"Academy?" I ask.
He uncrosses his arms. Looks at my bag, then at my face, taking his time about it. "How old are you?"
"Eighteen."
He looks at the mountain. The peak is visible above the tree line from here, gray rock and early snow, and the Academy is somewhere up there in the trees, invisible from this angle. He stays looking at it for a beat longer than the question requires. Something in his jaw tightens.
Then he opens the back door and gets in without a word.
We don't talk on the way up. The road winds through dense pines, switchbacks carved into the mountain with no guardrails, the drop on one side going down and down through trees until I can't see the bottom. The forest presses in from both sides, all the same height, all the same dark green, and they don't make any sound even though there is clearly wind up here, moving the canopy overhead. That's wrong. Trees in wind make noise. These don't.
I keep my eyes on the road.
The driver drops me at a wrought-iron gate set into a stone wall that disappears in both directions into the tree line. The gate is open. He doesn't pull through it.
"They'll collect your bag," he says, engine still running. "Registration is in the main building, straight up the path." A pause. I have the door half open when he speaks again, quiet enough that I have to focus to catch it. "Pretty girls don't last here."
He's pulling away before I've fully stepped out. I watch the taillights disappear around the bend. Just the gate, the path beyond it, the amber lamp light already burning in the late afternoon gloom.
I step through the gate.
The path from the gate to the Academy is about a quarter mile of crushed gravel lined with iron lamp posts, the lamps already burning even though it's only late afternoon, their light a deep amber that pools on the gravel and doesn't quite reach the shadows between them. The air smells different inside the gate, even after just a few steps. Still pine, still cold mountain, but richer now, more layered, more alive.
The grounds on either side are manicured to a standard that doesn't feel possible outdoors, in a mountain October, in a place with actual weather. The grass is so even and close-cut it looks pressed, more like a surface than a living thing. The hedgerows are shaped to geometric angles, every edge clean, not a twig out of place. Flower beds in late-season bloom, each plant spaced exactly from the next, the blooms all facing the same direction, the whole of it so relentlessly perfect that it sets something off in the back of my skull. Not fear exactly. A low, source less hum of wrongness, the feeling of something that looks right but isn't.
No birds. I realize it now, halfway up the path. The mountain had birds, I heard them through the taxi window. Here, inside the wall, nothing. The only sound is my own footsteps on the gravel and the low sigh of wind moving through the perfectly shaped hedgerows without disturbing a single branch.
Beautiful. Wrong. The combination of the two sits in my chest as I keep walking, each step on the gravel too loud in the no-bird silence.
The Academy comes into view around a bend in the path and my step falters for just a moment.
It's Gothic stone, dark with decades of mountain weather, reaching up into the sky in towers and buttresses and arched windows that throw the amber lamp light back at me. Gargoyles line the roofline, dozens of them, and they are not the generic crouching figures you see on cathedrals in photographs. Each one is different. Each one is individual, their expressions carved with too much care, too much detail, as though the carver worked from something real rather than imagination. Some are crouching. Others are stretched upright, arms extended, mouths open. Each one faces outward. Each one looks down at the path. At me.
The main building is four stories at its lowest point, wings spreading left and right, and the whole thing sits against the mountain as though it belongs there, as though the mountain shaped itself around the building rather than the other way around. Every window is lit from within, warm light behind old glass, distorted and amber. There are students behind some of those windows, shadows moving across the panes, the life of the place going on inside it, completely ordinary.
It should be stunning. It is stunning. It is also exactly what the bus driver's silence meant, what the taxi driver's quiet warning meant, what the town at the bottom of the mountain meant with its eyes-down residents and its weathered-over windows. This place has been here a long time and it has been beautiful the whole time and beautiful has never made it safe.
A sound reaches me from somewhere above the tree line, higher on the mountain. A howl, long and climbing, and then something in the middle register that doesn't sound like ananimal testing its voice in the dark. It sounds like something being split open from the inside, unwilling. It rises, holds, and cuts off. The silence after it presses down.
My pulse has gone faster than I'd like. My hands are steady, which is what I'm going to focus on.
I walk toward the front doors. I don't look at the gargoyles. I don't look at the man with the bucket. I keep my eyes on the entrance and keep walking until my hand is on the cold iron handle. I pull it open and go inside.
The cobblestones of the main courtyard are wet.
I notice it because the rest of the grounds are dry, the late October air cold enough to have chased off any moisture hours ago, the path behind me bone-dry under my feet. But the cobblestones in the open courtyard in front of the main entrance are dark with dampness, a roughly circular patch maybe six feet across, just to the left of the front steps. And there is a man crouched over it, gray coveralls, a bucket beside him, working at the stones with a long-handled brush in quick, systematic strokes.
He hears my footsteps on the cobblestones and glances up.
Our eyes meet for a moment. His face is closed, nothing moving in it, and then his eyes drop to mine watching the bucket and his jaw tightens. I look at what's in the bucket. The water is dark. Not the gray of soapy water, not the brown of mud. A darker color than either of those, with a density to it, the color of something diluted but not diluted enough. He looks back down at his work. The brush keeps moving across the stones, back and forth, systematic and unhurried, the rhythm of a task that has a method behind it.
I look at the courtyard around us. The rest of the cobblestones are dry and clean. Just this patch. Just this circle,six feet across, directly in front of the main steps, in the most visible possible location, being scrubbed away before the evening properly arrives.
I walk past him. Past the dark patch and the brush moving back and forth across the stones. I don't stop until my hand is on the cold iron handle of the front door and I am through it.
The entrance hall is vaulted stone, the ceiling disappearing into shadow high above, a chandelier of wrought iron hanging from it, candles burning in the early gloom. The floor is polished dark stone and my footsteps ring off it, bouncing back from the walls, announcing me to the empty space. Portraits line the walls all the way up the staircase, oil paintings in heavy frames, generations of faces staring out at nothing. The staircase sweeps up from the far end, wide, the banister dark wood worn smooth.
The smell hits me properly for the first time. Stone and candle wax and underneath that, something warm and alive and layered, something that fills my lungs differently than the mountain air outside did and settles there like a hand pressing down on my sternum. My pulse shifts. Something in me goes quiet and alert at the same time, like a sound just outside the range of hearing that I'm straining toward.
