Virgil knocked on the heavy green door and waited. An announcement came over the speakers and he heard the clop of a student aide floors below beginning their nightly check for lingering patrons. He could hear the footsteps behind him and made a split decision, entering the attic and silently shutting the door behind him. He listened to he back of the door for the footsteps below but could hear them no longer. He closed his eyes and tried to see into the code, but all he saw was the inside of his eyelids. He couldn't try harder. Whenever he tried to do something harder, he became stressed. When he was stressed, he couldn't do anything.
He accepted defeat, looking around Shane's empty room for somewhere to wait for her that would be unobtrusive. Somewhere that wouldn't surprise her when she came home. He opted to sit on her bed as the least creepy place.
He was moderately impressed at the space she had created for herself, though only because he hadn't seen the attic before.
Shane used whatever she could to emulate a normal person's home. From old shelving, a closet had been made to organize her collection of purloined clothes. The walls were covered in collages of pictures from magazines and old textbooks, though these were simple gifts from Roselyn, who felt the attic otherwise lacking in personality. The windows were alternately covered in colored cellophane or intricate dream catchers, casting Crayola spider webs across the walls. Her couldn't imagine how Shane managed to get a dresser up here, conveniently neglecting that he was nt her only friend.
His impatience grew as the minutes did until he couldn't help but slake his boredom at the font of curiosity. He looked through her clothes and found the pile of ruined garments, caked in dirt and torn beyond use. He stared as though their fate could be contracted through exposure, but he could make no sense of tem. He grew palely aware that his imagination had turned to thoughts of these clothes on Shane or, more correctly, not on Shane. He grew flustered as he willed these thoughts away, picking up a book on the nightstand for a distraction.
His eyes glanced emptily over three lines before he realized what he held. The unmistakable feminine scrawl told him all he needed to know as to its authorship, which was just as well; he could not read a word of it. The problem was not in the quality of the script, it was legible enough. It simply wasn't any alphabet he could read. But he did know it and had seen it last in that useless book he stole from Owen's room.
Before he could work through what this could mean, he heard the knocking at the windows. He dropped the book with a start and the rapping grew louder and more insistent. Arming himself with a broom, he backed against the far wall. The night beyond could easily be seen through the poor man's stained glass, the night and nothing more. No one to knock, certainly. No scraping branch in service to the wind. Nothing but the far off moonlit trees and streetlights. Yet the knocking came again and grew louder.
Virgil released the broom and turned to leave. The shadow of a vast bird, perhaps having slipped of the feet of some roc, projected itself against the webbing of the dream catchers.
Its beak landed against the window with the sharpness of a guillotine blade, pecking its warning or threat again.
Virgil ran down the staircase loudly, not caring who heard him. The alarm system, not benefiting from Shane's purloined code, trilled. Somewhere, the Raefian raised his head, but lowered it just as quickly. Not now.
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