What Lies Behind the Prickly Itch

I shouldn’t be here. Something is wrong. I can’t sleep. It’s three in the morning. There is this itch, just at the base of my neck, that won’t go away. Not in my apartment. Not on the campus. Always watching. Someone is always watching.

Can’t sleep. I’ve tried talking to people. But my advisor doesn’t particularly like me, I don’t think. He sees me as irritating. As a bit dimwitted. Because I’m not an asshole about other people’s time. Speaking of, Heather also knows something. I can tell she does. But she won’t share. Not because she thinks I’m dim, but because she thinks I’m weak. Betting she learned something right around the time that she broke up with Jean. Sure technically he broke up with her, but anyone paying attention could see where the discontent originated. I lie back down, trying to relax into sleep. Put on my headphones and play some white noise quietly. A fire, crackling. I feel as my eyelids begin to grow heavy.

I shouldn’t be here. The thought rushes into my head with a start, jolting me awake. It’s still just past three. No sleep tonight, it seems. Unfortunate. Slowly I get up and head to my kitchen, taking off my headphones as I walk and leaving them across a doorhandle. Just because I can’t sleep doesn’t mean my body isn’t exhausted. Walking takes so much effort just to make it to the kitchen. The kettle is all set up and ready to boil in the morning, so starting things early is just a matter of pressing a couple buttons. And readying the coffee is a matter of pouring grounds into the press. The itch, it won’t go away. The lights go on along the base of the kettle as it begins to heat up the water. That leaves a few minutes. I collapse onto the stool. To think.

Sitting still, despite my exhaustion, feels impossible. It takes a matter of seconds before the thought forces its way back into my tired mind. I shouldn’t be here. I stand up once more, just to not be still. Looking around, I try to think about what to do. I need the itch to stop. It’s been too long with barebones sleep. I need to fix it. The itch needs to stop before I start hallucinating. Or worse. I head over to the window, small and directly facing one of the mountainsides. Barely any view whatsoever. But that isn’t why I walked over here. Taking one stem off of my large potted plant that sits in the window, I focus on it and use the fresh, slowly dying leaf to trace a small sigil in the air, muttering to myself. The leaf pulls on my insides through my hand but I hold back as the leaf decays between my thumb and forefinger and a barely perceptible pulse surges out, contacting the border that the Magisterium wrote around my apartment building. It looks sealed. I just needed to be certain, because I was planning on doing a few rather large rituals and none of them would be the sort of thing you’re supposed to do unshielded.

As I let go of the thin flecks of decayed plant matter, another wave of exhaustion hits. But not enough to actually put me to sleep, just enough to make me feel unsteady. I lean on the window moulding. I take a deep breath.

Behind me, the kettle beeps. Pushing off, I make my way back to the kitchen. The water is just under boiling, as it should be. Picking it up, I carefully and slowly pour it into the press, locking the top in place. And that leaves yet more waiting. My mind is barely awake. Running practically on instinct. That’s what happens when in the last week I’ve gotten less than eight total hours of sleep. I start to slow down. Wait. But I can’t stop moving. I shouldn’t be here. The thought continues to haunt my mind. I push off to walk over to the knifeblock. Pulling out a small paring knife, I press the tip into my index finger, then once it breaks the skin, slice a thin slit in my fingerprint. There’s only a moment of pain that makes it past the exhaustion, then fades into the background once more. A bubble of blood begins to pool up on the fingertip. I let the drop grow, then I begin to draw the sigils around my eyes. As I draw, I begin speaking the old Germanic words. It burns, but it will be worth it. I need to get rid of the itch. The light from outside grows. Exhaustion washes over me in waves. I finish the words and drawings and, barely awake but far from asleep, I make my way back over to the press. Leaning on the plunger because I’m not sure I can push it down otherwise, I make myself some coffee.

As I drink the coffee, I look around. The entire apartment glows. Not good. Eyes and ears everywhere. I need to start narrowing it down. I go over to the flowers, sitting on my kitchen table. With a muttered apology to my secret admirer, I take up the flowers. And I start to lie them out on the table. The logic is simple. Undoubtedly there are magical scrying elements put in place by the very people who made the protective area. If I suppress the magical scrying, I can find the non-magical elements trying to watch me. Or confirm that something else is going on with the itch. Pressing my bloody finger into the center of the flowerbuilt shield, I let the blood flow across the petals. And, as I expected, the entire room begins to dim. The windows still provide a glow, as they are windows, but with the scrying magic dulled in the area, the room becomes much easier to find points of light in. I need to know how long, so I watch to see the pace. The blood begins to crawl its way outward along the flowers, seemingly consuming the flowers as it expands, leaving only ash in its wake. About an hour, maybe two, from the looks of how the blood crawls. If push comes to shove and this doesn’t get the itch to subside, I can buy a bouquet every day on the way home and get some sleep, at least.

Turning to face the room, I can see several points seemingly expelling light in my pitchblack room in the middle of the night. One by one, I go through them. Starting in the living room slash kitchen. Two cameras, three bugs. The cameras are basically pointed at one another, capturing a visual of the entire room. No mics on the cameras, but I assume that’s what the bugs around the room are for. I could be clever about it, but I don’t bother. I just want them all gone, so I can sleep. I move on to the bedroom, where there are four cameras, but only one bug. One camera that looks like some sort of web cam is by the desk, likely to keep an eye on my work. There’s a camera of an entirely different model pointed at my bed. Then the same two camera setup with a single bug in the light fixture sit in opposing corners. That means three different people, probably. The dual cameras are set up so that, if I weren’t primed by something else, I might only feel it a bit. The other cameras are much less cleverly positioned. I would put money on one of those two cameras being new in the last couple weeks, and what’s causing my sleep issues. Assuming there aren’t any oddities in the mystical scrying as well. Ripping away all of those, I head into my bathroom to check it. Same pair of cameras, one bug. And one other camera, in the toilet. People are weird. Ripping all the mechanical observation devices up, I lay them out on my living room floor.

I take a breath, unsure of how much I have left to give. I’m functional now, but that’s entirely the coffee. I can tell, mentally I’m practically asleep. I don’t have it in me to do anything drastic. And I’m not about to waste away my plant to destroy this garbage. I head over to the kitchen and grab a trashbag, tossing the cameras and bugs in there, trying my best to cut something important looking and wire-like on each one with the knife before tossing it into the bag. I’ll figure something out. Later, when I’m actually awake, and not merely caffeinated. Looking around, the blood has eaten through about half of the flowers. The only glow I can see is from the windows, lighting up a window’s shadow worth of space in my living room, as well as on the mountainside opposite. And there is still a very faint glow from the webcam, which I couldn’t mess with easily, but I shoved it in the trashbag and put the trashbag in the corner by my apartment door. Heading back to my bedroom, I grab my headphones and put them on. THen, I let the crackling of the digital bonfire relax me as I lay down. And try to sleep.

Despite the caffeine running through my system, I drift off into an odd light and dreamlike sleep. My dreams are odd, out of order and nonsensical, as my brain rushes while my body sleeps. And as I wake with the sun, that same thought hits me, though not with the force of before. Instead in the more normal way it lingers in my mind, the way it has always lingered there. A quiet voice that sounds much like my own, whispering in the back of my mind about how I shouldn’t be here.

Getting up and taking off my headphones, the prickle remains on the back of my neck. Not enough to keep me up, but more than when I first moved in. So some element of magical scrying beyond what the Magisterium hides in the wards. Can’t see what, the blood on my face is long dead, just like the flowers on my kitchen table. Heading into the bathroom, I wash the dried, brown, and flakey blood off of my face. I pour myself another cup of coffee, now cold, and put the mug in the microwave. It won’t taste good, but it’ll be good enough to get me to the coffee shop on campus. Getting dressed as the microwave runs, I pull on a coat as well as my sweater. The mountain air in November is rather cold. The microwave beeps, and I gather my mug before heading out.

As I’m walking through the ward once more and onto campus, Nuria approaches from the parking lot. “Felo,” she says with a smile, “How are you doing?”

I look at her. She’s more nervous than usual. Something else might be going on, of course. I don’t know enough about the goings on on the other side of town to tell if there’s something personal happening. But there is always the other option for why she’s nervous talking to me. “I figured you’d know that already,” I say, to see her response.

She starts stumbling over her words. “Look, I just needed some help getting ideas for projects and I mean, you know you always have way too many ideas and I wasn’t you know, I wasn’t going to steal any of your ideas that you actually wanted to use, but if you were discarding something that I was interested in, like with the airflow question a couple weeks ago, you know?”

So she’s behind the webcam. One down, two people to go. “It’s been there more than two weeks?” I ask.

She nods. “Yeah, I mean, just since midterms though, when I realized how behind I was on some projects.”

I take a breath. So, the webcam was a while ago. As were the corner cameras. Which leaves the one pointed at my bed as the likely culprit. “Did you happen to be recording the footage?”

“Yeah?” she replies, nervous.

I let out a somewhat relieved sigh. Maybe this conversation can help me figure out two of the three. “Could you send me those last couple weeks of it? I’ve been sleeping really poorly this week and want to see if there’s anything weird that happened.”