Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It was a cool, rainy day in late March when I first approached the Magnus Institute--one of those days that served as a reminder that the London spring, that fragile creature, was still all too vulnerable to the occasional strike from the claws of winter. It almost seemed a forbidding omen, as I crossed the threshold into the marble-dressed hall, but I was able to put such thoughts of gloom out of my mind. Weather was nothing more than weather, after all. There was no cause for it to have any sort of bearing on my purpose for the day, which, all things considered, was just to spend a half-hour speaking with an academic of a slightly left-of-field discipline.

There are no such things as genuine omens, I told myself. There would be nothing to fear in this place.

Spying a reception desk to the side of the foyer, I made quick pace towards a friendly face who could point me in the direction of my appointment. 

“Can I help you, sir?” the young lady at the desk asked me, with what seemed to all appearances a genuine desire to lend aid.

“I have an appointment with the Head Archivist?” I said in reply, my slight uncertainty betraying me to inflect the words as a question, much to my private annoyance.

“Of course, sir. And may I have your name, please?” 

“Martin. Martin Blackwood.”

She smiled politely. “Thank you, Mr Blackwood, I’ll be with you in a moment.”

The receptionist--I scanned her desk for a name badge, but found none--started typing, presumably checking my details on the system, and I took the opportunity to glance around the interior of the Magnus Institute. 

The owl that stood proud in the crest carved into the wall, and the Latin motto engraved in neat script beneath it, gave me pause. The two institutions had very little in common, but for a moment, I could imagine I was back in the Regian Library, or the study halls of St. Jerome’s, both buildings I had spent copious amounts of time in a decade or so prior. More omens, if I was to pay heed to such things.

“Alright, Mr Blackwood, we have you down here,” the receptionist told me with a smile. “You’re here to make a statement?”

I had been avoiding thinking of it in those terms--something about the phrase didn’t sit well with me, as if my experiences were testimony in some kind of criminal case--but I nodded all the same. Whatever the terminology, the purpose was the same. I had a story, and the need to have it heard.

“The Archives are a few flights downstairs,” I was warned. “Our elevator is out of order at the moment, I’m afraid, will that be alright?”

I assured her that it was, and proceeded to make my way down into the bowels of the Institute.

The young receptionist, who had accompanied me through to the dusty basement level, knocked on the door of the single office at the end of the corridor. After a moment in which she received no tangible response, she sighed, stopped at a desk, and returned to me with pad, paper, and apology. “I’m so sorry, Mr Blackwood, but it appears our new Head Archivist is unavailable at present,” she told me, the faintest trace of irritation bleeding through her otherwise immaculate professionalism. “If you’d like to come back later, I’m sure he’d be happy to take your statement--but if you’re busy, of course, you’re more than welcome to write it down instead.” 

In truth, I was hardly busy--I’d taken a day’s leave from my tedious clerking job to make the trip, as I suspected I’d need a stiff fortification once I’d given my statement--but I had already steeled myself once to enter this imposing establishment, and I was loath to repeat the experience. If I had to do it again, I knew I would be likely to turn away altogether. No, I was here, now. I had come here to make my statement, and I would not leave without doing so.

“Thank you,” I told her. “I believe I shall.”

The receptionist handed me the pen and paper, and directed me to a small sitting area.

“Make sure you fill in your name and contact details at the top of the form,” she reminded me. I did so, under her watchful eye--“There have been some organisational problems in the Archives, so completing the proper formwork will at least be a step in the right direction,” she informed me. She nodded approvingly as I completed it, then, after bidding me a friendly farewell, vanished back up the staircase. 

Once again, I was left alone with my thoughts, and once again, the comparison to my university days seemed inevitable. I had an essay to write, apparently, and while I was certain that the Head Archivist would prove a more charitable assessor than my old tutor, the thought still filled me with an undue amount of dread. I had been carrying the weight of these events with me for years, and the prospect of another person reading of them--judging them--seemed almost sacrilegious. 

But that was why I had come. To tell my account, and to be heard. To make my statement.

Swallowing down the last of my doubts, I put pen to paper, and began to write.

Chapter Text

Where do I begin, with the Bouchard set and all that happened? I’d hoped to talk to another person, face-to-face, who would reassure me that my experiences weren’t half- or misremembered, that what happened that night was real, and could be categorised somehow. But maybe it will be easier if I just write the whole thing out. I’ve always processed my feelings through writing, I suppose--poetry, typically, but this calls for prose. Like it was a story that happened to someone else. It feels like it, looking back, those hazy days of sun-drenched glory, where we were all so much younger and more idealistic. Nothing could touch us back then--or so we believed.

Well, if this is some sort of Homeric epic, the beginning becomes much easier to pinpoint. In this case, I feel lucky that the opening of the first act can be demarcated with such ease: my arrival at Avebury University. It had long been a dream of mine to attend one of the three so-called “great” universities, and although events in my life until that point had cast my hopes into the realms of mere speculation, a final, all-consuming push in my A-levels and the urgings of a kindly teacher had led me to submitting an application for a scholarship program at the University of Avebury. Slightly younger than Oxford and Cambridge, Avebury had grown in much the same fashion: a university and a town, twining around each other much like saplings planted together. Unlike its older siblings, Avebury was situated amidst a great Neolithic henge monument, the stones of which encircled the entire university town, which only added to its mythology. If Cambridge was founded after a disagreement, wherein scholars from Oxford were chased out of their own institution, and ran off to create a second university on their own principles, Avebury, so the story ran, came about through a calling. Not long after the Cambridge schism, scholars from both campuses were drawn to the small town, for a reason on which the legends remain unclear, and whatever research they had come to the place to conduct led them to establish the university on the site--a university that would rival the other two for prestige.

Be cause of this slightly mystical background, perhaps, Avebury enjoyed a reputation for being the most open-minded of the three greats. While its Sciences were certainly well-regarded, Avebury’s strength lay more in the Humanities--its History department was storied, and many of its Creative Arts graduates are now household names. However, the jewel in the crown of Avebury’s academic spheres was a faculty that combined History and Classics with current cultural studies: a degree with the rather unwieldy moniker of Myth, Folklore, and Cultural Transcendence. This was commonly shortened to merely “Cult Studies,” a name that I would soon learn was apt in more ways than one. 

It was, and still is, a very popular course, and one that requires high grades to be accepted into. I had set my heart on eventually taking the course when I first started my O-levels, but had all but given up hope of ever seeing this dream realised. Still, with the barest sliver of hope in my heart, I applied for it--and was more surprised than anyone when my admissions letter arrived. I can only imagine that the passionate essay I had submitted on Pandora’s Box--a piece detailing the necessity of the belief that a single life, a single hope, has meaning in a world full of evils, a subject that I will argue strongly for even now--lit some answering spark in the heart of the admissions officer who read it. Regardless of the means, the outcome was simple. I, Martin Blackwood, had been offered a place in the Myth, Folklore, and Cultural Transcendence degree pathway at the University of Avebury, with the fees fully paid by the Lukas Trust.

I was beyond delighted to have been awarded a place at such a prestigious institution. However, not all was to go quite to plan. My mother, whose health had been in gradual decline over the last few years, leaving me to juggle the stresses of Sixth Form with looking after her as best I could, suddenly took a significant turn for the worse. The plans I had to enter Avebury with my peers suddenly went up in smoke--we didn’t have the funds enough to hire a full-time carer, even with my university fees covered by the scholarship. 

The administration staff at Avebury were very understanding when I called them to explain my situation. They granted me a term’s deferral, and explained that the conditions of my scholarship would be able to stretch to allow this, but nothing further. Even so, I was grateful for the few months in which I could try to plan for the future.

Deep in my heart, I knew the truth already, if it came to a decision. I couldn’t not be with her when she was ill and in pain, whatever the personal cost. She was my mother, and I loved her, despite the fact that the love I received in return was thin and bitter. It was thankless work, but it was my duty as a son--trying to ease her suffering with care enough for both of us. 

However much I did for her, though, it never seemed to be enough, and through the dark moods of her illness, she viewed my presence with greater and greater disdain. It was a relief, almost, when a particularly severe episode placed her in the hospital, and in the care of people much more well-equipped to deal with her needs--and who she warmed to much faster than she ever did to me. When the nurses suggested she remain in permanent care, something that would give her the treatment she needed at a rate covered by the NHS, I nearly wept. I wouldn’t be abandoning her. It was the best place for her, mentally and physically, and I could finally make myself something other than the disappointment she so evidently found me to be. 

It was late December, by then--miraculously, I still had just under a month to put my affairs in order, and then I could finally accept my offer of a place at Avebury. The required enrolment paperwork went through with a surprisingly low amount of red tape--for once in my life, the stars had aligned in my favour, and I was going to seize this opportunity with both hands. 

And so, in the depths of mid-January, I found myself staring down the honey-coloured sandstone towers that comprised St Jerome’s College. After taking receipt of my key at the lodge, I made my way to one of the college’s quadrangles--Harvey Quad, it was called--and found the small board that served as a directory just inside the arch that marked Staircase 4. M. BLACKWOOD was printed neatly upon one of the thin slate tiles, a concrete sign that this was indeed where I was supposed to be.

With no encouraging parent to help me move my belongings into my room, I was glad to not be overburdened by an abundance of possessions. Everything I had that I wanted to take with me folded neatly into a pair of suitcases, and a small number of cardboard boxes. Even so, they were unwieldy enough that I was glad that my room was not too far up one of the quadrangle’s staircases. I was in room 8, on the first floor, a very manageable distance to make. 

My new key fitted satisfyingly into the lock, and in a matter of moments, I had dragged my meagre things into the room. Arms no longer full of cardboard stacked to almost eye-height, I was finally able to take stock of the place that would be my home for the next few years. 

The room--or, more accurately, rooms--was functional enough in design: firstly, a living area that included a small kitchen, shelves bare and waiting for some sort of personal touch. A window overlooked the patch of grass in the quad’s centre, but the slate-grey sky, which threatened a pelting, icy rain that luckily, I had narrowly missed, cast a pall over the landscape. Even with the forbidding weather outside, the room was cosy, as was the attached small bedroom. It was simple, and plain, and it suited me down to the ground. Most importantly, it was a space that was wholly and entirely my own, in a way I’d never felt at home with my mother.

With the room summarily examined, I quickly got down to the business of unpacking my few possessions. Clothing was hung up in the wardrobe in the bedroom; teabags, teapot and kettle were all unboxed with care; and the tins of food I had brought with me were offloaded onto the relevant pantry shelves. By the time I had set up a makeshift study in one corner of the living-room, I felt like a sloughing snake--half fitting comfortably within my old skin, but half quite the opposite: tearing the old, dead growth apart to grow into a new entity. In the same way, I was caught between being Martin from Stockwell: son and carer; and Blackwood, St Jerome’s College, Harvey 4-8: undergraduate scholar. The slight shift in the foundations of my identity caught me unawares, and it was all I could do for a moment to hold in the tears that misted my vision.

The one small token I did not set out in the room was a silver corkscrew, which was laughingly granted to me by the same teacher who had pushed me to submit my scholarship application in the first place. She was the only one I could tell about my admittance to Avebury who would have taken the news well--even by that point, my mother was all but refusing to see me, inasmuch as she could. She would turn her head to one side or the other, to best block me out, and despite my constant efforts, would barely acknowledge anything I said. 

On the other hand, Ms Herne almost cheered when I told her of my acceptance, and handed me a small box, tied with a blue bow.

“I had a feeling you’d be accepted,” she told me warmly, before pressing me to open her gift. “So I bought you small token of congratulations.”

The box contained the corkscrew. I looked at it in puzzlement for a moment, wondering why my former teacher had given me such an item, before she elaborated.

“From what I can recall of my time at Cambridge,” she said, “the entirety of the first few weeks at university is taken up by the consumption of many, many litres of alcohol. You will need this.”

The last words were spoken with the solemn certainty of experience. I smiled, and thanked her for everything she had done for me. I think we both knew that this was the last time we would see each other, and there was a sense of closure in the air as we bade each other farewell. We shook hands that final time not as teacher and student, but as friends.

The corkscrew remained in my pocket throughout the entirety of my first year, wrapped in tissue paper so as to not stab myself accidentally. Nicking the femoral artery with a concealed corkscrew would no doubt have been an ignominious way to exit this mortal coil, but at the start of the term, I felt that it was the best way to pay tribute to the reason I was at Avebury at all. By the end of the term, however, my reasons for carrying the implement were much different, though I doubt Ms Herne would have minded unduly.

Unpacking done in a relatively short space of time, I had the rest of the week free to do what I willed. The week before term started proper was a rather subdued affair, compared to the parades and colour of Freshers’ Week. That suited me, as I have never been the biggest fan of crowds, and the thought of forcing my way through the throngs of new undergraduates who would have filled every colonnade inspired in me a particular sort of dread. Even so, there were enough of us latecomers, scattered through the colleges, to be worth the various clubs and societies setting up small tables along the main thoroughfares, enticing the newly-arrived with promises of companionship through shared interests, or the simpler temptation: copious amounts of alcohol. I accepted an offered pamphlet from the Tea Appreciation Society, on one of the occasions I couldn’t avoid the fearless recruiters, but mostly tried to avoid the grasp of student politicians and networkers. 

Neither did I go out of my way to meet my new neighbours--we interacted, occasionally, and my brief conversations with the fellow inhabitants of Harvey 4 were always cordial--but I knew I had to spend my last week of freedom wisely. As much as I would have liked to get to know my immediate neighbour, the young woman in number 9 whose red dress always provided a welcome spot of colour when I passed her in the hallways, I couldn’t afford to take up my time with socialising. Instead, I spent the majority of my free time trying to catch up on lost work. The reading lists for my course were fearsomely long, and I was barely able to make a dent in them before term began. The name Elias Bouchard kept reappearing on the list--which was no real surprise, considering that Dr Bouchard, the faculty’s head, was perhaps the world’s premier scholar on matters of comparative folklore and cultural transcendence. His reputation as a scholar was illustrious, and I had long admired his writings.

What was more of a surprise was that the man himself was listed on my schedule as my tutor. I was convinced I had heard somewhere that Dr Bouchard had retired from teaching, but it must have been a vague rumour based on his age, and the responsibilities he must have had as a faculty head. Still, I was happy to admit to my misconception, and felt equal delight and trepidation at the prospect of learning directly from one of my academic idols.

My week of desperate free study culminated in the ceremony of matriculation: that is, becoming a member of the university in full, official standing. To be honest, I remember little of the ceremony at all. The longest part of it was the wait, the few new undergraduates who had deferred their entrance to the university lined up in academic dress outside the Gouldian Theatre. My name was marked off a list, I endured a number of speeches that were no doubt intended to be buoying and full of university spirit, which was sadly lost on me, and I stood when indicated. It was quite miraculous, in its own way--somehow managing to unite a soporific tedium with the acute, yet unfounded, anxiety of potentially getting some key part of the process wrong, and being unceremoniously kicked out of the university as a result. This did not happen, of course, and I matriculated into Avebury with, during the ceremony, not a single murmur of protest from anyone.

The ceremony was open to students and faculty members, and I had noticed a number of people sitting in the stalls, much to my confusion. It was already perilously dull for those who were there out of necessity--the thought of anyone being there by choice baffled me entirely. I was met upon my exit from the Gouldian by one of these spectators: a young woman whose striking bleach-blonde hair made it easy for me to recognise her, who regarded me with the same sort of expression one would typically give a tempting meal. 

"So, you're the famous Blackwood," she said, that hungry gleam in her eye. "The last one in the Bouchard set."

I could only nod, at a loss for what to say. She clearly knew something I didn't about my tutor, but the subtle intricacies of the social machinations of Avebury University were entirely a closed book to me. 

"I've been trying to transfer into that tutorial group for months," the young lady continued chattily, "but I keep being told that Dr Bouchard wasn't taking any more students. And yet here you are, a term late, walking into a place ready-made. So what makes you so special, I wonder?"

As I squirmed under that penetrating stare, a heavy arm dropped around my shoulders, and a cheery drawl sounded close to my ear. 

"Martin, old boy, good to see you again! Annabelle, I'm sorry, but I just have to steal him away from you, I hope you don't mind?"

While phrased as a mild question, the tone clearly brooked no argument. Annabelle just smiled thinly, before reaching into her purse and pulling out a slender rectangle of cream card. 

"Here," she said, and my fingers closed over her business card with automatic politeness. "Call me if you'd like to talk. About anything."

I smiled weakly and made my assurances, before allowing myself to be led away from Annabelle and her piercing scrutiny, feeling like a fly who had just avoided plunging headlong into a web.

As we walked away, the hand dropped from my shoulder as my new companion spoke. 

"Sorry to interrupt if you were having a good time, but nobody has a good time around Annabelle Cane, and definitely not on their first day, so I thought I should step in. You’ll excuse me claiming to know you already, I hope--but in my defence, I strongly believe that around her, all people are brothers: united by a mutual terror of having our heads bitten off. She jokes she’s part spider, you know, and it really wouldn’t surprise me if that was actually the case."

A laugh escaped me at these absurd, matter-of-factly delivered ramblings, which was met with an answering chuckle. Feeling at once much more comfortable than I had during any part of the morning so far, I turned to properly regard my rescuer. A tall young man with artfully tousled dark hair and eyes that danced as brightly as the exuberantly patterned shirt he wore, he offered me his hand and a ready grin.

"Timothy Stoker," he introduced himself as we shook. His grasp was firm, his hand warm and dry; every inch the practised host. "But to be frank, only my mother calls me that, and only when I've done something truly noteworthy, like releasing wildlife into our esteemed tutor's office."

"Martin," I returned. "Or 'the famous Blackwood,' I suppose, according to Annabelle. But you already knew that," I realised, remembering how he'd greeted me by name just moments before. 

Timothy smiled ruefully. "Quite so. It's a bit hard not to be curious about who you'd be, Bouchard's mystery final student. Just about all the department was there, keeping an eye out for you."

The assembled crowd in the theatre had been there for me? It was a preposterous thought, and one I couldn’t quite bring myself to deal with.

"Why?" I couldn't help but ask. "I mean, I know that Dr Bouchard is the head of the faculty, and that he's published a lot--I've read quite a few of his books, actually--and I thought I heard that he doesn't often teach, which is all very fair. But I didn't think being a part of his tute group automatically placed me under the microscope."

"Often? Try, hasn't taught a class for over a decade," Tim replied. "Because he's the expert on everything this godforsaken degree involves, he's written at least a dozen books on it all, as I'm sure you're aware, and he almost exclusively stays up in his ivory tower, until now. We've got no more students than normal, there's no need for an extra tutorial group, but something has made him descend from on high to personally deal with a small subsection of the student body. We were hand-picked, the rumour says, which has only piqued interest further. And then when your name was listed on the roll, and you failed to turn up for first term, well, you can imagine how that set tongues wagging."

I swallowed. "Oh. Er, right."

Timothy, perhaps seeing that the look on my face was one you'd more commonly find on the features of a shipwreck victim trying desperately to keep afloat, took pity on me. He touched me on the shoulder again--brief but reassuring, an action that spoke of comfort, rather than the hard, performatively masculine clap shared between Eton sportsmen--and his eyes softened. 

"Look, Martin, I'm giving a small reception in my rooms tomorrow evening, just to reunite the group after the vac. If you'd like to meet everyone before we're plunged into the lion's den for another term, you're more than welcome to come along."

In truth, I found the prospect of such a gathering to be mildly uncomfortable--I recognise my natural trend towards introversion and accept it--but Timothy, despite his affectations, seemed to be genuine in his welcoming nature. Besides, meeting my peers in a more informal environment than the implicit competition of the tute room would serve to assuage the anxieties I knew would have plagued me at a later date. I nodded and thanked Timothy, who beamed at me heartily.

"Capital! I'm in Delano, 3-24. Be there at eight, and if you bring a bottle of wine, you'll be beloved by all."

I nodded, like the instructions made sense, and resolved to see the college steward about such a procurement. But one final question nagged at me, and I couldn’t bear to leave without it being answered.

“Um, Timothy?”

“Tim, please,” he chastised with a grin. “Like I said, only my mother uses the full three syllables, and I do so hope you’re not her. And if you are, I apologise unreservedly.”

“On you behalf, or on hers?” 

The retort slipped out before I had a chance to stop it, but I felt I had enough of Tim’s measure to feel somewhat confident that he wouldn’t hate me for it. And indeed, he laughed, rich and genuine, and a subtle tension in his posture, until then unnoticed, eased.

“Both, but mostly hers. I wouldn’t wish a life as that woman on anyone, unless they were halfway through a traffic accident.”

A fist clenched around my stomach at that, but I kept my tone light with the ease of practice. “I can see why, if you’re constantly driving her to distraction. That’s what I meant to ask, actually--what did you mean by wildlife?”

Tim’s eyes glinted with remembered mischief, and I felt the knot in my intestines ease with the change of subject. “Well, I say wildlife. It was more like a single irate pigeon, and when you see our illustrious tutor’s office, you’ll understand exactly why I did it.”

“I look forward to it,” I replied.

“Don’t!” Tim quickly rejoindered, eyes still dancing. “Bouchard’s tutorials are never something to look forward to--get that into your head now, and you’ll be furnished with the only knowledge you’ll need for your entire undergraduate career.”

I nodded sagely, playing along. “I’ll take that under advisement.”

“Be sure you do! Now, what you absolutely must look forward to, with an excitement bordering on rapture, is tomorrow evening. 8pm--for God’s sake, don’t forget it! And if you don’t bring wine, you will be officially dead to me before the term has even begun.”

Certain that I would be nothing of the sort, I made my promises and farewells and watched Tim go, feeling like I had just survived an engagement with a remarkably exuberant Charybdis.

A party, then. Just a small gathering. Nothing to be concerned about, save for the constant low hum of social anxiety in my stomach--I was already comparing myself to Tim, and finding myself wanting--but that wasn’t unusual for me. But nevertheless, I was struck by the clear and immediate impression that I was standing on a precipice, the pivot point on which the trajectory of my fate would turn, and the vertigo was dizzyingly exhilarating.

Chapter Text

At a minute to eight the next evening, I found myself climbing an impossible number of stairs up the third staircase of Delano Quad, bottle of something that proclaimed itself as Clos du Vougeot, provided at great expense by the remarkably knowledgeable steward, clutched tightly in hand. Tim’s rooms were right at the top of St Jerome’s, and the ascent was steep--so much so that I had to pause for a moment to gather what remained of my composure. If these were the people I’d be spending years with in the most intimate of university settings, it would hardly do to arrive red-faced and sweating. When I felt my breathing and heartbeat had returned to a more civilised pace, I raised a hand and knocked on the door.

It swung open almost immediately, and I was greeted by Tim’s smiling face. 

“Everyone’s here,” he said, “and they’re all dying to meet you!”

The trickle of dread in my stomach that those words had engendered was promptly pushed aside, as I was ushered into the rooms with no small degree of enthusiasm. I was propelled by the same sweeping gesture to the front of the living quarters, stumbling against the sideboard before I caught myself. One of the room’s other occupants caught my eye and smiled--encouraging, not mocking, but still not quite enough to put me at my ease.

Tim, ever the showman, seemed perfectly unruffled by my clumsiness. With barely a beat, he introduced me as grandiloquently as I was beginning to suspect he did everything: presenting me to the room with outstretched arm and flourishes both physical and verbal.

“Ladies, gentlemen, denizens of night and day, may I present the inestimable Martin Blackwood, my newest best friend and the final member of our happy little coterie.”

Despite Tim’s words, the atmosphere I could perceive in the room was far from a happy one. Peers they might have been, but I could sense that they were a far cry from friends. Even so, they were the insiders, and I was most definitely the interloper. More so; I was a deer caught in the floodlights of intense regard; Annabelle Cane’s sharp gaze multiplied fivefold. I couldn’t find it within myself to return a single gaze--the brain protects itself in moments such as these, and preoccupied itself with an examination of Timothy Stoker’s rooms in minute detail.

I knew there was money in St Jerome’s, but it appeared that the rooms given to scholarship awardees and those given to full fee-paying--and presumably more--students were markedly different. The living-room and bedroom (presumably, the oaken portal between them was firmly shut) setup was a much grander cousin to my own two rooms. In truth, the primary chamber could hardly be described as a living-room; the room was designed for entertaining, for engaging in sparkling repartee, not just than the mere act of existing within its walls. The furniture, including the sideboard I had nearly upset, was more aesthetic than utilitarian, the windows stretched tall to capture the sun’s rays, and the carpet beneath my feet gave way with a pleasing and unexpected softness. 

It was on these facts that my brain focused, as, once more a knight gallant, Tim came to my rescue: retrieving the wine from my suddenly nerveless fingers, before steering me around the room to meet the other guests.

“Now, we’re all Cult Studies hacks here, so there’s no need to go through the insufferable tedium of introducing degrees,” he said as he guided me, “but you do unfortunately have to suffer the litany of an extra few names to remember.”

“An intolerable burden,” I agreed dryly, matching melodrama for melodrama.

Tim nodded with the same fake sincerity. “You see?” he asked the room. “He’s my sort of man.”

Amidst the indulgent snorts of laughter, I was led first to a pair of young women seated on a low couch. They were introduced to me as “Basira Hussain and Alice Tonner, but only call her Alice if you want to be murdered painfully and dismembered for parts.”

“It’s Daisy,” came the firm interruption from the steel-eyed blonde. She lounged upon the divan with the loose-limbed grace of a hunter who had already assessed her prey to be of no threat. Looking at her more closely, I could see why the word hunter had come to mind. Everything about her was lean and honed to the keenest of edges. I had questions about her name, of course, but it would have been impolite to ask. More so, I had the immediate sense that had I done so, I would have only received a verbal excoriation for my trouble.

“Pleasure to meet you, Daisy,” I said, remembering my manners at last. She took my offered hand in a grasp that squeezed right to the bone. I didn’t wince, though--something I’m still proud of--and my apparent fortitude prompted an appreciative smile that, even so, contained the barest hint of fang.

“Contrary to appearances, she doesn’t actually bite,” was the dry remark from Daisy’s companion, who had witnessed the interaction in its entirety. She carefully adjusted one of the pins that secured her headscarf, richly patterned in lavender and burgundy, before giving my hand a much more forgiving shake. “This is her equivalent of playing nice.”

“Daisy plays nice?” Tim asked, all wide eyes and innocence. "Perish the thought. Martin, dear boy, you'd do well to remember that these two are the metaphorical taser to the lurching semi-corpse of our tutorials. They're painfully bright, incisive, and will cut you down mercilessly if they think you’re a liability."

Daisy's lazy smile grew fractionally wider at that, and a corner of Basira’s mouth ticked up as she rolled her eyes.

“We won’t,” she reassured me.

“We will,” Daisy smirked, then subsided at a cool look from her companion.

Basira just shook her head at me. “We’ve sworn off murder, actually,” she told me with over-heavy sincerity.

“Do you mind reconsidering come exams?” I asked. “From what I’ve heard, I think I might welcome it then.”

At that, a barrier seemed to thaw between Basira and myself, and Daisy cracked a true smile. I had passed whatever test I had been set, apparently.

“I’ll put that one in the diary,” Basira said.

“Mark me down as well?” Tim asked hopefully. “If you could take me out before Mods, I’ll leave you something special in my will.”

Daisy barked a laugh. “With pleasure, Stoker.”

Tim smiled, then motioned to the person seated on Basira’s left.

“Sasha James, the second half of my withered soul, and by far the best of all of us here,” turned out to be the woman who had smiled at me upon my entrance, her dark eyes bright behind circular gold frames that matched the glitter at her wrists and earlobes. 

“Martin,” she said warmly, enfolding my hand in both of hers. “It’s lovely to meet you!” 

“You too,” I replied, and she smiled at me again with sincere welcome. 

She and Tim were cut from variations of the same cloth, it appeared. Both were genuinely friendly and welcoming to the outsider in their midst, and were excellent conversationalists. I decided, instinctively, that I liked Sasha. With her, there were no obvious walls that needed toppling before a pleasant cordiality could flow between us.

This was not the case for the next person to whom I was introduced.

“Melanie King, who carries knives but doesn't need them because her arguments are just as fucking vicious,” had a choppy black bob that was dip-dyed blue at the end, and platform boots that must have added a good few inches to her standing height. Despite her small stature, I could tell within the first five words she uttered in my presence that Melanie had strength of character enough for someone treble her size. 

“The supernatural,” she said to me abruptly. “Yes or no?”

I had most definitely been plunged into the continuation of some old point of contention, and supposed that she meant whether or not I had faith in its existence. In these circumstances, there was definitely a right and a wrong answer, but I couldn’t quite tell which was which. Bereft of strategy, I fell back on the truth.

Did I believe in ghosts? No, nothing so concrete. I believed in the effect of people, place or energy on others, in any case. Places could be haunted by the events that had occurred within them, for example, and people often carry the marks that others have left, long after the giver has faded into memory. Was that supernatural, or merely human? Regardless, I was certain it lay well beyond the bounds of physical and natural law, and so:

“Yes?” I replied tentatively.

This, seemingly, was the correct answer.

Melanie’s eyes lit up with triumph. “Ha!” she crowed, pumping a fist in the air and making a rude gesture towards the occupied armchair in the far corner. Its occupant tutted grumpily as Melanie turned back to me.

“Thank you, Martin,” she said with satisfaction. “You’ve just been the final nail in his coffin of his scepticism. Maybe now he’ll finally see reason.”

“Hardly,” came a deep voice from the armchair before I could respond. “Just because you’ve found another credulous idiot to add to our tutorial group doesn’t mean his opinion in any way changes a rational fact.”

“Why are you taking this goddamned degree, if you think people who believe in legends of the supernatural are idiots?” Tim asked pointedly.

There was a sigh from the armchair. “I’m interested in the sociological aspects, and how common mythology points to a shared human history. I hardly believe that any of those stories are real.”

With a shake of his head, Tim led me to the room’s corner. “Well, Martin, these absolutely bullshit opinions come from Jonathan Sims. Grade A cock, but somehow, we still like him. He’s the sole redeeming member of this group, in Bouchard’s eyes--which is a dubious honour, but it’s one he seems to bear with adequate strength, if not grace.”

Sequestered here at the very fringes of the room, and looking like he would much rather be anywhere else, sat the most striking man I had ever encountered. Of all of the room’s occupants, he was the one whose entire manner and bearing bespoke a natural affinity for the academic lifestyle. The crisply starched collar of his cream shirt rose from a dark green waistcoat, the edge of which was in the process of being smoothed by long, ink-stained fingers. His dark hair, worn long, was caught in a loose bun that, for the most part, kept it off his face. Indeed, practicality seemed to be the watchword of Jonathan Sims--the only ornament on his person was the thin gold chain around his neck that secured his square-framed glasses, which glinted in the light as he tilted his head to face our host. Yet even as his aloof manner rejected attention, his very being held such a potent magnetism that I was wholly unable to look away from him. 

“I wouldn’t have to, Timothy, if you ever deigned to spend more than twenty minutes with an assigned text,” this Apollo of the tomes returned waspishly. 

Tim just shrugged comfortably, clearly used to the sharp dialogue. “Who has the time?”

“I would,” I said without thinking. “Make time to read the readings, I mean. That is, we’re here to learn, aren’t we? It would be foolish to throw away opportunities like this.”

My only defence was that I wanted to make a positive impression on the man who had so captured my attention. As soon as the words escaped me, however, I knew I’d made a mistake in displaying my naivete--and so too did Jonathan. Turning his piercing gaze away from Tim, he looked me up and down, and was clearly unimpressed with what he saw. “You were late,” he said, abject disapproval dripping from his every perfectly-modulated syllable. “I hardly have great expectations for your regard for opportunities at this institution.”

Try as I might, I couldn’t do anything to prevent the familiar heat of a blush creeping along my hairline. He wouldn’t know, I reminded myself. He wouldn’t know about your mother, he wouldn’t know about what you did to take care of the painfully ill woman who hated you more with every rattling breath, how much you gave up for her--

“He’s this much of a prick to everyone,” Tim whispered to me, still loud enough to be audible by everyone in the room, and the not unwelcome frankness of it startled me like a bolt of lightning. “You’re not special in that regard, so try not to take it too personally. Still, without him, all of us would have probably been murdered by Bouchard two weeks into first term, so I suppose we have to count our blessings.”

Jonathan replied with a two-fingered salute that Tim cheerfully returned, then fell back into his study of the embroidery on his chair-arm.

“We shun him entirely when he’s in a mood,” Tim told me airily, heading over to the sideboard. “Which is all too often, nowadays. I wouldn’t worry about him, he’ll improve after a cigarette or two. Drink?”

“Please,” I answered, suddenly feeling the desperate need to quiet the part of my brain that overthought every interaction.

Tim nodded, shifting glassware around on the sideboard distractedly. “Fabulous. Now, where’s that bloody corkscrew...”

My hand dipped to my pocket. “Use mine,” I offered, freeing it from its tissue paper wrappings and holding it forth.

“I just knew you’d be the perfect fit for this group!” Tim said delightedly as he took it. A light scattering of applause, presumably from Sasha, accompanied his words. Within moments, everyone’s glasses were charged, and we were able to begin the evening in earnest.

I ended up perched on an armchair between Sasha and Basira for the rest of the evening. It seemed the safest place, shielded on all sides from the members of the group who either hated me on sight, or greeted the entire world with indiscriminate, cheerful aggression.

I didn’t contribute much to the conversation that evening. It flowed around me like I was a pebble in the Thames, an insignificant blip that did nothing to change the course of the rushing waters. For that, I was glad, as it was more like fencing than any conversation that I'd ever been a part of. Jonathan and Melanie were the main combatants, armed with scathing wit, acid sarcasm, and, in Jonathan’s case, quotation after quotation pulled from a prodigious memory. I found that as the evening progressed, his standoffish manner lessened, until he was striding around the room with index finger upraised and eyes afire, the distinctive clip of his shoe-heels echoing off polished floorboards. Though he never regarded me with anything less than disdain, among the others, he seemed almost relaxed, as he argued animatedly and with eloquence.

Melanie, on the other hand, countered with language of a sort that would make some of my peers in the Sixth Form sit up and take notes. Both were brilliantly, fiercely passionate about the most trivial of subjects, and their gladiatorial manoeuvring was fascinating to observe.

Not content to sit back and watch, our host often entered the fray himself, adding ideas of his own in support of one side or another. Usually he would joke, phrasing his points with a humorous twist that did nothing to disguise the keen intellect that underpinned the words. Sasha, too, never held back on her opinion, diving into arguments recklessly but with nevertheless meticulously-researched evidence.

Daisy, on the other hand, seldom offered her commentary, preferring to observe the goings-on from a loftier vantage point. When she did speak, her barbs were always accompanied by a dangerous flash of a smile. She took pleasure in the hunt, I could see, and cared little for a conversational victory; instead appearing to view her role in the proceedings much like that of a lioness, play-fighting with her cubs.

By contrast, Basira was calm, with flashes of whip-smart dry humour that she deployed into the conversation with militaristic accuracy. She spoke rarely, but remained a point of solid fortitude that I could cling to when the others left me feeling hopelessly lost, which was often. I liked her. Her patience and wry remarks gave me some slight hope for myself as a member of this group, and there was a welcome familiarity in her reserve.

Over the course of the evening, two significant impressions were carved into my mind regarding the Bouchard set. The second thing that struck me in that lavishly-furnished room was how, despite the arguments being so much more heated than any disagreement between myself and my mother, the room’s atmosphere was still one between people on friendly terms, if not exactly friends. It was evident that all parties respected one another, even as the discussions became more and more ferocious. The vicious insults were never personal, just another part of the complex game these people played.

The first was the casual extravagance shown by these people, my peers. Our glasses were never allowed to be empty, and the wine that filled them came from bottles laden down with seals and scrollwork. Indeed, the dress, manner and bearing of all the room’s other occupants displayed a social position that to me, was as unknowable as it was intoxicating. My new companions did not seem to care that I wasn’t Eton-educated, that I had never summered at my family’s estate in the country--but it was something of which I was acutely aware. I was accepted by them, those young Olympians, but I would always be distinct from the group. For a brief moment, however, as the alcohol sang its siren call through my veins, I could imagine that I was one of them, carefree and untethered to responsibility. Though the next morning would bring with it a painfully clear self-examination, I had never been able to even pretend such a thing before, and the experience was deliciously novel.

As the soiree stretched on, the contents of the copious number of bottles on the sideboard receded. My memories from later in the night have, for the most part, faded into a pale sepia blur, but a few stand out with clarity. Jonathan and Melanie, sparring hammer and tongs about some episode of a television show I hadn’t yet seen, before coming to the rare agreement that it was indeed a masterwork of crap. Sasha, eyes flashing, talking about her plans to confront the demon that supposedly lurked at the end of St Jerome’s longest hallway. Jonathan’s rich laugh, as Tim recounted a story from his schooldays that ended with a carton of smuggled beer disappearing beneath the surface of an artificial lake. Basira, dipping Daisy in a passionate kiss--the display the result of a dare, but the emotion as true and stark as daylight. A rendition of some bawdy sailor’s anthem, bellowed loud and proud from Tim’s open window at a quarter to two, and all of us but one collapsing in giggles as lights flicked on angrily all around the quad, while Jonathan’s baritone still rang out.

Clearest of all is still the single frozen tableau of Jonathan, leaning out of that same window, lit only by the dim glow of the cigarette caught between careless fingers. He was radiant, artlessly beautiful in a way that kindled the small glow of an ache in my heart, and the pit of my stomach.

How I got back to my room remains a mystery--and even more so, how I managed to avoid injury on that winding staircase in my inebriated state. Still, I must assume that I made the journey safely, something to which my unbruised shins the next morning attested.

I do vaguely remember stumbling to bed, and the length of time it took my exhausted, racing mind to finally quiet. All those thoughts that seemed so urgent at the time, however, are now lost, save for the last. Moments before sleep overcame me, I saw that image of Jonathan painted indelibly behind my eyes. And I regretted how much a pity it was that such a beautiful person already hated me with a deep ferocity.

Chapter Text

The morning after Tim’s soiree, I awoke blearily, my throat a parched wasteland and my head pounding as if all the timpanists of the nation’s orchestras had decided that the inside of my skull was an appropriate instrument. I was nowhere near awake enough to pick one of the many hideous descriptors for how I felt, but “bedraggled” and “befuddled” were the sister adjectives fighting for my attention at the first moment. I was unwell, to put it mildly--hungover in the extreme, and I wanted nothing more than to curl up into a little ball, and quietly sink into the half-death of the comatose. 

This was not to be, however. When the sharp pounding in my temples got suddenly louder, I was able to ascertain after a minute that someone was knocking at my door. 

I must have made some incoherent noise of acknowledgement, as the knocking receded while I groggily buttoned last night’s shirt, which I appeared to have fallen asleep in, and pulled on a pair of trousers. Eventually, I opened the door to find Tim, Sasha, Melanie, and a tall Black woman of a similar build to my own. All four looked bright-eyed and wide awake, in stark contrast to my own dishevelled state.

“My God, old chap,” Tim said kindly. “I thought it’d be an idea to take you for breakfast, and it appears we arrived not a moment too soon. You need coffee, or a Bloody Mary, or both, Martin. Possibly intravenously.”

With good-natured bullying of that sort, the four of them managed to chivvy me into something approximating a fit state to go out. We ended up at a small café just off the main street, wherein I barely managed to make my way through a small bowl of creamy porridge, liberally laced with banana and pecan, and a strong black coffee. My companions, on the other hand, showed no hesitation in their attacks on heaping plates of pancakes, eggs Benedict, and the like, with the ease of practice.

I soon learnt that the unfamiliar woman was Georgie Barker, a Literature student and Melanie’s girlfriend. She was perfectly genial, with a good humour I immediately warmed to. She was well-liked by Tim and Sasha, it seemed, based on their friendly back and forth. But it was her effect on Melanie that most surprised me. 

Perhaps it was the absence of Jonathan, rather than the presence of Georgie--or, most likely, a combination of both--that eased some of the lines of tension in Melanie’s posture. That acid tongue was part of her nature, I understood, but over that breakfast, I came to discover that while she could be prickly, sharp-edged and argumentative, that wasn’t all there was to Melanie King. There were flashes of lazy-lidded smiles she showed to Georgie, as well as a slight modulation of her voice in this company--lower, calmer, without the burr of defensiveness I had previously assumed was natural. Seen in this light, I could hope that Melanie was somebody I could like, and would like me in return.

The rest of my Sunday passed without event. The quartet who had treated me for breakfast--“don’t worry, old boy, it’s my fault you’re in this state, so of course I’ll cover your treatment and recovery,” Tim waved my protestations away as he opened his wallet--deposited me back at Harvey Quad, somewhat steadier on my feet than I had left. I spent the rest of the day in the coolness of my room, reading through a battered paperback--Wodehouse’s The Inimitable Jeeves , I believe it was--that I had brought from home, not feeling up to anything too taxing on my final day of freedom.

The next morning brought with it my first lectures, which I must admit passed in a poorly-remembered blur. I spent much of the day preoccupied with the conversation that I knew for the last two days I would have to endure. Still, it was best to bear a moment’s acute discomfort than suffer for the next few years, so after my final lecture of the day, I made my way to the tall building which housed the Cult Studies faculty. 

I was able to find the person I needed almost immediately. She beckoned me into her small office, and no sooner had she directed me to sit down than I began my impassioned plea to be transferred into another tutorial group for the course of my degree.

"I apologise, Mr Blackwood, but I really cannot change tutorial assignments at this point in the year.”

The impersonally polite eyes of Dr Bouchard’s executive assistant looked me from behind cat-eye lenses with the mildest degree of concern, and I knew my case was lost before it had even begun. Even so, I was determined to at least put up my best defence. 

It was clear from the soiree two nights before that I would not fit in with the Bouchard set--the bright and the brilliant, young gods given flesh. It wasn’t that I didn’t like them--quite the contrary--but their clear gifts only made me more painfully aware of my own deficits. The circumstances of my birth had already placed me at a disadvantage in such company, and the flaws of my own making served to highlight the contrast further. Lacking the obvious wealth of my new peers, and tending to favour a determined, workmanlike approach to my studies, rather than the flashes of innate brilliance that Dr Bouchard would no doubt expect, I could see no place for myself other than the rock bottom of the social pecking order. Surrounded by these golden idols, constant comparisons to whom I could never aspire to reach, I could see years of misery stretching out before me. It wasn’t insecurity, it was truth, my heart told me as it yearned for more familiar surroundings.

“Ms Zampano,” I began, only to be cut off with a not-unkind briskness.

“Besides, Dr Bouchard requested you specially,” she told me, as if it would be a balm to my worries. “This is an honour, Mr Blackwood. I’m sure Dr Bouchard wouldn’t have placed you in his tutorial group if he didn’t have faith in your abilities.”

I begged to differ, and I did, extensively. Ms Zampano, however, would not relent, no matter my argument. Cowed in the face of an unsurpassable wall of administration, I could only sigh and retire meekly from the field of combat. 

And so it was that despite my best efforts, I found myself at 11 A.M. on the second Monday of term, standing outside an imposing oaken door in the Davies building. Despite only having been at the university for slightly more than a week, I had already learned that nobody called the Davies by its real name. Due to the building’s towering height, and its position at almost the exact centre of campus, it had been dubbed the Panopticon--a moniker first granted by some Bentham-reading wag, then quickly taken up by the rest of the student body. The implicit comparison between students and prisoners was too good to pass up, it seemed, although it always struck me as somewhat contrived.

The office I was mustering the courage to enter was situated at the very top of the Panopticon. Its only decoration was the small brass plaque affixed to its centre, just above eye level, which proclaimed in a neat serif font that the office belonged to a Dr Elias Bouchard. Almost more imposing than that was the stooping owl of Avebury’s crest, carved deep into the stonework above the door. It would have been a hideously ostentatious piece of decor, if the same crest hadn’t been engraved above every doorway in the old buildings. However, as this office would contain the vast majority of my academic memories, the owl is, to my mind, inextricably linked to the office of Dr Bouchard.

The lectures I had attended in the first week seemed to be the typical bill of fare for Avebury--dry, well-intentioned academics imparting their knowledge to the hordes of drowsy undergraduates. Still, I recorded my notes with a diligence born of tension, the constant worry that I wouldn’t measure up to my peers, even as many of them discussed dropping the 9 A.M. lectures as quickly as they could. However, the act of waiting outside that office door seemed to house a greater trepidation than any of the lectures I had attended. Even the fiendishly hard Classical Greek lectures, given by the notorious Dr Morrow, seemed to pale in comparison.

The Avebury system of scholarship was such that tutorials were held along with the lectures. The lectures, I suppose, would be a common format to any university--for learning and taking notes, and open to any enrolled student, so that it would not be uncommon to see as many as a hundred and fifty students in a lecture hall. The tutorials, however, were far smaller groups of fifteen to twenty, so that students could ask questions of their tutor, a noted scholar of the college. We would discuss the topics of our lectures in depth, receive constructive feedback on our essays, have to demonstrate our understanding of the various concepts we were studying, and all in all benefit from the knowledge and experience of a preeminent academic.

The fact that Dr Bouchard had hand-picked seven of us for his first tutorial group in at least a decade was offputting in the extreme. But hesitating would do me no good. Steeling myself, I raised a hand and opened the door.

The room within was at once not at all what I expected, and exactly what I expected. It was a far cry from the poky little rooms of the other academics I had seen, with every available surface piled high with books and papers. However, from what I knew of Dr Bouchard, the space seemed to be an extension of his very personality. The office was large, airy and spacious, with tasteful knick-knacks dotted minimalistically around his many bookshelves. It was neat, too, the space of someone who was particular about everything being in its proper place.

As if sensing my thought, Tim flashed me a grin and raised his eyebrows. I could just imagine him smuggling some poor pigeon into the meticulously-kept office, and the sheer destruction that such an animal must have wrought.

Before I could make a quip on the subject, the atmosphere in the office drastically changed as the door swung open once more, and I was able to behold our tutor in person for the first time. He hardly matched up to his fearsome reputation. A slightly-built man in his sixties, with blonde hair fading to ivory at the temples, Dr Bouchard looked the picture of a prosperous, mild-tempered academic. Only his eyes, a peculiarly cold shade of grey, hinted at the ruthlessness with which I would soon learn he conducted his tutorials. Still, I believed I had no undue cause for concern as one of my academic heroes looked at me appraisingly.

“Mr Blackwood,” he acknowledged me with a thin smile.

“Dr Bouchard,” I returned.

He nodded, once. “I’m pleased you were finally able to join us. Your situation is known to me, so I understand that you’re entering my class without the same knowledge base as the others, but I’m certain that you’ll be able to catch up in no time. You won’t disappoint me, I’m sure.”

The polite dismissal left a sour taste in my mouth, despite the optimism of Dr Bouchard’s words. My mother, I knew, would have disagreed with him. Almost everything I did was a disappointment to her, and I found it hard to shake the ingrained belief that I would turn out the same to anyone who relied on me. 

Unaware of the knot that his words had tied in the pit of my stomach, Dr Bouchard had begun his tutorial. 

“Did you succeed in your project for the vacation?” he was asking the others. “To define beauty, true beauty, as distinct from a merely pleasing aesthetic?”

“Beauty is transcendental,” Sasha offered. “It’s transportative.”

“That’s not incorrect,” Dr Bouchard granted, “but there’s something more to it. I was asking you to find what makes it transcendental.”

Melanie was already shaking her head. “It’s subjective, there’s no answer to that.” 

“There has to be an answer, though,” Basira said. “Otherwise we as humanity wouldn’t be able to agree that beauty is a common concept.”

Dr Bouchard didn’t respond, but he inclined his head, faintly pleased.

“Terror,” Jonathan said quietly. “Something is truly beautiful if it frightens us. By its nature, it must be alarming, to jolt us back into the fullness of living.”

At that, a smile spread across Dr Bouchard’s face. “Very good, Jonathan.”

I spent the discussion just listening, trying to find a form to the tutorial that I could fit myself into. Dr Bouchard ran his classes much like a supplementary lecture, often focusing on an abstract concept common to human society. However, where they differed from the rest of our lectures was in the sharp, penetrating questions that Dr Bouchard fired at us throughout the class. His intellect was so keen as to be almost malicious, a beacon of impartial, immense knowledge as he watched us grapple with problems of Beauty and Truth. His recall was somehow even more exceptional than what I had seen of Jonathan’s, often waiting until one of us had carefully built up a precarious tower of argument, before quoting, word-perfect, a short epigram or counterpoint from another author that exposed a gaping flaw in what we had constructed. It was to ensure that we were able to create strong, well-reasoned arguments, I’m sure, and he expected us to rally, rebuilding and strengthening our points of view. But at times, however, I felt like Dr Bouchard took a perverse kind of pleasure in pushing us, pitting his fearsome intellect against the combined weight of our interpretations.

His line of questioning, too, seemed to be multilayered. The questions he asked were innocuous, at the surface level, and always made complete sense in the asking. However, he always demanded an answer of a particular individual, never the group, and often, his named target would tense, as if the question hit slightly too close to the bone. It felt deliberate, but there was no reasonable way that he could know what he was doing--they were often incredibly personal, things we would never have revealed to him--and his politely impatient manner never betrayed any hint that he was asking his questions with an ulterior motive, no matter our suspicions.

In writing this out, I feel that I am doing Dr Bouchard, or at least our impression of him, a disservice. Even now, with many years spent attempting to unpick that particular Gordian knot, I cannot quite describe the mix of emotions we bore towards him. He was cruel, sometimes, and I can’t deny that there were moments where we hated him--but his full attention, when turned on you, was like a physical force. He listened unlike anyone else I’ve encountered before or since, and until he inevitably watched us fall into the rhetorical pits we painstakingly dug for ourselves, he had a way of making one feel like an academic of his own calibre. He was charismatic in a strange way that commanded both our fear and our reverence, making us feel honoured to teeter on that knife’s-edge.

This was the cult of Cult Studies, and by the end of that first tutorial, I was well and truly inducted into its way of worship.

Over the weeks that followed, I settled neatly into the college lifestyle, every hour a drop of water wearing the same grooves that comprised my schedule deeper and deeper still. Days passed in a blur of repetition, lecture after lecture after lecture, with the weekly visit to Dr Bouchard’s towertop office. The tutorials got no easier, as I did not prove to be the instinctive genius that I was certain that my tutor desired; but I felt more able to cope with his penetrating questions, and his cool grey eyes regarded me with no more disdain than they did my peers.

A few weeks into term, faced with a truly heinous translation set by Dr Morrow, Basira suggested we meet in the common area of the Regian Library to hash the problems through as a group. As the results of this pooling of our resources netted us each a tidy A, the study group, as it were, continued through the weeks. Dr Bouchard had a nasty habit of setting us essays of his own, short compositions summarising our personal understanding of one concept or another, which he termed “statements,” and we found it beneficial to read through each other’s work before presenting it for assessment.

"We study cultural fucking transcendence, Jonathan," Melanie said acidly in one such session. She had mentioned that her statement for that week, about the desire to document and codify the unknown, had touched on her explorations into the supernatural. Jonathan, perhaps predictably, had pointedly reaffirmed his disbelief in the existence of the otherworldly, and Melanie hadn’t been able to let the insult to her worldview lie.

"And since there are so many cultures with a concept of a soul that haunts a place after the death of its body,” she continued, “it would make sense for such a belief to have its roots in something real."

Jonathan sighed. "Yes, the desire of the bereaved to feel the presence of their loved ones again. It's purely superstition, Melanie, there are no such things as ghosts."

"Yes, but how many reports of ghosts talk of a benevolent presence?" Melanie argued. "People don't want to connect with the ghosts in most ghost stories, they bring fear and violence. What kind of positive connotations come from the reports of people stuck in an endless loop of pain and mischief?”

“The horror genre exists for a reason, and mothers have been coming up with creatively gruesome ways to warn their children away from danger for as long as humanity has existed,” Jonathan countered.

“You’re missing my point!” Melanie huffed, stabbing at the desk with a finger. “There’s no didactic purpose to most reports of the supernatural. There’s no desire for connection. It’s just people who are scared, and I, like most paranormal researchers, want to give them answers!”

“I was trying to be tactful, but alright, then,” Jonathan said, his brows drawn close. “If you’d like me to look more deeply into the mental state of most people who have claimed to have seen a ghost, well, we can certainly go down that path.”

Melanie’s lips had thinned into a tight line. “That’s not what I meant, and you know it.”

I had to leave before I ever found out who had the last word in that disagreement. Neither of them were accustomed to giving ground, and their arguments were wont to drag on for hours, if allowed. I had to do my filial duty that evening, however, and much preferred to call my mother from the privacy of my own room, so I bade them a polite farewell and left under my own private cloud of gloom.

On my way back to St Jerome’s, I passed by a small stand that had evidently just been filled by copies of the student paper. I took one from the top, and carried on my way. I wasn’t expecting much, but I was aware these sorts of things often contained some trivialities, for amusement’s sake, and hoped that would lighten my mood.

The headlines all featured names and places I hadn’t yet come to know, so I just had a cursory flip through the pages as I walked. However, a mention of St Jerome’s in the column on page five that caught my eye, and I turned my full attention to the article. It appeared that Dr Gertrude Robinson, a History lecturer and senior Fellow of the college, had gone missing.

The article was unclear on the circumstances of her disappearance--its author appeared to have assumed that the available details of the case were already common knowledge, and saw no point in wasting valuable column space in rehashing the whole affair. More likely, the details themselves were sketchy at best, and the author used that veneer of superiority to cover up the fact that they, too, had no exclusive knowledge of the events. All I could determine was that Dr Robinson had failed to appear for a scheduled lecture two days ago, and her subsequent whereabouts were yet to be determined.

Luckily for me, the article had a small picture attached, so that if I ever was to come across Dr Robinson in the course of my day, I would be able to recognise her, and report her as no longer missing. The chances of this happening were infinitesimal, but any little helped, I supposed.

When I got home, I folded the paper and placed it on the bench in the kitchenette, on top of the existing stack of magazines and post I had yet to deal with. My thoughts turned from it as I keyed my mother’s number into my phone, and by the end of our conversation, it had faded from my mind entirely.

My week continued in the same fashion as every other, until Friday’s meeting of our study group.

"Catacombs," Jonathan abruptly announced as we gathered round our usual small table in the Regian, and I looked up with interest. By this point, I had learnt that such pronouncements were far from uncommon, and it best served to let Jonathan’s tangents play out without interruption. The fact that after six weeks of term, he still barely spoke directly to me, so I would take any opportunity to watch his face light up, and listen to his deep voice flow around me, was something I tried and failed to convince myself was irrelevant. If he was talking about his own research, he wasn’t criticising me, and I was able to just appreciate being in his presence.

"There are catacombs under the university,” he continued, as I pulled myself back to the conversation. “Under the whole town, I think, but it looks like they began under St Jerome’s.”

“We’re going down there,” Melanie said in a tone that brooked no doubt.

“Well, naturally,” Jonathan agreed, in rare concord.

Sasha’s eyes had lit up at this. She had an adventurous spirit, I had discovered, and was always eager to throw herself headfirst into a challenge, so the prospect of something like this would have checked every box on her mental list. “Tomorrow?”

Jonathan nodded. 

“We’ll need to be prepared,” Basira added, her eyes darting back and forth as she considered what such an expedition might need. “Torches, water, something to mark our path.”

“And something to cover our tracks,” Daisy said.

I must admit that I was somewhat taken aback by how quickly a plan had formed. There was a connection between the six of them that I was yet to find a way into, and it was never so evident than at this moment. They were all on the same wavelength, already imagining the catacombs and what they would find. 

I, on the other hand, was locked out. 

“Martin?” Tim asked, and I looked up, startled. “Are you coming?”

As much as I wanted to share in whatever bond hummed between them, I couldn’t see myself exploring the ancient tombs beneath Avebury. I didn’t believe I would be bringing the wrath of any phantoms down upon myself--but even so, the dead have earned what rest they have, and deserve to remain undisturbed by a group of college students on an expedition.

I was about to decline, albeit regretfully--and then I looked up, and caught Jonathan’s eye. His expression was for once unguarded, and almost pleading.

And just like that, I had agreed.

The catacombs, accessible through a service hatch on the ground floor of the Panopticon, of all places, were dark, stone-walled and dusty. We explored as a group for half an hour or so, finding nothing but more corridors, and growing gradually more disappointed. 

“Let’s split up,” suggested Daisy, counter to the rules of every horror movie I’d ever seen. The Bouchard set, it turned out, had the combined self-preservation instinct of a lemming, and quickly agreed.

Despite my misgivings, I soon found myself rounding a corner, chalk in hand to mark where I had come from. The corridor opened onto a small room, like a few others we had passed. My curiosity dulled by half an hour with no result, I didn’t expect to see anything inside. Still, I pride myself on being thorough, so I marked the doorframe with a white X and peered in.

My torch fell to the ground from numb fingers, metal cracking against stone with the sound of a universe of securities shattering into pieces around me. 

A sharp cry of "Martin?" cut through the faceted echoes, which were soon drowned out altogether by the tense clip of a tread I had all but memorised. 

“Martin,” Jonathan said again, breathless, as he approached the open door I stood in. With my body in the doorway, one hand desperately clutching the frame for some kind of stability, I was blocking his view of what lay within--and I was loath to turn aside. I took comfort in his presence, his blissful unknowing, for a moment, before I felt him grow still, his breath quickening. 

He had seen it, then.

The body of Gertrude Robinson, still and cold upon the floor.

Chapter Text

The clatter of my torch on the flagstones, combined with Jonathan’s cry, brought the rest of the group running to the doorway we were standing in. It didn’t take long for them all to see the grotesque tableau that was laid out within. 

There was stunned silence for a moment, then--

“Holy fuck ,” Tim breathed, his face deathly pale.

His words were an accurate summation of how we all felt. The horror that had carved into me from the moment I first looked into the room had become a tide that threatened to overwhelm us all with its immensity.

"What do we do?" Tim asked, for once at a loss for how to deal with a situation.

Melanie's expression was set. "We have to report it."

"Are you joking?" Daisy demanded. “If we report it, they’ll think we did it.”

“It’s not like we’re just abandoning it,” Basira pointed out. “They’ll find it eventually.”

“Her,” a soft voice insisted. My own. “They’ll find her .”

“Whatever,” Daisy said, brushing off my concern. “They’ll find her. And we can’t be connected to it.”

“Why would they think it was us?” Sasha asked.

Daisy shook her head. “The people who report a crime like this are always under suspicion. And--”

"Look," Jonathan interrupted, his deep voice hushed. "The wall."

We all looked, to see a circle of dead worms stuck fast to the wall above the corpse. It filled me with an immediate sense of foreboding, although I couldn't place my finger on the root cause of the feeling. Still, something about it felt wrong in a way that juddered through my spine. 

"It's a ritual," Jonathan breathed. His skin was ashy, and he looked to be on the verge of collapse. Nobody mentioned that his outspoken, vehement scepticism of everything we studied had crumbled to dust, or that he was the first of us to make the connection to the occult. The thought that anyone could disagree with him was unthinkable.

Instinctively, we all knew it. He was right.

I think I was the first to make the connection, as it was my horrified exhalation of "Oh, God," that first slipped into the leaden silence. 

“Yeah, they’ll definitely think it was us,” Tim said heavily.

While this was hardly what our degree was concerned with, and despite the course’s prestige, some external critics of the Cult Studies program still harboured a belief that studying ancient rituals as an aspect of history and sociology would lead students down a path to the "dangerously occult''. The link between the course and what seemed almost obnoxiously like a ritualistic killing wouldn’t go unnoticed. Added to that was the fact that Dr Robinson was a Fellow of St Jerome’s--with the college the centre of the Cult Studies faculty, the implicit connection was even clearer still. 

"Fuck," Melanie muttered. "We can't be found here."

"We need to leave," Basira agreed. 

“We need to investigate,” Jonathan said in the same instant.

There was a moment of absolute paralysis from the group. All of them, myself included, were united by a burning drive to understand every exact particular of an action or event--it was a trait of thorough scholarship Dr Bouchard encouraged. But in this case, the paths that lay ahead in our potential research seemed shadowed. Dangerous.

It was Daisy who broke the tension. “We leave,” she said firmly. “Right now. We don’t do anything that could arouse suspicion. We just stay in tonight, and lie low. Tomorrow, we meet up somewhere out-of-the-way, and then we start planning what to do.”

“My rooms,” Tim said, suddenly decisive. “Tomorrow morning, call it ten-ish?”

Daisy raised her eyebrows.

“It’ll be fine,” he replied. “Trust me.”

She just shrugged. “If you’re happy with that.”

Tim nodded, and she let the point drop. “We’re agreed, then.”

Sasha spoke for all of us. “We’re agreed.”

It was Jonathan, still standing next to me in the doorway, who grabbed my hand, squeezing my fingers tight in a ferocious grip. Startled, I looked down at our joined hands, and saw that he had done the same to Basira, who had found herself at his other side. She knew what he meant, and reached out to Daisy, who reached out in turn. Melanie took my empty hand last, completing the circle.

Looking back on it now, I realise that we had all, unconsciously, turned to Jonathan. Intense, he looked around the linked group, locking eyes with each of us with a fierce gravity. 

“We don’t say a word about this. To anybody.”

We nodded, with all the solemnity of signing a blooded contract. The air itself was weighted, electric and crackling with meaning. Whatever tense alliances and tolerances had previously existed between us had gone. We were one, now. Bound irreversibly by a shared secret.

When we emerged from the catacombs, it was a shock to find that it was still early afternoon. Much to my disbelief, the world had not metamorphosed in our absence into a nightmarish horrorscape of inky darkness. It was an unusually clear day for late winter; and the pale sunlight that wavered over the Avebury cobbles felt somehow wrong--too cheerful, as if the frost-blue sky and the macabre things we had seen in the stone-edged blackness under the university couldn’t possibly coexist in a single afternoon. 

I made my way back to Harvey Quad, feeling like the entire world was soap-bubble thin and equally fragile; fisheyed and warping distortions with every step I took. I made a cursory attempt to do some of the readings I had been assigned, but the words on the page were entirely abstracted from reality. Everything that was important was back down in the catacombs--the body, the ritual, the dread, the pact. 

I blinked, and it was late in the evening. I have no reference for the passage of time, but it must have slipped past me in the fugue state I found myself in. With nothing else I could do, I lay down and watched the patterns blossom behind my eyelids until the wheels of my mind ceased their turning.

I awoke the next morning from a fitful sleep. Even if I felt no more energised than I had the previous night, I was more grounded to reality, at least. The structures of my morning routine gave me something solid to cling to, and the prospect of meeting with the others was a beacon I locked onto with all my might. Still, I was on edge. I breakfasted and made my ablutions, all with a knot of dread in the pit of my stomach. The minutes crawled by, and I kept running and re-running scenarios in my head, planning how I was going to make my way to Tim’s.

As I reflect on that morning, the heights of my panic seem absurd. Nobody would have yet known of Dr Robinson’s death, nor had the faintest suspicion that I was in any way connected to something beyond the norm. My movements wouldn’t have been suspicious, either--I went to Tim’s at least once a fortnight during term. Even so, I felt it was imperative that on this occasion, I not be noticed, so before I left, I peered out of the small peephole in my door to check that the coast was clear.

It was not. Jane Prentiss, my neighbour in number 9, was standing outside her door, back pressed to the wall and phone pressed to her ear.

I couldn’t leave, not with her there to see where I had gone. 

Once again, time warped and wavered, every minute seeming to last an eternity, and yet no time at all. I glanced down at my watch, and it was already quarter past. I was late, and I hadn’t even left my room.

I sent a quick message to the others, who would doubtless be wondering where I was, and started to pace, checking sporadically to see whether Jane had yet moved on. It took the longest time, but eventually, I watched her head back into her own rooms.

I breathed a sigh of relief, then was jolted into immediate action as I noticed the time. Nearly eleven--a full hour late.

I sprinted the entire route to Delano Quad, expecting my peers to be furious, and arrived red-faced and sweating.

“Martin,” Jonathan said simply when I burst through the door, his voice tightly controlled. 

I froze, bracing myself for a litany of stinging rebukes.

“Are you alright?”

Of all the things that could have happened, genuine concern was the one I was least prepared for. 

"F-fine," I panted. 

"God, Martin, we were worried sick!" Tim exclaimed. 

Sasha nodded. "We didn't hear from you--we thought you'd been hauled in for questioning, or come down with something awful you'd picked up from the catacombs."

"No, no," I said hastily, trying to settle their nerves. "Just... Jane Prentiss was standing outside, my neighbour, and she... I didn't want to be seen, that's all. Followed, whatever. I sent you a message?"

Tim shook his head. 

I frowned. "But--"

I opened up my messenger client, and saw the text I had typed out--a draft, waiting to be sent. In my panicked state, I hadn't noticed that I hadn't pressed the send button itself. 

I finally looked around the room, taking in everyone's expressions. Far from anger at me and my apparent ineptitude, they just looked relieved, improbably, that I had managed to join them. 

"Well, you made it," Tim said heartily, "and that's the important thing."

I nodded. 

Daisy, for the second time in as many days, snapped the tension. This time, though, he remark was flippant.  

"Christ, what is that eyesore?" she asked from her position at the window--where, I realised, she'd been watching for my arrival. She referred to the large sandstone protrusion that jutted proud of the wall, which we had barely noticed before, with all our meetings being in the evening, when the curtains were drawn.

"Ah," Tim replied, a sly gleam in his eye. "It's not an eyesore, Daisy dear, it's the reason we’re here."

He slid the window open to its full height, and leaned out. "You can thank old whatshisface Crew in the year above for this one, actually. Come on!"

And with those words, he hopped out of the window, and used the sill and gutter to heave himself aloft. 

Daisy was the first to shrug and follow him, pulling herself up with athletic grace. Basira was quick to follow, and we could see Daisy's outstretched hand from above giving her an extra grip to cling to. 

I looked at Jonathan, and he at me. 

"I'll bring up the rearguard, shall I?" Sasha asked into the silence. She waited patiently til we were all on our way up, before swinging herself onto the roof after us with the ease of practice.

The slate tiles were, for once, dry. Although the sky was its typical grey, yesterday’s good weather had held, and the clouds were almost pearlescent. We were able to seat ourselves in relative comfort as Tim, the master of this small, lofty realm, uncapped the bottle of white wine he had brought with him, and raised it high in an ironic toast.

“Welcome, my friends,” he announced, “to Nirvana.”

He took a deep draught, then passed the bottle to Sasha.

“Crew called this place Sky Blue,” Tim said, “but I’ve renamed it Sky Grey, for obvious reasons.”

“Still a terrible name,” Sasha shot back, the cadence one of a familiar, well-worn argument.

Tim’s eyebrows quirked. “Better than literally everything you came up with, no? If we ask the others--”

“Does it need a name?” Basira interrupted, ever-practical.

The indignation from both of them was loud and immediate. “Yes!”

“Any private refuge worth its salt needs a good name,” Tim insisted. 

We were putting it off, and we all knew it.

“Enough,” Melanie said after a few minutes of meaningless bickering. “I’d like to, but...”

I knew what she meant. I wanted to engage with them, but the twisting in my gut prevented me from really distracting myself.

“What do we do?” I asked, the single thing on my mind. “About Dr--”

I was cut off by a sharp look from Daisy. The ban on talking about Dr Robinson extended even to here, apparently.

“Can we hide it forever?” Sasha asked, slightly hopelessly. 

We all knew the answer to that one.

“I didn’t see anything on the body,” Basira said slowly. She was observant, I had noticed, and I trusted her judgement. “No wounds, no gunshots, no sign of a struggle. We could just be getting worked up about--”
“Natural causes?” Melanie finished with a scoff. “The fucking worm circle’d put paid to that.”

“It could be a coincidence,” Tim pointed out. “Maybe. Or they could fall off the wall before anyone else finds her. Christ almighty, let it be so.”

Everyone, myself included, crossed our fingers for luck.

“But if they suspect a connection--”

Jonathan, his mien deadly serious, was interrupted mid-sentence by the noise of all our phones buzzing in unison.

The cause was a campus-wide text alert, and I felt my throat dry up. 

Jonathan, as the member of the group Dr Bouchard most often called upon to read statements and essays aloud, was the one we all looked to to read the news.

“Dear students,” he began, looking faintly stricken. “There will be--”

He sighed, and put his phone down. “There’s going to be an email sent out that we all have to read.”

Melanie was suddenly angry. “They’re taking the piss.”

“Of course they’re taking the fucking piss,” Tim agreed. “Because why should anything in this place be straightforward.”

“It’s probably too long for a text, but they wanted to make sure we all see it,” Sasha said, trying to give them the benefit of the doubt.

I couldn’t wait. I thumbed my phone open, refreshing my email client--

“Here,” Basira said, having pulled up the email seconds before I did. “Sad news... Dr Robinson...”

I felt a cold hand close around my heart.

“Police investigating... Matter of procedure, they are not treating this as foul play,” Basira read, and suddenly, gloriously, I could breathe again. “For privacy reasons... yes, yes, get on with it... wait. Students... students will not be asked to help police with their inquiries?”

A disbelieving smile crept its way across her face.

“We’re in the clear?” I asked, teetering on the edge of euphoric relief.

“Seems like.”

“Fuck!” Tim and Melanie exclaimed in uncanny unison.

Jonathan’s eyes lit up, a beacon in human form. The potential of being implicated in something awful averted, he was suddenly animated. No, more. He was excited, thrilled to the bone.

“Now we get to the most important part.”

I frowned. “Which is?”

“We research,” Sasha said, like it was obvious. “This is our degree, right? We look into old rituals at some point, so we’re bound to come across something.”

Basira looked more dubious. “It didn’t look like anything I’ve ever read about.”

“We’re only first-years, though,” Melanie countered. “There must be lots of this sort of thing in the library, somewhere we haven’t found yet.”

Basira shrugged, not unhappy with the prospect of spending more time among the stacks.

“Not just what it is, but what it means,” Jonathan said. “It’s connected. All of this, it has to be.”

All his former scepticism was a facade, I realised in that moment. It had dropped away as if it had never existed, and my God, this new side of him was just as captivating.

For what felt like hours, we planned and plotted, dividing the tome-filled bulk of the Regian into sections we could each scour for clues. Satisfied, we could sit back to enjoy the view, and we did. The many colours of rooftops below us, the fields around the town that stretched away into the distance, the meandering curve of the river. It was beautiful, and now, with my heart and mind somewhat clearer, I could finally appreciate it. 

Jonathan had spent some minutes staring at some point in the middle distance, his eyes hazy as he gazed out over the horizon. They didn’t move from that point, even as he suggested, “What about the Archive?”

“What?” Melanie asked.

“As a name,” he clarified, harking back to the conversation at the beginning of our morning. “The Archive.”

Daisy frowned. “Why?”

“It’s the last thing people would expect,” he said. “Archives are usually... basement-level. Dark, and close, and full of paper. Not this.”

“Makes sense,” Sasha acknowledged with a smile.

“And it just... felt right.”

“Plus, an archive is boring as all getout, so nobody’s going to ask us about it,” Tim added. “No offence, Jonathan, but it’s true. A good thing, too--stops people from asking about it.”

Jonathan raised a shoulder in a lopsided shrug. “None taken.”

“All in favour?” Tim asked the group.

I added my voice to the chorus of enthusiastic ayes.

“The Archive it is!” Tim crowed.

So as our research into rituals took over the study group, the Archive became a ritual of our own. Whenever the weather was fine enough to permit it, some combination of us would find ourselves on the roof of Delano Quad, our own private hideaway from everything the world could bring to bear. We would sit, the whole of Avebury spread out below us, and discuss our findings. We all brought along the fruits of our labours: indistinct grey photocopies out of ancient books dragged up from the bowels of the Regian; poorly-snapped photographs of texts on what passed for sociology and ethnography, back in the day; pages of notes and highlighted URLs. 

Nothing was ever conclusive, however. We found no recipe for a ritual that encompassed the whole truth of what we had seen, nothing that carried with it that same sense of all-encompassing dread that we felt that day in the catacombs. So while curiosity still drove us to investigate with the same fervour as when we first started, as the term dragged slowly to its conclusion, our meetings on the roof became less and less about the research and more a communion between friends. 

At one point in the term, when I had grown comfortable enough with the climb to risk carrying something with me, I decided to bring a thermos of tea to the Archive. The thought of sipping tea, far above everyone else in the town, curl of steam rising higher still, had an absurdity that delighted me. The experience was just as good as the idea--I can say with perfect honesty that I’ve never had a cup of Earl Grey taste as good as when it is drunk on a crisp morning, looking down upon a slowly-wakening town.

I noticed at the time that Sasha was watching me, a slight spark of envy in her gaze, but thought little of it until the next week, when my phone buzzed late on Friday evening with a message from Tim.

sasha says bring enough for the whole class this time , read the typically-unpunctuated text, and I smiled, knowing exactly what he meant. It became another tradition of ours: I would bring tea, in addition to the usual bottle of wine that accompanied at least one of the others, and the sparkling grape juice that Basira favoured. I would bring a different blend each week, and take a note of who liked what. Peppermint, chamomile, Assam, Ceylon, the traditional and the unusual. 

Not oolong, though. Never oolong.

Daisy surprised me one week by revealing a small and perfect porcelain tea set that fit neatly into a hamper. I felt like some Elizabethan nobleman, dignified to the point of ridiculousness, sipping from rose-painted china while my legs dangled off the roof. These lazy afternoons were halcyon and idealised, painted forever in my mind in strokes of gold and silver and rich sunset orange. 

It was on one of the smaller of our meetings that my worldview met with another concussive blow. Melanie had failed to appear entirely, as had Daisy, caught up in an optional seminar on self-defence. Basira, for once on her own, made a good attempt at a showing, but was called away by an imminent essay--with the same assignment weighing heavily on my mind, I couldn’t blame her. Sasha stayed a little longer, but had errands to run that pulled her away. Eventually Tim, too, left, excusing himself to attend some Architecture elective. 

And then it was just Jonathan and me left on the roof.

The silence stretched between us for a long few minutes. I wasn’t willing to get down yet, as the Archive was a pleasant refuge from the stresses of the half-finished essay I had left in my rooms--and neither, it seemed, was Jonathan. 

The chimneystack against my back was cool and slightly rough--much like our relationship. With everything that had happened, Jonathan had warmed to me slightly, or so I hoped, but he never seemed entirely comfortable around me. Or I him, for that matter--I was always far too cognisant of the sharpness of his intellect, his beauty, and his disdain. 

I still watched him, though. Whenever he was in a room, it was like he gathered all the light, drawing it close and letting it spill out around him, beatific, and it was impossible for me to look away. If I was as natural a student of comparative theology as I was the tiny details that comprised Jonathan Sims, I would have been Dr Bouchard’s favourite, I’m sure. But as it was, my scholarship was entirely specialised, and entirely private. Particularly to my subject, as I would only be greeted with withering scorn if he caught so much as a glimpse of my regard for him. 

I was determined not to be the one who broke the silence.

“You must think I despise you,” Jonathan finally remarked, and I jumped. He couldn’t read my mind, but he’d still hit remarkably close to the train of my thoughts.

He looked at me directly, a tinge of melancholy in his eyes. “You carry yourself differently when the others aren’t around. You’re more guarded.”

“Ah,” I said eloquently.

“It’s not like I haven’t given you cause,” he said. “I did, at first.”

“I’m sorry, what?” I asked, indignant. He made no attempt to hide it, of course, but even so, it was hardly something one would admit aloud.

His expression was inscrutable. “Past tense, not present.”

“Even so,” I huffed, still affronted.

He hummed a noncommittal agreement, and busied himself with withdrawing something from his jacket pocket. 

"Do you know why I hated you?" he asked a moment later, his voice barely above a murmur, eyes fixed on the lighter he was turning over in his long fingers. "Because I worked so hard to be here, and you just walked into the place, a term late, like you didn’t have a care in the world.”

I had to bite back the scoff that threatened to break forth. Carefree was one of the least likely descriptors for me. And why did it matter to him so much? He seemed effortlessly academic, and he was an original member of the Bouchard set. He had nothing to worry about.

“It didn’t feel fair that you were in the same financial position as me, but where I had to spend every waking minute fighting to be the best, just to be allowed to continue,” Jonathan said bitterly, “you were able to breeze straight through.”

“You’re on scholarship?” I asked, tactless in my surprise. “But...” 

“I’m not exactly proud of it,” Jonathan snapped. “A “gifted child” living with--hah, not even a single parent, but a single grandparent --”

“The others wouldn’t care,” I interrupted, trying to reassure him. 

“Enough people would.” He met my eyes coldly. “I’m not here to tick one of Avebury’s boxes. And I’m not a charity case, Martin, ‘oh, the poor orphan boy raised by his grandmother.’ I don’t want their pity, not now and not ever.”

“What about me?”

He seemed nonplussed by the question. “What about you?”

“I wouldn’t pity you,” I told him. “I don’t pity you, actually. You’re intimidatingly smart, you’re the only one Bouchard likes, and you’re almost, almost, too perfect to be real.”

I paused at that last. It had slipped out as matter-of-factly as the rest, my mouth betraying me without so much as the courtesy of giving my brain a warning. And apparently, it hadn’t yet finished.

“And you can be so much of a prick that it’s hard to feel sorry for you, sometimes,” my traitorous mouth continued. 

At that, Jonathan snorted indelicately, before falling silent once more as he digested what I said. “Is that what you think of me?” he asked quietly after a moment, his words dropping into the void I had created like water into dry earth.

I couldn’t lie. Despite everything I had learned to survive, the ways I could hide my sadness and loneliness and sarcasm behind the smiling mask of Good Old Reliable Martin, I couldn’t lie. Not to him.

“Yes.” I cleared my throat uncomfortably. “The good and the bad.”

Eventually, he nodded, slow and awkward, then his brow creased slightly. “I don’t--”

“Forget it, please,” I interrupted, before the telltale heat of a blush could creep its way over my face. “I... I don’t know. Um. Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. Any of it, if it’s made you uncomfortable, I, uh...”

“I knew you wouldn’t,” Jonathan said, instead of taking offence.

As was becoming normal in my conversations with the other members of the Bouchard set, and with Jonathan in particular, I passed straight through puzzlement and confusion to land in extreme bewilderment. “Sorry?”

“Pity me. I just knew you wouldn’t.”

His eyes flicked to the lighter in his hand, then back to mine. “I... well. We haven’t always seen eye to eye. That’s my fault, more than yours. But even with that, even if I didn't like you... I always knew I could trust you.”

As if ashamed by admitting such a thing, he returned to an intent study of the roof-tiles, while I sat there, dumbfounded. I thought I had plumbed the depths of confusion before, but there was still more for me to fall into.

“Jonathan...” 

His head snapped up, the motion putting me in mind of a deer in the headlights, seen and transfixed.

“No.”

And then he was once again silent. A moment passed, and I was almost ready to believe I had imagined that he had spoken at all. But there was still an alertness in his posture when I glanced over to him, the look of someone who has something on his mind.

A simple “Jon,” was all he eventually said.

“Pardon?” I asked, ever the slow-witted fool.

His mouth twisted as if he was reconsidering the wisdom of his choice, then committed. “It’s Jon. Not Jonathan.”

Jon .

"I've never liked Jonathan," he continued quietly. "But I thought it made me sound more... serious. Like them. Like I have the right to be here.”

I didn't know what to say. Any platitudes or denials I came up with would have sounded trite and empty.

“Will you tell the others?” I asked, in lieu of anything else, and because I was curious. 

He gave a half-hearted shrug, a raise of one shoulder. “Maybe. Probably, yes. But I’m not sure yet.”

I nodded. “Well, thank you for telling me.”

He inclined his head gently in response, and the silence--this time softer, more friendly--descended again.

Coming to some sort of decision on his own, and finally looking more at ease, Jonathan withdrew a packet of cigarettes from his breast pocket and flicked the lighter open. He tapped out a cigarette, plucking it from the cardboard with a practised hand, then went to retrieve another. His eyes flickered narrow for the briefest of seconds, and his hand paused, before he flipped the packet closed and replaced it in his pocket. 

"Something the matter?" I asked him, concerned. 

Jon just smiled ruefully. "I was going to offer you one, but you don't smoke."

Yet again that afternoon, I found myself taken aback. I didn't smoke, but I'd never made a big deal of the fact--to the point where even Tim, who I would say knew me best, still offered me cigarettes from time to time. It was an instinctive gesture on his part, I’m sure, and one that made me feel included, even though I declined without exception--so I was surprised that Jonathan had even noticed. Jonathan-- Jon --who smoked as if he was trying to give himself lung cancer. Whose favourite type of tea was strong English Breakfast, but would try every blend at least once, and despised coffee with a passion. Who was never ostentatious in his appearance, but was fastidious in every respect, with pressed shirts and carefully-tied hair and long fingers and well-kept nails, and always carried a small bottle of hand sanitiser in his trouser pocket, just in case. Who wrote with a script like calligraphy, perfectly suited to the flourishes of a fountain pen, but without exception wrote with the plain black ballpoint he kept in his top pocket. Who drank white wine over red as a general preference, but liked a dry Cabernet Franc best of all, and would never touch Chardonnay. Who I once noticed stoop to more closely watch a stray cat that regarded us from the shadows of an alleyway one autumn evening, his eyes uncharacteristically gentle as he observed the wary creature from a polite distance. Who was prickly and grouchy and still the quickest to respond the second he thought I was in trouble, down in the catacombs.

I had forgotten, it seemed, that when I was observing someone so closely, I was also being observed in turn.

Nothing outwardly changed, after that conversation. But when I climbed down from the Archive that day, I felt like something in my chest had shifted on a seismic scale.

And then, suddenly, it was the final week of term. It was a Tuesday, I remember it clearly, as I’d just finished a lecture for my Literature elective, all the way down the northern end of the town. I emerged into the March-crisp air--the afternoons were staying light, now, but the wind still carried a sharp chill--and retrieved my phone from my coat pocket. All at once, it vibrated, lighting up once, twice, three times, as a deluge of messages came pouring in.

An entire string of exclamation marks, from Tim. library, now , from Sasha. From Tim again, urgent urgent urgent

And from Melanie, most tantalisingly of all:

we found it

By the time I got to the Regian, and, with the direction of the portly Scandinavian librarian, found the hidden-away nook they had sequestered themselves in, I was burning with curiosity. Tim had been texting through my entire journey, a constant stream of where are you where are you where are you . I knew he could be impatient, but I’d never seen him--or indeed, any of the others--like this before. If they had come across what we had spent the term looking for, however... 

I couldn’t let myself begin to believe it, not until I had heard the words themselves, so I crossed Avebury at an undignified run. The others had apparently made their journey with as much haste as I had. Daisy’s blonde hair was haloed around her face, wisps escaping from their customary short ponytail, and Jonathan arrived in the doorway, breathing heavily yet nevertheless radiant, moments after I made my entrance. 

Tim, Melanie and Sasha unquestionably had the floor. All three of them were flushed and feverish with excitement as they talked over each other, all politeness forgotten in their need to share what they had discovered.

The words blurred together, but a coherent thread emerged out of the overlap.

“I found it--”

“-- we found it--”

“--Leitner was no fucking help--”

“--it was in an architecture book, of all things--”

“--Robert Smirke! You know, the Millbank architect, the one I told you about--”

“--and it led back to these letters, all these old white Regency dudes talking about the supernatural--”

“--which led to this guy called Von Closen--”

“--a study of superstition all across Europe--”

“--the stuff that never seemed important to other studies, the little things with a bad feeling--”

“--and it’s about balance--”

“-- im balance--”

“--well, it’s really about--”

And then, with perfectly awful timing, my phone rang. 

The caller ID flashed up with the hospital’s number, back in London. These sorts of calls were usually courtesies from my mother’s nurse, informing me of some minor change to her medication. It was something I thought I probably could have ignored--but after years of taking care of her, the instinct to answer had been drilled into me. Automatically, I stepped away, raising the phone to my ear.

It was then, a mere four days from when I had planned to go home for the vac, as I stood on the precipice of understanding exactly the track my life had been set on, that I received the news. My mother had died in hospital, of a catastrophic stroke. 

I had not been there for her, at the end. 

Neither did she want me.