Loralee almost thought she was dreaming. She'd been fighting sleep for almost an hour now, cramming hard for an Italian Cinema midterm that loomed like an iceberg on her study calendar, and despite the three empty energy drinks sitting on the table next to her it really wouldn't have surprised the petite redhead if she'd nodded off face-down in her books and drifted into weird Argento dreams of women in gauzy nightgowns stalking the sorority at night after everyone had gone to bed. She had to surreptitiously reach over and dig her fingernails lightly into her arm to make sure she really saw what she saw.
But no. It was real. Lia was walking through the common area in the middle of the night, her face splashed with lurid green light by the stupid lava lamp that some long-forgotten student had bought for the sorority house back in the Nineties. She had on a white baby doll dress that looked like it came out of Darcy's Armani collection, a slack-jawed expression of total vacancy on her porcelain cheeks, and her eyes.... Loralee felt a chill run down her spine, the product of too little sleep and too many giallos combining to make her imagination run wild. She could have sworn that in the moment she looked up, before Lia turned the corner and went down the hall to the kitchen, she saw her friend stare at her with empty, sightless eyes.
Loralee bounced to her feet, a wave of adrenaline giving her new energy that she had absolutely no intention of wasting on studying, and raced down the hallway after Lia. Surely she had to have imagined it. People didn't really have totally white eyes, not even in the movies. That was all special contact lenses, or post-production digital effects or something. Lia's pupils couldn't have simply vanished, and--and if they had, how could she even see? If she was really wearing opaque contacts, she'd be stumbling into walls and tripping over all the shit the sisters left in the common room at the end of the night. She wouldn't be gliding smoothly through the silent darkness like some kind of creepy phantom straight out of 'Suspiria'. She'd--
Loralee reached the kitchen door just as Lia opened it, two bottles of soda dangling from one hand, walking directly at her as though she didn't even realize the redhead was there. Loralee had just enough time to let out an embarrassing squeak of shock and dismay and fumble her body backwards onto the carpet before Lia smoothly and easily navigated her way around the supine young woman to head back the way she came.
Loralee sat there for a long moment, gaping in stunned amazement. She'd seen it this time. There was no mistaking it. Lia's eyes were a smooth, featureless white.
Only they weren't. It was a hell of an optical illusion, especially for someone like Loralee who'd spent the better part of the last week glutting herself on Bava and Fulci and Soavi, but she'd just managed to spot the tiny flickering rim of the iris and pupil this time, fluttering just beneath Lia's trembling eyelids as she stared vacantly into nothing and drifted her way through the dimly-lit hallways. Seeing couldn't have been easy for the blonde woman, but she must have had just enough vision to manage it... and she must have been sleepwalking to look like that. Loralee stumbled back to her feet, grateful that the only person who saw her wouldn't remember it the next day, and went after her friend to help guide her back to her room safely.
Only Lia wasn't heading to her room. It didn't take Loralee long to catch up with her--the blonde was moving gracefully, not swiftly--but when she did, she noticed that Lia was heading to an entirely different floor and an entirely different bedroom. "Hey, um, Lia?" she murmured, tugging gently on the hem of the baby doll dress in an effort to rouse the somnambulist. "Um, you're--you need to wake up, you're... I think you're headed to Darcy's room."
Not that it was a huge surprise that a slumbering Lia might head to Darcy's room when her consciousness was disengaged--ever since she won that stupid bet with Darcy last year and got unfettered access to the dark-haired woman's entire ensemble, she'd spent more time in Darcy's bedroom changing outfits than she did in her own. But Darcy was probably asleep at this time of night, and being intruded on by a sleepwalking blonde climbing into bed with her was probably the last thing she wanted. Loralee needed to wake her friend up before this whole thing got incredibly awkward. "Lia? Lia, rise and shine, hon. It's time to wake up."
But Lia didn't notice. Even as the two of them went down the hallway together, Loralee awkwardly skipping along to try to keep pace with her friend's gliding gait without actually bumping into her, the blonde woman never deviated from her course and never changed that blank, empty expression of hers. It only deepened the surreal feeling that Loralee had somehow accidentally stepped into an Italian arthouse horror movie, finding herself the plucky young ingenue who had to unravel the mystery of a sinister somnambulist who visited other women's rooms late at night while the sorority slept.
