Okay, yes, I know you’re all dying to know about Cassie. I swear it’s not as exciting as it initially looked. I mean. Yes. There was a monster there. It might still be after her. We’ve taken to barricading the door with our desk chairs at night just in case. But when I talked to her about it, asking what she knew about her roommate’s disappearance that she hadn’t told me, it turned out… there was almost nothing I didn’t already know. I’m pretty sure I’ve shared it all with you already, but in case I forgot (I’m trying to keep track of way too many things right now) the gist is: her roommate vanished. Her roommate’s parents blamed her for reasons??? And then everyone except for her forgot her roommate even existed.

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

Cassie just assumed that creature was what got her roommate because it was after her and that seemed thematically appropriate. She figured it wasn’t a coincidence.

I asked her if she considered it was sneaking into our room because of me.

She stared blankly at me for a moment. Like this hadn’t even crossed her mind. That whatever bond was between her and her roommate was strong enough to supersede my presence in her life.

So I asked her if she had loved her roommate.

She said no.

They were really close but it was like… best friends, you know? They were making plans to go somewhere together over the summer and they’d visited each other’s hometowns over long weekends like best friends do. Cassie is the only person somehow able to remember her roommate and her disappearance has apparently been a major devastating event in Cassie’s life

Normal friend stuff.

So yeah, it had nothing to do with love. It just seemed logical to her that if this creature had taken out one half of the pair, then it’d come back to finish off the other, right? That’s how these things work, right?

Obviously she was in love with the roommate but is also in denial, I guess.

Then Cassie got to the part I didn’t know about. The day her roommate vanished, she said, they’d agreed to meet up after class and then walk back to the dorm and to the dining hall together. Cassie had waited outside of her hall for a while and when it became apparent that she wasn’t coming and she wasn’t answering her phone, Cassie started to panic.

It was raining that evening. A gentle rain and Cassie wasn’t even bothering with an umbrella, but it was still raining.

She went to campus security first. They weren’t much help, she said. They wouldn’t do anything until more time had passed. Cassie got angry and they told her to stop making a scene and leave. She was in tears by that point, because she knew her roommate, and her roommate wasn’t someone that just took off like that and she certainly wouldn’t ignore her phone if it was Cassie trying to reach her.

Cassie wandered campus aimlessly, as if she’d find her roommate simply by walking around. And that’s when she saw it for the first time.

The rain changes things.

She saw a student from one of her classes. He was walking past her. He didn’t notice her and no one else seemed to notice him. No one except for Cassie. And she saw what had happened to him, how he was tall now, perhaps ten feet, and his shoulders and back were hunched and he shuffled rather than walked. She saw the tendrils protruding from his back, splitting through his shirt, the tips glowing with light like the beacon of an anglerfish. She stood there on the sidewalk, staring openly, while people edged around her without any indication that anything was wrong.

The next day the student was in her class and back to normal. But Cassie’s life changed irrevocably that day. She saw the inhuman and now the inhuman takes notice of her.

Just like me.

And this makes me fear she might be right - that this creature is after her because of what happened to her roommate. If we weren’t dealing with the inhuman then that timing would be coincidental, but that’s not how these things work. Worse, if she was in love with the roommate and the feeling was mutual… that does tie them together. Inhumans operate by symbolism and there’s nothing more firmly wedged into the human collective experience than love.

I’m reciting all of this to you pretty calmly, but at the time Cassie was a crying mess. Which of course made me feel awful, because I do like Cassie, she’s like my best friend now. So I was crying too and it was just wretched.

I didn’t want to drag Cassie’s soul-searching with her feelings towards her roommate or whatever is going on out into the open though, so I admitted that regardless of the reason, we should still be careful. We’d come up with a plan, I said, and figure out a way to protect her. I’d ask Tyler back home to send me another one of the campground charm bundles for her to carry around in her backpack. We’d keep barricading the door at night. Whatever it took to keep her safe.

I think that reassured her. And honestly, I thought we had a pretty good plan. The whole barricading the door thing alone should have been enough, right?

It was not.

Let me tell you how our dorm rooms are arranged. To maximize the available space, the school installed loft beds in every room. That’s great when you want to fit a futon and a mini fridge into your room, not so great when you get food poisoning from the dining hall (I am never eating fettuccine alfredo ever again in my whole entire life) and you need to go vomit in the bathroom every fifteen minutes. The beds have railings on them so the only way up or down is by the ladder. And while the beds are sturdy they do shake a little when you’re climbing.

So what I’m saying is, if someone climbs up into the bed and is kneeling over top of you with their face three inches from yours because they don’t have that much clearance between them and the ceiling, it should really wake you up.

I did not wake up. Not until the intruder stabbed a bony finger into my shoulder.

I’ve said before that I freeze when panicked. I think I’ve been underestimating just how strong the freeze reflex can really be. It was like every muscle in my body locked up. I couldn’t even breathe. Like the connection between my mind and my body had simply been severed and I was looking out of my own eyes but that was all I could do, everything else was simply out of reach.

I lay there and slowly recognition crept in amongst the panic as the face above mine resolved into the wrinkled grimace of the laundry lady.

“Look at this!” she hissed, brandishing a plastic bag. “Do you know how hard this is to clean?”

It took me a moment to recognize what it was. My shirt. The one I’d worn into the hallway. It’d been splattered with the worm’s blood as it pushed past me and out through the doorway after Daniel. I didn’t know what to do with it, so I’d wrapped it in a bag and hidden it deep inside my closet.

I opened my mouth to speak but all that came out was a hoarse croak. I swallowed. Some feeling was returning to my body. I could move my fingertips and my toes.

“I was going to throw it away,” I finally squeaked out.

“Excuse me? You’re in a partnership with the inhuman incarnate of laundry day and you’re just going to throw clothing away?!”

“Do… do you want to clean it?” I ventured.

“Yes.” She narrowed her eyes at me. “I’m going to clean it for you. And it’s going to be perfect when you get it back. But I want you to know how much work it’s going to be.”

Then she climbed down from my loft bed, taking the shirt with her. She paused long enough to grab my entire hamper from the closet and then vanished into the hallway, dragging a week’s worth of dirty laundry behind her.

Yeah. So that’s a thing. An inhuman is doing my laundry now.

I lay there for a moment, staring at the ceiling and listening to the frantic beating of my heart and Cassie’s steady breathing from across the room. At least she hadn’t woken up to all of this. Likely the laundry lady didn’t want her to wake up.

Then I sat up and climbed down the ladder. Our improvised barricade was still in place, which really raised a lot of questions on how she’d managed to get in and then out of our room while dragging my hamper. I’d heard the door open and close. I dragged one of the chairs out of the way and then awkwardly dragged it back to place after me as much as I could while shutting the door. I made sure it was shut properly too. No more monsters sneaking up on Cassie because I’m a dumbass.

There’s something that’s been bothering me since my first year here. I’ve refrained from saying anything because the laundry lady has been so intense in her hatred of the flickering man. Being a weak, squishy human I felt it best to not bring up any potential sore spots with the murder-prone inhuman - especially since I am apparently responsible for her ‘getting into trouble.’ However, seeing as she is now breaking into my room and doing my laundry, I felt that this meant our relationship had progressed to the point where I could ask some difficult questions and not lose a limb for it.

The hallway was empty and silent. I hadn’t thought to check what time it was, but judging by how none of the doorways I passed had light spilling out from under the door, it had to be past three in the morning. That was typically when everything settled down.

“Can I ask you something?” I asked from the doorway to the laundry room. “And it’s totally okay to say no, I understand that this might be a sensitive subject.”

Look I’m still gonna be smart about how I ask.

“You think I’m not going to like the question.”

She straightened from the washer and stared back at me. I shifted uneasily from foot to foot in the doorway. She wasn’t going to kill me or hurt me, she needed me. The worst she could do is pour bleach in with my laundry which… would suck quite a bit, honestly. I don’t make a lot working at the coffee shop and I’m not about to burden my mom by asking for money to replace my wardrobe.

“I just don’t want to be rude,” I said.

“No, you don’t want there to be consequences.” Her eyes narrowed. “But that’s how we work. There are always consequences when you deal with the inhuman.”

Ominous. And here I am with a deal with the devil hanging over me. I tried to shove that out of my head to focus on the conversation at hand. It seemed I wasn’t getting permission or forgiveness in advance. That did nothing to calm my nerves.

“You said I got you in trouble,” I said. “How, exactly?”

She gave a long, exasperated sigh and turned back to the laundry machine. She punched a few buttons and the machine rattled into motion. I noticed that she didn’t have to put any money in. Now that’s handy - an inhuman that does my laundry for me and it doesn’t cost me anything.

Well. Doesn’t cost me any money at least. As she had just pointed out, there are always consequences with the inhuman, and that often translates to a price.

“I was hoping you’d put the pieces together on your own so we wouldn’t have this little chat,” she said and her voice was strained with annoyance. “But for being in college, it seems you aren’t that clever.”

Which seems really fucking unfair, if you ask me. I’m not an expert on the inhuman. Okay, sure, I grew up in an area where it was common knowledge but that doesn’t mean I studied it like some people back home did. It’s kind of like how we all know the local government impacts the things going on around where we live, but very few of us actually pay attention or get involved. We know it’s important to our lives, but as long as it’s not directly impacting us, we don’t really care that much.

So I’m not sure what she expected me to figure out, but inferring the rules of inhuman interaction as they apply to this campus - which appears to actually not be operating according to traditional rules - are probably a bit too much to expect out of anyone.

Anyway, I’m complaining about all of this to you because there was no way on God’s green earth that I was arguing with an inhuman. I just stood there and let her insult me.

I stg none of you even think about telling me I need to grow a spine in the comments, there is a line of what’s worth fighting for, and I feel contradicting an inhuman is on the other side of it.

“How about you come with me?” the laundry lady said. “I’ll show you some things and maybe you can earn your answers.”

“You can’t just tell me?”

She stared at me, her face impassive and unreadable. Like locking eyes with a stone.

“You know that’s not how this works.”

Nothing for free. Nothing without a cost. I took a deep breath.

“How… do I earn them?” I asked.

“Quit stalling and get over here.”

She wrenched open a dryer. I stared at it suspiciously, keenly aware of the time I got stuck in it during my attempts at rescuing Sweater Girl.

(also I had no idea that was a porn trope until people told me in the comments and if I ever blunder into anything embarrassing like that again please just keep it to yourselves, I actually don’t want to be reminded of how sheltered a life I’ve lived)

“Go take a look,” she said brusquely.

“This is going to lead to your realm, isn’t it?”

That’s when she got tired of me hesitating I guess and kicked me in. I went headfirst towards the back of the dryer, there was a moment of terror when I thought I was going to go straight into a wall of metal, and then I was landing on soggy ground that smelled mostly of mildew, but also faintly of bleach. Gingerly, I got up, feeling the ground shift and give beneath my feet. I stood on the decaying remains of clothing, in the last stages of deterioration before returning to the soil. Everything was the color of mud and squished wetly, exuding bracken water. Like I was standing in a swamp.

There were mounds of earth, the tips of the piles of laundry that had stretched as far as the eye could see the last time I was here. The space no longer felt endless. It was diminished and I thought I saw something in the distance, faint lines, like the strokes of a pencil in the haze. The space between each narrow mound of muddy clothing was filled with water. Its flat surface showed me only my muted reflection when I looked down at it.

The water was gray in color and something squeezed at my chest. I tore my eyes away from it.

I felt like I shouldn’t look for too long.

“Depressing, isn’t it?” the laundry lady said from behind me.

“What happened here?” I asked.

No. That wasn’t the right thing to ask. I licked my lips nervously. She said I had to earn my answers. I stepped forward to the edge of the mound I stood on, nervously gauging the distance between myself and the next. I didn’t want to set foot in that water. My nerves screamed every time I glanced at it for more than a few seconds.

At least the gap wasn’t wide. I jumped and my foot slipped slightly when I landed on the next mound. My heart skipped in my chest, but I kept my footing and didn’t fall. Just had to do this slowly and carefully. I jumped to the next mound.

The faint lines in the distance were growing closer. They weren’t as far away as I’d feared. Perfectly straight, spaced erratically apart from each other. I paused, carefully examining the route ahead of me. The mounds were growing further apart.

Then I heard something from up ahead. A sucking sound, like pulling a drain plug, and a crunch like the snapping of branches. My body went tense and my gaze immediately shifted to whatever was approaching.

I wish I hadn’t looked. I shouldn’t have looked. Some things are not meant to be seen by human eyes.

It was far away and yet right over top of me at the same time. It encompassed the whole of this world. Immense, so immense that it didn’t merely cover the horizon, it was the horizon. Staring at it was like trying to understand the enormity of the earth, that this tiny patch of land I stood on was repeated over and over and trying to grasp that in my head, and then trying to grasp the enormity of the sun and that 1.3 million of that concept that’s already slipping at the edges can fit inside it, that I have no frame of reference for something so vast, so my mind tries to limit it in desperate self-preservation, tries to put metaphor and boundaries around it -

But it will not be contained. It doesn’t want to be shackled by something as insignificant as me. My attempts are like dust before it and I think I would have been blown away and scattered into nothingness if not for the fact that it simply didn’t care that I was there.

And I knew because being confronted with something like that, I had to know what it was, I wasn’t given a choice. I’d heard about it growing up, after all, because I come from a small town and small towns love their stories.

I stood before the master of the gray world.

And as I watched, it ripped away one of those mounds of decaying laundry with another sucking-cracking sound, and it swallowed it whole.

It was eating what was left of the laundry lady’s realm.

“We should go back,” a voice said at my elbow.

I almost shrieked. Fortunately, my freeze instinct kicked in and I only gurgled in terror. The laundry lady huffed in annoyance and her hand closed around my wrist. She dragged me backwards and I took one step and then I was tumbling out of a dryer and onto the cold linoleum of the dorm laundry room.

“What was that?!” I shrieked thinly, not even bothering to get up from the ground.

I stared up at her. It was all I could do to keep from clawing at my face with my fingers. I don’t know why I felt like that. It just seemed like the only thing I could do to silence the screaming in the back of my mind.

“Damned if I know.” She shrugged. “My realm belongs to it now, though. I couldn’t keep hold of it after what happened.”

I closed my eyes and regretted it. I saw the pools of gray water behind my eyelids. I opened them again immediately.

What happened? She’d said I had to earn my answers. That I had to be clever. This had something to do with the eyeball. It all came back to that - she’d been the one to help me defeat it because she was angry.

“The eyeball was a weapon,” I said slowly.

“It was.”

“I saw it attack other inhumans.”

No reply. I licked my lips. I had to earn my answers but perhaps she wasn’t talking about doing any great feat or anything like that. She was giving me the last few clues I needed to put it all together on my own.

“The administration used it to destroy your realm,” I said.

She glanced at me, her brow furrowed, but after a moment she nodded curtly. Yes, she said. That was a close enough understanding of what had happened.

I scrambled to my feet. But why? Why had they sent it after her? I remembered her confrontation with the flickering man and how intent he’d seemed on where she was taking the student. How it almost felt like mockery. Like he was trying to goad her into admitting something.

Something like… she was dragging the student off to an eternal realm of laundry.

“Are you not supposed to have your own realm?” I ventured. “No - but - the worm had one-”

“There’s a balance,” she sighed. “Humans are prey and we cull the herd - but we cannot destroy it. The worm is ravenous and its realm keeps its appetite in check.”

The locked doors. The time distortion. Its realm had manifested in such a way to lock it to a single target and to make sure that was the only thing it needed, feeding off the victim’s terror throughout the school year until it finally consumed them at the end.

Then if the worm was allowed to keep its world to contain it…

I thought of the bones hidden beneath the piles of laundry.

“You were taking too many people, weren't you?” I asked.

“I don’t particularly care to hunt when I’m full. I don’t like wasting food. But I could tuck them away here, set them to work, teach them a lesson about respect.”

The flickering man had scolded the thing in the hallway for taking another student out of turn. If she was kidnapping students, hiding them in her realm until they died of exhaustion, then perhaps… perhaps that was what she’d gotten in trouble for.

“Then they found out about my little realm,” she sighed. “And they got their hands on a weapon powerful enough to destroy a world like mine and well. Here we are.”

She sadly shut the dryer. I remained where I was, standing perfectly still, afraid to even breathe lest she detect some sort of anxiety in it and ask me the question I was dreading with every fiber of my being. Because I knew the answer and I didn’t think I would be able to get away with lying to her. But she didn’t ask. She didn’t seem to care. She just went over to the washing machine and stared moodily at the timer counting down the minutes until my laundry was done.

I awkwardly said thank you and I’m not sure what exactly I was thankful for - doing my laundry or showing me what had happened to her world. Then I scurried back to my room before she thought to ask me any questions.

There’s one I fear. One that I know the answer to and desperately don’t want her to know.

She didn’t ask how the administration had found out about her world.

I know exactly how that happened.

Grayson. I’d shown it to Grayson. [x]

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