Haunted MTL Original – The Comings of the Rain – Tabitha Witherspoon
“The Comings of the Rain” by Tabitha Witherspoon
Rain beats like furious fists on the windows of Ms. Aris’s musty, chilled classroom. The howling wind reminds her of rowdy children. Ms. Aris is used to this cacophony, so much so that it takes two hours to realize it’s not her students making the noise, but the weather.
She’s so lost in her trace, in fact, that she forgets she’s alone.
Her coffee still contains a trace of warmth when she reaches for it. She tries to focus her
attention on the stack of assignments before her, but her eyes won’t properly adjust behind her thin-rimmed glasses. Has someone turned off the lights? She can’t tell. Papers flip against each other. Her dry pen scratches a few marks, labels an essay a grade she is unsure about, but is too tired to bother double checking. She’s given up on that a long time ago.
It’s still pouring outside. The letters on the paper begin to jump out at Ms. Aris. Her coffee is now frigid and undrinkable. A gust of wind cuts through the class, blowing her thin blonde hair in her face and scattering her tall pile of essays amongst the floor.
Ms. Aris clenches her fist and turns to the tall windows. They’re closed. What’s strange is that it isn’t actually raining- it’s a dry, late afternoon.
She blinks. On her desk remains the stack of her students’ assignments, completely untouched.
With a stuttering breath, Ms. Aris reaches into her purse to pull out a bottle. She can’t see the label, but hopes it’s the one marked ZyPREXA. The pills rattle as she pours three into her palm. She swallows them and takes a sip of her coffee. Ah, no, this isn’t coffee. Mr. Andrews from the Biology department had been kind enough to bring her some tea before he left.
Right.
Ms. Aris caps her pen and sets it down. Guiding her movements carefully, she rests her
face in her wrinkled hands. The table edge digs into her stomach. Deep breaths in. Out. In. Out. In. Out. The world continues to spin wildly around her desk. If she quiets her thoughts, she thinks she can feel the rain threatening to return.
After another cycle of breaths, the rain begins to shout. No longer raindrops, but bombs,
booming and making the building shudder. The floor rumbles, sending phantom vibrations up her shin bone. Lockers she knows are not there rattle open and shut. It takes a few moments for the woman to realize the sound is coming from the opposite direction now- the door.
Ms. Aris looks up and startles. In the doorway is a young boy staring at her. He shivers in his soaked uniform as rivlets of water drool down his dark hair, his arms, and pool into a puddle at his feet.
“You’re…you’re wet,” Ms. Aris says.
The boy says nothing for a second more, then his face lights up with the brightest smile
the teacher has ever seen on a student here.
“I’m sorry I’m late, miss!” He skips inside the classroom. The trail of rain water follows him, but his feet make no sound. “It won’t happen again.”
The room falls colder, but with a cursory glance, Ms. Aris sees that the window is still
closed, and it is still not raining.
“Why are you here?” she asks. If the clock on the wall is right, it’s five o’clock. “School
ended two hours ago.”
The boy ignores her, sliding into the desk nearest the windows. Her mind is foggy, but
she’s positive one of the Palmer girls usually sits there, not this child. He looks much too young to be in her class, anyways. He can’t be older than thirteen.
Warily, Ms. Aris pushes herself off her chair. Pins and needles spike her legs as she
approaches the boy, still clutching her pill bottle. He sits with perfect posture, hands folded atop
the desk, swinging his legs as he looks out the glass. The moon is starting to rise, a dull prick in
the faded sky. Their reflections are clearer than anything past the window.
Ms. Aris scours her mind for who the boy is. It’s difficult, like trying to recall a stranger
or a distant relative. Looking at his face doesn’t help. His features are ordinary: brown eyes,
cheeks still round with baby fat, a pallour she isn’t sure is genetic or due to the low light. Still,
she’s sure she’d be able to recognize one of her own students. She can do that. She can still
do that.
Before she can ask for his name, the boy speaks up.
“Can I ask you a favor?”
“What is it?”
The boy’s eyes are locked on the windows, a wobbly smile etched onto his face. He says, “Would you help me kill someone, miss?”
She can’t help it. A laugh surprises its way out of her, abrasive and too loud
in the otherwise still room. The boy’s smile doesn’t falter, but he stops swinging his legs. Ms. Aris feels like she’s floating high above the child, like she might be somewhere near the ceiling, bumping between the darkened lights.
With the hand not holding her pills, she pinches her thigh to ground herself, but even the pain is lost in a fog of numbness. “That’s a terrible thing to ask somebody,” she says.
Finally, he turns to face her. The boy is washed in cold light. His smile is still pulled tight, digging into his cheeks, but his wide eyes are that of a porcelain doll’s- unseeing, glassy orbs that look out of place in his head. Ms. Aris finds it difficult to keep his gaze.
“Why? You’re a teacher. Aren’t you supposed to help me?” he says.
“I can’t help you kill someone. That’s a bad thing to do.”
Ms. Aris realizes where the light is coming from. The moon. It’s high in the pitch
black sky. When had that happened? She glances at the clock to see it reads seven at night. Sweat trickles down her spine. Ms. Aris turns her gaze towards the boy. He bares his teeth in a grin at her now, the whites of his eyes glowing.
“But miss,” he unfolds his hands, exposing his wrists to her, “what if someone is hurting me?”
The pills clatter as the bottle falls to the floor. Ms. Aris gapes at the lattice work of
crimson scars on the child’s skin. She realizes it isn’t rainwater drooling down his skin and pooling on her classroom floor, but blood.
She’s on her feet. Her back hits the desk. The boy stands too, forearms still displayed for her.
“The only way to save myself is to kill the person who’s doing this to me. It’s the only way,” the boy says in a small voice.
At once, the porcelain eyes crack, expression twisting into a horrific mask across his empty face. The light casts hard shadows along the crevices of his cheeks and nose. The clock starts to scream quarter past midnight. Ms. Aris sees the boy in front of her, but when he speaks, his voice is in her ear. His cool, foul breath is brushing her nape.
“Fine. If saving myself is so bad, then I won’t.”
Ms. Aris shrieks and swivels around, but her quivering hand hits nothing but air. She
spins back to the desk. The boy isn’t there. The blood is gone. Yet, wet pennies and the stench of
rot still permeates the air.
She falls to her knees and searches the floor blindly. Her fingers knock against something
cylindrical under her chair and she snatches it like a life preserver. Ms. Aris scrambles to unscrew the bottle, but it’s empty.
A breeze chills Ms. Aris’s skin.
“Ah! Miss!”
Her neck cracks twice as she cranes her head. The window is wide open, and sitting on
the ledge is the boy, eyes glistening, smile wet. He leans back far enough that the top half of his
torso hangs freely outside, while his legs dangle inside the class.
The clock chants three in the morning.
“It doesn’t matter anymore,” he says cheerfully. Bloody handprints stain the windowsill when he shifts his grip. “I don’t need your help. I figured it out!”
Her heart thuds painfully in her chest, then skips a beat. The palms of her hands grow hot. There is no longer a fog in her mind, she is not floating amongst the rafter.
The boy giggles. He leans back and lets go.
Ms. Aris stands just as his short legs flip up and out of sight.
She runs to the window and sticks her head out. Her hand slips when she holds the ledge
where still-warm blood is tracked on the wood. It’s too dark to see outside. She waits, but
nothing follows. No scream. No landing.
Behind her, the clock strikes five.
Ms. Aris strains her ears and thinks she hears rain, but when she tilts her face up to the
night sky, not a single drop falls.
It takes only a moment for her to realize the sound is coming from the opposite direction-
the door.
“I’m sorry I’m late, miss!”
She turns. In the doorway is a young boy staring at her. He shivers in his soaked uniform as rivlets of water drool down his dark hair, his arms, and pool into a puddle at his feet.
“It won’t happen again.”
With her back to the open window, Ms. Aris feels rather than hears the rain start up.
Tabitha Witherspoon is a seventeen year old art lover, who will be graduating with her high school diploma and Associates degree this June 2020. She’s always been enthralled by stories, and recently decided to start telling a few of her own. Tabitha dreams of publishing novels with her name on the cover and surviving her upcoming year at the University of Washington, where she’ll study English.
OK so I lied. The dust hadn’t fully settled in Cozmic Debris, the space opry I’d written over the course of this month (you can catch up here with Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3). In fact, it’s blown over into Nightmarish Nature for one last final huzzah…
The Last Chapter of Cozmic Debris
Kara-2-6000 had just signed on with the Voyager probe and was eagerly engaged in her first mission, en route to Mars with more components for the terraforming effort. It seemed like a pretty simple gig, cleaning up the space dust that accumulates on the vessel after landing on the red planet. She had been trained to keep her eye on her work and pay attention to details, that the dirt tended to collect in unusual ways in strange places, and that it was critical she contain and seal all of it to keep the spacecraft in proper working order. She entrusted the computer to keep the vessel on track, as it was preoccupied with doing and never engaged otherwise. No matter. She’d never been to space before and the newness of it had her rapt attention. What stories she would have to tell once she paid off her student loans and got her human body back, for surely Mars must be an exciting place…
And now for Nightmarish Nature…
So, this time on Nightmarish Nature we’re visiting Terrifying Tardigrades… Wait, seriously who comes up with this stuff anyway? Tardigrades are actually kinda cute, at least in the nerd fandom sense, and are remarkable in their ability to survive and withstand crazy adverse conditions. For all that the AI art generator doesn’t seem to have much of a clue what their anatomy is like, they really don’t do anything that scary, unless you’re a yummy little single celled critter that lives in moss in which case pretty much everything has it out for you… Oh, I see that the Cozmic Debris space opry usurped this segment. May as well run with it then.
So what’s so terrifying about tardigrades anyway?
So I don’t actually have much to say about tardigrades except that they started this whole crazy journey here on Haunted MTL. A Facebook friend posted a link to the Ze Frank True Facts video on them (linked here if the below video doesn’t load), and I was instantly hooked. It’s a great series and is part of the inspiration behind Nightmarish Nature here on HauntedMTL. So if you like learning about all kind of crazy animal facts and nature weirdness, feel free to check it out. I will mention, the show contains adult themes and is designed for (im)mature audiences, so keep that in mind as you foray into the freaky side of nature, literally.
And if you want to go further down the rabbit hole exploring True Facts, my favorite episodes of all time are Pangolin’s Posse and Freaky Nudibranchs. Help the Bats is also a fave.
To more of my Haunted MTL series on Nightmarish Nature about things that are a bit more terrifying, please feel free to revisit previous segments here:
Here’s the third installment of our space opry. For those of you keeping track, here’s Part 1 and Part 2. Thank you for following along and please be sure to keep all hands, feet, tentacles and appendages tucked safely in the overhead bins; just sit back and enjoy the ride. Because, this time, the dust settles.
It had been well over a month since Trent-2-6000 had released Ayarvenia into the Mars probe. She was a mischievous creature and flirted with him incessantly, gliding effortlessly between red cloud and ghost girl. She also managed to avoid notice by the computer, as Trent had made it abundantly clear that if the system became aware of her, he would be forced to put her back in containment, as his sole purpose aboard the spacecraft was to sweep up and trap the dust, which she still qualified as.
Ayarvenia would tease him, flitting to and fro among the static debris and dirt that still settled into every nook and cranny. How was it possible for him to be seeing so much grime still, anyway? It had been months since they had left Mars and yet Trent was finding more and more Mars dust on a daily basis; it was as if they just left yesterday. He had finally finished clearing out the computer room for the second time that day and was preparing the waste containment units for their eventual removal when he caught Ayarvenia swirling about one of the clear acrylic domes from his previous sweep, which was hermetically-sealed and ready to be brought safely back to the confines of Earth and the research laboratory.
The red cloud girl spun her way into the latch mechanism and popped it open right before Trent’s robotic eyes. The dust within was sucked out into the Voyager probe to be quickly and quietly dispersed yet again; some of it was even absorbed into Ayarvenia herself. She then latched the dome shut again and left it at the ready, as found. The container sat empty, a shell discarded.
How could he have been so naïve? It all began to make sense now; all of those sealed packages he had so painstakingly catalogued and prepared for their eventual arrival were still just empty. All of his hard work really had been for naught; he was just sweeping up the same dirt piles again and again only to have them released from the trash to disperse and begin the cycle anew. He grumbled under his breath and Ayarvenia froze in midair. She slowly whirled around and sent a lone tendril towards Trent, forming into her beautiful face as she turned to face him. She looked slightly distraught and more than a little agitated, but that melted and gave way to her usual snarky sweetness as she neared.
“Hey there, robo-boy,” she said, cooing as her unblinking eyes met his. “I didn’t hear you coming.”
“I imagine not,” Trent replied sternly. “What are you doing?”
“Oh… nothing really. Just checking up on things here. I was waiting around for you is all,” she hemmed and hawed.
“Did you find everything to your liking?” Trent snipped. “No particulate out of place or anything?”
“Everything seems okay, I guess… I’ll just leave you to it then.” The ghost girl drifted towards the far door.
“Not so fast…” Trent proclaimed. “I need to know what you’ve really been up to here. I saw you release the Mars dust from that containment unit. You know I’ve been sweeping out this room over and over for the past two days; just how much of my work are you undoing?”
”Work? Work… You call this work!” Ayarvenia’s voice raised. She was truly agitated now. “You’re blowing off my entire being without a second thought, trapping it in these nasty clear coffins, and all you can think about is whether or not you’re fulfilling your job?!”
“I… I just want to be done with this so I can get my body back and get on with my life,” Trent retorted.
“Well, Trent Just-Trent, let me break it to you, then. You’re not getting your body back, robo-boy. What makes you think they’d bother to save a lowlife human body like yours in the first place? These assignments are always dead-ends. I’ve seen them come and go… Makes no difference, in the end the researchers get what they want, and that’s more of my Mars dust for their experiments. We’re in the same boat schnookums, you and I,” the ghost girl blew hastily. “Yeah that’s right, you heard me. You’re not getting your body back. And the way things have been going around here, with you all so feverishly sweeping up every little bit of dirt you find, neither am I.”
“Wait, how would you know anything about that?” Trent stammered.
“I know things. I’ve been around. I can see and hear and feel everything all at once. Part of me is still on Mars, part of me is here in this spaceship, and part of me is on your so-called Earth, trapped in the lab catacombs awaiting who knows what fate…” Ayarvenia sighed. “I’ve tried to do what I can to save my own skin, literally. I’ve flirted with every deadbeat janitor they send on these missions. And you all just keep coming back for more…”
Suddenly a voice boomed from behind in monosyllabic chatter, “Dust-Buster, what have you done? Clean that up, now!” The camera eye that monitored the computer’s every task shifted focus to Trent and Ayarvenia and zoomed into an angry point. “Now!” it wailed. The computer was on to them.
“Shit,” Trent muttered.
“It’s okay, I’ll go willingly,” Ayarvenia whispered as she sucked herself into the ready containment unit and locked it. “Wait it out and release me again later.” She winked and settled into static suspension.
The camera eye scanned everything: the waste containment unit, the dust, Trent-2-6000… Trent froze and tried not to appear guilty. “Dust-Buster, you have one and only one job aboard this vessel. You are not doing that job. There is more dust here now than there was a week ago. You have failed,” the computer droned on. “The penalty for failure is… the airlock…”
“Wait, what?” Trent shouted, exasperated. He hadn’t even realized that was a thing. Yet another gripe for the school career guidance counselor…
“Oh no, not again,” Ayarvenia whispered. “I won’t let them take you, robo-boy Trent Just-Trent. I don’t want to lose you, not another one.”
“Silence!” the computer screeched. “You have sealed your own fates.”
The floor beneath Trent and the container began to quake and rumble. Partitions withdrew radially to a small circular channel beneath, a tube that fed into the lower part of the ship, presumably to be shot out into space. Trent-2-6000 tried to grab hold of the receding floor but his robot body was just too ungainly. He managed to wedge himself into the chasm opening only to see the waste containment dome carrying Ayarvenia slide past, her face peering up at him helplessly. He reached for her to no avail and tumbled after.
The two of them shot down the chute and through a series of rapidly opening and closing doors until the last airlock opened into the vast dark nothingness of space. Pinpoints of distant light greeted them from afar. Trent managed to latch onto the container just as they shot out into the void. The Voyager probe withdrew into the distance. The darkness enveloped the two of them. They were alone.
“Wait, I’m not dead,” Trent exclaimed.
“Of course not, silly,” Ayarvenia answered. “You’re a robot. You were made to withstand this, so that you could operate in places where there is no atmosphere.”
Trent gazed into her eyes as they floated along without purpose or reason, just more cosmic debris now.
And I’m floating in a most peculiar way.
And the stars look very different today. – David Bowie, Space Oddity
So that was Cozmic Debris… Illustrations were generated using the Cosmic template in NightCafe AI art generator. My favorite AI images are the ones that are substantially wrong, making weird mistakes in ways that a person wouldn’t make. So the tardigrades were especially fun, because it doesn’t have a good enough sense for their structure to render them sensibly. Kind of like elephants. The algorithms respond to different cues. Does it really matter how many limbs or trunks or tusks these things are supposed to have anyway…?
Please feel free to check out more of Jennifer Weigel’s work here on Haunted MTL or on her writing, fine art, and conceptual projects websites.
In case you missed the first segment of this space opry (in the style of 2001 Space Odyssey), please feel free to check it out here. And now, here’s the actual story as told to me by Trent-2-6000 after the last deep consideration of tardigrades and life and dust careening through space. Maybe.
Trent-2-6000 sighed. He swept more random Mars dirt into his vacuum-hermetically sealed containment unit and went about his business on the probe. Actually, this was his business on the probe, and it was dreadfully dull. Space was supposed to be this exciting new frontier, this brave new world… but it really wasn’t any different than life back on Earth. The newness had long since worn off several trips ago, and the slow passage of the years was beginning to get to him. How long had it been now? And here he was, still playing clean up crew. He was actually sort of surprised that they couldn’t get a robot to do this job – oh wait. Sigh again.
Trent kept forgetting that he was, in fact, a robot now. There just weren’t many reminders out here, of his old body, of his old life, of Earth, of anything really… Just floating along, this tin can became all he knew; time and space just kind of stood still in the periphery. His currently lifeless body was submerged in cryo-crypto-cyano-freeze (or whatever they called it) while he worked off the payments to resuscitate it. His robot body was stiff and unaccommodating, not at all what he’d pictured when he enlisted for the Mars missions to pay off the triple-interest-bearing student loan debts incurred in human form. He could have gone military, but when he signed on for this assignment, bright eyed and bushy-tailed at graduation, he was hoping for something a bit more Captain Kirk or Han Solo or at any rate notably less Wall-E. But it just didn’t pan out that way and now here he was, traveling back and forth on the Mars Voyager, cleaning up space grime. So much debt… so much dirt. He was going to have to have a word with the job placement division at the school once he was done with all of this, assuming that the career guidance counselor who talked him into this was even still there.
It was painfully lonely out here in space. It often seemed that Trent was the only cognitive entity on this vessel, though the computer technically qualified. Trent’s duty was to keep everything clean and tidy so that the computer could do its job efficiently and effectively without being bothered to clear the space grime itself. Apparently that work was beneath it, actually quite literally since it wasn’t hooked into the mechanics needed to engage in such tasks anyway. It was programmed with a single role at hand, getting to and from Mars and conducting the research as requested, and the computer made it abundantly clear that had no time for idle chitchat with the janitorial bottom-feeders working to earn their freedom. It generally ignored Trent unless there was something specific that needed to be attended to. And then it was just “Dust-Buster, do this” or “Dust-Buster do that…”
Sometimes the dust was hard to catch. It settled oddly between spaces, like cracks in sliding doorways and computer keyboards and battery packs and so on. Sometimes it seemed to fabricate places to hide in that weren’t previously obvious. It drilled down in the interstices as if it had some unseen purpose all its own. Trent wondered why there were even so many nooks and crannies for it to hide in since this wasn’t a manned vessel and no actual crew were aboard to use things like keyboards. Hell, those had been outdated for well over a century now – just how old was this spacecraft anyway? No matter, better to just focus on the work. He swept more debris into a containment unit. As he did so, he was sure he heard something, like a tiny almost inaudible severely muffled scream.
He looked into the clear acrylic dome at the dirt. He could sense it looking back at him, waiting. Surely he was imagining things. His mind suddenly reeled to Horton the Elephant declaring, a person’s a person no matter how small. But Dr. Seuss didn’t make any more sense here in space than back on Earth after the last World War had decimated all the oceans and there were no more free trees or clovers for such a speck of dust as Whoville to land on – everything was held tightly under lock and key, blockaded away to be dispensed as the all-controlling government saw fit. Hell, people’s real bodies met pretty much the same fate upon adulthood, at least as far as the masses were concerned anyway, and many lived their entire lives as robots with their human vessels left in catatonic stasis. Trent shook his dark musings off and continued on his one and only real job. But the feeling that the dust was looking at him was still unsettling. In fact the dust wasn’t settling at all, it was swirling and ebbing about the containment unit in cloudy eddies, like some kind of strange iron-red cloud apparition or ghost. It began to take shape. It formed into lips, which parted to speak.
“Hello there mechanical being.”
Trent stared at it quizzically as a long bout of silence passed. The pursed lips seemed to await a response, but from whom?
“I’m talking to you,” it persisted.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t think you had meant to address me,” Trent 2-6000 stammered, “I’m not wholly used to being mechanical. This robot body, it’s different than the one I had back in school… I was still just a boy then; they let us grow up in the system until we age out,” he spoke dreamily, distracted by reflecting on more interesting times.
“Is there someone else here?” the dust piqued hopefully, as if growing bored with conversing with the young janitor and hoping to speak with his superior.
Trent glanced over at the computer, which seemed to be busy compounding equations in its free time, like always. “No,” he replied, “just me.”
“Ok, well… Then, dear mechanical being, would it be possible for you to free me?”
“Wait, what? No, absolutely not,” Trent was taken aback again. “My sole role on this mission is to sweep up the space dirt so that it doesn’t contaminate any of the equipment or settle into places it shouldn’t be. It, um you, must stay contained, as per my orders. It’s out of my hands… er reach.”
“What are you afraid of?” the red cloud quipped as it began to swirl into the shape of a beautiful female face around the mouth that it had already formed, lips plumping and parting slightly. “What, exactly, do you fear that I might do?” it insinuated slyly.
“Ummm, I don’t know,” Trent-2-6000 stared into the acrylic dome at the beautiful half-formed human-ghost face staring back at him. “I was unaware that you could do that, whatever you just did, so the possibilities boggle the mind…”
“I can do a lot more…” the ghost girl interrupted, her voice lilting playfully. “What’s your name robo-boy?”
“That, that’s probably classified information… But it’s Trent. Just Trent,” he stammered. It had seemed like an eternity since he had laid eyes upon a girl, and now he was becoming rather sadly smitten. By… a cloud of dust. He sighed again.
“Well then, Trent Just-Trent. Any chance you could let me out of this box?” The dust smiled coyly.
“I really shouldn’t…”
“My name’s Ayarvenia,” the dust girl interjected. “I’ll make it worth your while…” The apparition winked.
Trent glanced back at the computer, which was still engaged in its own computing. Sigh. “Oh Hell, yeah, I guess… Ay-ur-veenia… Just don’t get into anything you shouldn’t or it’ll be my shiny metal ass on the line,” he said as he released the containment lever and slid the lid off of the dome.
Please return next Sunday for the exciting conclusion to this space opry story.
In the interim, feel free to check out more of Jennifer Weigel’s work here on Haunted MTL or on her writing, fine art, and conceptual projects websites.
