“Oh. Thank you,” Joseph said hesitantly as the kid hurried back to his spot with his siblings.

Joseph and Marko walked away awkwardly in silence, feeling incredibly unsettled about the prior situation. They continue to walk, studying the picture they were given by the young boy and pondering the overall encounter.

“Okay. What the hell was that?” Joseph exclaimed as they got far enough away from the kids so they wouldn’t hear them.

“I don’t know, man,” Marko responded with a slight quiver in his voice and a head shake. “Those little kids freaked me out a little bit. Like what the hell did he mean that this is a drawing of you?” Marko began to sound angrier rather than confused.

“I have no idea. A part of me wishes we hadn’t stopped to talk to them because that whole situation was incredibly unsettling.”

“Right, but at least we got some information?” Marko seemed uncertain as to whether the information they gathered could even be considered useful.

“Kind of,” Joseph responded, thinking hard about all the information they gathered. “The only thing I don’t find very useful in developing our theory is the part about Jesus. I’m Jewish, man,” he joked and the two of them chuckled softly.

“But seriously though. What can we take away from this?” Marko asked, staring at Joseph who had his eyes and attention focused on the path ahead of them as they were coming up to a busy street across from their campus.

“I think that there’s something weird going on with those kids. I think they’re acting on something beyond what their mother told them. That drawing of me had nothing to do with anything their mother said or anything I believe she would have taught them about. That concept he drew has nothing to do with Catholicism, so I have no reason to assume she would have taught him that.” Joseph spoke with more confidence, thinking critically about the encounter.

Before Marko could respond, their conversation was interrupted by the walk sign allowing them to cross over the busy street onto their campus. Joseph and Marko acknowledged the cars as they passed through the crosswalk, giving them a second to take their minds off this mentally taxing dilemma.

“So, you think that maybe these kids are crazy like their grandma?” Marko asked, implying that they may know information beyond what they should.

“Maybe,” Joseph responded, continuing to ponder the information. “I don’t think all of them are, but I definitely think that the boy that drew the picture might be. Everything about him was so chilling – the way he said ‘it’s a picture of you,’ the way he looked at me when giving me the drawing, and I almost feel like he never even saw us when we first came up to them. That’s what really shocked me more than anything, and my first response was that it can’t possibly look like me because he never saw what I looked like.”

“You’re right!” Marko exclaimed. “He never did look at you. Not once when we first came up because I was watching him draw that picture of ‘you.’ He had already started it before we even got there, and that made me even more confused when he said that it was a picture of you.”

“He STARTED it before we got there?” Joseph exclaimed purely in shock.

“Yeah. I believe so. At the very least, he had the outline of two people drawn out already.” The two students approached their destination, an old-looking three-story building built generally in the shape of a chapel.

“Well whatever. Let’s see if anyone here can help us out.” Marko agreed and the two walked into the building quickly and headed down the halls towards the section of the building with the most professor’s offices.

When they got to this section, they surveyed the rooms and room numbers, looking for any office with an open door. The room ‘147’ was wide open with the light on.

Joseph looked at the name on the room, “Dr. Kilmer.” He had never met him before and assumed it would be an awkward encounter but decided to continue with the plan and casually knocked on the open door.

Dr. Kilmer looked up quickly with a confused expression his face. His glasses dropped down slightly and he immediately fixed them as he studied the faces on the two seemingly lost students looking down at him.

“Yes? How can I help you?” He asked hesitantly, still astonished that he was getting student visitors at this point in the summer.

“My name is Joseph, and this is Marko,” Joseph introduced them, and the professor nodded his head with a slight smile. “First of all, we were wondering what you teach here?” He asked, looking around the fairly empty room for a clue but came up short.

“I don’t teach here yet. This upcoming semester will be my first and I will be teaching a few religion courses and a mythology course. Why do you ask?” He still seemed a bit puzzled and waited patiently for a response.

The two students sat down across from him in the two available seats and awkwardly looked at each other while trying to figure out how to continue this already strange conversation.

“Well we were wondering…” Marko paused and looked over at Joseph who briefly shrugged his shoulder, taking the Dr. Kilmer’s attention away for a swift second.

“We were wondering,” Marko continued, “If you knew anything or thought anything about The Devil’s Rain.”

“Oh,” the bald old man with a dangerously receded hairline laughed softly, making Joseph and Marko considerably confused. “My apologies,” he continued, “I do know of the rain, but I don’t know much about it. All I could possibly tell you are stories and legends, and that is not very scientific.” The man explained, sounding a bit disappointed as he felt that he genuinely couldn’t help them in their research.

“Well that’s exactly what we’re interested in!” Joseph spouted with his green eyes lit and a large smile on his face.

“So, you want to know about the not-so concrete information? Well, I have plenty of that. Are you looking for any specific lore or legend?” Joseph and Marko looked at each other and shrugged. They hadn’t really considered that question and thought of something to say on the spot.

“How about you start with telling us what you personally believe is the cause for the rain?” Marko answered, and the two fixed their attention on them intensely.

The old man nodded his head and reached into his drawer and pulled out a very thick hard cover book that nearly resembled a bible of some kind.

“This is a book that I use to personally record interesting myths and legends that I hear people discuss and talk about in the current world around us. There are myths dating back to mid-1800s and more recent one’s such as The Jersey Devil, Slender Man, Resurrection Mary, the vanishing hitchhiker. That’s one of my favorites.” He explained with a smile on his face. It was incredibly easy to tell that Dr. Kilmer took a lot of pride in his myth collection and loved the hobby dearly.

“So, you’re gonna show us what you have The Devil’s Rain then?” Joseph asked, seeming a bit impatient as excitement began to rush up inside of him. He looked closely at the book as the professor nodded his head and began sifting through the pages, looking for the recordings of the rain.

“I keep them in order by date in which I’ve encountered them in my own history which means The Devil’s Rain should be a fairly recent entry.” He continued to sift through his pages and came to a sudden stop and smiled. “Ah! This is it. Let’s see what we got on the rain.”

The professor began to mumble to himself as he was reading off information that he didn’t consider to be particularly interesting for the guests. The two students assumed he must be skipping information that he was certain they already knew.

After about 10 seconds of looking through his notes, he started to read something that he knew the boys would want to know.

“So, I wrote down my first personal experience with the rain. It reads, ‘June 17th 2023 approximately 2:15am. This hellish rain came out of nowhere. I don’t know why I was up at 2 in the morning, but I guess I drank too much coffee while filling out paperwork. At first, I thought I was just seeing things and the late-night exhaustion was just getting to my brain, but I had to take a closer look for myself. Blood red rain just didn’t make any sense. I then stepped outside to allow myself to get a first-person view of the rain and see if it really was red or if there was something weird in the sky making it look red. Sure enough, I was covered in what looked like splashes of strawberry Gatorade, and I nearly panicked, but tried my best to keep my composure. I had to be dreaming, I thought. But I could feel it, and I could hear every soft tap of rain against the ground and my body, and the smell was just too real. There was no way I was dreaming at that point, and I was in fact covered in red water. I stopped thinking about it in what I considered to be an irrational rain and just considered it a freak occurrence in nature and went to bed without giving it another thought.’”

Joseph and Marko seemed puzzled by the end of his story and stared at him with a cringe in their faces.

“Wait,” Marko said abruptly. “Your first encounter with the rain was exactly seven years ago today?” Joseph swiftly turned to Marko with a confused look on his face as that detail nearly slipped his wandering mind.

“Yes. Seven years ago today,” Dr. Kilmer responded with a blank expression, wondering why that piece of information stood out to him.

“Our first encounter was only three years ago,” Marko began to explain, and Joseph nodded his head. “We thought that the rain was only three years old and that it started here.” The professor began to shake his head in disagreement before responding.

“I used to teach at Yellowstone Christian College, but they didn’t pay me enough. Anyway, that’s where I first saw the rain seven years ago. And even before me, in a later entry, I wrote about how someone at the college came to me telling me that they saw the rain a month before I did at the actual Yellowstone park near the super volcano. That made me think that maybe the rain was being caused by the volcanoes somehow which made a lot of sense at the time, but once I started hearing about the rain in various places across the country, I knew that couldn’t possibly be it.”

“Seven years ago, huh?” Joseph spoke to himself, desperately trying to figure out how to put some of the pieces together. “We didn’t know that it was happening all over the country either, but if the first place was Yellowstone, we’re definitely going to want to investigate that further. And if the volcanoes can’t be the answer, what conclusion are you now considering then?”

“Maybe it’s the rapture. Maybe it’s some kind of Native American revenge curse that they put on this land. Perhaps it’s even extraterrestrials trying to communicate with us. Honestly, I have yet to draw a logical conclusion. But listen, I’ll keep filling out this journal, and I want you two to come back to me whenever you can with whatever information you find. We’ll find a logical conclusion with some dedicated research.” Dr. Kilmer began to write something down on a sheet of paper and then handed it to Marko. “This is my personal cell phone. Feel free to call or text me anytime with either information or a request to meet up in my office and discuss. I am really interested in discovering the cause—just as you two are. So please do not hesitate and keep me informed!”

The two nodded their heads, starting to feel a sense of pride in their work and appreciation from the old man. They hadn’t truly thought that this mystery would turn into a real project that got other curious people genuinely involved, but this was now the reality of the situation.

“Absolutely! We’ll definitely keep in touch. Thank you so much for your time and everything!” Joseph exclaimed and the professor reached out to shake both of their hands and waved to them as they left the room with a hearty smile.