Secrets

Chapter Twenty Three

The man shivered from the cold and put his scarf closer around his neck. He took a sip out of his coffee to go and let his eyes roam over the people around him. No one payed attention to him, in this cold weather none of the students wanted to stay outside for longer than necessary, and everyone went quickly towards their destinations. It was finals week and the students were caught up in their thoughts, their heads full of the material they had been studying.

He slowly made his way across the campus the way he had done for the past hour. From one lecture hall towards the library, then past the cafeteria and towards another main building. Due to a limp in his right leg he couldn't walk very fast, but he was used to it. Besides, he was looking for someone specific, so he couldn't allow himself to be hectic and possibly miss who he was looking for, anyways.

It was in-between classes, so there were many students going back and forth. I hope I'm lucky, I don't want to come back tomorrow, the man thought to himself.

After a while, his eyes caught the figures of two girls walking from one building towards another and talking animatedly. One of them was tall and blonde and elegantly dressed. The other girl was a bit smaller and dark-skinned, dressed more casually and carrying a large sports bag over her shoulder. He recalled the photos he had looked at over and over again within the past week and a half, burning them into his mind. The blonde girl was one of the two girls he was looking for, he was sure.

The two girls were walking in his general direction, so he stopped walking and waited until they were about 60 feet away from him. He had no intention of approaching them, he just wanted to observe. Seeing them from up close, there was no doubt in his mind that the blonde girl was Mr O'Hara's niece's friend. He thought that she looked like any other college kid her age, and that nothing about her appearance gave away what they suspected her to be, but he also knew very well to never judge a book by its cover.

Before the two girls entered the building they were headed to, the blonde girl suddenly stopped walking and pulled on her friend's arm to make her stop as well. The man was in ear-shot, and he could hear the dark-skinned girl ask her friend what had made her stop. The blonde simply turned around, and the man saw another girl approaching them, waving at them excitedly.

Weird, he thought.

I didn't hear her call out towards them. She was close enough for me to hear.

"Oh, Kari!" the dark-skinned girl excitedly greeted the girl when she had reached them.

"Hey Jewell! How are finals?" she asked and giggled.

The girl named Jewell simply groaned in response.

The two blonde girls had simply acknowledged each other with a nod. It struck the man as odd, because the blonde one had been the one to turn around towards their mutual friend. He kept walking a little, not wanting to stand there and stare and make himself suspicious. He could see the girl named Kari look around herself in confusion, as if she had noticed him, but she looked over him.

The man could see her face then and a light bulb went on in his head. It was the other girl from the photos! The two blondes were the sisters he had been looking for. Today is my lucky day, he thought.

He watched the three girls talk for a while more, then they went their separate ways again. The two girls he had seen first entered the building, while the other blonde girl headed into the direction she had originally come from. He looked after her and saw that she was walking towards the library. His heart stopped when she turned around and her eyes roamed the people around her in confusion, as if someone had called her name but she couldn't figure out who it was. She turned around again though, not having made eye contact with the man. He let out the breath he had been holding.

He threw away his now empty plastic cup and walked towards the parking lot, ready to turn up the heating in the car and head home. He had seen enough. Their aim had been to simply confirm that the sisters actually went to the college and to see if there was anything unusual about them. They had looked normal enough, he thought to himself as he looked for his car, though he couldn't shake their slightly strange behavior from his thoughts.

How had the one girl known her sister had called out for her? She hadn't had her phone out, and the sister hadn't called out for her. In fact, the girl had been engrossed in a conversation with her friend. And he wondered if the other girl had noticed him, she had been glancing in his general direction, though it hadn't seemed like she had seen him. There had definitely been something strange about them.

He couldn't wait to call Mr Schulzenberger and tell him that he had been successful. He had no idea what the next steps would be, but he was sure that the leader of the group already had a plan. He was glad to have found this group and to have people who took him seriously.

Ever since he had witnessed an almost-accident about two years ago, he was sure there had been supernatural powers involved, and he was determined to make sense of the scene he had seen. He had been waiting at a red light as a pedestrian at a busy crossroad. On the other side, the light had just turned red for the pedestrians, and it would be his turn to walk soon. However, a woman had still been in the middle of the road when suddenly a jeep had come around the corner at high speed.

He clearly remembered how he thought that he was about to witness a fatal accident and had stood there frozen in place. While the driver had obviously pulled the brakes at the last moment, the car still hit the woman, the braking distance being too long.

However, the next thing he remembered was that the car drove through the woman, then coming to a halt some 50 feet behind her. The woman had been knocked over, but not in the way one would have fallen down when one got hit by a car. The man knew a thing or two about that, having been in a similar accident as a young boy, the aftermath still visible on his body today. The woman had rather been knocked down as if she had been hit by one of those big gym balls, and she hadn't seemed to be injured.

He and other passersby had quickly rushed over to help the woman up, but she had only gotten a shock. When they looked towards the car, they could see it had already driven off, too far away to read the license plate.

Since no one had gotten injured, the people had dispersed again soon after, shrugging the incident off and feeling lucky that it hadn't turned out worse. The man, however, could not stop thinking about what he had witnessed. He was a very rational man and didn't give into any make-believe. Therefore he was unsure if his mind had been playing a trick on him, but he found no explanation. The car had driven right through the woman. Its contours had been blurred for that one second. He was sure of it, he had witnessed it with his own two eyes.

Unfortunately for him, when he told his wife about the incident and his speculation, she had simply laughed at him, not being used to such a way of thinking from him. So he had taken to the internet and after a while found Mr Schulzenberger's group. He felt understood and taken seriously, and so he didn't mind to make the drive from South Carolina to the small Georgian town every two or three months to attend meetings.

Ever since he had learned more about the 'conspiracy theories', as his wife called them, of the secret existence of a world-wide group of witches and magicians, he had become wrathful at this group of people. If they existed and possessed supernatural powers, why did they not use them for good? There were wars going on and people starving, houses burning down and accidents happening. Maybe technology could be improved with their knowledge and spare innocent children from a life of suffering the way he had. If anything, to his mind the magicians were selfish and had to be exposed in order to be of use to the greater good.

He thought about all this on the drive home, not knowing how similar his train of thought was to the one of the girls he had just spied on, despite them stemming from different backgrounds.