The rain’s pattering taps, intensifying as I turn the corner. “Run where?” I feeling stupid. It doesn’t bother to even reply. Just the same noise intensifying by the minute. I decide to get off my couch to take a walk down the street of my apartment.

“.-. ..—.”

run.

In Morse Code.

It’s driving me mad.

Even after the rain stops, drips from the lamppost repeat the same spine-chilling word.

I walk into my apartment, trying my hardest to ignore the drips off my porch’s roof, and close the door. I prepare to get to bed as I walk into my room, I turn the lights off only to find that the room’s windows have been shattered and there is glass everywhere reflecting the colors of the sunset.

I take a step forward, towards my bed, and cry out in pain as the edge of a glass shard catches the side of my toe. A thin line of blood appears. I feel dizzy and faint, not from the pain, but from the sheer cognitive dissonance that any of this happened. Am I going insane?

I stumble into the bathroom to get some disinfectant and a band-aid from above the sink. My fingers catch the light switch, flooding the room with a harsh white light that thankfully reveals nothing different. The tiled floor is the same: a little bit grungy from water damage caused by the leaky showerhead. I sit down on the floor and patch up my toe, breathing heavily as I try to come to grips with reality.

Maybe it's nothing. Maybe I imagined the Morse code, and my windows were broken by a freak weather accident in the storm. It's bad that they're broken, but it's not like I can't have them fixed once I clean the floor up.

I stop shaking and stand up, a little unsteady on my feet. The showerhead drips into the drain, plunking on the floor. Then again. Then...

Wait.

I know that pattern.

..-. .. -. -.. / -- . / ..- -. -.. . .-. / -. . .--. - ..- -. . .----. ... / .-- .-. .- - ....

I followed the pattern slowly, registering each plunk of water droplets hitting the tile, waiting until it settled into its own rhythm. Find me under Neptune's wrath. The message was so cryptic and so specific I sat there in awe, seated firmly in the fuzzy blue bathmat, pinching the fibres between my thumb and index finger until sweat soaked through. Only then did the pain return to me, the sharp shooting line of blood seeping from my big toe, and I rose to open the medicine cabinet and locate a plaster.

Upon placing the sticky thing on my injury, I immediately sped to the living room, where my laptop lay open. Neptune's wrath, I Googled, hoping to find it to be the name of some haunted location out in New England, or some stupid slang for a shitty dive somewhere. I came up empty, aside from a very angry review for a fish and chip shop called 'Neptune's Wreath' in Cornwall, cleverly satirizing the fact that apparently, their haddock caused explosive food poisoning.

I Googled 'run' then, finding Reddit threads and message boards of people from across all walks of life thinking they've been sent subliminal signs to 'run'. Some are tarot obsessed cuckoos, some simply victims of sibling pranks, some, genuinely hated by their community and being ran out by cruel landlords and the agents of gentrification. None of them had heard morse code in the rain. Of course they haven't. What a stupid thing to even think, I told myself, reaching for a cold beer in the fridge.

They were a housewarming gift, as if this shitty apartment needed to be christened, and tasted exactly like you'd expect a hipster IPA to taste. Like snobby piss. I pulled the can towards me, slipping a thumb beneath the ring pull when something caught my eye on the back, amidst the flashy visuals and funky colours, sat an address in bold orange: PAY US A VISIT! NEPTUNE'S WRATH BREWERY, 15 ALCOTT STREET, NEWCASTLE.