The Pencil

It was three in the morning, and the silence in the Architecture and Design Building was palpable, ominous. Even the Architecture and Design students, who usually played loud and rowdy music at this hour, had left. A cold breeze seeped through a broken windowpane and stung Casper’s back, but he did not wince, because it was the breeze that really kept him awake. Apart from his sheer determination to study through tonight, he also needed the sharp, biting edge of the breeze to frighten sleep off his eyes. But determination of the tepid kind borne out of exam phobia could wear down, especially in a long, sad night as this, so mostly it was the breeze he relied upon.
 Not that he was afraid of exams; but since his first year in the university, he had learnt that it was as easy to fail an examination as it was to tell a lie, whether you were bright or dull, a dux or a dunce. There were things that made studying in university so hard, distractions against which one had to fight so badly if one was to achieve anything at all: girls, music, movies, parties, friends, freedom, drugs, etc. It was in university where one actually discovered one’s potential to parry temptations. Casper had long realized that he was rendered weak when it came to rejecting offers, and that was why he was lucubrating tonight; usually he ignored his work most of the semester till exams began to hoot and honk in the near distance. There was, however, a comfortable feeling at the back of his mind that he wasn’t the only one usually overpowered by the savage temptations life in university offered with wicked generosity; there were a hell of a million students worse than him out there, even though not all of them were studying Electrical and Electronics Engineering in a department that specialized in murdering dreams, where Engineering was studied in theory.
 While he was awaiting admission into the university, Casper had heard incredibly wild and sweet stories about campus life. When he joined first year, he had tried to live the life described in those stories. The repercussions were that he flunked nearly half the units in his course, and that was when he began to hate and curse exams for turning an irresistibly enjoyable life into a mean, bitter dog, a mongrel. He had been in school for nineteen years, and had only one more to acquire his first degree; yet he still did not understand why there ever had to be exams anywhere on earth. They were always so, so brutally mean, the real killjoys in life.
 Somebody dragged a chair carelessly in the next room, routing Casper out of his deep thoughts. He jolted, sat upright. So he wasn’t the only student in the building as he had thought. The other ones most likely to forgo sleep were those in the medical school. The next room shut with a bang, and footsteps pitapatted toward the room in which Casper was brooding. It turned out to be a watchman.
 “Your student ID, please,” the night-man said without any preamble.
 Casper regarded him coldly. The man probably thought he was no student, and had no accommodation in campus, which was why anyone would choose to mug up in a deserted building at half past three in the morning.
 “What’s the worst you’ll do if I didn’t carry it with me?” Casper asked.
 “ID,” the watchman said slowly with contempt. He sounded as though he was talking to a very thick learner. The campus watchmen had problems with their self-esteem. They always felt that students despised them, which wasn’t totally the case. When they had a chance to bully an unfortunate one, they did it with utter desperation.
 Deciding instantly to play it rude, Casper said he had no ID.
 “Then you leave!” the night-man pronounced authoritatively.
 “I won’t!”
 “I said leave!”
Casper stood up abruptly. He was taller than the man. In fact, he was taller than most other people. Towering at six seven, with a broad chest, a long neck, and a small head (a classmate with whom he frequently shared a bottle of beer and a roll of weed had once insulted him that he was built like an ostrich: the same friend had also assaulted him that he, Casper, dressed like a suddenly educated fisherman!). Casper carried himself with condescending confidence, and delicately bloated dignity.
 “Listen, this is not your house, okay?” he spat disdainfully. “And I am a student here, okay? I have exams next week and that’s why I’m languishing in this cold instead of relishing the comfort of my room, okay? I’m doing a hard course and I am stressed, okay? And you’re here to stress me further, okay? Listen, you can never do the course that I do, not even if Jesus Christ himself adds you a brand new brain, okay? So you drive your despicable watch-manning butts away from me, okay? And don’t bother me again, okay? You are an idiotic prick-teasing, cocksucking son of a bitch, okay? You understand, okay?”
 Later, after Casper’s mysterious death, the night watchman described his voice as high-pitched and grating; the sound of hacksaw against steel.
Irritated, rendered inferior, defenceless and speechless by such a blatant show of disrespect, the watchman clicked his tongue, thumped his foot, and left. At the door, he turned once and told Casper that he was going to lock the door from outside then go call other security men. They would frogmarch him to the Student Welfare Authority Security Office for discipline.
 “Yeah, go right ahead, okay?” Casper said. “Lock the door and insert your dick in the keyhole, okay?”
 “Okay? Okay?” the watchman mimicked. Then he sneered venomously and scurried away. But he never locked the door; neither did he call his fellow security men.
 Around a quarter of four, Casper dozed off, the cold breeze notwithstanding. He was woken up by a movement so swift he did not comprehend it at all. Somebody must have entered the room then left quickly. All a long there had been a big black rucksack at the far corner of the class. It had sat there since six the previous evening when Casper first came in. It probably belonged to one of those selfish students who usually left their books behind on their favourite reading tables long before they arrived at the rooms so that no one else occupied those particular tables.
 Now the rucksack was gone. Whoever had come in while Casper dozed off must have taken it. But how fast! Casper was sure he hadn’t dozed long enough to enable even the most surreptitious person to intrude upon him. His first reaction was to rush outside, find out who had sneaked in on him, but he decided it could have been the owner of the rucksack or someone else of no consequence to him. He went on with his studies.
 Sometime into four, he dozed off again, and became alert when a pencil rolled on the table where the rucksack had been. It was a HB pencil, with black and red longitudinal stripes along it, brand new, sharpened once for the first time. It had not been on that table a few minutes before. Where could it possibly have dropped from? Casper was thinking of Miva, his girlfriend, when he picked it up. Miva liked to calculate her rough work in pencils. He would tell her that he bought this one for her. She would be pleased.
 To test its sharpness and efficiency, he used it to sketch electrical circuit diagrams in his book. What transpired between the circuit sketches and the writings that he later saw among his rough drafts, he did not know and could not explain. While holding the pencil, he must have drifted into a sleep, or lost his consciousness completely, because he could swear with his head in a noose that he did not write the following words:

RETURN ME! RETURN ME! RETURN ME!

 Return me? Return who? What? This wasn’t right. Maybe he was exhausted, his memory growing vague, fatigued. He decided to end his studies, go to his room, and catch an hour’s worth of sleep.
 He met Miva in class at eight and gave her the pencil. She was genuinely pleased in a big way, and she kissed him in a big way. She promised him sex after classes, and he had gruellingly slow hours of delightful hope. But later in the evening, she returned the pencil to him.
 “What the hell is this thing?” she asked in panic.
 “A pencil, of course,” Casper replied blandly. “I bought it especially for you.”
 “It doesn’t write,” she stated.
 “It does. I used it before I gave it to you; and of all things possible, a pencil cannot refuse to write. ”
 “Look at what it did to me.” She raised her skirt, and there was a deep wound on her thigh. She had stopped bleeding but the wound was frightening.
 Out of concern, Casper was truly shaken. In a quick flash, it crossed his mind that he could not say for sure where the pencil had come from.
 “How did that happen?” he asked in near hysterics. He was a scared person, a coward.
 “I was doing a report, and this pencil couldn’t draw. So I dropped it on my reading table and fetched another. When I was done with the report, I started to get off the chair, and I fell. I fell on this pencil.”
 “How did you fall on it? It was on your table.”
 “I don’t know,” she said uncertainly. “It was on the table for sure, but when I fell, it was on the floor and pointing upwards. Believe me, it was pointing upwards. And when I fell, I felt like something was pulling me down forcefully to the floor.”
 “I’m sorry. I’ll take you to Sick Bay.”
 “Keep it. It doesn’t write after all.”
Casper took the pencil. “It’s alright. I’ll get you another.”
 “I saw some words in my book, but I didn’t write them. RETURN ME RETURN ME RETURN ME . . . I didn’t write those things, but they were all over my page. I don’t even understand what they’re about!”
 Casper remembered the words he had seen all over his rough draft, and he stiffened.
 “Do you recall them?” Miva asked, studying his reaction, and wincing from the pain in her fat thigh.
 “No,” Casper denied; “just thought it’s weird.”
 “They were written in a HB-pencil. That much I could tell. The one I had before you brought me this one was a 2B. But this one doesn’t write, so who wrote those words?”
 “Let’s take care of your leg first. We’ll sort out the rest when we come back.”
 “I’m scared.”
 “Don’t be. Maybe one of your friends did write those things.”
 “I was alone in the room and I had the book all along.”
 “You’ll remember. No need to panic.”
Casper remembered, was frightened, and in panic. Whose pencil was that, and where had it come from? Had it been in the rucksack? It couldn’t possibly have dropped when the unseen intruder grabbed the rucksack. It had not been there shortly after the intruder was gone. It had come from somewhere. Otherwise how long would it take a pencil dropped on a tilted reading table to start rolling across? It surely would do so immediately. This one had started rolling after some time. So it hadn’t dropped from the rucksack, and had not been on the table.
After they had left Sick Bay, Casper escorted Miva to her room in Hall 13. He was sorely disappointed his hopes of fucking her had been dashed. He swore at the pencil.
 When he got back to his room, he took the pencil and examined it the way he would examine a faulty electrical circuit. It was only a simple pencil. Could it be harbouring dark powers? A haunted pencil harbouring malevolent powers belonged in the books by likes of Stephen King. Casper was an engineer, and engineers made the world go round. Engineers were sane. So what was this about a pencil that hurt people and wrote on its own? He would be damned to admit it.
 He fetched a clean foolscap and made sketches on it with the pencil. It worked. What was Miva saying about the pencil not writing? A pencil is the most reliable writing instrument in the universe. It can’t just stop writing and can be used anywhere regardless of the variations of atmospheric pressure or whatever. The pencil was fine, as far as Casper could tell. He was still making sketches of complex circuits when the pencil stopped cooperating, and stubbornly made no more marks on the paper. And everything he had drawn suddenly disappeared, erased by invisible hands. This was hard to believe. Determined to make some sense out of this uncanny phenomenon, he pressed the pencil down on the paper to make more scratches, but he only managed to rend the paper. How could a mere pencil behave like this? Casper decided to break the graphite, and re-sharpen it. He tried three times, hitting it hard on the table top, to no avail. The graphite refused to break. It had been sharpened in a manner that left only a short tip sticking out for writing. Resolute for once, Casper told himself he had to get this one thing right, nevertheless. He kept no sharpeners in the room, so he fetched a pocket knife and settled down to business. He held the pencil in his left hand with its tip protruding between the thumb and the forefinger, and most of its length folded in his palm. The first stroke he made with the knife peeled off neatly the skin of his thumb above the last joint all the way to the base of his nail. The wound looked like a gore-filled groove.
 Casper was too stunned to feel the pain. Usually the sight of blood frightened all the living hell out of him, but tonight he merely regarded his own blood with total incomprehension.
 He was standing in his two-by-three-metre campus room, the knife in his right hand, the pencil in his left, and the wound in his thumb. He stared at the knife, then at the pencil, and then at the wound. He dropped the knife, switched the pencil to his right hand, and spread his hand, fingers apart. Without any understanding whatsoever of his actions, he raised the pencil and . . .
 Ouch!
 And now Casper screamed. He made a high-pitched metallic sound; like the cry of a bat.
 The pencil had made a hole through the palm of his left hand, and he was bleeding profusely. It had made him stab himself. Terrified, enraged and in pain, he threw the pencil away carelessly, and rushed for tissue. As he moved across the room struggling to stanch the blood, he stepped on the pencil. It had moved from where it fell. It was pointing upwards, and it penetrated full length into his right foot. It did not snap as would have been expected in view of the fact that Casper’s feet were hard like carapace, and his weight was stupendous. More out of terror than out of pain, Casper opened his mouth wide and yelled like a retarded child. His roommate was away, so no one rushed in to assist. With his right hand, he pulled the pencil out of his foot. It had lodged deep into the nerves, and even if he survived this torment, he would limp for the rest of his life. Pulling the pencil out caused more pain, more bleeding and he yelled some more. The pencil was coated in blood. Casper considered throwing it into the trashcan, but decided he would have to return it to where he had found it. Suddenly, the words that had been scrawled on his rough draft and in Miva’s book made sense to him. The pencil was alive, haunted or bewitched. It was probably a voodoo pencil. The dark forces that roamed the universe every night had trapped him with it. Unless he took it back to where he had found it he would be hurt worse than he already was. The pencil jerked in his hands, like a live thing. With desperate panic he hurled it across the room. It landed on the opposite wall then rebounded onto the bed. Casper swore at it.
 Stepping firmly on a rug, he fumbled for his cell phone and called Miva, and the friend with whom he shared beer and weed. Casper called him Mr. Fattee. He was obese, and looked like a four-dimensional being: he had length, width, height, and some other dimension yet to be discovered, hiding in the next universe perhaps. He was also unpleasant and cantankerous. He had once assaulted Casper, over a crate of cheap beer and a roll of second-hand weed, of course, that Miva walked like a duck, a male duck. He was always drinking or munching something.
 Even as he called Miva, Casper knew he had lied to her about the pencil; even so, he wasn’t ready to tell her the truth. Besides, she was in pain, and he doubted she would make it to his room that fast. She was also heavy-bodied. If Mr. Fattee came first they would make it to Sick Bay before she arrived. But Mr. Fattee was clumsy and hateful, a humpty-dumpty clodhopper, with the attitude of abused dog. He had an IQ of a mob, and Casper quietly abhorred him.
 As he sat on his bed, swathed in insufferable pain, he thought about the pencil and the urge to pick it up overpowered him. He wanted to hold it in his hands, grasp it tightly and find out if it really possessed supernatural powers. He wanted to squeeze it till it broke and every ounce of its malicious powers choked out of it. He wanted to crash it into such tiny bits that it would never gather up itself to hurt anyone. He stretched his long arms to grasp it, but before he could even flick it with his fingers, and to his utmost horror, the pencil moved . . .  jumped . . . on its own. And that was when Casper wet his pants.
 Mr. Fattee, his frighteningly colossal weight notwithstanding, was the first to arrive. He took one look into Casper’s room and choked dangerously on the Strawberry yoghurt he had been slurping down his oily throat. He coughed so viciously that he developed a stroke, and died on the spot.
 Miva came in later with a friend in tow. Their screams awoke the entire Mamlaka B Hall of residence.
 The pencil was lodged deep into Casper’s forehead. His bed was awash with blood. He was dead, with his eyes open, his mouth twisted, gaping.

Face frozen plastic,
eyes open, dry, unseeing
in eternal still.

 There was another mysterious death in a different room two floors above Casper’s. A student had been strangled by a black rucksack.
 In the Architecture and Design Building, the following notice hung askew on the notice board:

IF YOU TOOK A BLACK RUCKSACK
FROM ONE OF THE CLASSES OR IF YOU TOOK ANY THING THAT WAS IN IT
YOU HAVE
TWO HOURS TO RETURN IT OR YOU WILL DIE!

 By the time the deaths occurred in Mamlaka B, the two-hour ultimatum had elapsed.
 The pencil had been in the rucksack!