The academy poltergeist: found objects, "no visible means of attachment," and Stice stuck to the glass

texture · ~Aug–20 Nov YDAU

• When: an accelerating cycle from ~August YDAU, peaking through the 20 Nov blizzard
• What: An academy-wide uncanny phenomenon, distinct from ordinary pranksterism, running the length of the fall. Objects appear where they cannot have been placed: it began in August with thousands of practice balls scattered across the blue lobby and an AminoPal-bar pyramid on Court 6, then "inanimate objects have either been moved into or just out of nowhere appearing in wildly inappropriate places around E.T.A." — a grounds-crew lawnmower standing in the dawn kitchen (which so rattles cook Mrs. Clarke she takes mornings off, forcing repeat menus), a cannon-sized ball machine moved into the Females' Sauna, dinette sets in the tunnels, acoustic tiles falling from subdorm drop-ceilings, squeegees hung in a saltire on the dining-hall's north wall with "neither nails nor holes from nails, as in no visible means of attachment," an X of brooms glued to the kitchen wall (scene 154), and Stice's own bed moving. The objects have "a tektitic and sinister aspect [...] they're not funny," and the whole thing is "studiously not talked about." It culminates on the 20 Nov blizzard dawn: Ortho Stice wakes and finds his forehead frozen fast to a hall window — "It's stuck is what it is" — and has to be detached by night-custodians Kenkle and Brandt, leaving a strip of forehead-flesh on the glass (Troeltsch charges $2 a look); that same night Stice's whole bed was somehow lifted and bolted to his room's ceiling without waking his roommate (scene 179), and eight drop-ceiling panels have fallen out of their struts by Pemulis's hidden tunnel entrepôt (scene 174). Stice's own reading: a "beneficiary or guardian ghost" that "manifests in ordinary physical objects" has chosen him, to teach him not to underestimate them and raise his game — frozen to the window he tells Hal he's seen a figure ("he just stood there. Then he went away. Or… it.") and promises "some parabnormal shit that'll shake your personal tree," confidences he has otherwise brought only to Lyle (167). One documented human vector exists — scene 137 catches Pemulis re-lying a fallen drop-ceiling panel, "changing its lie on the strut from square-shaped to diamond-shaped" (his stash-tunnel cover) — mundane mischief that explains some incidents but not the no-nail-hole squeegees, the ceiling-bolted bed, or the forehead on the glass; recorded as written, not harmonized. (E.T.A.'s manifestation of the wraith motif — the animate "presence" on the grounds; Stice's fixation and Orin's report of nude footprints on the Moms's windshield tie it to the same haunting.) See the Stice timeline.