I decide to go down to the common room. It’s a better reading atmosphere anyway; me and Alex used to sprawl out on the Persian carpet amid a fortress of books—teacups at our elbows and jazz playing off Alex’s Bluetooth speaker.
Alex.
The memory lances through me like a thrown dart. It’s unexpected enough to steal my breath away, and for a moment I’m standing there dizzy in my own doorway as the house tilts and spins.
I’d known it would be worse, coming back here. Dr. Ortega had explained it to me before I left, her voice placid and reassuring: how grief would tie itself to the small things, that I’d be living my life as normal and then a bit of music or the cut of a girl’s smile would remind me of her and it would all flood back in.
I understand the concept of sense memory. But understanding isn’t preparation.
All at once I want nothing more than to dart out of Godwin House and run down the hill, onto the quad, where the white sunshine will blot out any ghosts.
Except that’s weakness, and I refuse to be weak.
This is why I’m here, I tell myself. I came early so I’d have time to adjust. Well, then. Let’s adjust.
I suck in a lungful of air and make myself go into the hall, down two flights of stairs to the ground floor. I find some tea in the house kitchen cabinet—probably left over from last year—boil some water, and carry the mug with me into the common room while it brews.
The common room is the largest space in the house. It claims the entire western wall, its massive windows gazing out toward the woods, and is therefore dark even at midafternoon. Shadows hang like drapes from the ceiling, until I flick on a few of the lamps and amber light brightens the deep corners.
No ghosts here.
Godwin House was built in the early eighteenth century, the first construction of Dalloway School. Within ten years of its founding, it saw five violent deaths. Sometimes I still smell blood on the air, as if Godwin’s macabre history is buried in its uneven foundations alongside Margery Lemont’s bones.
I take the armchair by the window: my favorite, soft and burgundy with a seat cushion that sinks when I sit, as if the chair wants to devour its occupant. I settle in with a Harriet Vane mystery and lock myself in Oxford of the 1930s, in a tangled mess of murderous notes and scholarly dinners and threats exchanged over cakes and cigarettes.
The house feels so different like this. A year ago, midsemester, the halls were raucous with girls’ shouting voices and the clatter of shoes on hardwood, empty teacups scattered across flat surfaces and long hairs clinging to velvet upholstery. All that has been swallowed up by the passage of time. My friends graduated last year. When classes start, Godwin will be home to a brand-new crop of students: third- and fourth-years with bright eyes and souls they sold to literature. Girls who might prefer Oates to Shelley, Alcott to Allende. Girls who know nothing of blood and smoke, the darker kinds of magic.
And I will slide into their group, the last relic of a bygone era, old machinery everyone is anxiously waiting to replace.
My mother wanted me to transfer to Exeter for my final year. Exeter—as if I could survive that any better than being back here. Not that I expected her to understand. But all your friends are gone, she’d said.
I didn’t know how to explain to her that being friendless at Dalloway was better than being friendless anywhere else. At least here the walls know me, the floors, the soil. I am rooted at Dalloway. Dalloway is mine.
Thump.
The sound startles me enough that I drop my book, gaze flicking toward the ceiling. I taste iron in my mouth.
It’s nothing. It’s an old house, settling deeper into unsteady land.
I retrieve my book and flip through the pages to find my lost place. I’ve never been afraid of being alone, and I’m not about to start now.
Thump.
This time I’m half expecting it, tension having drawn my spine straight and my free hand into a fist. I put the book aside and slip out of my chair with an unsteady drum beating in my chest. Surely Dean Marriott wouldn’t have let anyone else in the house, right? Unless…It’s probably maintenance. They must have someone coming by to clean out the mothballs and change the air filters.
In fact, that makes a lot of sense. The semester will commence at the end of the weekend; now should be peak cleaning time. No doubt I can expect a significant amount of traffic in and out of Godwin, staff scrubbing the floors and throwing open windows.
Only the house was already clean when I arrived.
As I creep up the stairs, I realize the air has gone frigid, a cold that curls in the marrow of my bones. A slow dread rises in my blood. And I know without having to guess where that sound came from.
Alex’s bedroom was the third door down on the right, second floor—directly below my room. I used to stomp on the floor when she played her music too loud. She’d rap back with the handle of a broom.
Four raps: Shut. The. Hell. Up.
This is stupid. This is…ridiculous, and irrational, but knowing that does little to quell the seasick feeling beneath my ribs.
I stand in front of the closed door, one hand braced against the wood.
Open it. I should open it.
The wood is cold, cold, cold. A white noise buzzes between my ears, and suddenly I can’t stop envisioning Alex on the other side: decayed and gray, with filmy eyes staring out from a desiccated skull.
Open it.
I can’t open it.
I spin on my heel and dart back down the hall and all the way to the common room. I drag the armchair closer to the tall window and huddle there on its cushion, with Sayers clutched in both hands, staring at the doorway I came through and waiting for a slim figure to drift in from the stairs, dragging dusk like a cloak in her wake.
Nothing comes. Of course it doesn’t. I’m just—
It’s paranoia. It’s the same strain of fear that used to send me lurching awake in the middle of the night with my throat torn raw. It’s guilt reaching long fingers into the soft underbelly of my mind and letting the guts spill out.
I don’t know how long it is before I can open my book again and turn my gaze away from the door and to the words instead. No doubt reading murder books alone in an old house is half my problem. Impossible not to startle at every creak and bump when you’re half buried in a story that heavily features library crimes.
The afternoon slips toward evening; I have to turn on more lights and refill my tea in the kitchen, but I finish the book.
I’ve just turned the final page when it happens again:
Thump.
And then, almost immediately after, the slow drag of something heavy across the floor above my head.