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.

"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.

You will participate once or twice, in the early stages, but you will not see the appeal. Your sticking point is the controller, an ungainly thing that looks like a Romulan warbird and seems to require three hands to operate it. Your limited video-game experience has been conducted almost exclusively on the classic NES controller, a purely functional device with no pretensions of beauty. But at least it was designed for a human being.

Because of this inability to wrap your mind and appendages around the controller, you will be terrible at GoldenEye, spending most matches trapped in a blocky, pixelated corner until your blow yourself up out of frustration or incompetence. Because of your inability to play well, you will stop playing altogether. And because you stop playing the game, you will not develop the bonds that naturally occur when friends gather to murder each other for fun.

This game should be a boon for you. You do not make friends easily. You and Bryan were only friends because of your shared love of GI Joe. He was the Joes and you were Cobra, and as long you played these roles, you understood how to relate to him. Once he grew out of it, he grew away from you. You need a common reference point. You need structure. You need rules. This game provides all three. If it fails you, you will need to find a new game to play.

Tim had already discovered that the Handbook's entries were thorough. Often more thorough than they needed to be. The same was true for its entry on "the dead king, graffiti of." He was looking for information, but what he got was something messier than that, something less clear-cut. It felt like reading his own diary, except it was written by someone else – someone who didn't even seem to like him. It was the same feeling the face gave him: the feeling that he was being watched by something that couldn't possibly be watching him.

He skipped ahead a few more pages, seeking out raw data.

The dead king's name is Milo. King Milo the Expired, to be formal. He is the sigil of the Nine Dead Men, a so-called "secret society" that exists only in the fevered imagination of UNWG freshmen, and in the surprisingly persistent artistic endeavors of pranksters armed with chalk and penknife.

According to the tales, King Milo represents Milo Kirby, founder and permanent member of the 9DM, about whom you will find more elsewhere in this Handbook. The myth posits that Kirby is joined in the society by eight students, two from each class. Every year, in the fall semester, Milo picks two members of the freshman class to replace the two seniors who graduated the previous spring. This means that, for most of fall semester, there are only Seven Dead Men. Again, more information on the Nine Dead Men can be found elsewhere in this volume.

However, more diligent readers may discover, via admissions records, that no Milo Kirby ever attended this school. But do not let that pesky fact deter you from the mild pleasures of participating in this collective fiction.

Before Tim even understood what he was doing, he reached in his pocket and pulled out the slender folding knife, engraved "TIMOTHY" on the handle, that his uncle had given him as a graduation present. He felt compelled to add to the graffiti, to let Milo know that watching was a two-way street. He scratched the word "MILO" into the wood below the face. He intended to follow it up with a blunt, to-the-point "SUCKS," but his hand carved something else instead:

MILO LIVES

The observant student will find King Milo chalked, carved and painted all over campus. A detailed list of the most prominent examples can be found elsewhere in this Handbook, though as new ones are added every day, it is by no means comprehensive. It certainly doesn't include any Milos that may be found in residents' rooms, so if there are any in 79A you will have to find them yourself. But you will have to be more observant.

You see no Milo on your desk when the phone in your room rings for the first time, and you ignore Drew's offered N64 controller to answer it. It's Chet on the other end, asking you to come to the security gate and sign him in as a guest. He is still unable to answer the RA's questions, despite the intervention of the RLC. Even though all involved know that Chet lives in Wintertree 79 and has every right to exist beyond the security gate, protocol must be followed.

You don't see a Milo carved into the 2x4 that serves as a jamb for the door between 79 and 79A as you climb down the rope ladder, and you don't see any in the corridor between 79 and the security gate, nor on the gate itself. The RA, Ben, gives an apologetic shrug as he slides the binder and its Guest Sign-In Sheet toward you. Julian apologizes to Chet, but Chet is furious. As you escort him, your guest, back to his room, he mutters darkly about having to go see Ron Marston tomorrow to clear this up.

When you enter 79 you hear the sounds of simulated gunfire issuing from 79A. Chet's mood brightens. He ascends a few rungs of the loft's wooden ladder and pokes his head in the room. "Holy shit," he says. "Is that GoldenEye?"

Upon receiving an affirmative, Chet scrambles up the ladder and into your room. You could join them. There is room in the game for three players. You don't see Milo anywhere, but you feel something or someone watching, waiting for you to make a decision. This is it, the first night. Your choice will not determine everything, but it will determine more than you'd think.

Tim looked at the words he had carved into the sign. He didn't know why he had written that, but it felt right. The face, King Milo, seemed to agree. Its dead eyes seemed to be glancing to its right, toward the bridge that overlooked the stadium, and the Student Union just beyond. Tim took its suggestion and walked down the curving road to the bridge.

On the first concrete post of the bridge's railing, Tim found another Milo, this one drawn in purple chalk, no more than a day old. Its eyes urged him on. Tim crossed the bridge, pausing at the middle to look down into the stadium. He thought he saw in the interplay of shadows on the field a giant Milo, but it disappeared as soon as it resolved.

On the far side of the bridge, a Milo had been etched with a stick in the sidewalk's concrete when it had been freshly poured. "FA 85" was engraved in the concrete next to the face. Its eyes directed Tim across the street to the Student Union.

It was past 11, and half of campus hadn't even shown up for the semester yet. The plaza between the Union and the University Bookstore was quiet. Mannequins in Ambassador purple stood guard in the front window of the Bookstore. A few lights were on in the Union. Tim saw a janitor inside wielding an industrial vacuum. He was wearing headphones, oblivious.

A single floodlight illuminated the brickwork mosaic of the plaza, throwing every gap between the bricks into deep shadow. At the center of the plaza, the geometric pattern broke up, and the bricks formed the shape of a King Milo. Tim stepped toward it, to see where Milo wanted him to go next.

"Don't step on Milo." Tim's foot froze. He looked up and saw four figures in shadow, sitting and leaning against a low wall on the other side of the plaza, next to a bike rack. Smoke wreathed their heads. One of them stepped forward, and Tim saw her hair before the rest of her, bursting into flame as she stepped into the light.

"He doesn't like it," said Holly, the RA who had given Tim his Handbook. She was still wearing her DUH T-shirt, now partially hidden under a flannel. One of the figures in shadow handed her a joint. She took a drag and handed it back. She stepped closer to Tim. "I know you," she said. "Levitt. 79A."

Tim didn't quite know what he had stumbled into here. There were no rules. Rules were in fact being broken. "Yeah," he said. "That's me."

"How are you liking your room?" she asked, not with the tone of a concerned RA, but with the tone of someone who knows a good deal more than she's letting on.

"It's...weird? The key you gave me – I might need a new one? It doesn't open 79, and 79A doesn't even have a door."

"That's above my pay grade." Holly was different off the clock. The exuberant good cheer she had displayed earlier in the day was nowhere in evidence. Her energy was directed elsewhere. "All I know is, some weird shit has gone down in that room over the years."

"What kind of weird shit?"

"You hear things. Stories passed down from the older RAs. The oral tradition, you know?" She stepped closer. The spotlight caught the edges of her hair, rimming it in gold. "They don't give that room to just anybody. What's special about you, Levitt?"

Nothing, Tim was going to say, but before he could speak, a wailing rose from somewhere to the west. It sounded like a wounded animal, or the ghost of something long dead. Tim turned toward the sound and started to walk toward it, unconsciously. He stopped and turned back to ask Holly something, but she and her friends were already gone. He could see them retreating through the shadows down to the Union parking lot.

The wailing was only intensifying. Someone or something was in trouble. Tim was not a brave person. But he felt himself being pulled toward the sound.

He looked at the mosaic Milo. Go, it seemed to say. Hurry.

Tim ran up the steps past the Bookstore to the intersection where Suttledge met Milligan. He crossed over Milligan, ignoring the red hand on the crosswalk signal, and up more steps toward the entrance of Thorn Hall. His thighs ached with the effort. The wailing was coming from somewhere to his left. He ran down the walkway that wound around the south side of Thorn, and the wailing got louder and louder. He came to a wooden sign: "FOUNDERS' GARDEN." Past it, the walkway continued up an incline to a gate and a broad field of yellow and green flowers. The wailing was so loud now it seemed to be coming from all directions. He couldn't pinpoint it.

There was a Milo carved into the sign. A tiny one, inside the "O" in "FOUNDERS'." He bent down to examine it. Its eyes directed him to his left.

There he saw a dirt path, wending down through a grove of magnolias. He took the path, and when he made the turn around the last magnolia he came to the entrance of a small tunnel. The wailing emanated from inside. The stone walls amplified the sound and directed it right at Tim.

The tunnel was both narrow and short, just barely clearing Tim's head as he stepped inside. There was perhaps a foot of maneuvering room to either side. He moved forward cautiously. The end of the tunnel was visible, a dim light that registered mostly as a different kind of dark than the darkness of the tunnel itself. After another few feet everything went black and the wailing stopped.

Something started moving toward Tim. He heard its feet sliding across the tunnel floor, and caught occasional glimpses of the end of the tunnel as its broad back dipped and rose, moving in a hunched, crabby shuffle.

Tim wanted to run but he felt frozen in place. The thing got closer and closer. He could hear it breathing, ragged and hard.

Then it was in front of him.

It was Joanie. The girl from the bus.

She stared at him with solid black eyes, nearly bent over double, her long limbs contorted awkwardly in the too-small space. There was some sort of black matter in her hair, on her face and clothes, like she had walked through fire.

"Joanie?" Tim said. "Is your name Joanie?"

Nothing in her black eyes betrayed any recognition of the name. She looked at Tim curiously for a long moment. Then she spoke.

"You," she said. "You're the boy in the tunnel."

Hey, that's the name of the book! Let's see what Joanie has to say about all this.