Okay so let’s get the part I’m ashamed of out of the way first.

I haven’t talked to Daniel in weeks.

In my defense, that’s what Maria advised. She talked to him like she said she would and it didn’t go well. He’s projecting, she claimed. He’s scared about what’s happening to him and is looking for someone to be angry with. The creature in the hallway isn’t an option, because he’s trying to avoid even thinking about it, and he can’t be angry at the only person that can resolve the situation, because that’s himself. So he’s angry at me because I “forced” him into this impossible dilemma.

I don’t know if projecting is the right term for it but none of us are even taking psychology classes so sorry if that’s wrong.

(if you’re new, start here, and if you’re totally lost, this might help)

We last talked about the situation over dinner a few days ago. Maria’s dorm is fairly close to ours and our cafeteria has better food, she claims, so she’s taken to showing up around dinnertime and we eat together. About half the time Cassie joins us. I am growing more accustomed to the thought that she has more friends than just me, although I admit I still have moments of panic when I think it’s me, I’m the problem, I’m the one no one wants to be around.

“Maybe we could invite him around and sit down and talk through it,” I suggested.

“No,” Cassie and Maria said in unison.

I guess they’ve been talking about this without me.

“He’s been going around calling you a bitch,” Maria said uncomfortably.

“Oh.” A thought occurred to me. “Wait, going around where?”

And that’s how I found out that both Maria and Daniel had joined the new Rain Chasers group. Maria was just showing up to keep an eye on things, she claimed. She didn’t recognize anyone there and she was giving them all a fake name so they hopefully wouldn’t realize she was the former president. Daniel was at least keeping her secret - mostly because he was refusing to talk to her anymore. He was there because he wanted help with the scratching in the hallway.

I picked uncomfortably at my food. The scratching started all of it last year. Maria saw my unease and hastily added that he wasn’t getting much help. The new group of Rain Chasers - sorry, members of the “Folklore Society” - were not interested in Daniel’s drama. They were actually discussing a new rule for the group. No stories without documentation.

“How long until he takes video of the scratching on his phone?” Cassie asked.

“Well…” Maria hesitated. “He says he did. But when he got his phone out to show people, the recording was gone. He freaked out, swearing it was there before he left the dorm and that something had to have gotten to it - something nefarious. But the club wasn’t giving him much credence after that. They’ve since moved on to more interesting matters, specifically, the graveyard. They are particularly obsessed with the graveyard.

I felt that was a good time to tell them that I also had concerns about the graveyard. I’d leave out important parts of the story, of course, such as the laundry lady and flickering man’s involvement. Instead, I started with how the traveling river had come up around me and swept me away and that’s how I wound up in the graveyard.

“How did you get caught up in the river?” Cassie asked.

“It’s a rule, Ashley!” Maria sighed dramatically. “A rule you wrote! How do you manage to not follow your own rules?!”

“I wasn’t paying attention! It happens to everyone!”

Anyway. I took a breath and continued with how there was someone else in there and I had a really bad vibe from him. If the folklore society was looking at the graveyard, then I was worried what would happen if they managed to get inside.

“I’ll keep being our mole, I guess,” Maria said. “If it sounds like they’re seriously going to break in we can always call campus security to stop them before they succeed.”

That actually sounded like a very reasonable plan. With that handled and Maria promising to keep some contact with Daniel to see if he worked through his issues, I was left with not much on my plate.

Hahaha jk I’m a college student and the flickering man is trying to kill me I have so much to do.

At least having like eight papers to write has kept me distracted from the whole Daniel situation. It’s also meant that I’ve been spending a lot of time in one of the computer labs because it has very specific software that I need for a project. It sucks, because I don’t like working in the computer labs (they’re kind of stuffy and the lights give me a headache) but I’m just lucky to even have a laptop of my own and it certainly can’t run this program even if I wanted to buy a license for it (I don’t).

It also means it’s possible that I’d run into someone that I’d really rather not just because they happened to need some special resource only available on these computers as well. Like Chicken Tenders.

We haven’t spoken to each other since last semester and I expected him to pretend I didn’t exist. Instead, he walked in, took a long look around the room, and came right over to my row. There were lots of empty computers, I thought frantically. There were only two other people in the room right now. One was a student using the computers, the other was a student employee from the service desk team who was taking apart a broken computer in the front row. But he just… walked right past all those empty chairs.

“You were right, I was wrong,” Steven whispered, sliding into the seat next to me.

“About what?” I asked, suddenly confused. What had we argued about? Weren’t we just generally not compatible?

“I don’t know, my sister told me to apologize over summer break.”

He was only half paying attention to me, his gaze fixated on the girl unscrewing a computer case at the front of the room.

“She also said I shouldn’t try to get back with you, so I guess we’re just acquaintances now.”

“She seems pretty smart,” I said. “What college does she go to?”

“She’s fourteen.”

Awkward.

But Steven didn’t seem to care. He was watching the girl at the front of the room. He hadn’t even bothered to login into the computer yet.

“Is she your new girlfriend?” I asked.

“Nope.”

Which made his overt staring so much creepier. I hesitated for a moment and then I mustered all of my courage. You know what made my brief relationship with Steven so disastrous in the first place? My complete lack of a backbone. Well, it was time to remedy that. I’d go up and say hi and ask if she was in one of my classes because she looked familiar and hopefully that’d get her head out of the computer case long enough for Steven to grow a sense of shame.

Look, I’m not quite ready for full-blown making a scene yet. Diet confrontation will have to do.

Behind me, Steven hissed frantically for me to come back. I ignored him. I got the word “hi” out and the girl looked up, a screwdriver poised in one hand against a harddrive mount, and then I heard the rustle of someone moving and then a hand clamped over my mouth.

Steven’s hand.

He pulled backwards, physically dragging me away from her. I think I made some kind of noise of surprise, because the only other student in the room’s head jerked up. Steven saw the movement as well and hastily took his hand off my mouth, so it was no longer so obvious that he was physically restraining me. He quickly shifted to put himself between me and their line of sight, laughing and throwing his arm around my shoulder.

“She’s busy, Ash,” he laughed. “C’mon, I know you don’t believe me, but I promise I can fix that corrupted file for you.”

The student’s head turned back to resume staring at their monitor. I followed Steven back to our chairs as he urgently pulled me along. I glanced up at the front of the room as I sat down.

She hadn’t moved. She was still staring at me.

“What the hell was that?” I hissed at him.

“They said something about this,” Steven muttered, furiously thumbing through messages on his phone. “I know they did!”

“Why did you stop me from talking to her!?”

He ignored me. Actually, I thought, why wasn’t she doing anything? It wasn’t like our altercation had been that subtle. In fact, it was right in front of her. She’d been staring at me when Steven put his hand over my mouth to keep me from talking. And Steven wasn’t just looking through his phone like a normal person - he was panicking. His hands were shaking.

A lightbulb went on in my head.

“You said I’m right,” I said slowly. “You… you’re taking the inhuman stuff… seriously now, aren’t you?”

He didn’t reply, just cast a furtive glance up at the woman at the front. She still hadn’t moved. It was like staring at a statue and I felt cold creep into my guts. No one stood that still for that long.

She wasn’t human.

“Okay, what’s going on?” I hissed, ducking my head down so the monitor hid our whispering. “Just give me the gist of it.”

I almost wished he hadn’t.

Most of the people who showed up to fix busted computers were normal students, he said. But sometimes they weren’t. It was a rumor that went around mostly the computer science students and he was taking an introductory course to fill one of his requirements and when he got his first lab assignment, one of the older students warned him about it. He asked around a bit more, got a hold of a couple people that claimed to have encounters with them, and eventually a number he didn’t recognize texted him with what had happened to them. He’d texted back but… they never replied.

A student died, he said. That’s what this person said.

Steven gave up trying to find the text message and shoved the phone back in his pocket, giving the girl a brief glance as she did.

“You don’t talk to them,” he said. “Nothing that disturbs their work. Just leave them alone.”

“And if you don’t?”

Like I’d just done.

“They… take you apart,” he said miserably.

The girl’s fingers twitched. They opened and then wrapped tight around the screwdriver she held.

I haven’t seen her in person (thank goodness) but I realized the look on the girl’s face. That stance. It all felt familiar.

“It’s a modern Perchta,” I whispered. “Oh gods, it’s her all over again.”

The Germanic goddess that slits people open and removes their intestines. Patterns repeat, after all, and the new monsters merely harken back to more ancient roots.

She took a step towards us. I grabbed my backpack and Steven did the same a second later.

“Wait here a moment,” he said. “I’m going to cause a distraction and then you run for the door.”

He sauntered up to the front of the room. I stood there in the aisle, watching as she slowly advanced on me. Behind her, Steven paused. He glanced sideways at the disassembled computer on the narrow desk.

He pushed it off onto the floor.

The resulting crash caused the poor student that was just there to do his work in peace to shriek in surprise. The girl whipped around, her back now to me, and I took that opportunity to run. I didn’t dare pass directly by her in the aisle, so I went over the front row instead, knocking over monitors as I did. She was moving towards me, but I was hitting the ground and sprinting for the door that Steven held open, and then I was out into the hallway. He slammed it shut behind him and we waited for a moment, panting, to see if she would pursue us any further.

Nothing happened. The doorknob remained perfectly still. I allowed myself to think that we’d escaped, that everything would be fine due to Steven’s quick thinking.

Then we heard screaming. Horrified, anguished, screaming.

The third student in the room. The one that had nothing to do with any of this and just happened to be in there at the wrong time.

“That’s not how this works!” I shrieked in the empty hallway. “I’m the target! I’m the one that broke the rules! It’s not supposed to - to switch to a bystander!”

My cries did nothing to drown out his screams.

Neither did the fire alarm.

I looked over and saw Steven standing there with his hand on the alarm, his face grim. He quickly let go as we heard doors banging open in the distance. Soon the landing would be flooded with students as they dutifully headed down the stairs to outside. I kicked open the door between us and the stairwell and Steven wrenched open the door to the computer lab.

Strength in numbers. The computer girl couldn’t continue her grisly work if there were too many people around.

I couldn’t hear screams anymore over the commotion in the stairwell. Steven had stuck his head into the computer lab and then he turned and yelled at me that the student was alive, but that I needed to get help.

Fortunately, emergency services were already on their way. I hurtled down the stairs, elbowing my way past people, and sprinted out the doors right as the firetruck was pulling up. They were quick to react when I came running at them, screaming that there was a hurt student in the second floor computer lab.

Then I just kind of milled about with everyone else, hoping I hadn’t attracted too much attention, until the ambulance showed up and they wheeled him out on a gurney.

It was a while before I found Steven again. The crowd took a while to disperse and I loitered in the lobby, once we were allowed back inside. Eventually he came down the stairs and collapsed onto a sofa. I gingerly sat down across from him.

“I don’t know if he’s going to be okay,” Steven sighed. “I couldn’t see that well because he was down between the rows of desks, but there was blood just… and something like… on the ground.”

He swallowed hard. He didn’t have to say it. Something that looked like intestines.

“And pieces of it were… in the computer case. Like cables. But he was alive. I could hear him whimpering. The girl… she was gone.”

I took a deep breath. I didn’t want to ask, but this was important.

The student that texted him, I said carefully. Did they specify what the student was doing with the computer when someone tried talking to them?

Yes. They were disassembling the case.

I may have a new rule. I’m going to run it past Maria and Cassie and see if they agree that two occurrences is more than a coincidence.

Rule #9 - Don’t disturb the student workers that are fixing computers in the computer labs. They’re busy and don’t need interruptions. But if one of them is disassembling a computer, don’t even talk to them. They might decide they’re missing some parts and you’ll do nicely.

I think we can all agree this is a very important rule to spread around because those computers break all the damn time.

But a new rule isn’t the only thing I’ve gotten from this. The way she switched targets… it gives me an idea. If these creatures will go after bystanders if they can’t reach their original victim, then maybe there is a way to help Daniel. The university president said that it has to be the victim that kills it, but what if we switched the victim?

I’m going to talk to Maria. She can talk to Daniel. And then we can figure out a way to remove him as the target and I’ll go in his place.[x]

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