Explore your office

Abigail leaves you. Before going, she tells you she’ll fetch you for the staff meeting. If you have any questions, she’ll either be in her classroom, or in her office, which is just off her classroom.

Alone, you feel overwhelmed. Here you are. Your new life. Your new office. It feels sterile. It feels uncomfortable. It doesn’t feel like yours. Instead, you’re an impostor, standing in someone else’s office, and at any moment they will come in and chase you out.

No, this is yours. You sit in the big chair behind the desk. It’s surprisingly comfortable. You root through the desk. A few pens and pencils. Other than that, empty.

You stand up and look at the bookshelves. Copies of the textbooks. A few other books. All familiar. If you haven’t read them, you’ve read books like them.

You open the cupboards beneath the shelves. Several reams of white paper, all unopened. Another pile of posters, spare maps, all educational, all referencing your topic. A couple of packs of plain, white women’s knickers. Interesting. Unopened. Maybe you should throw them out. Maybe you should mention this to Abigail. Instead, you just put them back. You’ll decide what to do with them later.

As you’re investigating you notice someone has scratched something into the wood at the back of the cupboard. You peer closer. It appears to be a rune, or a symbol. You don’t recognise it. You have a passing understanding of Ogham symbols, but it’s not one of those. You look at the other cupboards. Yes, in every alternate cupboard, at the back, someone has scratched a symbol. They’re not all the same. They repeat, a pattern of three different symbols. But then two of them, but not the third. The cupboards run out.

No. The third would be where the door is. The door is covered by a poster extoling the virtues of St Perpetua’s Sixth Form College. It’s tacked to the wood of the door. You untack it and pull it down. Yes, behind the poster, scratched into the wood of the door is the missing third symbol. Odd. You tack the poster back up. The symbol makes you feel uncomfortable. It makes your arms itch, especially around the tattoos that mark where the bands had been.

You step out into the classroom. Were these walls also covered in the symbols. The near wall is covered in white-boards, and they can’t move. And one wall is windows, like your office. The other two walls are covered in posters. The bottom half of the door is also covered in a poster, telling students that if they study hard, they will get their rewards. That’s the easiest poster to tackle. You untack it, and yes, there’s one of the three symbols scratched into the door.

You don’t need to unhook all the posters to know they hide more of the three symbols. What does it mean? You have no idea. You have no idea who put the symbols there. The school? You can’t think why. The students? Unlikely. Your predecessor, Miss Wandering? But why?

Your contemplation is broken by Abigail’s return.

“You ready to meet everybody?” she asks. “They’re starting to gather in the staff room for the Doctor’s big speech.”

You consider raising the symbols with her and then think better of it. Maybe she had something to do with it? Or maybe she’ll be as much in the dark as you.