ARIELLE

Chapter9

Here’s something I noticed:

If you work behind the café counter long enough, the campus starts to reveal itself in slices. The main library's entrance dominated my line of sight, with students streaming in and out carrying overweight backpacks as midterms drew closer. Armed with coffee in hand, they navigated deadlines in a caffeine-fueled hustle. To my left, the quad sprawled, Gothic buildings clustered close together like old bones too stubborn to be swept away by administrative whims. And to the right, if you stand exactly between the espresso machine and the pastry case, you’d see the North Tower. How do I know where exactly to stand? Call it intuition. It rose above Halebridge like a grudge that never learned how to let go.

I’d sensed something off about it from the onset, but the creeping dread didn’t take hold until the November cold arrived. It was like the windows could feel you staring and looked back at you, all dark glass and cold angles. The glass seemed sealed to deflect attention, not sunlight. It wasn’t really fulfilling its purpose, though, as it got a lot of attention from me regardless. And don’t even get me started on the bricks on the lower wall. I could swear they’d been patched in recently. The mortar was still the wrong color, a botched attempt at making the old disappear behind fresh stone.

Mara materialized beside me, holding a tray of clean cups. She’d worked at the café since the Bronze Age or something like that, about ten years by her own admission. “You’re staring at something,” she observed, sounding amused.

“The North Tower,” I answered. Star had told me its name during one of our evening walks around campus. “It’s weird, like a prop in a haunted house.”

Mara followed my gaze and gave a little shrug. “It sure is weird. Nobody goes in, nobody comes out. Technically, it serves as storage; the university’s solution to all things inconvenient and forgotten. Might as well be a ghost town.”

I wondered if she also felt the way the building radiated its own energy. “You ever see anyone actually use it?” I pressed.

She shook her head. “The only time the place was open was three years ago for a maintenance check. The crew left after an hour, their shoes looking like someone had emptied the janitor’s storeroom on them. They said it was nothing, but you know how campus gossip can be; news spread like wildfire. This must be what you guys find exciting now?”

“Well… it is way better than a bake sale,” I muttered.

She grinned before wandering off to attend to a customer, leaving me with the ancient espresso machine and a growing suspicion that Halebridge had secrets more potent than her coffee.

As though agreeing with me, the mystery followed me underground. The archive room in the library’s basement became my second home, initially as a result of my research assistant gig with Dr. Ashton, but increasingly as a solace from the noise and daylight dramas of college life. That Tuesday, I was looking for custodial history records for a painting from the 1980s, but opened the wrong filing drawer and tumbled into history.

Actual maps. Old, delicate, and barely holding together. The oldest, which was dated 1963, had dark lines tracing a campus that looked familiar in outline but alien in detail. The newest was from 1985. As I flipped through, Halebridge transformed before my eyes. Buildings popped up, paths were rerouted, and walkways materialized. The North Tower, however, stood unchanged—always there, its name inked in block letters like an admonition.

There was an annotation on the map from 1978: “North Tower: Internal restructuring, access restricted per administrative request.” Below it, someone had penciled a dotted line, showing doorways connected by underground passages. A leftover from a time when secrets were mapped out rather than remembered. In the next map, these routes had disappeared, replaced with a simple note: “Archival access restricted.”

Why would the university invest in so much underground infrastructure, then erase it from existence? Something didn’t sit right.

I acted on impulse and photographed the maps with my phone, my inner detective on high alert. Secrets, I always thought, were supposed to announce themselves with trumpets and storms, not fading pencil marks. Still, I felt like I’d stumbled on something left there on purpose.

During my research session with Dr. Ashton, I nudged him about my findings. He went quiet, considering my phone’s screen with a neutral expression.

“These are old,” he finally said. “Campus planning changes happen regularly. Infrastructure has to evolve; otherwise, we’d still be stuck in the Stone Age.” He closed the file we had been working on and suggested a new project, something earlier, from the ’90s. I didn’t press. The switch was subtle, but my brain put it aside as another footnote in the ledger of things that didn’t add up.

Life outside the archival library continued its charade of normalcy. Star asked why I stuck to the basement so often. “You have access to an actual art studio, you know? That has windows, the kind that let in light—not cryptic vibes.”

“I like it down there,” I confessed. “It’s quiet. Feels like there are secrets kept there, not because they are necessarily dangerous, but because they matter. Someone took care to preserve things, and I’m very curious about what those things are.”

She arched an eyebrow. “You sound almost poetic. Be sure not to tell your fans, it’ll destroy your reputation as resident cynic.”

“My secret’s safe with me,” I replied. It was a joke, but not a comfortable one.

Though the archive room was fortress-like, it still had cracks. There was a back area, insulated and kept cool, that was filled with artifacts not shown on campus tours. While doing research, I would sometimes stop and study the velvet rope that blocked off the restricted section, calculating how many rules I would have to break to satisfy my curiosity about what was behind it. But in the meantime, I remained law-abiding and kept storing information at the back of my mind. The urge to cross the invisible line hovered at the edges of my consciousness, growing stronger by the day.

The campus felt different—colder, quieter, like everyone had an unspoken agreement to lie low until after finals. I rotated between café shifts, classes, and research, my calendar crammed. The café became my personal watchtower.

Customers came and went. Some students spent a large chunk of their day in the café studying. Professors chatted about nothing and everything. Dr. Ashton started coming by in the afternoons, and his visits grew more frequent. He’d walk in with his black coat to ward off the November chill, order his coffee black, and engage me in a conversation. He also had a habit of taking careful glances at my sketchbook as we talked.

He asked me about my painting projects, how my experience with the seminars has been so far, and who I spent time with. Always friendly, never inappropriate, but his questions started becoming a ritual. “Have you always been this observant?” he asked one day as I prepared his order. “I’m really curious as to how your childhood was for you to notice what others miss.”

“Hidden talent,” I replied. “I don’t know, I never tried figuring out how. Even my art’s obsessive, apparently.”

“It’s a gift,” he told me. “Understanding what’s beneath the surface is useful; in painting, life and all things hidden.”

That right there sounded like something he’d told me before.

I just nodded, feeling assessed like a math problem. A prickly thought lingered: Had he been studying me as closely as I was the North tower and the campus’s history?

Even Mara noticed his consistency. “Your professor’s turning into a regular,” she commented after Dr. Ashton left one day. “He likes his coffee, but I bet he likes talking to you even more.”

I also spotted other patterns, maybe due to my recent investment in it. I hadn’t really paid much attention before. Professors talking quietly near the North Tower. Administrative assistants glancing in that direction nervously. No one ever approached the locked door; its handle was smudged but unmoved, probably since the maintenance crew’s visit.

Despite my best efforts, I never found outright answers. What was stored in the North Tower, and who, if anyone, had the key? Star was the only person I could trust with fragments of my suspicions. We joked about the haunted architecture, but I could tell she was paying serious attention beneath all the laughter.

As we split a bag of pretzels and watched the rain splatter the quad one evening, she broke the lull. “If you’re looking for trouble, there’s got to be a better kind than campus ghost stories.”

I snorted. “Trouble is overrated. I, for one, am just looking for context. Who builds a tower like that anyway?”

“Old money, old secrets. College is basically a museum for things nobody’s willing to explain.” Her answer was vague, but I let it go, my resolve hardening.

It seemed like mystery actually enjoyed my company, because the next archive session brought another oddity. I found an unlabeled box tucked away on a top shelf. Inside were scrapbooks from years past, filled with annotated photos and Polaroids. One image in particular caught my attention—a group of people who looked like faculty members, smiling as they stood in front of the North Tower during a ribbon-cutting ceremony, the brick looking as new as a fresh scar. Most faces were unfamiliar, but two stood out: Ashton, shockingly young and grim-faced, and a woman who bore a striking resemblance to Star. I slid the photo back into the scrapbook, but not before taking a picture for reference.

Later, in painting class, my mind wandered. Dr. Cho warned about “letting distractions win,” but my canvas was filled with exactly that: architectural lines, shadowed windows, and blocked-off doors. When she walked by, she paused while studying my abstraction. “Looks like you’re chasing a story, whose?”

I shrugged. “Campus legend.”

She smiled, enigmatically. “Legends have roots somewhere.”

It stayed with me till that night in the dorm, as I sat at my desk. It was then that I realized how much could be hidden in plain sight if only you knew what you were looking for and looked hard enough.

Still, there was no fear. Majorly curiosity, lingering long enough for suspicion to take root. The campus, I concluded, was alive in its own way.