A Real Thinker

Whoever the Watcher is, you think, he is obsessed with the past. With origins. Maybe if you can find a clue as to who he is, you can catch him in the act. Some kind of evidence.

Right now, you worry, no one would believe you.

And so here you are, in the oldest building on campus, staring at the rows upon rows of black-and-white faces with their old-fashioned spectacles and haircuts, staring back at you. Was he a student like you? Was he a professor?

Whoever he is, he doesn’t just know about you. He also knows this place. He knows its secrets.

You think again about the phrase scribbled on the back of the paper from the last envelope: “not of an age, but for all time!” A quick online search had informed you the line was from a poem by Ben Jonson about William Shakespeare, but you don’t know what else to do with that information. You already flipped through several collections of Shakespeare at the library, and asked around the theatre department. No luck.

You pull open the poem again, and are skimming through it when one line catches your eye: “thou star of poets.” It wouldn’t stand out, except that you happen to be looking out the window right now, and as if by magic, the word POETS is also written in tall yellow letters in the window of the building opposite.

And there, also as if by magic, you find the next envelope, tucked under a chair beneath the large wooden seal, emblazoned with “poets.”

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