Mr. Dobbs and the Rain

After a string of downturns, Mr. Dobbs encounters a strange phenomena.

One morning Mr. Dobbs was woken up by a drop of water to his forehead.  He sat up not knowing what had happened.  He swept his forehead and lay back down.  When he was finally jarred awake by his alarm clock, he stood on the bed and ran his fingertips across the ceiling.  He quickly dropped the incident from his thoughts regarding it as a moment from a realistic dream. 

Two days later it happened again.  He scoured the ceiling of his small apartment, feeling around every crevice, standing on chairs to reach the corners and walls.  After he gave up he got dressed and went to work.

            Two days later two drops woke him, he called the super of the squalid building and reported a leak.  After a few days of harassment, the workers finally came and searched the apartment.  They told Mr. Dobbs that he was crazy and left.  Totally embarrassed, Mr. Dobbs returned to his routine.

            The twin drips visited him every other day for two months before being accompanied by a third.  Mr. Dobbs not wanting to be ridiculed suffered them in silence as they continued to visit him every other day.  Then one morning he was startled out of his sleep by four drops, and the next week five.  They pounded upon his brow in stark succession, and it wasn’t until the drops numbered seven that he saw one while he was completely awake.  They were fat and prompt and struck just above right between the eyes.  The number of drops increased steadily week by week until finally they became a steady stream.

            The stream would only strike him for thirty seconds or so, and one day continued to follow the top of his head as he had sat up.  The stream afflicted him about ten minutes before his shrieking alarm was set to wake him, and was a considerable annoyance.  Even then he told no one about it.  Honestly, there was no one to tell.  Not even his children returned his calls.

            The stream just became a part of his life.  He would wipe his head dry, take a shower, put on one of his six button down shirts, don one of his four ties, report to work.  He had little to say to his fellow coworkers for he barely knew them, regardless of the fifteen years he had been with the firm.  He knew few names and was referred to as old man Dobbs around the water coolers. 

            At around four months he woke to find the stream pouring over his head for a full minute.

            He had called himself foolish for keeping the car that he bought in ’89 when he had purchased one as recently as ’ 04.  However, when his second wife had taken his newly purchased vehicle during their divorce he was thankful to still have the broken down jalopy for his three hour commute.  He had even sighed with relief when he had found that his wife was in no way interested in the car when they split in ’05.  She had left him for a man whose name he had never heard, and she had seemingly felt no regret in doing so.  Yet when he would fall asleep at night, alone and cold, he still felt a strong yearning for her, and his first wife.  He resigned himself to the facts, that at the age of fifty-six, he would probably never again meet a woman who would be willing to settle for him again.  He awoke to find the phantom stream now occurred for a full two minutes.

            He no longer bothered in setting his alarm, for the stream woke him promptly at the same time every morning and now accompanied him all the way to his shower.  He simply placed a small hand towel on his head as he walked through his small cramped apartment.  Once while eating his meager breakfast he felt an unexpected drop on his head as he recollected upon his house he had once shared with his second former wife.  How large it had seemed, how much space he used to command, if ever so brief.  How long ago had that been?

            He had incorporated the steadily increasing length of the stream until one morning he had barely noticed that it accompanied him all the way to his rusting car.  It stayed with him in the car and soaked him down to his undershirt.  At first he went to work embarrassed, storming off into the bathroom to dry his shirt with the electric hand dryers.  

            He had finally accepted and gotten used to the now constant twenty four hour stream when he noticed that another stream had appeared.  When the two streams equalized in intensity, a third showed up.  In order to sleep with the triplets he got used to sleeping with a thick towel over his head.  When the fourth stream appeared he had to wake in the night and change towels.  The flow of water was constant and there was no escape from it.  He considered bringing a change of clothes to work, but the thought of people seeing him change clothes filled him with dread.  Especially since they could not see that they were wet.  He showed up to work soaked and dripping, and left damp and freezing.

            By the time the fifth stream appeared Mr. Dobbs was already spending most of his free time washing towels and shirts so as to prevent them from smelling and becoming moldy.  He spent most of his day sitting in a plastic wrapped chair and a bright yellow raincoat so as to escape the rain.  His entire house smelt of water and rot and mildew.  Mr. Dobbs spent hours on his hands and knees scraping and scrubbing mold and mildew from the many crevices that his small apartment offered.  Soon he stopped performing this little activity as well.

            Life for Mr. Dobbs continued this way until he woke up to find ten evenly distributed streams in a loose circle above his head and shoulders that followed him throughout the day.  They soaked through the towels that Mr. Dobbs placed over his head so quickly, he learned to sleep without them.  He removed the sheets every morning to allow the mattress to dry and never walked barefoot, for the endless flow of water made the floor slick, and he did not want to fall and break his neck.

            The water flowed over everything he came in contact with.  The papers at work became waterlogged and the ink ran, or the swelling of the paper warped the printed text before the water disintegrated the paper.  This made his work suffer very badly and his productivity nosedived.  When he went for a coffee break, the water caused his #1 Dad coffee mug to overflow and the liquid inside become opaque and tasteless.  This was the same for the food he ate, rivulets of flavor splattered his shoes, leaving a soggy mush.

            The streams continued to increase in numbers and at a steadily increasing rate.  They now numbered well over thirty and fell around Mr. Dobbs in a circle around ten feet in diameter.  It was impossible for him to walk with his head up from the intensity of the falling streams.  The roaring sound that the water made as it rushed past his ears made it hard for him to hear and all social contact, besides work related issues, had ceased for Mr. Dobbs.  He had to sell his small rusted car and now had to take a four hour bus ride to work.  His performance at work sagged still further, papers and orders filled his cubicle in towering stacks.  The paper seemed to either separate into pulpy shreds or float away before he could get to it.  He sat in his chair while his supervisor yelled at him.  The force of the water forced his head down.  No matter how many streams appeared or intensely they fell, they only affected Mr. Dobbs.  Predictably it was not long before he was finally fired.

            He sat in his small apartment, his bills piled up and in no way about to be paid.  One by one the light bulbs in his apartment winked out, he did not bother to replace them.  He would sit by the phone and stare it.  It began to appear to him as some sort of relic.  He seemed to remember it as a device he could use to connect to other people.  Now when he picked it up all he got were recordings, phantoms.  Ghost like voices of people he used to know.

            He had taken to the task of drinking away what small amounts of money he had left, it would not take long he figured, and he discovered that bourbon turned the water from a dull cold to a warm, almost comforting temperature.  The water, which used to simply flow out from under his front door stopped doing so, and now steadily collected, forming his apartment into a quickly filling pool.  Mr. Dobbs paid no notice and simply sat drinking straight from the bottle as the water reached his knee and sent his personal effects floating around the room.  The level rose to a point where he now had to swim to keep his head above the water, which he did not to breath but to take another long pull from a dark labeled bottle.  Eventually the water reached to the ceiling and Mr. Dobbs was completely submerged.  He did not fight it, he simply went limp and succumbed.  The bottle fell loose from his hand and drifted down, he watched it as it fell leaving a dark liquid trail as it quietly dropped to the bottom.

            When the super finally opened the small apartment of Mr. Dobbs after weeks of complaints of a horrid stench in the hallway, he was not greeted by an angry rush of water.  All he found was a collection of whiskey bottles, and the crumpled remains of a broken man.  He approached Mr. Dobbs and lightly pushed his cold clammy shoulder, the dingy t-shirt that covered his body like a flag of surrender.

            When the medical examiner made his report, he concluded alcohol poisoning as cause of death, despite the unusual amount of liquid found in the lungs.  No one read the report, or came to the subsequent funeral.  The apartment was re let, his position at his old job filled.  He was buried in a plain pine box, and his cheap headstone carried not a name, but a number, and was eroded and faded away over the years through constant and unseasonable rainfall.

Author's Note

All comments welcome.

Reviews

[Craig2591]

A strange and surreal story. I like it. It was well written and I saw no glaring errors.

[Goat]

This is a chilling story! This scared me, even though that's not a hard thing to do. Nice write!