The Ghost of Winn Peterson

29. Vicar

The student, Vicar soon discovered, was also English, and had come likewise from somewhere near Cambridge. Why he was in America, he declined to offer, and Vicar declined asking. There was something powerful in needing to leave one's homeland, and given the sensitivity of his own absence from his family's old house, he was politely ignorant. 

He did ask, however, what the man was doing out in the dark. "Are you devoid of classes? It isn't so late that they've stopped altogether, is it?"

"No," smiled the stranger, who had been peering curiously at Vicar from the corner of his eye for some time. There was an unsettling lack of words in him, a stoicism not born of superiority that confused Vicar greatly. In his experience, people who hardly spoke and still carried themselves confidently were hiding something, and it was usually a disdain for everyone else. This person, however, was oddly... happy. Vicar was grateful to have been rescued, but was unsure how happy he was to be walking with the student. 

"Do you walk around the willows often?"

"No. You work in the library, yes?" Vicar blinked. The sensation of discomfort grew exponentially. A reader of Sade, a spy of presumed isolation - a curious mix, and a dangerous one. 

"I do. Your classmates are astonishingly inept at locating textbooks on their own."

The stranger laughed aloud, his voice like melted chocolate. It was a peculiar laugh, and Vicar felt his cheeks flush at it. In one of his brother's saner days, he'd put on a play for Vicar, an attempt to console him in the absence of any parental guidance for the day. Vicar couldn't remember what the play had been about, but he could recall Gaston's dress; all red and feathers and horns. A tail had been fashioned of socks and curtains, a red and pointed tail that Vicar still saw slithering around at the edge of his vision. It was the laugh of the devil, the very same laugh Gaston had made as he paraded about the curtained rooms of their house. 

Crossing his arms in front of his chest, Vicar slowed his walk and stared hard at the stranger. "What are you here for?"

"I am seeking a degree in English Literature." The red-brown eyes flashed in the final blink of the sun. "Does our country not possess the very best, the most worthy stories of fear and thievery and misfortune? I am curious, I'll admit, what our friends on this side of the sea have to teach on the matter." 

There was a long pause. "... why are you here?" 

"I've come to find you, of course!" 

Before Vicar could run and escape the horrid prickling feeling that crawled up his bones, a series of voices called out for the stranger, and the black-haired youth turned and flashed his teeth to them. In the brief distraction, Vicar slipped into the very shadows he'd been rescued from and hurried forth in the gloom, eager to find the nearest entrance into Pendragon-Hall. Just as he made his way indoors, though, he spared one last look at the bizarre scene and found the stranger was looking directly at him, unmistakably, even past the hundreds of yards that now separated them. 

Shuddering where he sat on Winn's bed, the sharpness of the memory produced the same disgusting sensation it had even then. Scratching his arms, Vicar wished it would all just go away. The memories, the randomness of what came to his mind, the mysteries he found himself surrounded with. There was no safety, no matter which country or which room he fled to. 

He stood and paced. His shoes had long ago been discarded, and his bare feet froze with each step. The sun may have been rising, albeit at its own disturbed pace, but the weather had long since doomed any hope of warmth. Vicar suspected being in such a grief-stained room didn't help with the cold, either. Cracking each toe against the floorboards, he walked to the window, but found that he couldn't focus on anything outside, not when there was so much in his head and in the room. Try as he might to think instead on Winn and her relationship to his brother, to the house (who's connection to Winn's time was still lost on Vicar - how and when had it become his family home, if it was once the doctor's? Was it not always in his family?), Vicar was drawn instead back to the memory of that evening in America, the peculiar encounter with a student he'd neither seen before nor since.