CHAPTER THREE

As Harold pulled his travelling bag behind him, what the athletic student that had been at his front on the queue said began to bother him.

If they were keeping tabs on a student or a group of students, what was their motive? If they felt that the student(s) was/were up to no good then there was trouble looming round the corner. Harold felt nauseous.

He stopped on his tracks and took out his phone. Before swiping the screen open, the corner of his left eye caught the dark-skinned student walking to the first building. That meant he was in his third and final year in Golden Lake University.

The second, where Harold and Wilkes had stayed in last session, was for the first years and since they were having a meeting at that particular time, it was pretty deserted. 

‘What's the room number?’ Harold texted quickly. He put the phone back into his pocket and grabbed his travelling bag. 

He walked slower than he'd been previously chiefly because he didn't want to get to the entrance of his new hostel and wait for a text from Wilkes. That will make him feel more incompetent than he already felt he was.

His phone made the familiar sound of a message coming in.

He stopped on his tracks again and fished his phone out of his pocket.

‘What will you do without me?’ Wilkes had texted back with a silly grinning emoji added after the question mark.

Harold smiled and as he prepared to type a reply, a new text from Wilkes caused his phone to chime.

‘Last room to your left on the topmost floor. Odd, huh?”

Harold took his eyes off his phone's screen and studied the building instead. It was three storeys tall, a fine blend of modernity and pristinity.

‘Yeah, it is odd,’ he texted back. ‘Seems to me like they want us isolated from… other students?’

‘That has to be it!’ Wilkes texted back immediately. He had been expecting a reply the same second he'd sent one. ‘I wonder why, though.’

Harold shrugged and out the phone back into his pocket.

If he was to go by Max's acceptance into the school, the paperwork at the school gate and now, the odd location of the room he had been assigned to, the new session was going to be very, very different than how the last had been. It was going to be worse.

For the umpteenth time that afternoon, Harold placed his hand on his bag and sluggishly pulled it along, behind him, as he walked to the hostel's entrance.

When Harold got to the door, he sighed and paused for a while as he remembered how the trouble began last session, in his first year. Just like this session was turning out to be, it was on the day of his arrival.

He had been praying to find his hostel before the curfew meant that he was sent back to his pack and had overheard two people talking. The more important one of the two was now dead, six feet in the ground. He had nothing that told of his existence but the painful memories in the back of Harold and a few other's heads. 

Harold shivered as he rested a finger on the doorknob. He was scared of the unknown.

It was almost like the very second he opens it, a new set of problems were going to resurface and unlike the last time, they just might consume him. Either way, he had to do it. He had to open the door, go to his room, meet his roommate and other friends perhaps late in the evening and pray things went well.

The door squealed softly as it opened.

Harold Girard walked into it with his travelling bag before him and just as mildly as he had opened the door, he closed it behind him.

The hostel was very much like the one he had stayed in last semester although it gave off a vibe that it was newer.

To his right and left were rooms. They seemed to be bigger in size than the ones in his previous hostel were but there was no way he could be absolutely sure.

Students trooped into each others rooms. Most students got new roommates while there were a few like him and Wilkes who just had a change of room.

Unlike the long flourescents in the building he had spent his first year, small, circular light bulbs were built into the edges of the pale white ceiling causing a shadowy shade to spread from the beginning to the end corridor.

Without taking too much of his own time, Harold Girard pulled his travelling bag behind and walked to where the staircase was. Unlike that in the previous building, the stairs in this was well lit and from what Harold observed, there was no office positioned where professor Ericson's had been in the other building.

Struggling, he climbed up the stairs. By the time he got to the topmost floor, he was totally exhausted and was dripping with sweat like someone who had just had a shower.

Without bothering to observe the the storey meant to home him for the next an hour, professor Ericson pulled his bag behind him and walked to the last room, and knocked on the door.

A second later, the door flung open showing a student with a lot of tattoos. He had managed to smuggle them into the school. 

It wasn't Wilkes Milton. Definitely not.