I’m honestly not sure what I expected when I said I’d go on a date with Chicken Tenders. (okay, his name is Steven, I guess it’s only fair I start using it but he’ll always be Chicken Tenders in our hearts, right?) Like, you’ve ever made a decision that you knew was the wrong choice and then you look back and are like… what was I thinking? Why did I see that through? Why didn’t I stop at any point?
Sort of like how I dyed streaks into my hair last week. It didn’t go well. That’s all I’ll say about it.
(if you’re new, start here, and if you’re totally lost, this might help)
It’s not that Steven is a bad guy or anything. He’s kind of boring and holding a conversation with him is tedious, but that’s the worst I can say about him. He showed up at my dorm with his car right on time for our date and Cassie came out with me and stared at him with her arms crossed, making it clear she was memorizing his face and license plate. He got out of the car to introduce himself, so that was a point in his favor. And like he was polite and nice and paid for dinner because his parents are paying for his college and give him a spending allowance, so he doesn’t have to worry about money as much as I do. So there’s really nothing I can complain about, right?
We went to the Chinese buffet which is apparently the only restaurant in town that isn’t fast food and that college students can afford. Not exactly a venue for a romantic date, but I’m not one to criticize considering I come from a town where dating involved driving an hour to the nearest Olive Garden.
(and I didn’t learn that Olive Garden is in fact not the model for upscale dining until a few days ago when I scandalized Cassie and the other girls in the dorm that were hanging about)
It wasn’t a bad date, honestly. It was just… I think I was telling Grayson the truth when I said I wasn’t ready to date again. Maybe I assumed I said that out of panic and I was testing the waters with Steven, because I don’t think highly of him, and he’s safe to mess things up with. Which I don’t think actually happened, because he asked if he could take me on a second date when he dropped me off at my dorm and I was flustered and I said yes.
And I went to my dorm room just feeling miserable about everything*.*
I shouldn’t have said yes, I think.
I feel bad for Steve. I keep wondering if I should tell him what I told Grayson or if I should keep going out with him and see if I just, I dunno, get over it.
Ugh. Okay, enough about my dating problems. I don’t want to think about it anymore.
I needed to go to the library and I invited Cassie to go with me. One of my professors has assigned a research paper and we’re required to use the library and only the library for our sources. Why yes, this is also the professor that doesn’t cancel class because of the rain, why do you ask? I’m torn between thinking this guy is trying to get us all killed and thinking he just hates freshmen. Could be both.
Anyway, orientation didn’t really cover how to use the library, so I asked if Cassie wanted to go with me in the hopes she’d be able to show me where everything is. The library is a big place, after all. It’s tall. A nine story building that goes straight up in the center of campus. It’s red brick with windows at the corners and the front has this strange abstract mural from top to bottom, black on sandstone. The walkway dips down in front of the building in a gentle slope, forming a concave bowl so that its entrance takes you into the basement instead of the first floor. Interesting design for a place that gets this much rain, but okay, sure, I’m not an architect.
Cassie latched onto the idea of going to the library and suggested we go right then. I was a little more hesitant simply because I’m not the spontaneous type, but I didn’t have a good argument as to why not. I needed to check some books out for this project, after all. She seemed hyper while we were walking over. No… jittery.
“Did your Rain Chaser friends tell you anything about the library?” Cassie asked on the walk over.
“They’re not my friends yet,” I sighed. “I feel like such an outsider still.”
“Oh. Is anime club going well, at least?”
It is, I guess. Turns out that Katana Boy is in both the Rain Chasers club and the anime club and he recognized me at the last anime club meeting and figured that meant we were friends since we have the same interests.
We are not friends. I’m not that desperate.
Fortunately someone else rescued me from him extolling the artistic merits of “Darling in the Franxx” which I haven’t seen so it was a one-sided conversation where I just had to nod vacantly and smile.
Spoiler: I thought “Darling in the Franxx” would be like a cute boy-meet-girl slice of life set in Germany or something. I googled it after the meeting. I was only partially correct. Very partially correct.
But dodging Katana Boy has limited my ability to make friends. Also I don’t have a whole lot to talk about because I’m watching anime for the first time in my life and apparently have a lot of catching up to do before I can relate to anyone there.
Anyway, I told Cassie the short version of all that, which is that I know a handful of people but that’s it. I’m doomed to be a friendless loser.
“But seriously,” Cassie said, stopping at the first step leading down to the library’s entrance. “Did they tell you anything about the library?”
I paused, turning back to look at her. She was staring past me towards the interior of the library, her eyes wide.
“Have you heard… rumors… about the library?” I ventured.
She slowly shook her head up and down.
“I haven’t been inside the library since orientation,” she admitted.
I need to take a moment here to talk about Cassie. I know some people suspect she’s inhuman, some people think she’s sus in other ways, and pretty much everyone agrees she’s hiding something. Let me elaborate a bit more about her that’ll hopefully explain why I’m not really bothered by any of that.
Now, I may be sheltered and maybe a little naïve, but even I know that small towns - like mine - have a certain reputation in America. So I can understand why Cassie, being black, wouldn’t immediately be an open book with a small town roommate that the university assigned to her without asking her opinion on the matter. She’s probably got her own reservations about whether or not she can trust me, especially after her last roommate left without even so much as saying goodbye.
Also I called a friend from highschool that is now working full-time at the campgrounds and she stole one of their charm bundles (they’re not being used anymore) and I hung that up over our door and Cassie has had no problems entering the room so I think she’s human.
“You have library books,” I said. “I saw them on your desk.”
“Maria checked them out for me.”
Maria is one of the girls that lives caddy-corner to us. She’s studying to be a math teacher and was friends with Cassie before I arrived. She’s started having dinner with us regularly. I’m hoping this means I can say I have made three friends at college now. (Cassie, Grayson, and Maria if you’re keeping track like I am)
I sighed and asked Cassie what she’d heard. The Rain Chasers did have something to say about the library, but I wanted to know where Cassie was at first. She’d heard that the library flooded. That was covered in her orientation by the senior that led her tour. He had too much fun telling the incoming students all the ghost stories and once they were inside the library, near the back of ‘the stacks’, he told them about the flooding.
The library didn’t drain right, he said. That’s why all the books in the basement - where the majority of them were kept - weren’t put on the lower two shelves of the metal racks. Cassie said when he started telling this story they were far back enough in the library that she couldn’t see the exit. She was surrounded by rows and rows of books stretching up to the bare ceiling and the entire room felt eerily hushed, even though the cement floor surely didn’t do anything to dampen sound. Her tour guide told them how the water came rushing in, faster than anyone expected, and it’d be up to your knee before you knew it.
Like the traveling river, I thought.
It was cold. Took your breath away and numbed your legs. There was a student that got frostbite from being caught in it and had to have his feet amputated. It was better than what happened to another student, the guide said. Many years ago, shortly after the library was built, a student got caught in the flood and couldn’t find his way back out. He wandered up and down the stacks, growing ever more frantic, and the water kept rising. Every row of books looked the same. The lights flickered overhead until they finally went out. There, alone in the dark, the water sapped his strength until finally he could stand it no longer. He collapsed face-first into the water and drowned.
He was still there to this day, trapped in the basement of the library, trying to find his way out. If a student was in there alone, they just might feel his frozen fingers wrapping around their ankles.
Then the tour guide had flipped a nearby switch and the lights in that part of the building went out.
“Everyone screamed,” Cassie said, clearly disgruntled, “and one of the librarians came over and turned the lights back on. She yelled at our tour guide for causing trouble and then threw us all out.”
“Okay, so what I heard,” I said, “is that yes, the student’s ghost is still in there, but that he doesn’t’ go around grabbing people’s ankles. The Rain Chasers said that if it starts to flood, he’ll lead you out.”
She stared at me carefully, searching my face for any sign of dishonesty. I really was telling the truth. I’d asked about the library beforehand in the discord because it seemed like the obvious place for something unnatural to happen. This is what they’d told me.
“We don’t split up,” Cassie told me.
“Sure,” I agreed. “I think that’s a great idea.”
After my adventure in the tunnels, I was starting to think that being in groups was the best way to avoid the inhuman. It was humanity’s oldest survival technique, after all. We entered the library and I quickly saw why the ghost story talked about getting lost in the basement. There was a front desk to check out at, an elevator, and a stairway. After that were nothing but rows and rows of books. The entire room was quiet, which did seem odd for such a large area with no carpeting. We first went to the handful of computer stations to check where in the library we’d find books related to the subjects we were needing. Then, armed with row and shelf numbers, we ventured into the stacks.
I can’t tell you why the basement is called ‘the stacks’. It’s just what we’ve heard the upperclassman say.
We went after Cassie’s first. I’m sure there was an ordering system to the rows of bookshelves, but we certainly couldn’t figure it out. We were reduced to roaming aisle by aisle, doubling back each time we reached a cinderblock wall, desperately scanning the numbers labeling the edge of each metal shelf. We soon lost sight of the entrance, which seemed odd to me. Cassie noticed this as well.
“I guess the bookshelves aren’t arranged in rows. Maybe they’re in segments?” she suggested as she peered down one aisle that ended abruptly with another impenetrable wall of shelves.
“That’s a good theory,” I said.
Better than mine. I was wondering if the bookshelves moved. Or if this entire floor was only loosely anchored in reality.
We finally found Cassie’s section by a wall. There was a door nearby and I walked over and put my hand against it. Warm. The steam tunnels again. Of course. They were everywhere, after all, helping heat the buildings. I stood near the door, waiting while Cassie pulled book after book off the shelf, searching for one she thought would help. I idly checked my phone. No reception. We were too deep in the building for cell service, I thought. I glanced at the ceiling. No sign of wifi repeaters, either, so we might not get campus wifi service back here.
Or we weren’t entirely seated in our own reality. I hadn’t ruled that out yet.
I heard a voice and I glanced up, asking Cassie what she wanted.
“Huh?” she replied. “I didn’t say anything.”
She turned around. It might have been an innocuous misunderstanding anywhere else, but Cassie was on edge simply being in the library. Her eyes were wide. I sighed and leaned my head against the door to the steam tunnels. I’d tell her it was just some rattling in the pipes that I’d heard, I thought.
Except when I placed my ear against the door, I did hear voices.
“It’s just a maintenance crew in the tunnels,” I said cheerfully.
“Are you certain?” Cassie asked. “Are you very certain?”
The look on my face told her everything. No. I wasn’t. There was something inhuman down there in the tunnels and while I didn’t think it could escape - while I didn’t think it could talk - I couldn’t say with any confidence that if that door opened it would only be normal, ordinary humans on the other side.
I glanced down, unable to meet her eyes, and saw steam swirling at my feet.
I froze. The image of that face coming out of the steam came to mind. Like it was stretched under plastic, straining to escape. The steam swirled at my feet, creating currents and rivers of its own. It billowed up around my ankles and I stood there, my limbs locked, my mouth dry.
“Snap out of it!” Cassie hissed. She grabbed my hand. “Do we need to get out of here?”
“Y-yeah,” I stammered. “Go!”
She broke into a run, dragging me behind her, her books still tucked under one arm. Behind us, the doorknob rattled. We ducked around a corner just as the door clanged open behind us, lurching from its metal frame. Cassie ducked instinctively and I flattened against the metal edge of the bookcase, heart pounding. She peered around the edge of the metal shelf to watch where we’d just been. I leaned over her so I could also see. Both of us were breathing shallowly, terrified of being heard by whatever was emerging.
Steam billowed out from the tunnel, filling the aisle. It dissipated quickly in the cool air of the library basement. Cassie’s hand tightened on mine, and I clutched desperately at her’s.
I held my breath.
There shouldn’t be steam in the tunnels. Not unless something has gone wrong.
Then someone stumbled out. A young woman. She waved at the escaping steam with one hand, covering her mouth and nose with the other. Another student quickly joined her, also coughing and gasping for fresh air. Their faces were flushed and damp with steam. Then a third person emerged and they quickly turned and pushed the door shut behind them. It took the combined efforts of all three to slam it shut and then, with two of them leaning on it to keep it closed, while the third fumbled to lock it. Only once the deadbolt slid into place did the trio relax.
“We need a different route,” one sighed.
“It’s only for a bit longer,” another replied.
They looked familiar, I thought, mentally cursing my inability to attach names to faces. It took a moment to place where I’d seen them before. The Rain Chasers meeting. They were the ones sitting in the back not saying much.
What were they doing in the steam tunnels?
I waited for them to start walking away from the door, giving them a reasonable distance where it wouldn’t be obvious I’d seen them walk out from the tunnels. Then I took a step forward, opening my mouth to call out to them.
I didn’t have a specific plan. I just wanted to see how they’d react to a chance encounter. It wouldn’t seem weird for any of us to be in the library, after all.
Then Cassie’s hand tightened on mine, squeezing my fingers together and her nails dug into the back of my hand. It hurt. I whirled on her, ready to demand what the hell this was all about.
She was still crouching, one hand stretched up to hold me back. Her other arm was stretched behind her.
A young man leaned over her back. Something about him seemed off. His skin was pale and his clothing felt… dated.
It was also soaking wet.
He held Cassie’s hand, his fingers interlocked with her’s just as tightly as her’s were with mine. With his other hand, he had one finger to his lips, signaling for us to be silent. I met his eyes briefly and then he vanished.
The drowned student. The one that led people out of the water. Away from danger. To the exit.
To safety.
He was now warning us to be quiet so that the Rain Chasers didn’t see us. [x]