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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/fainting–goat on 2024-10-05 01:12:30+00:00.

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You know how I haven’t really talked about my manager since the rescue in the graveyard?  It’s because not a lot happened with him after that.  He was kind of like, you cool? And I was like yeah I’m good and he left it at that.  My personal theory is that he either doesn’t remember what happened, is in denial, or is dealing with his trauma by burying it very very deep and hoping no one asks about it.

Haaaaaaaaaaaaah that’s familiar.

Probably a combination of all three, if we’re being realistic.  Anyway, I’ve been going to work as normal despite everything, because life goes on right, and I don’t have that many shifts to begin with.  And I think things would have just continued on like that, with him in a state of amnesia/denial/trauma and me not wanting to bring it up because I had other problems to deal with.

HOWEVER.

Neither of us accounted for my former boss.  

We certainly didn’t expect her to show up unannounced at the end of my shift.

“I AM OUT OF PUMPKIN SPICE,” she bellowed, bursting in through the back door of the kitchen area.  “DO YOU HAVE PUMPKIN SPICE.”

Uh, no, we obviously did not have pumpkin spice.  We did things like reheating spinach quiches and mixing cans of chicken alfredo with pasta.  Pumpkin spice wasn’t something we needed on the regular, unlike the coffee shop which had decided to make it a permanent part of their menu.  My former boss ignored me though and went into the pantry.  I stood there, waiting, while she rummaged around.  My manager emerged from his office at the commotion to see what was happening.

“Okay, you don’t have it either,” my former boss said, emerging from the pantry empty-handed.  “We need to go shopping.  My car is broken, so you’ll need to drive.  Oh, and let’s bring Ashley, we’ll need help carrying it.”

How much pumpkin spice were we buying?!

“You could just take it off the menu,” my manager suggested.

“UNACCEPTABLE.”

I would like to say that this level of volume wasn’t unheard of for my former boss, but it was unusual.

“I’d have a riot on my hands,” she added.  “Putting it on the menu was the most popular decision anyone has ever made on this campus.”

I’m not sure I’d agree with that, I feel like ‘a professor canceling a Friday afternoon class’ could put up some real competition, but my former boss was moving through the kitchen like a whirlwind.  She went to my manager’s office and helped herself to his car keys.  Then she headed for the exit, my manager following because it was his car and he had no choice, and me following because at this point I just wanted to see what the heck was going on.

I did remember to text Cassie and tell her what was going on so she wouldn’t freak out when I didn’t show at our meetup spot now that my shift was done.

My manager at least managed to reclaim control of the situation by insisting that he get to drive his own car.  But as we were leaving campus, my former boss gave him some instructions on where she wanted to go.  Don’t go straight, she said. We weren’t going to the grocery store.

She told him to get on the highway.

And then he drove in confused silence for half an hour while I sat in the back and wondered if I was being kidnapped.  I had my cellphone on me, so maybe not though?  Maybe we were just going to a retailer outside of town, because the local grocery store probably didn’t have the quantity of pumpkin spice she needed.  Restaurant supply stores are a thing, right?  I assumed this was the case just to calm my nerves, while I watched out the window as the rain pelting the car slowly dwindled and then vanished.  I could see sunlight for the first time in almost two weeks.

“Okay, now that the rain is gone,” my former boss sighed, “let’s talk about what this is really about.”

“So the pumpkin spice…” my manager began.

“Oh we’re totally out of it.  But I crossed it off the menu like a sensible person.”

Which meant this excursion was about the rain.  It was about me.  And sure enough, my former boss wanted to know what happened in the graveyard.  I didn’t just free my manager from the tree, she said.  It’d started raining that day and it hadn’t stopped.  That wasn’t a coincidence.

So while my manager drove, hunting for someplace to pull over that might have a decent coffee shop, I told them everything that had happened.  Everything.  Because I needed all the help I could get and both of them were pretty entrenched in the inhuman by this point already.

“The devil!?” my manager said when I was finished.  “Am I losing my mind?  Is this what it feels like to lose my mind?”

“Says the man that periodically eats the contents of his entire kitchen, including, mind you, the grease traps and the raw bacon,” my former boss retorted.

I’m so glad she’s on my side.

“But why are you getting involved in this?” I asked.  “I seem to recall you being an advocate of keeping your head down and not saying anything.”

“Yeah, I was,” my former boss said grimly.  “But you know what else is different?  Haven’t seen the possums around for a while.  Haven’t seen a few things around lately, actually.  Got me thinking - maybe campus can change.  It is changing.  And turns out you’re the reason.”

I started to say something self-deprecating, that it really wasn’t me, that I’d just been cast in this role because Grayson needed a body to inhabit, but she quickly cut me off.

“So what are you going to do about the rain?” she asked.  “Any ideas to get rid of it?”

That hadn’t even crossed my mind.  Stopping Grayson, yes, but not getting rid of him.  He was the rain.  You couldn’t get rid of the rain.  But I had a seed now, a seed to a tree that was weakening - containing - him and maybe all I needed to do was find someplace to plant it.  Not in the graveyard.  That would just return us to the old status quo, to the very situation the devil had singled me out to undo. I couldn’t go back to that.  Grayson was right in that regard - he couldn’t keep stealing bodies.  That had to stop.

“I don’t want to get rid of Grayson,” I said quietly.  “I think… I think in a way, the rain protects campus.”He hadn’t hesitated to kill all the swimmers.  He’d killed that kelpie.  He was keeping things in check and yes, he wasn’t getting rid of everything - the flickering man in particular came to mind, at least while he was following Grayson’s rules - I still had to wonder how much worse campus would be without him.  No ancient being was fully benevolent.  They were reflections of humanity, a single shard of a broken mirror, but even that slim aspect had a multitude of angles from which to view the world.  Grayson, no, the rain, was far more complex than mere good or evil.

“Look, I know it’s hard, but he made his bad choices and you are not responsible for them,” my former boss said and I felt like this wasn’t the first time she’d had this conversation with someone.  The words felt like she was familiar with them, like she’d used them before.  “You need to let him go and do what’s right for you.”

“I don’t know what’s right.”

“I didn’t say what’s right,” my former boss snapped.  “Because what’s ‘right’ is usually decided by like… society and people with lots of money and shit like that.  I said what’s right for you.  What you want to do.  So what do you want?”

What did I want?  I wanted to graduate.  I wanted to remain myself.  I wanted the people I cared about to be safe.  And Grayson… I wanted things to go back to how it felt when I first met him.  When he was just a part of my life like anyone else and there was no visible ulterior motive and he wasn’t desperate and he trying to make choices for me and he wasn’t anything more than just someone I felt safe talking to.

“I, for one,” my manager added dryly, “would like the rain to stop turning me into a monster, so I’m all for trapping him inside a magical tree.”

I wanted to protest that I didn’t know that’s how it worked, but something was turning around in the back of my mind, something basic, something so simple that I already knew it long before I started my geology classes.

It was weird that the rain turned people into things, wasn’t it?  And how all the monsters came out in the rain and how the doors in the steam tunnels led to other places.  Like the world was crumbling and the reality we humans knew and clung to couldn’t hold together.

Like it was eroding.

“Holy shit,” I whispered.  “I think I do want to plant the seed.”

What happened when it rained and there wasn’t enough plant life?  Erosion.  The rain changing things, turning students into inhumans and back again.  The crumbling of the divide between our world and theirs.  The traveling river, sweeping through our world and then back to where it came from.  The steam tunnels, leading to different places through each door.  And creatures crawling out of that pool of water, finding their way onto campus where the rain, trapped in a human body, could only do so much to remove them again.

The university president had upset the natural order by putting an ancient being into mortal flesh.  Professor Monotone’s ancestor had attempted to reduce the rain’s power by planting a tree.  And maybe that was the right answer, but for the wrong reason, and not in the right spot.  We did want a tree, not to trap the rain or to weaken it, but to stabilize the earth.

A live tree.  Not…

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