PAINTED IN BLOOD

PART 2 (Chapter 2: The Professor Who Doesn't Blink)

"He knew my name before I introduced myself. He noticed I closed my notebook. He spoke for an hour and a half about the nature of human creativity and I genuinely could not tell you a single moment where he seemed like a normal person."

Cora was quiet for a moment.

"Did he blink?" she asked.

I stared at her.

She had the expression of someone who had asked the question before and already knew the answer but wanted confirmation.

"Not at a normal rate," I said slowly.

Cora nodded, like this was information she was filing away. She picked up her sandwich, looked at it, put it down again.

"Cora," I said. "What do you know about him?"

"About Professor Voss?"

"About any of it. The portrait. The missing students. The taxi drivers who won't come past the gate after dark." I watched her face carefully. "You know things. I could tell last night. You decided not to tell me, which means you made a choice, which means there's something to choose about."

She was quiet for long enough that I thought she wasn't going to answer.

Then she closed her sketchbook.

"My grandmother went to Aldermoor," she said. "Class of 1974."

I waited.

"She was the top-ranked student that year."

The cold that moved through me had nothing to do with the autumn air.

"She didn't disappear," Cora continued. "She left voluntarily, two weeks before the end of year exhibition. She never talked about why.

Not to anyone — not my grandfather, not my mother, not me." She looked at her hands. "But before she died, she gave me a notebook. Old, falling apart. And in the front cover she had written one thing."

"What?"

Cora looked at me. Her huge dark eyes were very steady.

"Whatever you do, do not let him see your work."

The courtyard was quiet around us. Somewhere above, a window creaked open in the wind.

"She didn't say who," Cora said. "She didn't need to. There's only one him at Aldermoor who has been here long enough to matter." She picked up her sketchbook again, opened it to a blank page. "I came here anyway. Because I needed to know."

"Know what?"

"What he is." She looked up at me, and something in her expression shifted — younger, somehow, and more afraid than she was letting herself show. "What he actually is."

I thought about the portrait. The eyes that followed. The brass plaque that had no right to say what it said.

I thought about the way Professor Voss had looked at me during orientation — that two-second pause that had felt, inexplicably, like recognition.

D. Voss. Faculty. Est. 1847.

"Cora," I said carefully. "How long do you think he's been here?"

She smiled. It was a small, tired smile, the kind that meant she had been carrying a question for a long time without an answer.

"Long enough," she said, "that the portrait in the entrance hall isn't a portrait of his ancestor."

The wind moved through the courtyard.

I looked at my sketchbook — the one Professor Voss had held by the corner, careful not to touch my fingers.

Your work will tell me everything.

I thought about closing it again.

I thought about my grandmother — I didn't have one who had gone to Aldermoor, who had left a warning in a falling-apart notebook. I had nothing except the feeling that had followed me up the hill last night and hadn't left since.

The feeling that I had walked through those gates knowing, on some level, that something in there had been waiting.

And that it already knew my name.