We haven’t had much rain on campus lately. It’s a welcome relief. I’ve been using the opportunity to strengthen what few friendships I have, because it’s occurred to me that my anxiety about Grayson might not just be entirely related to the whole ‘is he romantically interested?’ thing or how he’s the son of the university president and also the university just happens to be filled to the brim with monsters.

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

You see, I think I’m anxious because I don’t have that many friends, so the loss of any of them feels like my entire world is being uprooted. I also lost a parent as a kid so I’m sure that hasn’t helped my coping skills around people leaving, either. But it’s like if this one person walks away, then there won’t be someone to replace them, and someday soon it’ll just be me. Only me. And I feel this horrible future so deeply in my bones that it takes my breath away and I’m watching for any small sign that might indicate my world is starting to crumble around me.

But you know, on the surface I’m trying to play it chill. Like it’s fine. Everything is fine. I’m not screaming and crying and throwing up on the inside (in the bad way) because you decided to go hang out with other friends that aren’t me.

I see my friendship with Grayson teetering on the edge of the abyss. One bad revelation could take that all away from me. As much as I’m suspicious of him, I also desperately don’t want to lose that connection.

But then I thought, maybe this is a situation partly of my own making. Maybe if I felt more secure with my other friends, or heck, if I had more friends than I have fingers on one hand, then it wouldn’t feel like such a loss. I could be sad about it and then move on, which I assume is what normal people do.

If I’m wrong, then I’m better friends with more people and that’s still a win in my book. So I’ve been agreeing to go out and do things with Cassie when she asks, even if the prospect of interacting with people I’ve never met before terrifies me.

Cassie’s friends are cool though. I’m starting to learn names. And they’re… nice. There’s one guy in particular that makes sure to include me in the conversation so I don’t feel like I’m just tagging along in Cassie’s shadow. I’m not sure if he’s doing it deliberately or if he’s just like that.

Extroverts are wild.

Cassie is also starting to meet some of my friends. Well. Maria. She knows Maria and now if she sees her around, she’ll invite her to come along with us wherever we’re going. This happened on one bright and sunny day where there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, so naturally everyone was out of their dorm and enjoying the weather (and safety) while it lasted.

We were on the way to the campus grocery store because hell yes snacks and we ran into Maria having an urgent conversation with Daniel.

If you don’t remember, Daniel is Katana Boy. It only feels right to use his name, though he’ll always be Katana Boy in our hearts.

They broke their conversation short when I waved at them. Maria looked upset and maybe a little angry. Daniel just looked angry. So… we interrupted a fight. Great.

They put the issue aside and we got to the grocery store and back out again before I opened my dumb mouth and asked when the next Rain Chasers meeting is.

As a reminder, I removed Discord from my phone because I didn’t want to think about what happened last year. I haven’t talked to Maria much outside of distributing the list of rules and even then I just handed them off to her, because she said she’d take care of all of it. If there’s been any announcements, I’ve clearly missed them.

And oh have there been developments.

“There aren’t going to be any more meetings,” Daniel burst out.

Yep, found what they were arguing about.

“She didn’t just cancel them,” he continued angrily. “She didn’t even turn in the paperwork!”

You know. The paperwork the university requires to be listed as an official club and get the ability to reserve rooms in the student union for meetings. The paperwork that requires a professor’s sponsorship.

“You could have handed the club over to someone else,” he said, turning his attention fully to Maria now that we were caught up on the drama.

“It’s a bad idea!” Maria shot back, on the verge of tears. “The whole thing was a bad idea and now - and now-”

Now people are dead. She couldn’t bring herself to finish the sentence.

“But more people are going to die if you do nothing.”

He hissed his last rebuke with such intensity that it made me pause. I was still trying to puzzle out why he was so deeply invested in this club when Cassie made a few connections of her own and figured it out.

“You’re in trouble, aren’t you?” she asked softly. “Something’s happened to you.”

Everyone stopped walking. We stood there in an awkward half-circle with Daniel avoiding everyone’s eyes and Maria wiping at the budding tears in her own.

Daniel stood there in silence for so long that I thought he wasn’t going to answer at all. A group of students walked past us, laughing at something, and that seemed to jolt him out of his hesitation. He stayed up one night a week, he said. Late into the night. Just to make sure it was quiet.

Then one night, it wasn’t.

“There’s a scratching at my door,” he said miserably. “Every night. I-I’m going to end up just like that guy from last year, aren’t I? I’m going to tear all my skin off.”

The Rain Chasers were his only help. Much like that student from last year, he was desperately seeking out help wherever he could. This wasn’t like the stories he concocted for clout at the meetings, where he bravely wielded a crowbar against the darkness. This was real.

I mostly stood there feeling miserable. I admit I’d been wanting to see Daniel taken down a few notches for a while now, after all his posturing and his ridiculous stories at the Rain Chasers meeting. I think most people just let him have his moment, but there were a couple students that ate up what he said and treated him like he was some demon slaying badass. But now that it was happening right in front of me… I just felt shitty.

He was going to die and he was terrified. Only someone that’s really fucked up would be happy to see that.

“We’ll help you,” Maria promised. “We don’t need the Rain Chasers to do that. Look - Ashley here comes from someplace with a lot of experience with these creatures. I’m sure she can help us find out what this scratcher is and how to stop it, right?”

That was my cue. I hurriedly agreed, suggesting that there were some folks back home I could call - I dunno, the old sheriff or Tyler perhaps, though I’m not sure I’d trust either of them to not report back to mom that things weren’t all okay at the university I was at. They’re the types that value your safety over your familial happiness or your privacy, you know?

And then I’d have to tell them I couldn’t leave because I made a deal with the devil and it’d get real ugly after that.

In that moment though, I swore I’d do it. I’d throw my whole life away if I thought it could help Daniel. I could see him doing the calculations in his head, wondering if that pit of black water was still in the power plant, if it was worth the risk even after what happened with all those poor dead students.

(I don’t know if it’s still there. I haven’t been back and I’m not going back)

“How about this?” I suggested. “How about I stay in your dorm room overnight? Maybe I’ll see something you missed or if nothing else, I can have a firsthand account of what the scratching is like for when I talk to others about it.”

Then I saw Cassie making angry eyes at me and she had just opened her mouth to say something likely along the lines of, “you’re not staying overnight alone with this boy and with monsters” and I didn’t find out which she would have been more upset about: the boy or the monster, because I hastily amended my suggestion.

“Better yet,” I said, “Let’s have Daniel stay the night in someone else’s room. That way we can see if it’s following the person or if it’s tied to the room.”

I’m kind of proud of myself. It was actually a decent idea, considering I literally pulled it off the top of my head as a way to head off Cassie.

We picked Maria’s room. Her roommate has a boyfriend she sometimes spends the night with and it’d be easy to find a night where Maria was the only one around. It would have been convenient to use my room, but I managed to catch Maria’s eyes and shook my head to warn her off suggesting that. Cassie is still clearly dealing with her own issues with the inhuman and I didn’t think bringing something to our door would help with that.

A day later we were staked out in Maria’s room, loaded up with soda and snacks. Turns out that Daniel is loaded or at least has well-off parents that don’t want him to starve, so he showed up with like four grocery bags of food and drinks. It was great. I had a stomach ache by 10PM.

Then Daniel nodded off. I’m not sure how you do that after downing two bottles of Mountain Dew, but maybe he’s been sleeping that poorly. I think after hearing a death sentence clawing at your door you’d have trouble sleeping, right? Maria and I left him to sleep on the corner of the futon. She put a throw blanket on him and I snuck a pillow under his head with all the stealth accumulated from having younger siblings.

Then we waited. And at midnight, we heard the scratching.

It was subtle. It’d be easy to miss if you didn’t know what to listen to, and it certainly wouldn’t wake anyone up. Maria and I looked at each other for a moment, then I got up and walked to the door. It was fine to look through the peephole, I told myself. Nothing bad happened just from looking. Still, it took a moment to work up the nerve.

I saw the hallway, but the orientation had been flipped. Daniel’s room was pretty much in the middle of the hallway, but now I stared at it as if I were at the end, looking all the way to the other side. Except it didn’t stop, it just kept going and going, endless rows of identical doors as far as I could see. The overhead lights were out and I could only make anything out because of the light shining from beneath the closed doors.

There was something in the distance. I strained to make it out through the tiny piece of glass.

Something was moving in the darkness, like a little scrap of cloth caught on a branch.

I stepped back from the door. I told Maria what I saw and then she made the horrible, horrible suggestion that one of us go out there. Her roommate likes to crochet, we could unravel one of her yarn skeins and tie it around my waist. She could pull me back in if something went wrong.

“Okay, good idea about a rope,” I hissed, quietly so we didn’t wake Daniel, “but you know that yarn is going to break before you could reel me back in an emergency. Also your roommate will be so pissed. How about I just go out there?”

It had to be me. Obviously. Otherwise Maria would go and I still didn’t trust her to do something dumb after the library incident.

She at least had the good sense to look nervous about me going out there without some sort of guarantee, but whatever, nothing in life is safe. The flickering man is right. I’m always going to be scared, so I’m just going to have to do this scared.

Guess I can be brave enough to get myself into a bad situation.

I opened the door and walked out into the hallway. I began walking down past all those silent doors, towards the scrap of movement I saw in the distance. Just close enough to get a better look, I told myself. It was still early in the semester and it was so far off.

Then an odd thing began to happen. It was like… my thoughts weren’t quite coming like they should. They bounced around my mind, scattered like confetti hanging in the air, and I’d grasp at one and catch only a fragment, only to lose it a moment later. I knew that I had to keep walking, but I wasn’t sure of why anymore. I thought of all sorts of things, just images without context. A birthday cake with candles, an oak tree with gnarled roots, its leaves bare, branches dark against the dim winter sky. Fragments like this, snapshots of things that happened in my life, things that made no sense outside of their context. The image of a moth’s wing that perhaps I once held in my hand, a sensation of deep anger but I didn’t know why I was angry.

It felt like… my brain was heading in the right direction, but taking too long to get there. Like I felt every connecting thought on the way to that one singular thought I wanted to keep reciting. Keep going. Keep walking, until I could see what it was. The train was going in the right direction, but I was noticing every stop along the way.

It felt like I was in that hallway for a lifetime.

Then I was in front of the creature, my sluggish mind realizing belatedly that I’d gotten much closer than I intended. It was almost on top of me. The thing was tall, almost scraping the ceiling of the dorm room. Its legs reminded me of a grasshopper, two thin claws, thin ankles sweeping up to sharply defined joints before connecting to the body. It was long, like a banner, stretching on and on down that endless hallway. It had no face. It was white, the off-white of faded paint, like milk you didn’t quite trust. It didn’t even have a comforting tinge of pink that might hint at blood beneath the surface of its glistening skin. Just a long white tube, rolling about on its long legs like a sack of marbles balancing on toothpicks.

It floated towards me, undulating gently. Like the tail of a kite. Up and down, its sides rolling rhythmically with the movement of its stilt-like legs. I could see the rolling of its shoulder joints stark against otherwise formless white flesh.

Then it stepped over me. Just… raised a leg and passed over my head and kept going. I stared up at its milky underbelly, watching its array of legs pass me by on either side like the slats of a fence.

It didn’t see me. It had no idea I was there. Of course, I thought sluggishly, plucking the thoughts out of the long and distant corridors of my mind. I’m not its intended victim.

Then I blinked and I was back in the room.

For a moment I was disoriented, unsure of what had happened and how I’d managed to get back here. Then I remembered - I’d taken a step backwards. Just a half step, an anxious movement like my body was finally catching up to what I was seeing and preparing itself to flee, without any conscious instruction on my part. That was all it took. One half step and I was back in the room.

I shut the door. I stood there at it for a long moment while Maria furtively asked what I’d seen, until she realized I wasn’t ready to talk yet and feel quiet. Finally, I looked through the peephole once more. The hallway stretched on and on and in the distance I could see that fluttering ribbon of movement.

I got up and checked every ten minutes. When the clock reached 1AM, the hallway returned to normal.

We didn’t tell Daniel quite everything the next morning over breakfast. I told him I heard the scratching, but I couldn’t see anything distinctive when I looked out the peephole. We promised we’d help him. We’d figure something out. Then when he’d left and it was just Maria and I, I told her what I saw in the hallway. It didn’t seem right to me, because that white gelatinous mass didn’t match what the other student saw. The other student said he saw a person, but then he was the scratcher, staring in at his own dorm room.

“The scratching lasts almost all semester,” Maria said thoughtfully. “It takes a while for it to get loud enough to hear if you don’t know what you’re listening for. What if… what if that creature you saw is a larva?”

We have a deadline now. We need to stop this thing before it metamorphoses. [x]

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