Chapter 1: Awareness
Karyn couldn't believe that the professor had gone over again. It seemed he never finished on time. Lately she just didn't like the walk back to her dorm. It was midway through her first semester and she'd been told all the stories about what happened to unescorted girls after dark on campus. It was getting entirely too dark too fast at night.
Her khakis, sweater, and fleece jacket covered a form, that caused more than a few missed notes in her classes, though she was unaware of this. Her male classmates saw a body that was decidedly feminine without being voluptuous. She was what most would call petite, and some would call sexy. She thought herself plain.
Her sparkling blue eyes scanned the grey overcast skies, and the early autumn wind tossed her almost blonde hair about her head like the branches of the leafless trees around the campus. The smell of snow still threatening, even this early in the season. The first clawing winds of a promised winter were trying to tear through her sweater and jacket. Icy talons of air slipping where proper fingers dare not.
Soon
, she thought to herself,
winter,
spring, then summer. Sunlight... these cloud-cast skies will be gone soon. I can't say that I'll miss them ...
These ideas rambled around in her head.
She was distracted enough with these musings that she almost didn't see him. He stood off in the shadows, tucked in under the boughs of a hemlock. Just beneath the last tendrils of sunlight. She'd occaisionally studied under that tree in warmer weather, and knew that the lowest branches were nearly six and a half feet off the ground. He stood just under them, not touching
,
but within a few inches of them. Dressed in mostly black, a long trench coat, black shoes or boots, even the glasses he wore were jet black. His shirt though, that was different; deep blood red, astonishing it should even be discernable in the lavender light that preceded night. He seemed, not like he was hiding in the shadows but, rather like the shadows were a part of him. He was so still, almost invisible if you didn't stare into the darkness he had cloaked himself in. She looked again. Boots, he definitely wore boots, with the trousers tucked in.
Trousers? They're called pants Karyn
, her insecurities whispered in her head.
He was watching her. She looked at his face. Stared at it and, even though she couldn't see through the lenses of his glasses,
felt
her eyes lock with his. The wind picked up and raked chilling fingers down her back. She reached out for the open flaps of her jacket and pulled them tighter together to keep the cold at bay.
Two people shouting at each other from the quad behind her jarred her attention away from his unseen stare. She turned to see what was happening. Nothing. Two friends, one yelling to the other about that night's party. She turned back up the hill, thinking to hurry out of the wind back to her room. But first she looked back into the shadows. He was gone.
She didn't know why but something inside her felt disappointed, almost... cheated. Another gust hit her and she finally moved back towards the doors of her dorm. As her foot touched the first step, she heard a voice. A cultured British accent spoke in her ear, "I am what you have always desired. You will learn this."
She turned, almost dropping books and papers. Her pen slipped out of her books and skittered onto an empty sidewalk. No one was there. No one was anywhere, and certainly no one was close enough to have spoken those words into her ear. She knelt down and picked up her pen. Still kneeling she then, after looking up and down the walk, gaurdedly stood, turned and went up the stairs to her dorm's entrance. As her peripheral view of the shaded area was cut off, she thought that she might have seen something move there.
Don't be stupid
she chided herself, and walked into the lobby of her hall.
Days went by. The weather got worse then better then deteriorated again. She wished she would have gone to college in the south. She would think from time to time,
Oh well, the Northeast has its perks, can't recall any just now, but it seems to be alright.
Tests were taken; some aced, some could have been better. Till recently, most nights were spent out
. Why not? You only live once.
Why not enjoy the night if the day had to be spent laboring to remember things I'll never need to know again.
This was what she told herself.
She thought about a lot of things. More and more her thoughts came back to that figure she had seen in the shadows. At least she thought that she had seen him.
Maybe
...
maybe I was just too tired from the night before. That must be it. Maybe I should just forget about the whole scene. I'm obsessing about a dream... nightmare. Why nightmare? Where'd that thought come from? But it felt real. No, that's not right. It felt too real. It's been a week, drop it.
Time and again she stumbled over the same litany in her mind, chasing it around in her head for days. It was even cutting into her studying.
