x
Chapter 4: Somebody’s Watching Me
“Wow, you’re wearing your hair down today? I’ve never seen it like that before.”
Lainey stood in front of the mirror on the back of her door and stared at the haze of auburn hair that greeted her. There was a reason why her hair was always in braids or buns or ponytails because it was unmanageable otherwise. She was still thinking about what the strange boy had said to her the night before, and although she had no reason to trust him and listen to his judgment, she was still doing so. She didn’t know why, but she just felt like would rather be safe than sorry, even though his reasoning sounded ludicrous. The only problem was that now she was stuck with this mass of long-knotted curls that she had no idea how to tame. She was so focused on tugging a comb through her hair, locks falling into her eyes that she didn’t notice Petra had awoken and was standing right behind her.
“Yeah, well, I don’t know, I wanted a change before the first day,” Lainey lied. She was still debating whether or not she should tell Petra about what she had been told but was afraid that she would think her a mad woman, considering that was the second strange thing that had happened to her that day with no one else to bear witness.
“You know, you can really bring that frizz down if you wanted me to,” Petra continued, now looking through their wardrobe for her outfit of the day. “My mom and aunts have some real curls, even worse than yours, and they use all the right products so they can survive even with the scorching humidity. It takes a while but it looks worth it in the end.”
“Thanks, I’ll think about it,” Lainey said absentmindedly, deciding to just braid her hair in a way that would cover her birthmark. She didn’t even know why she was listening to the words of a stranger telling her to cover something that had never caused her any problems. Sure, her birthmark was peculiar, but most times people found it interesting to look at, not something that would get her in trouble. She rubbed the white groove on her neck, remembering how it had pricked with pain when she had seen those shadowy figures. Now that, she had never experienced in her life. She wondered if the boy had also seen those people, and somehow knew what they were. Petra was still standing behind her, now looking sheepish. By the time she had returned from the party, Lainey was already asleep in her top bunk, or at least pretending to be since she couldn’t shake what had just happened to her.
“Look, about last night,” Petra blurted out as Lainey grabbed her backpack. “I’m so sorry I went to that stupid party without you. I shouldn’t have let you leave like that alone.”
“What? Oh,” Lainey remembered, having completely forgotten about what Petra was talking about with everything else going on. “It’s fine, I’m sure you just wanted to catch up with your friends.”
“Lainey, you can’t be serious,” Petra said, stopping in her tracks and looking Lainey dead in the eyes. “Those people are not my friends. That’s who I’ve been trying to avoid this entire time.”
But Lainey had been serious. She was taken aback at this notion, just assuming that Petra was maybe accidentally missing her friends and not purposely. She guessed she really didn’t know anything about friendships, considering Petra’s obvious discomfort when her old pals had finally cornered her.
“I—I guess I didn’t notice. But then why do they act like you’re friends?” Lainey stammered, blinking dumbly.
Petra dragged a tanned-skin hand over her face and sighed. “It’s a long story, but I guess it’s time I spit it out, huh? Well, we all were friends, for a long while actually. I’ve known Xander since we were pretty much babies since we were neighbours. But anyway, we had all planned to go to the same school together. We had this other guy in our group who was a year younger than us, and I guess it was kind of his idea but again, irrelevant. But I don’t know, it was mostly Leiko, to be honest.” She shifted where she stood and looked down at her hand, where Lainey assumed a bracelet similar to Leiko’s beaded one once lay: a friendship bracelet.
“She just got kind of, well…totally insufferable. And they all just let it happen and didn’t care. It got so bad in the summer that I just decided I would leave them, cold turkey, y’know? And after last night, well, I think they got the hint…”
Petra finished her story with a small squeak as she noticed the time.
“But—if we don’t leave now we won’t have time for breakfast so we should hurry up,” she concluded, throwing her clothes out of the wardrobe and racing to put them on.
Lainey thought about what Petra had said. It was almost like they were In completely different worlds. She was desperate to find friends and Petra was desperate to get rid of them. It made her nervous, wondering if she would ever unintentionally become ‘insufferable’ enough for Petra to leave her too.
The two made their way down the stairs of the dormitory building and to the dining hall, quickly so they could make it in time to scarf some food down before class.
“But, one thing I’ll say is that, when I met you, I knew I had made the right decision in leaving them,” Petra said, breaking the silence.
“You did? Why?” Lainey asked, bewildered.
“Because, Lains, I’ve had more fun with you than with any of them in ages. I had totally forgotten what it felt like to not be annoyed at someone, and to not have someone call me ‘Petey’” for once.” She shuddered.
“Oh, I—really?” Lainey said, feeling oddly giddy. Maybe she didn’t have to worry at all. She indeed had felt the same way with Petra, but she didn’t have many others to compare her to. It was then she realized that she could trust Petra, and she should trust her with what she had seen last night. She had just told her something personal, and she knew she couldn’t wrangle these unnerving instances alone. Trust, Mary had told her, was the mortar between the bricks of friendship, and she had to start somewhere.
But Lainey didn’t exactly get a good opportunity to tell Petra until much later. Due to their very different programs, they only had one class together: An elective, intro to Psychology. Petra dreaded her classes since she knew Leiko, Krystal and Daphne were all in the same major as her, but Lainey couldn’t be more excited for hers.
She took in every piece of information from her professors like a sponge, even if it was just a teaser of what was to come in the course or boring preliminary matters like the syllabus. She recognized her “Astronomy in Culture: a history of Star Mapping” professor as Ms, she now knew as Dr. Higgs, who had helped her on the first day. She smiled at Lainey from her spot in the middle of the lecture hall, clearly remembering her from orientation day.
Lainey finally got a chance to tell Petra what else she had seen on their way to their first class together on Tuesday, half-walking, half-running since Petra had accidentally slept in too late that morning. Still, after hearing the full story, Petra couldn’t help but stop in her tracks.
“Your hair? Ew! Why would he even say that?”
“He wanted me to cover my birthmark. Maybe he thought it was weird or something and was offended by it.”
Petra then took a second to look around her neck, noticing her birthmark for the first time.
“Oh, that? It isn’t a tattoo?” she said, puzzled. Lainey shook her head, having been asked this several times before. She knew that the mark on her neck was indeed unusual, but she had never been demanded to cover it up before. If anything, she had always been asked to show it more, so observers could analyze the bright white spiral more clearly.
“Maybe he has a crush on you or something,” Petra suggested slyly, once again picking up the pace to the lecture hall. “Trust me, some guys can be totally weird around girls they like.”
Lainey scrunched her nose in disgust, shaking her head adamantly. She supposed she had never seen it in action, a boy having an interest in her, but she didn’t want anything to do with them if they acted like that.
Since the duo were out of breath by the time they reached the plain wooden doors of their psychology lecture room, they had ceased talking about the subject of the strange boy.
“I hope we aren’t the last ones, that’d be embarrassing,” Petra whispered to her as they sat down on creaky chairs close to the front, trying to avoid sitting close to Leiko and her friends. But they weren’t the last ones.
“Can anyone think of a reason why psychological studies differ from other disciplines? Anything that specifically makes psych stand out?” the professor asked the class at large. Most of the class looked back at him blankly, only watching the clock since there were about 5 minutes remaining. Lainey looked over at Petra, unsure of the answer since it was out of her field of study, but Petra was trying her hardest not to doze off on her folded arms. Only one person seemed to have something to say, and the professor’s eyes lit up once he saw the lone hand in a sea of boredom.
“Yes, you there, what’s your name, young man?”
“Mendel,” was the response from the voice Lainey had not yet put a face to, turning around in her seat to see him. But her curious face immediately became a grimace as she laid eyes on her newest subject of interest. There he was, propped in the back row by himself, his bright red hair painted in contrast with the dark dusty seats.
“I’d say firstly the main difference would be the amount of variables that could contribute to an array of results, with something as complicated as human behaviour.”
“Excellent answer, Mendel,” Professor Daxton beamed. Lainey continued to watch the boy, apparently named “Mendel”, trying to make sure it was really him but there was no denying it. She thought of nudging Petra awake to indicate who he was, but thought it would be too obvious.
But the teacher referred to Mendel again, seemingly egging him on for more engagement. “Perhaps you can name a type of variable that needs to be taken into account when completing a psychological study.” He pointed his long piece of chalk at him, ready to write down his notes on the blackboard.
“Let’s see,” Mendel said, almost lazily as he leaned back in his seat. “There’s social class, age, gender, education level, culture--”
He looked like he wanted to say more. He had his mouth open, ready to keep blabbing but he didn’t, and only Lainey seemed to know why. The teacher took this as a sign that Mendel was finished and wrote down all of his answers, before swiftly returning back to the lecture. But Mendel had perked up, leaning forward to grip the edge of his fold-up desk. Following his gaze, Lainey looked towards the doorway, above the heads of all the students and saw them again. Those figures. Shrouded in shadow from the buzzing fluorescent lights. Bathed in deep purple robes, nothing visible besides their decrepit, knotted hands. There was only one of them this time, but that didn’t make it any less chilling. She still couldn’t see their eyes, but she just couldn’t shake the feeling that they were staring directly at her, like a panther ready to strike, a wisp of something sinister just within her peripheral. No one seemed to notice, once again. There was only yawning, the scratching of pens, the ticking of a clock. It was her, it, and him, who had also spotted her, like the strange shadow, and was staring right at her.
“Is class over?” Petra lifted her head, her left cheek squished from being pressed against the desk.
“Petra, look!” Lainey said quickly in a hushed voice, turning away for a split second to look at her friend. She gestured towards the door, only to find once again that the figure had vanished.
“You’re kidding me,” Lainey sighed frustratedly as the rest of the students began to pack up, finally free from the professor’s droning.
“What? Did I miss something?” Petra asked, rubbing her eyes and grabbing her backpack.
“No, I just--I swear I saw those people in robes again,” Lainey replied under her breath, rushing to leave and see if they were out in the hall somewhere.
“Oh darn, I missed them again,” Petra chuckled, seeming slightly skeptical at this point.
“Look, I’m not crazy, he saw them too. That’s the guy who said that weird thing to me the other day.” she said quickly, giving Petra no time to process everything that had happened in the past minute.
“Wait, which one, him?” she asked, but Lainey had already packed up her things and started heading out of the lecture hall with the crowd of students, desperate for answers. The two strange occurrences that had happened that night were connected, they had to be. Mendel, whoever he was, knew something about those people, or whatever they were, and she would not stop until she got to the bottom of it. If it was a practical joke, it wasn’t funny. If it was somehow a profession of love, which she doubted, it was creepy.
Mendel was walking fast as well, being one of the first ones to leave the classroom, but was easy to spot with his looming stature and flaming hair. She finally caught up to him outside the science building, once again out of breath, her hair flying wildly in her face.
He was standing next to another one of the school’s old relics, the marble plates carved with grooves and symbols. Just before he was about to walk across it, he whipped around to face her, hearing her footsteps crunching through the grass.
“Can I help you?” he said, visibly annoyed with his hands in his pockets. He was dressed far too proper for someone his age, appearing more like a businessman than a student.
“I know you saw them,” Lainey blurted out matter-of-factly.
“Yeah, because that definitely narrows down what you’re talking about,” he rolled his eyes at her just as Petra finally caught up to her.
“Lainey! I thought you had another class or something but you’re just talking to some--oh,” she shut her mouth at once, finally realizing what was going on. She instinctively took a step in front of Lainey as if to protect her from a monster, though she was about a foot shorter than Mendel.
“You saw that thing in the robe, you were looking right at it! What is it?” Lainey continued, planning on filling Petra in later. Mendel was only half paying attention to her since he was scanning the campus around him, his green eyes darting at everyone passing by.
“Just because I saw it doesn’t mean I know what it is,” he said evasively.
“Look, first you say some weird stuff about my birthmark--” Lainey started,
“Scar,” Mendel corrected her.
“Birthmark, and I’ve been seeing these figures around the place and no one else seems to see them but you and I. Logically, that can’t be a coincidence.”
“Will you keep your voice down?” Mendel suddenly hissed, taking a step toward her.
“Stand back perv!” Petra cried, subsequently bringing even more attention to them. “She just wants you to leave her alone, okay? Get that through your mind!”
But Lainey didn’t want to be left alone now. Not when she still had a million lingering questions that she felt like only he could answer. But it didn’t look like she was getting anywhere with him. He simply groaned in exasperation.
“What I was trying to do was help you. But if you keep asking questions, then maybe I did more harm than good.” With that, he walked back the way he came, completely ignoring Lainey and Petra’s dumbfounded expressions.
Lainey would no longer let herself be watched, so instead, she became the watcher. Anytime she was walking across campus, whether alone or with Petra, she was hurriedly scanning her surroundings, ensuring that there were no other eyes upon her. Anytime her professor wasn’t speaking in class, she was watching the door, half expecting a silhouette of the darkness to come barging in. Through half-lidded eyes she stared out of her dormitory window every night before she slept, checking one last time before she drifted into another world. She would not be caught off guard again.
Fortunately, she had stopped seeing the robed figures after her first psychology class. As the first two weeks of school passed her by, and her homework began to pile, they had seemed to disappear completely, at least out of her sight. That meant the only thing she did keep seeing was Mendel. With the campus being so small, it was impossible to go even one day without seeing him, especially now that Lainey was left on high alert. He was always alone, elusive and often lingering in patches of shade, a book in his hands and a sour expression on his face. Even more than that, Lainey had encountered him several times close to or standing on the school’s relics, the carved plates that most people just ignored. One night, after an evening physics lab, she found him kneeling down next to one, his hand brushing against it as if cleaning off the dust. At the sound of her coming, he immediately stood up and glowered at her, before silently stalking off. She wanted to yell after him, confront him, inquire about exactly what he was up to. But she let him go, instinctively covering her birthmark with her bushy hair. ‘What exactly about those things fascinates him so much?’ Lainey thought to herself as she climbed the stairs to the library, a pain in her legs from standing for three hours. Either he just had a strong passion for architecture, or there was something more, something that linked everything together, including her.
“Hey, you need help finding something?” Lainey quickly turned around, startled by the sound of a whisper directly behind her in the aisle. It was true, she did need help since she had been trying to look for a book for the past 10 minutes and didn’t even seem close.
The person who had spoken immediately sparked her memory, since this was the boy who had his arm wrapped around Leiko the night of orientation. The boy in the friend group that Petra couldn’t stand. And if she couldn’t stand them, then Lainey was inclined to as well. But on the other hand, she did really want this book, what was the harm in accepting some help, and then going on her way?
“Uh yeah, actually,” Lainey replied slowly, backing herself into the bookshelf to put more space between them. He didn’t appear anything like Leiko and Petra in their bright colours and glitter, he was dressed plain and modest and even had a polite smile on his round face.
“So, whatcha looking for?” He asked casually, clapping his hands together.
She told him the name of the book, “View of the Abyss” by Ronald Fletcher.
“I figured it would be in F for Fletcher, but I couldn’t find it. Then I tried A for Astronomy but I can’t find it here either. I can’t find any astronomy books at all.” She explained frustratedly, turning around to check the titles of the books one more time, just in case she was mistaken.
“Oh, well, that’s your problem, then,” he stated, leading her out of the aisle. “That would be in aisle Q.”
“Q?” She asked, bewildered. “Why there?”
“Well, CSU runs on the Library of Congress system, you see. Every category has its own initial even if it doesn’t correlate to the first letter of the category. It’s the way it is, y’know? And general science is in section Q, so if I’m right, it should be right about here.” He pointed to the middle of the row and began looking for the title she asked for.
“It’s kind of an old system, I personally prefer the Dewey but that might just be what I’m used to since…” he then appeared to have a sudden realization of what he was saying.
“Sorry, I kind of went on a tangent that I’m sure you don’t care about. Here.” He finally handed her the book she had been looking for.
“Thanks,” she accepted it, slightly confused at his sudden silence. “I don’t mind, by the way, that was an interesting lesson. You’re a history major, right?”
He nodded, slightly sheepishly. “And you’re an Astronomy major?”
She nodded back, now with an abrupt epiphany running through her mind. She was once again thinking about Mendel and those relics he was always idling by. But now, she had a person who was willing to talk, who could possibly give her some answers on them.
“Hey, do you know where I could find any information on the history of the school? Would there be a book on that?”
The boy’s eyes lit up behind his glasses.
“Of course!” He said eagerly, before lowering his voice down to a whisper, remembering they were in the library. “There’s stuff in E, for American History.” He pointed to the section across the room, back the way they came. “There’s some land records and general folklore of the area there. It’s really fascinating if you ask me. It’s a big reason why I even came here.”
Lainey felt slightly stupid to not have done any research about this place before she set foot in it. It was really her only option, but she wondered if everyone knew about the apparently rich history of the school, the way the staff talked about it.
“How is it fascinating?” She asked him, only fuelling his passion even more.
“Well, maybe it’s just more fascinating to me,” he backtracked slightly, “but it’s just the forming of the school in its kind of unusual way. Basically, the school was founded by these two villages, or families, that lived on this land two hundred years ago. There’s a lot of crazy rumours about them, actually. Some people thought they were a cult, others thought they were witches or angels. That stuff you see on the ground as you walk around campus are the relics of the original buildings in the villages before they disappeared, right before the school was built.”
‘Witches and angels’? That didn’t seem to help her one bit. The truth about those people had clearly been skewed by the primitive minds of the people hundreds of years ago, leading to them making up some folk tales about them. She expressed this opinion to the boy, who just grinned at her.
“Well, what is history, if it’s not biased?” He chuckled. Lainey sighed. She wanted the truth about the school, about those buildings, and where it all went. But the only thing she had left were stories, falsifications dazzled up with time.
“And who exactly were these people?” She asked him. “We at least have to have the names of who created the school.”
“Well, it’s in the name.” He said simply, before quickly continuing at Lainey’s puzzled look. “‘Cerebres’ comes from the Cerebs and the Res, the two denominations that made the school. The only problem is that they hated each other.”
Lainey wanted to ask more, she wanted to sit there with him and talk about history of the buildings that surrounded them until she got the answers she was looking for. But in the heat of the conversation, she had forgotten who he was. The enemy. She couldn’t lose Petra’s trust, no matter how friendly and helpful he seemed. She didn’t want to risk something she had just gotten for the possibility of some answers.
“...I should probably go,” she said after a long pause, backing away from him slowly and towards the spiral steps leading down to the checkout area. She was glad she did so, too, because at that moment she heard another unpleasantly familiar voice from around the corner, hissing like a snake about to strike.
“Xander! What does seven mean to you? You left me waiting for fifteen minutes!” Leiko was strutting through towers of books, her arms crossed and eyes narrowed as Lainey rushed down the stairs, not wanting to have another awkward encounter with her. Even still, she could hear her voice echo through the circular room, over the hush of silent students below her.
“And why were you with her?” she asked waspishly. It took Xander a moment to respond as he watched the back of Lainey’s head reach the front desk and hand her book to the librarian.
“She just wanted to know about the history of the school, that’s all.”
“You know she’s the reason why we lost Petra, right?” She shot back, cornering him against a stone pillar. “I’m not about to lose 2 for 2 with you.”
“It’s not a competition, Leiko, come on. It was just a conversation. I got to talk about history for a bit.” he mumbled.
“Fine, you can tell me alllll about your little history stuff at dinner, deal?” Leiko said. Lainey didn’t get to hear Xander’s response as she left the library, blinking her eyes to adjust to the hazy violet sky. She supposed she would just have to do the rest of the investigating on her own, with the information she had been given by Xander. She didn’t even know if she could trust what he said, although he did seem so elated, so excited to discuss it with her. Instead of going back to her dorm or heading to dinner, her restless mind thought it best to pace across campus, once again in search of the relics. She had more knowledge than she did before, but it still wasn’t much. Who these ‘Cerebs’ and ‘Res’ were and where they went was still a complete mystery, and even Xander didn’t seem to fully know.
But this time, forgetting what she didn’t know, she realized something else. Something she knew. Something that made her own eyes light up. The relic that she stood over was directly aligned with a star above her. The circular grooves perfectly mirrored it, and the grooves seemed to trace its path in the sky throughout the night. She stared at it, new meaning filling her mind like a tidal wave. This was fascinating. Not caring about the people staring, she raced across the lawn to find the next one, staring up again to see if it was only a coincidence or a pattern. Pattern. The next relic lined up with the Bellatrix star on the torso of the Orion constellation. She walked across it, feeling the stone and metal clink beneath her. She didn’t know if she was imagining it, although she was nearly certain she was, but she could almost feel it alive with the past, calling to her to figure it all out. She wondered if anyone had discovered this before. Surely Dr. Higgs would have, with all of her astronomy knowledge. But if these were relics, then how did they align so perfectly? How could there be a pattern in what was left behind if it was senseless? It couldn’t have been due to natural weathering. It was purposeful. But Lainey couldn’t figure out why. Lots of cultures mapped the stars, that’s how constellations were made. But why those specific ones?
She quickly went to the next plate, a large one. It looked the most pristine out of any of the ones she had seen, and it reflected light off its polished surface in the soft moonlight. This was the marker of Betelgeuse, the red giant, a star that was now long dead in a supernova that hadn’t reached Earth yet. She began to step on this one, like she had all the others, to take in its intricate details, only this time, instead of awing in wonder, she cried out.
A sharp pain that she had never felt before struck her nerves like a lightning bolt. She felt like a thousand bees were stinging her, a dog was biting her, and a taser was shocking her all in the same spot. She clutched her neck with a shaking hand and lept back from the relic, trying to maintain her balance, and slowly but surely the pain faded, leaving her only with a dull throb right over her birthmark. Lainey was left panting, wide-eyed, staring down at the Betelgeuse plate with a new fear. That nearly confirmed it. What could have caused it? Were there live wires underneath the plate that had shocked her? Was she having an allergic reaction to the material somehow? She didn’t know, but she wasn’t curious enough to find out. Everything she had learned was more than enough, at least for tonight.
Feeling more vulnerable than ever, she strode back to her room, still clutching her neck and occasionally looking back at the thing that had somehow done it. Whoever the Cerebs and Res were, she wondered if one of them knew how to set a trap.
ns 15.158.61.23da2
