Walter Atlay hasn’t left his musty Crothers dorm room for weeks. His desk overflows with urine-filled jars and Sprite-filled bottles, though the two have long since become indistinguishable. On his roommate’s wall is a tasteful Iron Maiden poster, but Walter has blanketed his side of the room with the scrawlings of a mad man. Tarnished, water-damaged photographs pepper the façade, bright red twine snaking between them. At the center, connected to it all: a black-and-white Snapchat screenshot, printed from the nearest computer cluster, of a lone lamppost.
“It all starts with the lamppost,” Walter recounted, eyes gleaming in the candlelight. “Everything traces back to that lamppost, and to them. They thought nobody would notice, they thought nobody would connect the dots, but I did, I’ve done it…” Atlay trailed off. His eyes fixed on one phrase scribbled on his wall above all the others: “Lamppost…lamplight…light mayo…Dijon mustard…tardy slip…slip ‘n’ slide…slide whistle…whistle blower…corporate secrets…secret society…ILLUMINATI”.
By this point, nearly everyone has written off Atlay as a hopeless lunatic. Everyone, of course, except Professor Jack Riskin, head of the Crackpot Studies program. “He’s onto something here, that’s for sure. For Christ’s sake, the Oval is just the Illuminati eye. And those sculptures near the Quad? That’s some weird shit.”
