Light Through the Window

by Cassandra Morphy

  "What? When?" Ellie asked.

  "Mike Burges."

  "Oh, right. Mike Burges. Whatever happened to that guy?"

  "He dropped out to start a rock band or something. I heard he's the drummer."

  "Anyway, bottom line is, I need to stay as far away from that group as I can," Ellie said. "And I suggest you all do as well. Whatever they are, or whatever happened to them, I want no part of it."

  "You might not have a choice in the matter," Alex said. "No matter what your connection is to this group, you have to have one. Otherwise, why are you the only one of us that can sense them?"

  Ellie was left with that unsettling thought as they headed back out of the lecture hall to get lunch. Fortunately for her, Alex made the suggestion that they ate in the lecture hall, which had proved to be much better for their needs than the cramped library. And, at least for the moment, free of abyssal eyes.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Testing the Waters

  First thing Monday morning, the four of them entered the lecture hall as a united front. They had met up in the lobby of the dorm and walked over. Alex had offered to sleep in their room with them, but Ellie worried she might be sending the wrong signals if she allowed it. George hadn't bothered to offer. They all knew, if he got caught in their room overnight, there would be hell to pay. Though the dorm was co-ed, the dorm rooms were certainly not. However, they all lived in the same building, which let them all meet up with minimal time of them being alone and exposed.

  Following through with that, they were the last people to arrive for the test, coming in just half a minute before it was scheduled to start. Eric was in his usual seat at the back of the lecture hall, which he had chosen so he could get a better view of the board, rather than so that he could slack off or sleep like Ellie had thought at first.

  Most of the seats were already taken. With only a sprinkling of empty seats around the room, none of them were together. Reluctantly, the four of them broke up, spreading out around the room, with Ellie getting her usual seat next to Eric. As she slipped past him, he gave her a questioning look, almost as if he were feeling left out of something.

  "Nice of you guys to come back yesterday," Eric said, sarcastically. "I ended up studying with those three girls that came in right before you left."

  Ellie inhaled sharply, catching some phlegm just right, causing her to cough a few times. "What?" she asked, shocked. It took her a few moments to remember that he was still in the dark about what was going on there.

  "Jealous?" he teased.

  "No, I... I didn't know they were in this class."

  "A lot of people are in this class," he said, gesturing around at the full room. "I think that's them down there."

  He pointed down to a group of three girls five rows below them. Collectively, the three of them turned around in their seats at his words, looking up with their dark eyes at the two of them. Ellie gave out a few more coughs, covering her mouth, then her whole face, in a failed attempt to hide from those eyes. The three of them smirked up at her, not the least bit deterred by her attempts to hide.

  "I don't know what you were so worried about. They're nice enough girls. I even asked the middle one out on a date this weekend."

  "You what?" she asked. Several people below her shushed her, drawing her attention to the fact that most of the class was quiet as they hurriedly tried to cram in some last minute studying. "What did she say?" she asked, quietly.

  "That I wasn't her type. Can you believe that? I'm everyone's type. Well, not yours, obviously, but that's because you're an oddball."

  "No, it's because I'm gay."

  "Same difference."

  Ellie opened her mouth to give him the riot act, but her diatribe was interrupted before it could begin by a loud bang that rang throughout the room. Several people jumped in their seats, books fell to the floor, and the low murmur that had buzzed through the room silenced. Dave was walking from the now closed front doors, the source of the banging, over to the desk. A tall stack of papers was clutched in his hands. He let them fall to the table, sounding out another bang. Eric gulped loudly next to her as he stared at his supposed doom. Ellie was almost excited about the fact that the worry this test had instilled in their class would soon be over.

  "Gravity," Dave said, pointing at the dropped papers. "One of the strongest forces in the world. Would anyone like to suggest other, perhaps more powerful forces?"

  "Love," someone shouted out, which was accompanied by a splattering of laughter.

  "Fear," someone else said, silencing the laughter.

  "And, yet, neither of those will let you float out of those chairs. Or, of course, get you out of this test."

  "Not even your love for your daughter?" someone called out.

  "I'm sure she'll do fine." He looked up at Ellie, a large smile on his face. Several of the audience turned around to look up at her as well. She just slipped further down into her seat, doing her best not to draw attention. "Alright, take one and pass them back."

  Dave grabbed large piles of papers and passed them along the front row, indicating for them to pass them backwards instead of across. He started at the far side of the room, next to the side door that he had been dragged out of when he was kidnapped. He didn't seem the least bit disturbed by that fact, or even that he remembered it. To him, the door was like any other, something to be ignored when not being used. By the time he got to the middle of the room, he had to go back to the desk to grab the rest of the sheets. He ran out of papers before he made it to the other side of the room. As the papers were being passed out, he ran up the stairs that ran along that side of the room, slipping along the back wall towards where the first piles were already arriving. As he passed by Ellie, he patted her on the shoulder, a subtle gesture that anyone could have missed if they weren't looking for it. Ellie smiled at him as he passed, thankful that he didn't make a bigger show of it.

  The pile of papers for her column came to her before Dave returned. There were still a bunch of them left over, so she held them over her head as she started to look at her own sheet. It took a few moments before the leftover tests were taken from her. But even without the use of both hands, she already had the answers for the first three problems before she could start writing anything. With all the worry that Eric had instilled in her, the test seemed almost too easy. Yet, still, Eric let out a few whimpers next to her as he struggled to start.

  Ten minutes into the test, which was supposedly designed to take the entire time, Ellie was already finished. She looked up at her dad at the front of the room, but he was reading a book, seemingly oblivious to the class in front of him. However, after a moment of her looking down at him, he looked up from his book, directly at her, as if his parent senses were in full swing. She lifted her paper, as if she could send it down to him from her seat. He smiled, shook his head, and pointed at the chalkboard. While she had been buzzing through the test, he had written five rules on the board.

  · No Questions

  · No Talking

  · No Cheating

  · No Devices

  · No Leaving Early

  Dejected, she sat back into her seat, placing the test down in front of her. She looked all around the room, trying to find something to put her attention to. At first, she looked her test over, making sure that she didn't miss anything. It took her only a minute to find three things that she suddenly thought were wrong. Every one of them ended up being right the first time around, though, which took another minute to confirm. Shaking her head, she turned the sheet over, putting the test out of her mind before she ended up correcting her right answers.

  She wasn't the only one to finish the test early. While Eric continued to struggle through it next to her, writing, erasing, and rewriting in an almost feverish fervor, he was looking to be in the minority. Many of the people around her were similarly letting their eyes wander, taking in the other people in the room. At first, Ellie thought these were limited to the abyssal eyed peo
ple, their dark, empty eyes staring back at her from every angle. She closed her eyes, trying to block those looks out, trying to think straight, to realize that the world wasn't out to get her. However, when she opened her eyes again, they really were all looking straight at her, all eyes as dark and hollow as the first pair she had seen.

  Mixed in between these people were others. The normals. The regular humans. They all still had their head bowed, praying to the test gods as they continued to struggle through the test that had taken the rest of them mere minutes to complete. She didn't like that comparison, that similarity that she had with the abyssal eyed people of her class. Had that been what they saw in her? An ability to consume an advanced test in a matter of minutes? Her capabilities at breaking and entering? Or was it something else, something more insidious? Would she just wake up one day and see her eyes in the mirror as being as dark and vacant as those that stared at her?

  Ellie looked down at her father at the front of the class, where he continued to read his book. She couldn't catch the title from so far away, but the beaten-up look of the spine told her that he had read it often. Dave could easily be lost in a book, given the right setting. A quiet classroom was just such a place. With her eyes locked on him, Ellie reached down into her purse, pulling out the old compact she kept there. She rarely wore much makeup, beyond simple lipstick and the occasional blush. But she always kept the old compact for the mirror inside. Once she was certain that her father wasn't about to peak up at her, she pulled the compact free, flipping it open to the mirror. She gazed into it, if for no other reason than to assure herself that her eyes hadn't gone dark in the past hour. That the familiar blue still looked out at her from its depths. Her eyes flipped up a little at the ends as she smiled at her own reflection, something she had never done before. She had never been that vein of a person, though Mare had often told her just how beautiful she thought she was. Ellie, however, was never so certain.

  With a steadying sigh, she slipped her compact back into her purse, trying to let go of her returning fears as she passed the remaining time away. When she looked back up at her father, she got a shock that felt like a punch to her stomach. He was looking up from his book, a familiar, annoyed look on his face. At first, she thought he had spotted her. that he had seen her using her compact. While there hadn't been a rule strictly against it, he might have thought it a device or her attempt at cheating. She knew her father was a real stickler for cheating, and being his daughter would be no protection against it.

  Dave got up from his seat, his book falling to the table. The binding was so worn that, instead of slamming closed, it flopped open, the pages flipping around in the air before settling on a page at random. Ellie's heart skipped a beat as he came over to the stairs, but he stopped only three rows up from the floor, staring dagger over at someone in the middle.

  "Ms. Higgins," her father said. He always got proper like that when he was about to punish someone. It took Ellie a moment to realize that he was talking to Becky. "What is that on your wrist?"

  "What?" Becky asked. Ellie couldn't see her through the crowd, couldn't see what it was he was referring to, but she had an unsettling thought about it. "This? It's just my smartwatch."

  "Can you tell me the fourth rule on the board?"

  "No devices?"

  "And that would be?"

  "A device. But I'm not using it. I hardly even remember that it's there."

  "Take it off immediately." Dave held out his hand towards her, stretching over the distance between them. He stood there like that for a few moments while Becky undoubtedly struggled to remove her watch. When it was offered to him, he reached down, grabbing it from her. "You can retrieve it after the test. In the future, all smartwatches must be removed and surrendered prior to the beginning of the tests. That goes for everyone." He stomped his way back down to the front of the room and over to the desk. After sitting down heavily in his seat, he said "Thirty minutes remaining."

  Over the next several minutes, Dave sat there, with the watch in hand, fiddling around with it. If Ellie hadn't known better, she would have thought that he was just playing with it, expanding and retracting the display several times. However, she knew exactly what he was doing, trying to see any evidence that it had been used to give Becky an unfair advantage over the rest of the class. Ellie would have loved nothing more than to vouch for her roommate, but she just didn't know her well enough for that. She did, however, know her well enough that she would be slouched down in her seat, embarrassed to no end, and just trying to focus on the test long enough to finish it on time.

  With that distraction over with, most of the abyssal eyed students turned to their own tests, each of them minding their own business and leaving Ellie and Becky alone. This gave Ellie some breathing room to get her mind in order, though she could never quite forget the fact that they were still there. Still interested in her. Still weird in some unknown, unknowable way.

  "Time," Dave called, in seemingly a lot less time than thirty minutes after he took Becky's smartwatch.

  Not wanting to be caught again by the abyssal eyed people, Ellie ran to the front of the room, slamming her test on the growing pile there, before dashing for the main door. For a split second, she considered running through the side door, but she feared what she would see in the alleyway beyond it. Worse, what she wouldn't see. She knew that was the place that the student had been killed by the kidnappers, though many others have forgotten it.

  So, instead, she pushed her way through the growing throng that were making their way through the main doors.

  And bumped right into someone standing just outside those doors.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Vern's Follow-up and Follow-through

  When Ellie bounced back from hitting the person standing outside, she bumped into someone else walking behind her. The boy gave her a grunt of annoyance before pushing past her, disappearing into the crowd that was fleeing the test. Ellie was left standing there, stunned, looking up at the familiar face that she thought she had escaped.

  Vern, the security guard from the other night, was smiling down at her. His hands were out to his side, reaching forward as if to catch her when she fell. However, he was too far away from her to do so. After a second, he retracted his hands, using his left to smooth out his thick black hair. It hadn't seemed out of place to Ellie, but he seemed self-conscious enough as it was.

  "Um, hey," he said. He was obviously trying to sound nonchalant, and failing miserably. "I was looking for you this weekend. I never... You never called me. I did give you my card, right?"

  "Um... yea," Ellie said. "Look, Vern was it? You're just... Well you're not really my type."

  "'Cause I could have gotten in a lot of trouble, defending you like that. I mean, if that Rebecca Anne girl ever brought this to my supervisor, he might have thought that I didn't investigate the issue fully. There may not have been any evidence, but filing a report is standard. The least you could have done was call me. Maybe get a coffee or something, before completely turning me down."

  "Vern, I--"

  "I mean, I know, I'm just a lowly campus police officer. But still, I'm a man like anyone else. I have ambitions, though they may not have been as high and mighty as whatever college students you find attractive these days. I--"

  "Vern, I have a girlfriend," Ellie blurted out. Her words carried, echoing down the hall, and conjured several cat calls from the trailing members of the throng making their way out of the room. "I didn't call you back, because I'm not interested in guys, in general."

  "Oh," Vern said, standing there stunned. "Well, I... I guess I hadn't... But you were flirting with me, too. Weren't you?"

  "Maybe a little," Ellie said. "I was scared. I thought I was going to get in trouble... for something that I didn't do, of course."

  "Yea, I can kind of see that," Vern said.

  "Thank you."

  "See that you're a bitch," he sneered. "I mean, you're cute and all, but obviously man
ipulative. Maybe I should have believed Rebecca Anne after all."

  "Vern, I--"

  "Maybe I'll revisit the crime scene, put that report together after all. Better late than never, right?"

  He looked around at the remnants of the crowd, though most of them had disappeared into the distance. All that were left was Ellie, her friends, and a few more stragglers. Her dad was still over at the desk talking with Becky. Behind her was a scared looking boy, no doubt waiting for his chance to plead his case with the professor, though it wasn't clear what he was hoping for. More time on the test? A second chance for it?

  "Forget it, Ellie, if that even is your real name," he said. "You've had your chance to get with this and you blew it. There are plenty of other girls out there." With that, he spun around in place and practically strutted away from them.

  "What the hell was that?" Alex asked.

  "That was the guard from the other day."

  "The guard? You mean when you--" She stopped in midsentence, looking over at Eric who was standing next to her. They still hadn't let him in on all that had been going on, and Alex didn't seem like she thought that would be a good idea.

  "Yup, that one," Ellie answered her unfinished question. "And I think we're in a lot of trouble."

  "Who is?" Becky asked. She was practically bouncing as she approached the group, effortlessly putting her smartwatch back into place on her wrist. It was clear that she had plenty of practice doing it, though the screen kept flipping out on her. "Dang it. I think your dad broke my watch."

  "This is bad," Ellie said. "If Vern starts taking Rebecca Anne's side, I might get kicked out of school. Or worse, arrested."

  "Some might view it the other way around," Eric said, smiling.

  "Honestly, at this point, being kicked out of school might be a good thing. I've never seen these... people outside of this school before. Maybe they're limited to here."

  "Who?" Eric asked.

  "Maybe," Alex allowed. "I just wish I could see them like you do. Maybe then I could tell you if they had shown up around town before this, and when."