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Here’s the thing: Olga doesn’t believe in the supernatural.
She has always considered herself to be a very level-headed person: she could keep her cool when others lost themselves to a flurry of emotions, she never jumped to conclusions without substantial evidence and she never ever followed superstitions.
Of course, that is not to say that she never even thought about the paranormal – no, she grew up on stories about witches and vampires and magical objects, and an occasional thought about bad luck automatically cropped up in the back of her mind after a broken plate or some spilled salt. But, well, she was an adult, and a pretty rational one at that, and so she knew that what was considered to be “supernatural” by the general public was entirely explainable by science.
It’s just… that there seemed to be some areas of science Olga was not fully familiar with to explain some things away.
The first time she encounters the- not the supernatural, obviously, just the… unexplainable- the first time she encounters it is when she is studying at Surrey University (she adamantly Ignored the memories of the creatures in the shadows of her childhood bedroom, reaching for her with their elongated arms, instead chalking it up to her vivid imagination). She was doing a course in Theoretical Mathematics, and she was rather busy with preparing for her exams when the rumors about an experiment gone wrong in the Psychology Department started.
The only thing that Olga knew about it were outlandish claims that a girl filled with, quote-unquote, “magic psychic spider powers” had killed a bunch of students and was roaming the halls of the university. Olga, naturally, didn’t believe a word of that, so when she was dared to sneak into the Psychology wing, she agreed to do it without any second thoughts (she had been rather rebellious back then… there was no way she would waste her time on such childish things now.)
The wing was still crawling with police officers investigating the incident (which did give some credibility to there being some fatalities, though no confirmation for freaky spider superpowers), but Olga knew very well how to travel the halls unnoticed after years of avoiding any unnecessary social contact.
And so there she was – in front of the door labeled “Experiment Room №8”. She quickly tore off the police DO NOT CROSS lines, and peeked inside the room, expecting to see a scene of murder. Perhaps some blood, some white outlines, nothing that she hadn’t seen on crime shows before.
The place was drenched in spider webs.
There was no other way of describing it – there were spider webs on the floor, on the ceiling, on the walls – and one enormous web connecting all of the other ones, its center hanging just in Olga’s sightline. One little spider was sitting right on it.
Olga somehow got the feeling that it was smiling.
Before she knew what she was doing, Olga was entering the room, her shoes getting tangled in the sticky substance on the floor, her hand reaching out to touch the spider, to let crawl onto her, into her, to let it take her-
And then she was being forcibly hauled away by angry cops, who were shouting at her, and she was pretty sure one of them slapped her face, which threw her out of the trance. When she glanced back into the room, it was empty. No spiders, no webs, just clear, gray walls and some scattered glass.
Olga got a reprimand for unauthorized entry and had to sign an NDA, but the University wanted to keep the whole thing under wraps, and so no further punishment followed.
Her friends wanted to know what she saw, begging her to tell them whether there indeed was the fabled spider girl haunting the Psych Wing, or if she had seen any bodies or ghosts.
“No, I didn’t see anything,” she had told them. “Just some blood and white outlines. Like in crime shows, you know?”
It wasn’t even because of the NDA. No, Olga convinced herself, there, in fact, were no mind-controlling spiders. There never were. Just something her mind conjured up.
It was fine.
The second time Olga encountered the unexplained (She Ignored the time she saw something- no, someone, it was just a person – in the darkness of a back alley, asking for a cigarette, their mouth not moving and their feet hanging several inches above the ground. Olga didn’t smoke.) was when she was just about finishing her degree. One of her friends, Josh, was also studying Theoretical Mathematics, although he had been a year above her.
They used to hang out regularly, but when Olga started writing her thesis (It was on uncountable infinities. Yeah, she was cool like that.) their meetings started taking place less and less often. Not because they drifted apart or anything like that, no, she was just busy, that’s all.
And then one day Josh showed up on her doorstep, uninvited. She was a little bit irritated (she hated surprises, he knew this), but let him in. Olga noticed that he looked rather pale, dark purple circles under his eyes deeper than usual (every respectable mathematician has to have at least a hint of lack of sleep on their face, it’s just A Thing), and he had been frantically muttering something under breath.
She sat him down in her kitchen and made him a cup of tea while he was doodling something on her napkins. When she placed the cup in front of him, he finally spoke to her.
“I think I’ve almost solved it,” he told her, his voice raspy and quiet.
“Solved what?” Olga asked him. As they haven’t spoken much recently, she didn’t know what project he had been working on.
Instead of answering, Josh just gestured to the napkins he had been drawing on. Olga looked down at them, squinting, thinking she’s going to see an equation of some kind, but there were-
There were fractals. Just fractals, drawn all over her napkins, some of the doodling spilling out onto her wooden table.
Olga blinked.
She was not unfamiliar with the concept of a fractal, of course, but that’s all they were – repeating endless patterns. There was nothing to solve there, no mathematical paradox or anything like that, so what the hell was Josh talking about?
“Do you see?” Josh asked frantically, agitated by Olga’s continued silence. “Everything makes sense now.”
Olga looked up at his face and realized that the popped red veins in his eyes formed a net of sorts. A Lichtenberg figure.
“Josh. When was the last time you slept?” she asked, concerned. This clearly wasn’t healthy. Whatever madness Josh had somehow dragged himself into, she was going to help him get out of it.
“I don’t- I don’t remember,” he said quickly. “It’s not important, Olya. Do you- Do you see?” he shoved the napkins into her face. “I’m almost there, I just- I just need one last detail! And I’m going to solve it. I’m going to solve everything.”
“Stop it with the bloody napkins!” she yanked them out of his shaking hands, tearing some in the process, and threw them in the trash bin. “Josh, you need to get help. I don’t know what happened, so will you please tell me? Without any of this nonsense about damn fractals?”
Josh didn’t appear to hear her, instead staring at the trash bin where his precious napkins went, horror slowly creeping up onto his face. “No, no, no- What have you done? What have you done?”
Before Olga could do or say anything, Josh hurriedly got up and bolted out of the kitchen, running into one of the corridors. Olga ran right after him.
“Josh- Wait! We can deal with this together, please-”
She only caught sight of a door closing, and then Josh was gone.
Olga reported him missing after a week of him not answering her texts or phone calls. The police had tried to look for him, but it appeared that he cut all of his ties with family and friends, so no one knew where he could’ve gone. They had found his apartment abandoned, filled from top to bottom with drawings of fractals with no discernable pattern. There were no further leads after that.
This was fine. Olga often looked down on the stereotypical portrayal of a crazed mathematician who went insane after he couldn’t solve a theorem, but, well, it was unfortunately based on some real life occurrences. Josh just happened to be one of them.
Olga decidedly Ignored the fact that the door Josh had walked through had never existed in her house.
The unexplainable came in small doses after that. An invisible figure brushing by her in the street (just a trick of the mind), strangely loud whispers awaking her at night (sound traveled weird through the ventilation in her apartment building), the way the mold in her shower seemed to spell her name if you looked at it from just the right angle (a simple optical illusion). It didn’t bother her, and she usually just forgot something unusual even happened.
Then she started getting visitors.
It started with two deliverymen showing up on her doorstep one Friday evening. Olga just got out of the shower, and was prepared to have a nice rest in front of the telly (a new episode of her favourite documentary just came out and she did not want to miss it), when her doorbell rang.
She came to the door, a towel hanging loose on her shoulders, irritation already babbling up inside her. Who in their right mind showed up on people’s doorsteps this late? On a Friday?
She looked through the peephole and saw two very ordinary-looking men. Olga wasn’t familiar with them. Door-to-door salesmen, perhaps?
Olga was deciding whether it was a good idea to just ignore them and go lay down on the couch like she wanted to, when one of them reached out and pressed her doorbell again. That sound was getting rather annoying.
And so Olga sighed deeply, collecting herself, and opened the door, just far enough that her face could fit in the gap.
“A bit late for advertising, no?” she said, eyeing the two men warily. They turned and looked at her. Simultaneously.
“’scuse us,” one of them said.
“Got a delivery for Olga Proskevitch,” the other one continued.
Olga glanced down at the massive unlabeled wooden crate at their feet, which definitely didn’t contain the slippers she had ordered on Amazon.
“I think you got the wrong address,” she said and slammed the door right in their faces.
The deliverymen rang her doorbell for a while after that, but she just turned up the volume on her telly and Ignored them until they gave up and walked away.
Those scammers really are getting desperate these days, huh?
The other… unusual visitors that she got came a couple of months after that. Olga wanted to go out shopping, her bag already on her shoulder and all that, and then when she opened the door to leave they were just… there.
A pair of them, like last time, though they weren’t the same two (Olga could tell, even though she couldn’t particularly remember the deliverymen’s faces). One of her new guests looked strangely… fuzzy (that was the only word Olga could come up with), and the other one looked deathly ill, their skin dangerously close to being a shade of grey. Olga wondered if they came here to ask her to call the ambulance.
But no, instead they just stared at her, like Olga was the one who showed up on their doorstep unannounced. It was quickly getting uncomfortable.
“Can I… help you?” Olga asked, shuffling on her feet. She really needed to get to that grocery store, as it closed in about a half an hour (yes, she had been procrastinating, so what? Shopping was stressful), so this sudden interruption had better be quick.
“Whose are you?” the fuzzy one asked. Their voice was strangely echoey, sounding almost like it was coming directly from Olga’s head.
“Pardon?” she replied, not in a polite way, but in a way that clearly indicated that she was annoyed.
“Who do you serve?” the other person asked. Dirt was spilling out of their mouth. Olga thought it was rather unhygienic.
“I work at an Applebee’s,” she answered (look, it was hard finding a job with a degree in Theoretical Mathematics, okay? And she was not going to be a teacher; she did not spend a decade trying to get out of that hellscape only to go right back in). “Is this some kind of public survey?”
The other two exchanged a glance, and Olga saw the fuzzy-looking person passing something to the other one, who was now grinning, more mud falling out of their mouth. Then they nodded at her, and when Olga blinked they were gone, leaving only a whiff of the wind and a pile of dirt on the floor.
Oh, so she had to clean up after them now? Great. Just great. At least the deliverymen took their package away with them.
And so there she was now. With a couple of experiences with the unexplainable (that surely was explainable) behind her back and absolutely no belief in the supernatural in her mind. Sitting in a coffee shop, being watched by a stranger.
Olga was not unfamiliar with being stared at – she was aware she was a good-looking woman – and although she knew she could not reciprocate, it was still nice to know she was being admired, but only as long as it was wistful glances from afar kind of staring, not the creepy-person-across-from-you-on-the-underground kind of staring.
This time though, it was neither of those.
Olga got a feeling that it was not her physical body that was being looked at, but rather the inside of her head, like all of her hidden thoughts and forgotten memories were now out in the open, being examined and criticized. It was a terrible feeling, one that left her dizzy and trembling.
Before it could get worse, Olga got all of her things inside her bag and left the coffee shop, not looking back at the person she knew was staring at her. But as she was walking down the street, there it was again – that terrible feeling that sent a chill down her spine.
Oh god. She was being followed.
Olga turned right on the next intersection – the opposite way from her flat. She couldn’t let them know where she lived (unless they already knew? Oh god, what if they already knew-), and so that’s how she ended up in an unfamiliar part of London, on some street that was progressively getting emptier, and narrower, until she made a wrong turn and ended up in a dark alley. Dead end.
The stare still relentlessly burnt a hole into her back. She was cornered.
Olga took a deep breath. This was fine. She just had to stay calm.
She slowly put a hand into her bag and felt around for a pepper spray. There. This was fine.
She turned around and looked the man who followed her in the eyes.
He didn’t look particularly menacing – shorter than your typical outlaw, deep bags under his eyes, messy hair falling onto his face. But his eyes – bright, even in the darkness of the alley – they felt scorching on her skin, like they wanted to chew right to her core. She felt sick.
“Tell me your story,” the man said. There was a sound of something clicking and starting to whirr.
Olga blinked.
Ah. So this wasn’t the mugging or the stabbing sort of creep. Just the harassing one.
“Take one step closer and I’m going to call the police,” she said determinedly, her hand tightening around the pepper spray.
The man, apparently stricken by her response, made a step back. Olga saw the opportunity and took a step forward to him, closer to the way out of the alley.
The stranger looked… confused? “What?” he hissed. He steadied himself, and said again, “Tell me your story.”
“Look, if you wanted an interview, you could’ve just asked for one,” Olga said, much more confident now that the man revealed himself to be of no apparent danger to her. But, better safe than sorry, and so she nodded to her hand inside her bag. “I’m armed, so you better get out of the way before I have to make you.”
The man staggered back, giving Olga enough space to safely make it out into the lit up street. She gave one last warning glance to the man, and, hoping that now that she’s threatened him he won’t try to follow her again, speed walked away.
He didn’t try to follow her. Olga had really hoped that she wouldn’t ever see him again.
She did.
Shopping was stressful. Mostly because Olga hated being in public spaces for prolonged periods of time (and also because she hated spending money on herself; but that was the secondary reason), but when one day her grocery trip was less painful than usual it took her a rather long time to notice.
Olga was almost done getting all of the items on her list, the juice aisle being one of the last stops, when she finally realized that the store seemed to be completely empty (well, better for her, honestly). It was also getting very cold and foggy, to the point of it being hard to make out anything – must’ve been something wrong with the ventilation. Olga had been squinting down at the expiration date on a carton of apple juice when someone bumped into her.
“Excuse me,” she muttered, even though it wasn’t her fault at all. But, well she was British. Or at least pretending to be British for the last twenty years. She mastered the art by now.
“What- What are you doing here?” a strangely familiar voice startled her. She looked up, trying to make out the person’s face through the fog, and-
Of course. It was the creep from the other day. What a pleasant surprise!
“What are you doing here?” she countered. “Back for another interview?”
“Interview...?” he repeated, then shook his head and threw his arms up in the air. “Don’t you see? Everyone is gone!”
Olga looked around. The store still was very much empty. “Yes, I noticed. Do you think we missed an evacuation announcement, perhaps? There seems to be some kind of issue with their ventilation system.”
“…Ventilation system,” the man repeated again. Then he laughed into his hand – it was an exhausted kind of laugh, not a happy one – and muttered, “Is this how I used to sound...?”
This was a very nice reunion and all, but Olga really didn’t have time for this, and so she put the apple juice carton into her basket (damn the expiration date, she was going to drink it all in one day anyway) and headed towards the checkout.
“Wait- where are you going?” the man called behind her. She didn’t bother to answer. “Look, we need to get out of here. I know where the exit is-”
“Well, I do too, thank you,” Olga gritted through her teeth, very much not politely. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to the checkout. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t follow me this time.”
“But there’s not going to be anyone-” he cut himself off as the sounds of a busy store rushed back in around them, “…there.”
The fog dissipated, the temperature came back to being slightly higher than Olga would have preferred and a cart being rolled by a kid almost slammed into her back. Back to normal, then.
Not that there ever was anything out of the parameters of normal in the first place, of course.
“How- How did you do that?” the man asked, still following behind as Olga queued to the checkout. He didn’t even have any purchases of his own. Did he come inside specifically to stalk her?
“How did I do what,” Olga replied flatly, giving up on the pretenses of being polite. She just needed to get out of the store, and then she’d be able to either get away, or call for help (she could also do that inside the store, but she needed to buy her apple juice, damn it).
“It shouldn’t be possible for her to…” the man mumbled to himself, like he hadn’t even heard her non-question. “She’s been touched by so many, I can’t tell which one she’s aligned with…”
Okay, now this has officially gone past the weirdo customs and straight into the creep territory. Talking about how she’s been touched by someone? Nevermind that it’s entirely false, she was going to call the police as soon as she’d made it out.
On second thought, she’d rather not. Dealing with cops was always such a pain.
As the cashier scanned her groceries, Olga tried to make eye contact with them to subtly signal that a suspicious man was following her, but they didn’t even glance at her. She supposed she had to command their focus on their job.
The said suspicious man continued talking to himself while Olga paid for her bagged purchases. The credit card terminal beeped, inquiring for a PIN code, and Olga internally cursed, leaning over the machine so the digits she was typing in couldn’t be spied on by her follower. From the hunched over position, she glanced at the man only to notice a tape recorder sticking out of his coat pocket.
“Are you serious?” she hissed at him and hit the “enter” button on the terminal. It let out a happy bleep, but she paid it no mind. “You’ve been recording me as well? Do you have any shred of decency?”
“Recording-?” the man checked his pocket and had the gall to look surprised at finding the apparatus there. “Oh, I didn’t mean to- This just happens-”
“Right,” Olga said. She gripped the handles of her bag tightly and turned around, determinedly walking out of the store.
The door didn’t have the time to close behind her when the man came barrelling out, hurrying to catch up with her. “Hold on, Ms. Proskevitch! I need to ask you-”
“And I don’t want you to talk to me!” Olga whirled back to face him and pointed at him, her hand trembling with barely held back fury. If she hadn’t forgotten the pepper spray at home, this man would have two less eyes to see with. “I don’t know who you are, and I don’t know how you know my name, but I need you to stay away from me! How much more clear do I have to be?”
“I’m Jonathan Sims, the Archivist,” the man replied, apparently taking this as the perfect opportunity to introduce himself. The hand Olga was pointing at curled into a fist.
“The Archivist of…?” she asked through her teeth. If this guy did, in fact, give away his real name, she could put in a complaint at his workplace.
“Oh. Right. The Archivist of the Magnus Institute,” the man (“Jonathan”?) added.
Ah. The Magnus Institute. Well, that explained some things.
Olga sighed heavily, letting the tension leave her shoulders. So this wasn’t the creepy sort of creep. Just a crazy one.
“Look, Mr. Sims,” Olga said patiently, in a sort of tone one might use with their old mother suffering from dementia, “I don’t mind your Institute. You can ‘investigate’ the supernatural all you want, I don’t care. But this ? Stalking people, recording them, harassing them until they give you interviews? This is too goddamn far, not to mention borderline illegal! Be sure I will be raising a complaint with your employer!”
Sims opened his mouth to say something, but Olga cut him off. “And you can stop following me. I don’t have any information to provide you or any interest in becoming a supporter of your Institution. Let me be clear, – and you can write this down – I never have and never will believe in the supernatural!”
With that Olga turned her back on him and confidently walked away. The piercing stare slowly faded away the farther she got, and by the time she got home she felt lighter than she had in weeks.
She put the groceries away in her fridge except for the apple juice, which she opened to take a victory gulp out of.
“Here’s to dealing with crazy stalkers!” she said to the empty kitchen and started to chug the apple juice right out of the carton. Her eyes widened after the first swallow, and she spit it back out, the liquid splattering on the floor.
Olga turned the carton in her hands and looked at the numbers printed on the back. The expiration date was clearly labeled as yesterday.
Goddamn fucking hell.