“No, it’s… it’s alright.” With a deep, bolstering breath, I dug deep and pulled out memories covered with dust and aged around the edges. But in the center, there was my sister, as bright as when she was alive.
Ophelia waited, not moving or speaking until I was ready.
“Her name was Laura,” I said. Ophelia hummed contently as I voiced life to my sister’s memory once again. “She was older than I. Outgoing and loud, she knew when to put me in my place when I needed it. Laura came to Kilbride on a scholarship for art. At the time, I was too young and foolish to understand how it happened. I thought her projects were all nonsense. But smarter people than me saw the beauty in her creativity. Only now, decades later, can I appreciate the artistic legacy she left behind.”
“Do you still have some of her artworks?”
“I do, yes.”
“I’d love to see them someday. If you’d let me.”
“I just might,” I conceded.
My hand lazily stroked Ophelia’s side under the covers. She wriggled closer, and I tightened my arm around her waist. Then I kissed her temple, feeling her body go lax as she fell asleep. “Laura would have loved you.”
But not as much as I do.
27
I’m in my grandpa’s office, holding his journal.
My fingers run over the pages, luxuriating in the texture of parchment and tracing his handwriting. A strange piece of him left behind, and a part that frustrated me as much as I appreciated it. And I’m staring at the symbols and impenetrable language, tension rising as I still can’t solve the…
The ink melts across the pages, turning into smoke. I gasp and rear back, clutching the journal tight as the smoke swirls and sinks back into the pages. Liquid ink spools down the parchment before threading into sigils and words I no longer struggle to decipher.
Somehow it looks the same but just different enough that the illegible scrawl makes sense. Softened enough that my suddenly rewired brain grasps at new meanings. No longer infuriating nonsense, but coherent clues to something definitive. Perhaps something my grandfather wanted me to find.
My eyes narrowed on the clearest line in the middle of two fuzzy paragraphs. A code?
No, it was coordinates.
A whooshing wind crashes through my ears.
The walls bleed and blur, turning to mist as the room dissolves.
My heart revolts. It twists and drops, worsening the sensation of the world being ripped out from under my feet andtipping me sideways. Paralyzed, my form crashes through the floor, and I couldn’t so much as flinch.
Pitch darkness claws up and swallows me.
I blink, finding myself in a new location.
The world crystalizes around me like fractals of a diamond flattening into a clear pane of glass. As if I had become a puppet on strings, my foot moves forward. Propelled through the glassy surface, I enter a world of gray gloom and a thick fog so palpably heavy it grabs at my ankles with each step forward.
I’m at Kilbride, walking across the misty quad at night. My legs are moving as if they know the way.
I feel like another ghost, one of hundreds, haunting the campus.
In my periphery, I see them. Specters caught in time, lost in the veil between worlds and trapped for eternity. And I am one of them, and they are me.
I am heading toward the address from the journal, somehow knowing it was a location on campus. Memory of how I got there evaded me, but that’s inconsequential. I have somewhere to be. It’s very important that I be there.
The archive building materializes from the gray shroud. Rising one brick at a time from the darkness in all its aged glory. Arched, narrow windows, ivy snaking through the grooves in the stone—the large wooden door parts soundlessly like jaws opening and ready to feast. And I slid inside like a willing meal, eager to be swallowed into the cold, concrete stomach of the beast.
I blink, and I’m no longer in the foyer.
I’m on the stairs, going down, down, down.
The deeper I go, the darker it becomes.
