Page 22 of Merciless Prince
“Well… maybe a bit,” I admitted, cheeks flushing with warmth. “But worrying about assignment due dates is hardly enough to make me hallucinate an entire night of being stalked by a maniac. I mean, I know what it looks like with all the evidence disappearing, but I swear, everything happened the way I said it did.”
The dean was silent for a moment as he stared at me, seemingly weighing up my credibility.
“Can you think of anyone who might want to do something like this to you?” he finally asked. “Any enemies you might’ve made here at Bellingham? Anyone strange whose attention you might’ve caught? Any past stalking incidents?”
I hesitated. No one had ever stalked me before, as far as I knew, and I’d never had any enemies either. Not unless you counted the little blond boy in my third grade class who used to pull my pigtails.
“No,” I said. “I can’t think of anyone.”
“Are you absolutely certain of that?”
I bit my bottom lip as I considered it again. “Well… I’m pretty sure I pissed off the guy in the dorm above me on my first day here, so I don’t think he likes me very much. But I’d hardly call him an enemy.”
“How did you bother him?”
“By asking him to turn his music down, because it was super loud,” I said. “But there’s no way he’d do all this crazy stuff just to get back at me for asking him to be quiet.”
“You’re right; that seems doubtful.” The dean rubbed his chin. Then he cleared his throat and spoke up again. “Well, then… I suppose our main question is: why did something like this happen toyou? Surely whoever did it had a reason, as twisted as it might be.”
I frowned as I considered his question. It really seemed like someone was specifically targeting me and trying to scare me away from Bellingham.
But who? And why?
“I have no idea,” I said out loud, clutching the counseling pamphlet in my lap.
Dean Blackwell rubbed the back of his neck. “Okay. Here’s what we’re going to do,” he said. “I’m going to ask the security guards to do a few extra loops around Rosewood Hall during the evenings. Usually they only check the area every hour, but we’ll change that to every half-hour. Also, I’ll get Student Services to issue you with another new door code for peace of mind. Make sure younevershare that code with anyone. Not even your friends.”
I nodded slowly, glad he was finally taking me seriously. “Okay. Thank you.”
“Hopefully, the increased security presence will make you feel safer, and we won’t have any repeats of this nasty incident. It sounds like it was an absolute nightmare for you,” the dean went on. He cocked his head slightly. “Come to think of it… is it possible that it could’ve been a nightmare? My daughter has had some terribly realistic dreams before. She woke the whole house up once because she believed that Bigfoot was outside her bedroom window, scratching to get in. It turned out to be a branch scraping against the glass. She must’ve heard the sound while she was still asleep, and it made her dream up Bigfoot as an explanation.”
I gritted my teeth to bite back an angry retort, because it was so typical for a woman to be gaslit by a man into thinking she was just being dramatic and inventing things in her head. But then I recalled an incident from a few years ago, during my junior year of high school. I’d badly hurt my ankle during a lacrosse game, and the doctor prescribed some heavy painkillers for me to take for a week afterwards.
That whole week, I’d experienced severe sleep paralysis and hypnagogic hallucinations. I kept waking up in the middle of the night thinking there were shadowy figures and demonic monsters lurking in my room. The doctors told me it was a rare side effect from the painkillers. I was just one of the few unlucky people who had it happen to them.
Clearly, my brain was wired in a way which made me prone to crazy nightmares and wild visions.
“Maybe I didn’t…” I trailed off as my mind whirled, trying to figure out if last night actually happened or not. I was so sure of it earlier… but now? Now I was questioning everything.
“Shay?” Dean Blackwell leaned forward. “Could it have been a nightmare?”
I lifted a shoulder in a slight shrug. “I guess so. I mean, it looked and felt totally real, but I’ve had sleep paralysis from painkillers before, and that made me see things at night that weren’t actually there.”
“Have you taken those painkillers recently?”
“No, I haven’t had them for years,” I replied. “But my doctor told me stress can cause sleep paralysis as well. I know I said I wasn’t really stressed about my classes and assignments, but I’ve had some other stuff going on outside of that, so I guess it’s still an option.”
The dean smiled. “Well, that’s probably what it was, then—a sleep paralysis nightmare caused by excessive stress. But we’ll still take the aforementioned security measures, just in case we’re wrong.”
“Thank you,” I said in a small voice.
“I’ll start making the necessary calls. Will you be okay to return to your dorm for now?”
I nodded. “Yes,” I mumbled. “I’ll be fine.”
I felt like a complete and utter idiot. Why hadn’t I considered the possibility of a hypnagogic nightmare until the dean brought it up? Granted, I was totally exhausted, but my brain was still functioning. I should’ve recalled my medical history and realized that last night’s stalker fiasco probably wasn’t real; that it was just a terrible hallucination like those I suffered from in high school.
My embarrassment soon gave way to a warm swell of relief. Now that the dean had pushed me to figure out the truth, I knew I had nothing to worry about. No one was after me. No one was stalking me.
