Fall semester. 1997. At a strange Southern college, freshman Tim's eerily prescient Student Handbook tells him he's going to fall in love with 6'6" sophomore Joanie. But Joanie has more important things to deal with than a weird crush - like a creep...
The face saw him before he saw it. It watched him walk along the curve of Suttledge Drive, his form turning high-contrast every fifteen yards in the pools of yellow-orange light from the streetlamps, then slipping back into shadow. The trees grew tall and thick along the road for the quarter-mile between Wintertree and the Student Union. Their branches were still full with green leaves, on the edge of the fall. So many places to hide here, so many places one could be hidden. He stayed on the sidewalk, letting the lights guide him, but he could see the trails that wound through the woods, and the face saw the longing as he passed each one. It saw him look up in alarm at the sound of approaching voices. It saw his relief when he realized they were coming from the other side of the road. It watched him come down and around the dip in the road at the sharpest bend, and then he saw it.
The face was carved into the wooden sign at the base of the winding stair of railroad ties that led up the hill to the Gertrude & Max Wheeler Science Building. The "X" in "MAX" served as one of the Xed-out eyes of the face. The rest of it was crudely gouged into the wood with a pocketknife: a hand-carved X for the other eye, the straight line of the mouth, the circular head topped with a nine-pointed crown. It was roughly the size of Tim's own head. A dead king. Tim remembered a T-shirt his friend Bryan wore in 9th grade, a band logo. No, he remembered, he and Bryan weren't really friends at that point, not for years.
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"Why are you watching me?" Tim said to the face, and as soon as the words exited his mouth, he knew it was an absurd thing to say. But something about the way the face looked at him, placid and regal, he couldn't be certain that it hadn't watched him the entire way from Wintertree to these stairs. It may have been watching him before he even left Wintertree. It may have seen him in the windowless room 79A, helping Drew set up his TV/VCR combo and his Nintendo 64.
A word of warning about this "Nintendo 64," which we understand to be some sort of electronic console that allows you to manipulate colorful figures on your television screen. It will come to dominate the waking hours of many of your fellow Wintertree residents, chiefly via a single game that as of this writing hasn't received an official release. But see, here, your roommate reaches into his duffel bag and pulls out a game still sealed in its cardboard and shrink wrap. You can just make out the face of an actor on its cover: Pierce Brosnan. "Check it out," Drew says as he extricates the cartridge from its packaging. "My cousin works at a Media Play. This doesn't even come out till next week." He pops it into the console, and the title screen appears.
GoldenEye, it's called. It is a crudely animated diversion in which you assume the role of James Bond or one of a number of 007-adjacent characters, and then try to murder your friends. It is this aspect that will cause such a fervor among the Wintertree populace. Four players can participate in the murder contest at once, and so they will cram onto thrift-store couches and strain the springs of dorm-room beds, endlessly mashing buttons and shouting epithets at each other regarding their prowess at murder, or lack thereof. This will go on all day and all night, for weeks and months. You will hear "Fuck you, Oddjob!" from multiple rooms as you traverse the halls, and you will hear it in your sleep.
