsters.”
And he giggled.
“A-are you high?” I asked in disbelief. “This isn’t funny! There are things out there! I’ve seen them!”
His expression changed again. It snapped into a twisted anger, his brow furrowed and his eyes narrowed tight enough to etch deep creases into his flesh. When he spoke, he spat each word while I sat there with my back pressed against the chair, unconsciously trying to put more distance between us. I felt like he would leap across the desk and snap my neck with his bare hands from the way his fingers jerked and convulsed on the desk surface.
“There is nothing out there,” he said.
Each word was barked with incredible effort, like a hook was dragging them out of his throat. His chest seemed to writhe with the effort.
“Nothing,” he repeated. “The rain is just the rain.”
He wasn’t even looking at me, I realized. His eyes were unfocused. It was like I didn’t even exist anymore. Who, then, were his words for? He kept repeating it, over and over. There was nothing out there. The rain was just the rain.
Bullshit, I thought. But I knew better than to say so out-loud.
His face was growing red. Froth formed at the corners of his lips. He began to shred the papers on his desk, his fingers curled like claws. I watched as my report that he’d dutifully written down was ripped in half and then half again.
There was nothing out there. The rain was just the rain.
I slid sideways out of the chair, stumbling away from his desk. No. This couldn’t be happening - no. I’d come here for help and instead - instead - I didn’t know what was happening. The person in front of me continued to writhe, repeating his mantra over and over, caught in the throes of something he couldn’t resist.
I ran. I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t help him so I thought, maybe, if I removed myself as the cause, it’d get better.
I don’t know.
The person at the front desk absently bid me a good day as I rushed past them. Their words sounded vacant, as if whatever had gripped the man helping me had thrown its net across the entire office, blinding them to my distress. I fled, bursting out the front door, and then paced up and down the sidewalk once or twice, trying to catch my breath, trying to think straight.
Finally, I took a deep breath, and stepped back inside. The person at the front desk greeted me as if they’d never seen me before and asked how they could help. Down the hallway I could see the man that had taken my report getting a drink from a water fountain.
I stammered that I’d mistaken the door for the grocery and hurried back out.
I started crying as soon as I stepped out of the building.
I thought… leaving my home would mean something. That everything would be different, no, that it would be better. That I’d be leaving behind the secrets and the fear.
I feel so naive. This is just how our world is and once you know what to look for, you can’t go back.
I sat down on the curb at the edge of the sidewalk, buried my head in my hands, and cried. There was something out there in the rain and it didn’t want to be found. Whatever it was, it was entrenched. It’d taken over campus security, a student’s first recourse for assistance. What else did it have a hold over? I felt so scared and helpless. There was no old sheriff here to help me. No list of rules. It was just me.
“Hey,” someone said from a few feet away. “You okay?”
I looked up and through my tears I saw a man that looked vaguely familiar.
“Have we met?” I asked.
“I think so. At the graveyard? You were with your mom?”
It was the student that warned me about the rain.
“I saw you walk out from campus security,” he said awkwardly. “They can be pretty useless. Do you want to go to the town police?”
“No, it’s nothing they’ll care about.” I stood, hastily wiping at my tears with the back of my hand. “Someone broke into my room and went through my things. They didn’t take anything but it’s just… crossing a line, you know? It’s really something I should handle myself. I think I know what I need to do. I just don’t want to do it.”
I glanced off towards the direction of sweater girl’s dorm. If I went there and tried to help sweater girl directly - what then? Would laundry lady’s earlier goodwill be revoked? How could I hope to deal with something inhuman when I didn’t know what it was? I had no weapons, no protection, and no knowledge. This was the kind of thing that got people carted out of the campground in body bags. My throat was tight with fear.
“Would it help if I walked with you?” the student offered. “I’m going in that direction.”
And I agreed. I thought I was crazy for doing so - who stumbles across someone having an emotional breakdown and offers to keep them company just like that? Or am I just being too cynical? But it did make me feel more normal, walking across campus with someone else keeping up a conversation about boring, mundane things. He told me about how campus security arrested a bunch of students having a Nerf gun war a few years back and charged them with ‘inciting panic.’ Useless, he laughed. All of them.
Then we were at sweater girl’s dorm and I told him I’d be fine from here.
His name is Grayson and he’s a sophomore. I got his discord handle so I can contact him again.
I loitered around the lobby until I could get into the dorm floors through the ancient practice of following closely behind someone else. Easy enough.
Sweater girl’s hallway was empty. I could hear music faintly coming through the doors of some of the rooms, so there were people around, they just weren’t out of their rooms. When I reached sweater girl’s dorm number, my stomach twisted into a guilty, horrified knot.
Her door was open and her room was ransacked. All her clothing had been thrown out of her closet and dresser and shredded. A confetti of fabric scraps coated the floor. I shuffled into the room and desperately cast about, kicking the piles of ruined clothing aside, searching for any hint of what had happened to her.
She wasn’t answering on discord. I’d messaged her hours ago. Sure, she could be in class, but somehow I doubted it. I desperately scanned the bookshelves and the rest of the room. Her purse was still here. A backpack hung on the back of her chair. Maybe it was her roommate’s, I thought desperately, and she really was at class. But no - that backpack - I remembered it. It was the one she’d pulled the extra sweater out of.
I was too late. Of course I was too late. Hadn’t I delayed in my stupid hunt for more information? Hadn’t I been stalling when I went to campus security? Wasn’t I searching for someone else to take care of my problem for me, because I was scared to do so myself?
And now here I was standing in the ruins of my mistake.
In panicked desperation, I ran from her room. Down the hall and I burst through the doorway of the laundry room. I’m glad the hallway was empty, because I can’t imagine what a sight I made. Wide-eyed, frantic, running mindlessly down the corridor.
I froze in the doorway. The laundry room was the exact same as the one in my dorm. Maybe this doesn’t seem surprising, but my dorm and her dorm were not the same floor plan. They were quite different, actually. My dorm had four wings around a central area and was rather aged. The carpet was threadbare. The furniture in the common areas was probably older than I was. Sweater girl’s dorm, on the other hand, had to be only a handful of years old. The carpet was fresh, the common area was sleek and modern, and the floor plan was an elongated ‘L’.
I expected the laundry room to be modern too. New appliances. Linoleum that wasn’t so scuffed and worn. Or at the very least, for it to be in a slightly different sized room. Yet when I stepped through that doorway, I was hit with a sudden sense of disorientation, like I could no longer reconcile this place I was currently in as different from the laundry room of my own dorm. The similarity was that striking. It was like a perfect replica, down to the noisy coin-operated washing machines and the stacked wall of dryers.
All of them were in use except for one dryer. I walked over to it and peered inside. I didn’t know quite what I was doing, other than I was following my instincts.
Empty. I started to turn away, disappointed. What was I expecting to find, after all? Then something caught my eye. A flash of color and a glint of reflected light. I pushed my glasses further up on my nose and took another look.
A fingernail was caught on the back of the dryer. Just the fingernail, the end still bloody from where it was ripped from a hand. It shone with glittery purple nail polish.
The bathrooms all require key codes to enter, so I threw up in the laundry room trash can instead.
With my stomach empty, I could think a little more clearly. Part of me wanted to just walk away and pretend I didn’t see anything, but then I would have to live with that resting on my conscience. Someone’s daughter would just vanish with them never finding out what happened.
Sort of like how my father vanished.
So with trembling limbs, I crawled into the dryer. I plucked the nail out of the side and held it tightly in my hand, even as my stomach twisted queasily. The drum was just barely big enough to fit me and I had to curl up, my head almost between my knees. I felt tremendously silly, but sweater girl had possibly been through here and I couldn’t think of anything else that would take me to her.
I only had to hope that whatever was going to happen would hurry up and happen before anyone came along and found me stuck in the dryer like an idiot.
The door slammed shut. I shrieked in surprise and slammed my shoulder against it in panicked instinct, but the door didn’t budge. Instead, the drum began to slowly rotate. It tilted, pitching me forwards, and then flipped me upside down. It did this for a few rotations, until I was dizzy and flushed from the blood rushing to my head. I slammed my elbow against the door but it refused to budge.
Something had turned it on. But it certainly didn’t seem to be transporting me to wherever sweater girl had gone. This was just a cruel little game at my expense.
And then the door popped open. I spilled out, head-first, and rolled out onto the floor at someone’s feet.
“I know you’re having a bad day,” Grayson said from above me, “but I don’t think whatever you’re trying to do here is going to help.”
“W-what are you doing here?”
“So this is my dorm,” he replied as I turned myself right side up. “I’m supposed to be here. Unlike you, I think.”
“I was trying to find passage to another reality,” I coughed, raking my hair out of my face.
I no longer cared what he thought of me. Apparently anyone who was nice to me died or something. Maybe it was better if I didn’t have any friends at college. I’d just screw it up like I was already screwing up being here. My family was right, I didn’t belong here. My former classmates were right, I was the most likely to die to something inhuman. I was nothing but a massive fuck-up.
“I didn’t know you were part of the rain chasers club,” he said.
“What.”
Disheveled and on the verge of tears once more, I stared up at him. He had a bemused look on his face under his sandy-brown hair. He extended a hand to help me up. It’s an innocuous name, he said, but they’re into the stories that surround the campus and specifically the rain. He assumed that trying to find alternate realities was their latest crazy idea.
“Not that I think you’re crazy,” he said hastily. “They seem to have a lot of fun chasing down rumors. I went to their meetings in my freshman year and still lurk in their private discord channel. I’ll send you an invite.”
And he did. Their next meeting is in a few days. I introduced myself on discord and only said I was curious about the rain. I’m going to be careful. After the incident with campus security, I think it’s best if I listen and learn for a bit first.
As for sweater girl, there’s a glimmer of hope. A slim one. I can’t confirm that she’s dead. She’s gone. That’s different. And maybe I can find where she went and bring her back. [x]