Finals are right around the corner. We’re wrapping up our projects and papers. Cassie is holding study groups in the dorm common area for the other students trapped with the professor from hell. She’s not the only one determined to pass out of spite. Then they’ll go to the dean, once they’ve got their final grades for the semester and are safe from retaliation. It’s given her something to focus on and be angry about. It’s seemed to help, after what she told me about her roommate.
(if you’re new, start here, and if you’re totally lost, this might help)
I told her how my dad died, when it felt the moment was right. How we were never given an official reason - how everyone said he just ran off - but that we just knew.
I wanted her to know that she wasn’t the only one living with this horrible uncertainty. She wasn’t alone. I’m not sure if it helped. She just said that’s awful, in that uncomfortable sort of way when you don’t really know how to respond. I get it. It’s a hard thing to have dropped on you like that - hey, my dad died. Sometimes it takes my breath away at unexpected moments, even after all these years. Like… he’s gone and I’m as lost and confused as I was the day it happened. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it.
I see my relationship with my mom starting to change and I look at her differently now that I’m taking on adult responsibilities of my own. I wonder what it would have been like with my dad, if he were still around. He’s frozen in time for me, eternally the dad I had when I was a child.
There are only snatches of time in which I can miss him. I have my own work to do. I’m attending studying groups only because I’m finding that helping other students is really useful for my own studying. That’s not to say that I’m confident I’m going to do well, since I’m able to tutor others in my classes now. It just means that they’re in even more dire straits than I am. They might be able to get by on C’s and B’s, but I’ve got an academic scholarship to keep and I need to do better than I did at midterms.
At least I had Patricia taking care of the laundry lady problem. Sort of. She kept to her word and helped spread rumors around campus. She also gave me a date and time to show up at the power plant to try to talk the Rain Chasers out of going along with her stupid idea. Which, I told Maria dourly, probably wasn’t going to help much. I wasn’t exactly a convincing public speaker.
“Then I’ll tell them,” she said brightly. “I can’t stop them from making their own choices, but I’ll make sure they know there might be some really bad consequences later down the line.”
I’d told her about the Patricia situation and expressed my unease with the plan. And to make sure I really drove the point home, I told her a little bit about my hometown. About how the town’s unofficial rule is ‘we don’t make bargains with evil things’ and why that is, how everything had a price to it. It might not be one you pay right away, but even gifts come wrapped in razor blades. Even a benevolent entity might give you something and ask nothing in return, but that is because you need it and they expect it will be used and that means that you have trouble up ahead.
I told her about the harvesters. A piece of your body in exchange for something you need later down the road. A high cost paid up front in exchange for a strings-free gift that saves you when you need it most. What cost, then, would come around in time for a strings-free gift up-front?
Turns out Maria is a little squeamish and telling her how someone in town got their bones removed really helped drive the point home.
She wouldn’t drink from the water, she said. She’d defer to my expertise. I also had a hunch that she didn’t want to stop seeing these things around campus, but hey, it worked in my favor so I’ll take it.
“I’ll start talking to people in advance,” she said thoughtfully. “There’s going to be too much peer pressure the day of. Patricia thinks she’s real smart and she’s got a lot of other people convinced of it.”
“She drank the water,” I muttered. “I don’t think she’s smart at all.”
“She is. Like ‘gets A’s without even trying’ kind of smart. But I don’t think that means she’s clever and she’s a bit full of her own bullshit.”
I barked a laugh. It was kind of nice to hear someone else trashing Patricia, to be honest. I’m still not convinced she’s not a proto-Kate, or a Kate-in-training. Kate wasn’t very likable, so it kind of checks out. Unfortunately, Patricia is just likable enough to be a problem. Even Maria had to admit that she appreciates Patricia’s ability to rally people and organize them to get stuff done.
I tried to help where I could. Maria sent a few people my way to chat and I told them what I knew about inhuman things. I mostly talked about the harvesters. They seemed like the best example to get people freaked out. I’m not sure if I convinced anyone not to go drink the water, but I tried.
Actually, I think I did convince someone. Or at least, gave them the push they needed. Katana Boy was like, ‘hmmm I’ll take my chances with laundry lady,’ when I got done copy/pasting my pitch to him. I was hopeful that he was being reasonable but then he said that he’d been keeping a wakazashi in his room and had taken to rubbing it with sage so it should be effective against monsters which I guess has some grounding in lore except when I was telling Maria later she confided that she’s pretty sure he’s using ground sage he bought from the seasoning section at the grocery store.
Points for creativity?
By the time the date Patricia had set rolled around we’d done as much as we could to talk people out of it. We both wanted to make a last-ditch effort to talk people out of it. It was too late for Patricia, obviously, but perhaps we might talk some sense into her to call the whole thing off. We met up at my dorm and then made our way through the steam tunnels to join them at the power plant.
We emerged from the tunnels to silence. The basement was dark save for a cluster of light at the center of the room, where the pool of water was. The light from the LED lanterns cut jaggedly through the support columns, casting long shadows like fingers across the floor. Maria and I made our way towards the light and as we approached, I realized that we were too late.
A small group of students were already gathered around the pool. They were kneeling in preparation to drink. Patricia was doing the same, her back turned to us.
“That scheming bitch,” Maria hissed.
She’d changed the time on us to ensure we’d arrive too late. Everyone had made their decision already. We were showing up in time to witness it and nothing more.
I broke into a run to catch up to them. I went to call out, but the sound died in my throat.
Something felt off.
I slowed and a second later Maria caught up to my side. My gaze was fixed on Patricia.
She was motionless. I’d never seen her like this. She’s not someone that holds still for anything.
“What’s that?” Maria gasped, pointing up towards the ceiling.
I looked. I’ll regret that forever, I think.
There was a hole. A hole in the world. It seemed to stretch into infinity as I stared at it, encompassing the entirety of what I could see, drawing my gaze in and consuming everything else around it. I felt like I was held there by it, caught in its maw, and I would sit there and stare at it until it drained everything from me. Maria’s grip on my arm, her nails digging into my skin in terror, snapped me out of it. I wrenched my gaze away, panting. She remained fixated beside me, her pupils dilated and her mouth parted in awe. I shook her until she too was able to tear her stare from the abyss.
It was only as big as the circle of kneeling students. I looked at it through the corner of my eye, caught sight of it in snatches, so that I couldn’t be drawn in again.
The students didn’t notice what was above their heads. They were lifting the water up in cupped palms, silent, moving slowly as if in a trance. As if they were acting in unison, as if this was a moment of reverence.
“Look!” I finally screamed at them. “Look above you!”
None of them responded. I stood there, panting, one hand raised and pointing at the hole in the world. A hole that scraped at the edges of my consciousness, stirring something to the surface that I’ve been trying hard to forget.
I’ve seen this before. That gaping maw opened up in the middle of an endless ocean and the water pouring down endlessly into it. The memory shocked me into motionless, like my blood slowed and my body went numb.
It was here. The ocean was here, just above our heads.
“W-we have to stop them,” I gasped.
“Don’t go out there,” Maria whimpered.
“But-”
“Please. You said - you said it’s not safe.”
We were so far beyond ghosts in the library and gelatinous creatures flopping around on the carpet. The sheer weight of the abyss, of a mere glimpse of a slice of eternity, had shattered Maria’s naive confidence. The air felt like wet sand as I took a small step towards the students.
“I have to save them,” I whispered.
I felt like I was in a daze. I stumbled forward another step. I tried to cry out to them once more, but my voice was thin and thready and nothing came out. Like the sigh of a dusty chest being closed to once more be forgotten. Another step. I felt like I was being pulled in two directions. My body wanted to flee, to run from that hole in the world and never stop running. Yet I kept moving forward, stretching out a hand to the nearest student, telling myself over and over that I had to. Wasn’t it my responsibility to save them? Weren’t they here because of me?
They drank.
The water in the pool between them rose upward in a torrent, a waterfall falling up into the waiting maw of the abyss. Their heads were bowed and they were caught up in the deluge. I saw Patricia’s hair tangled up in the water, standing straight up like her head was under a faucet.
Then the waterfall stopped and for a brief moment I thought it was over, that whatever had transpired was done and that everything would be okay.
Something filled the expanse of the hole in the world. A white, glistening surface, lined with veins. I saw it poised there for a moment, teetering on the edge, and then it emerged into our world. It threw itself into our reality, hurtling downward. An immense orb, slick and smooth, and it slammed onto the bowed heads of the students.
Their bodies pitched forward in unison and their heads slammed into the ground.
It was like swatting mosquitoes. An impact, a pop, and then a spray of blood.
The impact knocked me off my feet. The shockwave shook the ground and I fell backwards, landing hard on the ground, but I didn’t even feel the pain. I couldn’t tear my eyes off of the thing that was now rising from the ground, its mass supported by the limp bodies of those students. I saw Patricia’s arms dangling at her side, but her legs still moved, her hips and spine still held firm. The bones straightened, her knees unfolded, and the creature rose with the assistance of all its many, many legs. Their heads - or whatever remained of them - were absorbed into the creature’s membrane, its surface smoothly swallowing them up at the neck and shoulders.
It turned. All those legs cooperating, their knees facing inwards, shuffling awkwardly to rotate it around.
A black orb rotated into view. A faceted ring around it, the color of the morning fog.
An eye. It was an eye.
And it stared down at where I lay on the ground, gaping in horror.
“ASHLEY!” Maria screamed.
I rolled and tried to scramble to my feet. It was like my knees wouldn’t work. They buckled before I could even get off the ground. I dragged myself forward with my hands instead, my elbows scraping the rough concrete beneath me. It was as if all the strength had drained from my limbs.
I felt the eyeball’s stare burning into my back. I heard the awkward shuffle of the bodies that supported it as it crept closer. Like a spider uncertain if its prey was done struggling yet.
I felt like nothing more than an insect. Crawling on the ground, mewling in terror, nearly paralyzed beneath the stare of this immense, unfathomable intelligence. I think I would have preferred malice from it, hostility or anything other than the impassive contemplation that scraped at the edges of my mind.
It saw me. It saw me in entirety, it saw through me and peered into my memories and it simply didn’t care.
Like I was a speck of dust that would be blown away in an instant.
There was a rushing sound from behind me. Water. Lots of water. It hit me before I even realized what was happening, a few inches at first, ripping past me like a bucket had been upended. It grew deeper by the second and a fish swam past my wrist - then the current was around and beneath me and it began to sweep me along with it. I flailed, my chest seizing up in panic, and up ahead I saw Maria’s outstretched hand. The water was up to her knees and she had flattened her back against a pillar.
I reached out and caught it. She pulled me over to her and with the pillar breaking the current, I was able to get my feet underneath me. We stood there, huddled in a small pocket of churning water, as the flood continued to rise all around us. It surged from one end of the power station to the other, a flash flood ripping through the basement.
The traveling river had arrived.
And the eyeball was going along with it.
It scuttled past us, the pupil rolling to the side casually to watch us for a moment as it shuffled by. Then its attention returned straight ahead and it charged into the river, sinking into its depths with each step. Soon we could only see the top of the eye, a pearly dome like an island protruding from the roiling surface of the water, and then it sank below and was gone.
The river receded just as quickly as it had come. It’d collected what it was after and its presence was no longer required.
Maria and I didn’t talk for a little while. We just sat there on the basement floor, wet and frightened. I don’t know what I thought of while I waited to calm down. I’m not sure I thought of anything. It was like my brain had emptied itself and was slowly bringing fragments of thought together again, piecing my consciousness together bit by bit. Everything felt like it was moving in slow motion. In my mind, I saw Patricia, her hair standing on end in the waterfall, then how her body flattened as the creature landed on her. How her hair was stained red.
Beside me, Maria vomited onto the ground. I awkwardly reached out and patted her shoulder.
“W-what do we do now?” she asked weakly.
I got up and walked to where the pool was with trembling legs.
It was empty. The water was gone. All that was left was a black slab, textured like marble, recessed barely an inch into the ground.
“I don’t understand,” I whispered.
I was speaking to myself, but my words carried in the vast chamber.
“What do you mean?” Maria asked.
She came to stand beside me and stared down at the slab. Her arms were wrapped around herself and she was shaking so badly that her teeth chattered. I idly wondered why I didn’t feel anything at all. Like my body was somewhere far, far away.
“It doesn’t follow any of the stories,” I said. “None of this does.”
There are old, old patterns, I explained. Long ago when humanity found words and tried to understand the world around them, they told stories of the creatures that lurked in the dark places of the world. And those creatures, summoned from the subconscious morass, gleefully filled their role and gave humanity reasons to fear the shadows. Many of those creatures had similarities, as humanity shares the same fears regardless of location or culture. We fear the dark. We fear starvation. We fear death.
“Okay, so people fear storms and water,” Maria said blankly. “How does none of this fit with that?”
“Because these creatures don’t exist outside campus. They’re all…new.”
There were lots of unnatural horses because horses are kind of scary. There’s lot of unnatural dogs because dogs can also be kind of scary. How come none of those things were present on campus? My hometown had plenty of new and interesting creatures, but we also had the old ones in abundance. It didn’t seem natural that a place like this - steeped in the inhuman - would only have creatures I’ve never heard of before.
“This… thing,” Maria said, “is new, then? We-we witnessed the birth of a new monster?”
I nodded slowly. The Rain Chasers - or poor, doomed Patricia - had somehow been the catalyst for bringing it into this world. That was the only explanation I had.
“I’m certainly not going around daydreaming about giant eyeballs,” Maria said. “So who is making this up?”
The students? The Rain Chasers? The administration?
I wish I knew.[x]