I entered my apartment, with Spot clutched to my chest. I set her down and took off her leash and harness. I noticed that the harness had melted and that the leash was missing the loop for my hand.

  “What the hell? There wasn’t any fire, what is going on?” I checked on Spot’s paw, at this she was starting to get fed up with being touched, but she put up with it. Singed fur, no actual burns, she seemed to have a few curled whiskers.

  Fed up with me poking and prodding her, she ran off to the bathroom. I instantly heard her jump into her litter box and begin the esoteric art of tossing litter around. “Got it, sorry I kept you from your box.” No answer but the swish flick of litter.

  I took off my shirt and noticed it had melted in a few spots. I tried to pull it off, but part of it was stuck to a sensitive part of my back.

  “Ow, ow, ow.” It finally gave way. Ow, that really hurts, I looked at my shirt and noted a patch of skin that came off with it.

  I went to my bedroom and got into my travel bag, searched around and found my bag of various over the counter meds. “Hmm, aspirin, tylenol, advil, or aleve?” I decided on aleve, as the aspirin and advil always gave me a stomachache, and tylenol only ever helped with the occasional headache. I thought about it, tylenol too, because I definitely had a headache on top of the burns.

  I took a look at my watch, it wasn’t even 10am yet. This has been a pretty bad first day. I poked at the spot on my back, “ow”, a little bit of blood on my finger. Damn it, I guess I need a shower to get this clean. Who knows what was in that water.

  I took a shower and patched myself as best I could. I wondered if I should switch to all cotton shirts just in case something like this happens again.

  What, like another towel monster attack? Seriously?

  You should be questioning your sanity right now!

  It didn’t just happen to me, it got Spot too.

  So that means it’s real?

  Are you listening to yourself?!

  You need a rubber room, that’s what you need.

  I sighed. I closed my eyes and just breathed for a moment.

  Everything is fine. This town is just weird, like Ezra said.

  With a crazy wheel, not a freaking towel monster that said things FROM YOUR NIGHTMARES!

  So what should I do, we’ve seen weird fire things before, we just keep ignoring them and leaving.

  Nothing has compared to that.

  A few nightmares over the years do not compare to that.

  That compares to The Fire.

  I stopped that thought. I don’t want to think about that. I have more work to do, also Ezra had told me that story about the fire in Old Grimwood Springs. Maybe that has something to do with the towel monster.

  Sure, you keep telling yourself that.

  I finished getting dressed and decided to see what other work I had to do. I asked Spot if she wanted to help and she shut the bathroom door on me. Evidently she’s staying in there for the day. I heard her turn the faucet on. I blinked, talented feline.

  I went back to the laundromat to clean up. No more paranormal activity. I fixed the broken pipe, dealt with the coins and cash, and reloaded the exchanger. Made sure the coin-op chemicals were stocked. Took a couple hours but the place almost looked like it belonged in the 20th century.

  I decided I would check out the video store that my apartment connected to next. I used the front door to go in. It smelled of old stale popcorn and deteriorating cardboard. There was still a bit of signage up, though it had faded out. I couldn’t tell what the place had been. All I could make out is a big W and an ee-Oh. Didn’t ring any bells.

  I went into the back room behind the counter. An old VCR, CRT TV, and a handful of VHS tapes. Huh, that could be something to look at when I have some free time. I looked at the tapes, they seemed to be home made. Ugh, I hope I didn’t just find someone’s old porno tapes. This is definitely a task for a different day.

  I spent a couple hours cleaning up. I opened all the windows to let some light in. I noticed it was still lightly snowing, but not sticking. I began pulling down the old signage, dusting, and sweeping. Found a whole box of broken DVDs with security tags on them. I’d need a vacuum with the carpeted areas, but it at least looked cleaner. I grabbed a shopping cart and used it to take the garbage out back to the dumpsters.

  The shared mall dumpsters were locked behind a tall fence. I looked at my keys, there were several Masterlock keys that might go with the lock on the fence. I chose at random and actually picked the right one, or maybe they worked on each other. I shrugged, that’s a problem for future me.

  I opened the fence and saw a box with a bunch of VHS tapes and a couple old video game systems. Huh, someone's just throwing this stuff out. I have that TV back at the old video store. I nodded and thought that today was looking up. I dumped my trash, grabbed my found treasure and took it back to the video store.

  I closed the windows and locked the place back up. While I really really wanted to check out what I had found I needed to see if there was anything else I needed to do before I called it a day.

  Back at my office I looked at the clipboard.

  End of day tasks:

  This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  Worklog: enter what you did for the day in the log, make sure you log the weird stuff too

  Orders: order any out of town supplies you may need, there’s a list in the computer, just hit the checkbox and submit.

  Check email: check work email, it’s pretty low volume with so few tenants and Home Office rarely checks in.

  Deposit coin-op cash: go to bank, use bank card in the master clipboard.

  I looked at the phrase “weird stuff”. I’m not sure if it made me feel better or worse knowing this stuff was just part of the job.

  Okay, I can do all of this.

  In the worklog for today's date I put in:

  This is Kit Walker, Jerry quit and made me the manager. I fixed the leaky pipe in the laundromat, while doing so I was attacked by a fiery towel monster from my nightmares. Defeated it with a few injuries, cleaned up afterward. Finished daily maintenance on laundromat. Cleaned up former video store. Took trash out.

  Okay, that’s done. Check the email. Something from Home Office. Yikes.

  To: CURRENT MANAGER

  From: Home Office

  Welcome to the Grimwood Stores Inc. Family. You’ve taken stewardship of the Grimwood Plaza Mall location. This email is to acknowledge that change. Please hesitate to contact us. We trust that you can handle the job from what FORMER MANAGER has told us.

  Please use the computer to order anything you may need that you can’t acquire locally. Please be on the lookout for potential tenants that may help you in your endeavors/adventures/horrors.

  Form 11a is for new human tenants, Form 11b is for new entities that wish to be tenants. You will understand in time.

  Office/Room 14 is off limits until it is time.

  Regards,

  Home Office

  That was weird. I don’t think we have an office or a room 14, so that’s pretty easy. So I’m not just a manager, I'm a steward. And they don’t want me contacting them, because Jerry said I could do the job. I’m also supposed to look out for tenants that can help me with whatever that means. I don’t want to deal with horrors. What the hell does “new entities” mean? I’m so confused right now.

  Okay, I did the worklog and checked emails, I don’t need to order anything, what else? Ah, the bank. I know Ezra goes around 6pm, well, at least he did yesterday. I patted my pocket that had a wad of 1 dollar bills from the money exchanger. I opened a drawer on my desk, and there’s envelopes. I stuffed the money in and looked at the time. 5:12pm. I had a little time to kill.

  I went back to the video store to check on the box of stuff I found by the trash. Some old VHS tapes, labels 1 to 4, with no other names. An old Atari 2600, a yellowed NES, and a 1st generation Sega Genesis. A few games too. Pitfall for the 2600, the label was peeled off on the front and someone had used colored pencil to draw a little scene on it. Some other 2600 games that didn’t have labels. Sonic and Knuckles for the Genesis, that was the one that you could plug other carts into. A couple other Genesis games, Altered Beast, Sonic 2. For the NES there was Dragon Warrior, a mixed cart with Super Mario Bros/Duck Hunt, a golden cart that I knew was a Zelda game, but it didn’t have the label, so it could either be 1 or 2.

  There were also some various controllers. The standard joystick for the Atari, a yellowed NES controller, a yellowed and grey NES light gun, and a couple of the 6 button genesis controllers.

  I heard Ezra’s car start from inside the store. I looked at my watch, 5:55pm. I better get a move on.

  I headed outside, brr cold, and waved to Ezra, he waved back and rolled down his window. “Are you headed to the bank?” I asked. “I sure am,” he said with a smile. “Any chance we use the same bank?” “An excellent change, hop in.” I did, and we were off.

  I won’t bore you with all the interactions at the bank and everything. Ezra and I talked about the fire some more and I told him about what happened at the laundromat.

  “...and I have burns on my chest and back from it, and my cat caught some of it too, but nothing physically left at the laundromat,” I finished.

  Ezra gave me a concerned look. “I’ve heard some weird things in this town, and this isn’t the first time something off has happened in that laundromat, but I haven’t seen many people actually get hurt.”

  I pulled up my shirt and showed him the fresh burns I had bandaged.

  “Didn’t do this to myself.” Ezra sighed, “I know you didn’t, wasn’t saying you did. The stuff in the laundromat usually has something to do with water. The place can’t ever stay dry, even when it was new. I’m just glad everything there is electrical, I can’t imagine how bad it would be if there was gas running through it.”

  I nodded, “yeah, that whole place could have gone up, I imagine some evidence would have been left behind then.”

  Ezra nodded with me. “You know, you could try talking to June over at the library, she’s kind of an expert on the weird stuff happening. Has what you might call an historical perspective on it. There’s also this gal that fancies herself a ghost hunter. She’s got a blog called The Skeptical Spector. Might be worth a look,” Ezra suggested.

  I gave him a look. “Yes I know what a blog is, just because I’m old doesn’t mean I don’t keep up with the times.”

  I put up my hands in surrender, “I didn’t mean anything by it, I’m just surprised.” Ezra nodded, mollified.

  The snow was starting to stick and the wind was strengthening. I pulled my coat around myself as I walked across the parking lot into the hallway that led to my domain. I finished my work for the day, it was time to go home.

  Spot greeted me at the door with a “mroww.” “How did you get out of the bathroom?” I queried.

  She gave me a look of, I’ll never tell.

  She headbutted my shins hard enough that I thought I was going to fall over.

  I scritched her head, “I missed you, too. Do you want some wet food for dinner?”

  She put her paws on my thigh and trilled at me.

  I guess that’s a yes.

  I went to the pantry, “How does chicken and giblets sound?”

  Her polite trills turned into full on meows. “Mroww, mow, mrrow.”

  “Okay, okay, I can only go so fast, especially with you trying to trip me.”

  I opened the can and got out a paper plate, thank you Betty. I put the plate on the floor next to her dry food and water. She happily dug in, purring all the while.

  I guess I need to eat something too. I had some frozen hamburgers in the freezer, I pulled them out, pulled out the frying pan, thank you Betty again, and turned the stove top on.

  A wave of nausea hit me as I felt the heat from the stove. Spot stopped eating and hurriedly got between me and the appliance. She hissed at it and let out a low growl. The nausea abated, and she went back to her food. Before she began eating again, she gave the stove one last look, and then looked at me and gave me a slow blink, and then dug back in.

  I’m not sure what that was all about, but I think the frying pan is hot. I made my dinner with no recurrence of the nausea. I’m not sure what Spot did, but she told something off I couldn’t see.

  The rest of my evening was uneventful. I thought about heading down to the video store to play with my finds, but I was just too tired to head down the stairs. I took a shower and did all normal parts of getting ready for bed.

  I was a little weary about sleeping after a day of weirdness and last night's nightmare. I can’t believe that was just last night. Maybe I should take something to help me sleep.

  I got into my little otc med bag and pulled out the benadryl. I popped one in my mouth and hoped that would help me sleep without dreams. Spot started trying to herd me to bed, “Okay, okay,” I said as she began rubbing against my legs and then heading to the bedroom and meowing at me.

  I slipped into bed, and Spot joined me. I gave her attention for a few minutes before the medication kicked in. I rolled over, and she took her spot on top of me.