The archive room

First class

The bell tolled seven times, deep, hollow notes that reverberated through stone and skin alike. I stirred beneath a too-thin blanket and reached instinctively for warmth that wasn’t there. The air in Bellmere House had teeth. The window beside my bed had frosted at the corners, and my breath curled visibly in the air.

Ava’s bed was already empty, sheets smoothed to perfection, her scarf missing from the peg on the wall.

On my desk sat a folded piece of paper, unassuming but deliberate. In her now-familiar handwriting:

“Lecture Hall B2. Don’t be late. He notices.”

I blinked the sleep from my eyes and sat up slowly, the tension from yesterday still lingering in my shoulders. I hadn’t dreamed, not exactly, but I’d felt watched all night, like the walls themselves had kept a ledger of my thoughts.

I dressed in quiet haste. Black sweater. Long skirt. My boots creaked on the floorboards. I braided my hair with stiff fingers and tied it with a velvet ribbon. No makeup. Just enough composure to keep the outside world from seeing the chaos inside.

I stepped into the corridor. The air smelled like damp stone and old wax. The light filtering through the narrow window panes was thin and colorless. I didn’t expect the sun, not here. At Blackmoor, light always felt borrowed.

The courtyard was nearly empty. Just a few silhouettes moving between buildings, their coats drawn tightly around them, their heads down against the sharp bite of the morning wind.

I paused under the archway before stepping out, letting my eyes take in the campus under a veil of early frost.

Blackmoor looked older in the daylight.

The library tower pierced the clouds like a cathedral left half-unfinished. Ivy covered half the walls and had turned black in the cold. Stone gargoyles clung to the corners of buildings, their eyes hollow, mouths frozen mid-scream. The grass in the quad was brittle underfoot. Somewhere, bells rang again - not timekeeping, just a reminder. A presence.

As I crossed under one of the old cloisters, a raven burst from the rafters above, wings slicing through the fog like ink dropped in milk. I watched it vanish toward the eastern side of campus, where the oldest buildings hunched together like secrets.

A few students leaned against the stone columns outside the dining hall, smoking and murmuring in French. Their eyes flicked to me, then away. No smiles. At Blackmoor, no one asked who you were on the first day. They waited to see who you’d become.

Lecture Hall B2 was down a long corridor of stained glass and shadowed alcoves. The door was thick wood, older than any classroom door I’d ever seen - hinges blackened with age, carved with initials and scratched-over years: 1947. 1872. A.V.

I pushed it open.

The room was smaller than I expected. Dark wooden paneling rose halfway up the stone walls, and high windows filtered in pale light. A heavy fireplace stood cold at the back of the room, flanked by two empty armchairs that looked like no one had sat in them for decades. A blackboard spanned the front wall, already scrawled with notes in tight, elegant script. Names. Titles. Quotes.

Eight or nine students sat scattered among the rows, none of them speaking. Some took notes already, some pretended not to care. All of them looked like they belonged.

I took a seat at the far left side of the room, one row from the back, and opened my notebook. My hands were still cold. I rubbed them together beneath the desk.

Then the door creaked open again.

And in he walked.

Caspian Vale.

He wore a black buttoned coat over his shirt, the cuffs turned back neatly to reveal the pale skin of his wrists. No tie. No robe. His hair was slightly tousled, as if he hadn’t bothered with it. He moved like someone who didn’t need to explain himself.

He didn’t stand behind the desk.

He didn’t even introduce himself.

He just looked at us all for a moment, long enough that the silence grew too thick to breathe, and then spoke:

“The Gothic is not about ghosts. It’s about what we fear when the lights go out.”

He didn’t smile. He didn’t blink.

And I couldn’t look away.

Professor Vale crossed the room slowly, his boots quiet on the stone floor, and picked up a piece of chalk. It made no sound as it touched the board.

He turned back to us, the chalk still resting between his fingers.

“It is not horror, not really. Horror is the scream. Gothic is the silence that follows.”

No one moved. The room seemed suspended between breath and thought.

He walked slowly between the rows of desks. “Gothic fiction exists in the space between reason and madness. Between duty and desire. It is a literature of shadows.”

He paused by a student seated near the front and held up a small black book - The Monk by Matthew Lewis.

“You read this over the break. Some of you probably hated it. It’s lurid, convoluted, and indecent. But what frightened Lewis wasn’t the supernatural, it was temptation. Corruption. A priest undone by his own appetites.”

His eyes moved across us like searchlights, waiting for something to rise to the surface.

Then:

“Why do we romanticize decay?”

Silence.

The question hung there like a blade. I lowered my gaze, praying he’d ask someone else.

No such luck.

“Miss Holloway.”

My head snapped up. Everyone turned to look.

“I...” I cleared my throat. “Maybe because...decay means something once lived. We don’t fear what dies - we fear what used to be beautiful.”

Professor Vale tilted his head slightly. “Not bad,” he said. “But you’re holding back.”

He walked back to the front of the room and picked up another book - Wuthering Heights.

“Decay is not death. It’s memory refusing to fade. Obsession. Guilt. Desire unfulfilled.” He held the book up like an accusation. “This is not a love story. It’s a ghost story.”

He dropped the chalk into its holder and looked at me one last time.

“And the question is: which ghosts are you carrying, Miss Holloway?”

A chill passed through me, not from the cold, but from the sense that he already knew the answer.

When the bell rang - though there were no bells at Blackmoor, only the creak of doors and the scrape of chairs - I stayed in my seat longer than necessary, pretending to put away my notebook slowly.

Most of the other students filed out in silence, murmuring to each other or hurrying off to their next class.

I glanced up just in time to see him walking past me, Professor Vale, coat flaring slightly with each step.

He stopped at the end of my row.

“Miss Holloway,” he said, voice low enough that it didn’t travel.

I looked up, startled. “Yes?”

He studied me for half a second. “Your answer was honest. You’d be surprised how rare that is.”

I said nothing. I didn’t trust myself to.

“Don’t second-guess your instincts,” he added. “They’re usually more loyal than your mind.”

Then he walked away, leaving nothing behind but a faint scent of ink and cloves.

I found Ava back in our room, her feet propped on the windowsill, painting her nails with a practiced hand and humming something low and eerie.

She didn’t look up when I walked in.

“Well?” she asked. “Did he speak to you?”

I hesitated. “Sort of.”

She turned to face me, eyes narrowing like a cat scenting something interesting. “He looked at you the whole class.”

“I don’t think he...”

“He always picks someone,” Ava interrupted. “Every year. Last year it was a girl named Eloise. Brilliant. Fragile. She left in the middle of the term. No explanation. No goodbye.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Are you saying he...?”

“I’m saying nothing,” she said quickly. “Except this: don’t get flattered.”

I sat on my bed and unlaced my boots, heart still pacing from the encounter. “He just... asked me a question.”

“And then spoke to you after.”

I didn’t reply. Because Ava was right, he had looked at me too long, too closely. And something in his voice had felt like a dare.

Ava blew on her nails and said, without looking at me, “If he pulls you in, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

I lay back on my bed, staring at the ceiling where the candlelight cast flickering shadows that looked like wings.

Something had begun.

I just didn’t know if I was being seen, or hunted.

Later that night, the hallway outside Bellmere was quieter than usual. A heavy fog clung to the ground outside the window, thick as wool. Even the owls were silent. I couldn’t sleep, not after the way his voice still echoed in my chest. I sat at my desk, flipping through the worn pages of The Monk again, trying to focus.

I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, answers, maybe. Or signs. The book felt heavier in my hands than it had earlier, though I knew that was just projection. Everything felt heavier since that class. Since him.

I reached into my bag to retrieve a pen and froze.

There, folded neatly between my notebooks, was a piece of parchment.

No one had touched my bag. I was sure of it.

I unfolded the page slowly. It was written in the same tight, elegant handwriting I’d seen on the blackboard.

You ask good questions, even when you don’t say them out loud.

No greeting. No context.

Just that.

I sat back in my chair, my breath catching.

He had placed it there. During class, maybe. Or right after. I replayed every moment - had I turned my back, even for a second?

A chill ran down my spine. It wasn’t just the message, but the fact that he’d been close enough to leave it. That he had written it at all.

What did he mean by even when you don’t say them out loud?

Had I said something with my silence?

I closed the note and tucked it between the pages of my journal, trying not to tremble.

But I couldn’t help it.

Because as strange as it was... I wasn’t afraid.

Not really.

It was something else. Something slower. Deeper. Like the ground shifting just a little beneath your feet, just enough to remind you that you’re standing on something ancient and unstable.

I lay in bed that night staring at the ceiling, the shape of his letters burned behind my eyelids.

You ask good questions.

What questions?

And more importantly,

What answers was he planning to give me?