Sigma Eta

The Structures of Stoke Moran

Stoke Moran College was not a very unusual university from the outside, in fact it had many appealing characteristics that successfully summoned students from all over the country, even from all over the world. It was an old college, rustic and authentic with its brick lined streets and its old, refurbished academic buildings. Some of the halls you could tell had been constructed so as to look old, but others were authentically ancient, some as old as the college itself. What drew Victor most to this small town was the prospect of living through all four seasons, something that was unusual where he had come from in a small town on the Southern coast. Well he had got what he bargained for, seeing as though it was not yet Halloween and yet he was trudging his way through about two inches of freshly fallen snow, accumulating in the night and melting with the morning sun. The air was brisk and always windy, clouds circled the campus on even the most pleasant days, and yet the summer heat burnt twice as hot as anywhere else in the country within its allotted months. It was a different sort of heat, sticky and exhausting. Oh but it wouldn't be the seasons that could scare him away so easily, not now that he finally achieved a well-paying job that would turn into a career if all of his cards were played correctly. It would be his first time teaching alone, for his experience only ranged through assistant teaching in various high schools or colleges across the country, nothing too fascinating for a resume but obviously enough to land him a job with such a salary. The classes at Stoke Moran proved to be a success, for most of the students who found themselves in math classes obviously wanted to be there. That was the problem with most high schools, their classes filled only because the kids were forced into the seats, and usually about three quarters of the unfortunate students wanted nothing to do with the study that was so fascinating to Victor. Math was everywhere, and anyone who tried to deny that they were good at it obviously wasn't looking deep enough into their daily lives. Perhaps they weren't good at the most complex forms of math, though the counting and the numbers operated on a daily scale, the equations ran their lives, to be truly bad at those would certainly cause some sort of mental breakdown. Anyone who truly couldn't do math would not have made it this far in their lives, that was for sure. And that was the problem, wasn't it? No one was ever brave enough to take on something that they had already convinced themselves they were no good at. They all gravitated towards some of the lesser sciences, those who had their foundations rooted within mathematics. Math was a dying art, though if it were to truly vanish so too would the whole of the human race. No matter how much the subject was dwindling, Victor still found that it occupied all of his time. He didn't yet have a family to distract him from the work he had suddenly taken on, all of the lesson planning, test making, and grading that went into this startlingly difficult world of professionalism. And with no distractions it felt as though each second of his time was occupied only within his desk, and if he was not physically sitting in his desk then he was thinking about the things he would get done when he was allowed to return. The days turned over in his mind, each one mirroring the other in his tasks and responsibilities. He was one of the leaders in a world that was so new for each one of his students, a world that was so exciting! Though as a professor each day became less and less exciting, until the months wore on and the repetition began to catch up to him. Suddenly grading math tests was no longer what he looked forward to in the day, suddenly sitting in his desk proved to be more exhausting than any other process in his day. He enjoyed getting up in front of a class, he enjoyed the entertainment that the students brought, though when he was relieved of his classes he found himself just as alone as ever, with no one to return to when he wallowed his way through the snow back to his little home. What kept him going, then, if the very job he had taken on was beginning to prove torturous? Well what else but the building exactly opposite of his office window, the most haunting structure that the campus could provide? What could be as fascinating as a building that no one ever entered, yet a building which stood tall and proud all the same? Stoke Moran may indeed be a normal university, filled with students of all ranges of diversity, filled with brains that were waiting to be utilized, but not all of it fell within the status quo. Not every building was slapped on the front of a folding pamphlet; not every building was sketched onto a map. One of them held secrets, the stories that weren't mentioned on the campus tour, the tragedies that couldn't ever be proven true. Something had happened within this campus that was still buried beneath the ground, and all Victor had to do was bide his time until he found the right shovel. He first heard the name Sigma Eta when he had proven himself distracted during the very hours that were supposed to be dedicated to his students, not to his daydreaming. There was a girl dressed in white, sitting across from him in the chair that he had pulled from the basement heap, a chair that should have fallen apart ages ago. This was the thing he set aside for his students, and it was in the tangled wicker that the girl sat with her notebook upon her lap, dressed rather unusually in lace with a very innocent look to her. However interesting her grievances with the homework were, well Victor couldn't find himself engaged enough to listen. Who cared much about tangent lines when right over her left shoulder could be seen the abandoned house? He found himself drawn to it in a way he could not explain, for his eyes couldn't get enough. From what he could see from here everything but the minute details were clear. From here the general structure could be seen in its entirety, a large building shrunk down to the size of a postage stamp from the distance he sat away. There were aspects to the building that he couldn't define from his office, particular chips in the paint, suggestive smudges on the window panes, footprints lost in the mud. And how he longed to examine them, how he felt the need to investigate! How could he pay attention to this poor student when his mind was so far away?
"Professor, did you hear me?" asked her quiet voice, nervous now that she was proving to be a bore. Victor blinked, alerted suddenly when he realized he really ought to be sitting with his body, and not wandering about in the world. The girl looked at him apprehensively, her cheeks blushing as her pencil pointed down at some numbers between the printed lines.
"Yes I um...well no." Victor admitted quietly, tapping his fingers twice against his wooden desk to ground himself in the appropriate moment.
"I was wondering where I went wrong. I followed all the steps, but the book says I haven't gotten it." she admitted. Victor nodded, looking towards the paper and seeing her name scrawled at the top. Midge, the handwriting claimed. Well it wasn't like Victor to remember each and every one of his students, especially considering he had been given four whole classes to take on throughout the week. All the same, such a name might have stuck in his mind, and for the life of him he couldn't recall seeing it before. Though she sat here now, with the homework he must have assigned. After checking over her work and finding the small error (a negative sign had caused a rather nasty chain reaction of errors) he set her working on the problem herself, sitting quietly and sniffing every so often to accompany the rhythmic scratching of her pencil. Victor stared out the window once again, fascinated with the building across from him. As of that moment he wasn't sure what purpose it had ever served, nor what had caused it to fall into such a state of decay. The only thing he knew for sure was that it was a beautiful building, though in all the days he had spent staring out that window he had never seen anyone go inside, nor leave. It seemed as though no one ever gave the structure a passing thought, which in itself seemed to be a mystery. It was as if the building was lingering in the far back of everyone's mind, a piece of reality that had all together been forgotten. It was weaving into memory, even while it was still standing. Could it be that Victor was one of the only ones to think about the building, or even to acknowledge it?
"Professor, you seem distracted." The girl commented, her voice now getting a bit more aggressive that she was taking control of their conversation.
"I won't deny it." Victor admitted at last, turning his attention back towards his audience. "I ought to just buy some curtains, to stop the outside world from distracting me."
"You wouldn't be the first person to look at Sigma Eta like that." she muttered, as if she found the whole ordeal to be quite exhausting.
"Sigma...the Greek letter? Was it a fraternity?" Victor asked abruptly.
"It was, way back before any of us could remember. It shut down sometime in the sixties, I think." The girl admitted. "Though there have been others inside since."
"That's strange. You'd think fraternities would go on forever." Victor commented. From what he knew of the campus layout there were at least two other fraternities that he could pick out, all fully operational within their designated houses.
"Not if there's a tragedy." The girl chuckled. Victor didn't at first respond; instead he took to staring at the girl in some sort of awe. She seemed to find the situation amusing; in fact there was a smile upon her face! How could one laugh at such a thing, a tragedy, here at Stoke Moran? Suddenly the Professor grew nervous, nodding his head very quietly and keeping his eyes rather suspiciously on the strange girl before him.
"What sort of tragedy?" Victor wondered at last. She smiled again, leaning back noiselessly on the old chair.
"Something that will happen again, I'm sure. Something terrible." She whispered. "They've lost the truth within rumors, but they say the truth was so ghastly that it sounds the most fabricated of all."
"Why do you say it will happen again?" Victor wondered nervously, his nerves prickling as he sensed something strange, some sort of danger that he could not quite place. His body was beginning to go into fight or flight mode, though he could not tell what the motivation was. There seemed to be no danger, not at least in this room across the desk from a harmless teenaged girl.
"Look at the way you stare. Everyone stares like that, unless they know not to look." The girl muttered. Victor allowed himself to look one more time; he let his glance fall through the window panes of his office and straight across the lawns and the road, back towards the house where it gleamed once again with a particular curiosity. It was pulling in his gaze; it wanted him to be fascinated.
"It's just a house." Victor said rather forcefully, as if he felt entitled to degrade the thing into its bare basics, into the structure it was made into rather than the force it had become. Though the room remained quiet, Midge seemed to think it was better not to respond. When at last Victor decided to follow the basic instructions, when he felt it time to look away, only then did he discover that the girl had vanished from his office. Victor jolted, frightened though he didn't know why. Just as noiselessly as she had been during the duration of her visit she had crept quietly away, leaving the wicker chair motionless and her notebook sat upon the desk. Why would she leave such a thing? Hesitantly, Victor stretched out his hand towards the notebook, spinning it around to see the work that she had been doing while she sat there. Well, what used to be numbers seemed to have turned to scribbles, lines drawn erratically across the notebook paper in no such order, no legibility at all. Instead of the equations he had demonstrated for her, the page was filled with nothing but lines and a simple name scrawled at the top, a name that seemed to be written in Victor's own handwriting.