The Borrower in the Rain

The rain had been drumming on the tin roof of our cottage for three days straight, a relentless percussion that seemed to seep into the marrow of the walls. I was drifting in that grey half-sleep of late afternoon when Marcos, my roommate, shook my shoulder. His face was pale, and he held a dripping umbrella like a weapon.

‘There’s a woman at the door,’ he said. ‘From the farmhouse down the lane. She says her husband is… acting up. Needs help.’ I groaned, pulling the blanket over my head. Marcos had always been the good Samaritan, the one who answered when the world knocked. ‘You go,’ I mumbled. ‘I’m dead tired.’ I heard him sigh, then the creak of the front door, and the murmur of voices swallowed by the rain.

An hour later, Marcos returned, soaked to the skin, his eyes wide. ‘You won’t believe what I saw,’ he said, shaking water from his hair. ‘I was standing on their porch, trying to calm old man Whitfield down. He was ranting about someone stealing his tools. And then… I looked across their yard, through the rain, and I saw a child. A little kid, maybe five, just standing there in the middle of the field, not moving. I shouted, but the kid just stared for a second, then turned and ran towards the old abandoned barn at the edge of the woods. I chased after it, but when I got there, the door was locked from the outside with a rusty chain. And the strangest thing – there were no footprints in the mud. Not one.’

I laughed it off. ‘Probably a trick of the light. Or a stray dog.’ But Marcos insisted, and his fear was contagious. That night, I couldn’t sleep. The rain had stopped, and an unnatural silence hung over the cottage. I got up to get a glass of water, and through the kitchen window, I saw a figure standing by the barn, a small silhouette against the moonlit mist. It was watching our house. I froze, and then it raised a hand and waved. Not a friendly wave, but a slow, deliberate gesture, like it was beckoning.

I woke Marcos, and together we grabbed a flashlight and trudged down the muddy lane to the barn. The chain was still there, but it looked new, and the lock was a heavy padlock we had never seen. ‘This wasn’t here before,’ Marcos whispered. I shone the light inside through a crack in the boards. The beam swept across an empty interior, but in the corner, a child’s toy lay on the dirt – a small, red fire truck. I’d seen it before. It belonged to the Whitfield’s son, who had drowned in the river last summer.

We rushed back to the farmhouse, hammering on the door. Mrs. Whitfield answered, her face haggard. We told her what we saw, and she went white. ‘That’s not possible,’ she said. ‘The lock’s been rusted for years. No one’s been in that barn since…’ She stopped, hand to her mouth. Then, from behind her, her husband appeared, eyes bloodshot, muttering about ‘the borrower’ – a thing that takes what’s forgotten, that mimics the lost. ‘It’s come back,’ he said. ‘It’s been borrowing our grief.’

We left, shaken, and walked back through the fog. As we approached our cottage, I saw something on the doorstep: a child’s muddy handprint, no bigger than my palm, stamped on the wood. Inside, the kitchen was ransacked, drawers pulled open, the silverware scattered. On the table, arranged in a neat row, were three small stones, a piece of string, and a note, written in blocky, childish letters: ‘Borrowed. Will return when the rain stops.’ It hasn’t stopped raining since.