Chapter 86: Day 85

Day 85,

Cass let herself in to wake me up early this morning.  The mists are out today and she and her family were trying to get back to the farm before they got too thick.  They made the detour by the library to offer me a ride back home as well.

As I scrambled to get my things together and put on proper clothes I noticed Cass seemed… off.  I pondered aloud how Maiko was doing.  She perked up and slid into her signature smug expression telling me that “logically” there was nothing to worry about since we hadn’t felt anything through the bracelets and Maiko had survived years of mist nights out in the woods on her own.  I smiled and told her that she was right and I shouldn’t fret.

I’d wanted to ask Cass if she’d heard the tapping too since we got back from the floating island, but we were back upstairs and locking up to join her family by that point so I didn’t get the chance.

I’m back at the house now.  The tapping’s started back up.  Going to spend the day going through the documents from Priscilla’s to try to tune it out.  I’ll admit, I had a moment of fear the other day when I realized I had left them alone at the house for the nature sprite to mess with, but it doesn’t seem to have bothered.

Is it the nature sprite that’s making the tapping?  If it followed me into the archive to do it all night, that throws off what I understood about how it operates, which is unsettling in and of itself.  But if it’s something else, then that’s a new unknown force haunting me that I know nothing about, which is maybe even worse.

 

Spent the past hour in the notebook I’ve been using for formal Archivist recordings trying to put the tapping rhythm to some sort of notation.  Can’t get anything that feels right in its capture.

 

Lost my temper and started shouting at the nature sprite to stop the tapping and show itself already.  That’s… probably not healthy.  Need to calm down.  Maybe sing my own song to drown it out.  Change the rhythm.

 

The tapping finally stopped.  I just checked the window and there are shades out.  Could there be a connection?  Or just coincidence?  Or is the sprite amusing itself by setting up arbitrary stopping and stopping points to make me grasp for connections and seek patterns where there are none?  If its goal is to entertain itself by frightening me, it’s succeeded in finding a new type of fear to tap into.

 

Time for bed.  Tapping’s still gone.  Small solace though with the Catacomb nightmares I know I’m about to have.  Going to be wrapping that blanket around me tight tonight.

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