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The letter landed heavily on the doormat, its creamy envelope conspicuous in a sea of estate agent leaflets. I opened it while waiting for my toast to pop up, and the name on the elegant letterhead gave me a feeling like a cold hand on the back of the neck. Frances Cavendish was announcing the Cavendish Scholarship: a new bursary for disadvantaged students, to help them pursue their musical studies at Cambridge. The moment Frances had decided to set up the scholarship, she’d wanted to involve me. Not just, I imagine, as director of Voices from Before (which she acknowledged as Manchester’s finest ensemble for early twentieth-century vocal works, a phrase that mirrored our website exactly), but as a friend of the Cavendish family.

Frances very much hoped I’d join the judging panel at the auditions later in the year to select the recipients of the inaugural award. After the judging, there’d be a celebratory dinner in college, for the organizers, the judges, and their guests, which would of course be an emotional but rewarding experience. Frances ended the letter saying something about “fond memories.” Not what I’d call them.

My instinct was of course to reply with a firm “thanks, but no.” Life had settled, the years steady as a metronome, and I’d relished it: the parents, assuring me of their children’s genius, the children themselves rolling from one grade to the next at a resolutely average pace. Outside teaching, I clung to the predictable calendar of concerts through which my ensemble performed for undiscerning local crowds. That the vast majority of my university connections were broken was no accident.

And yet. This was a tantalizing professional opportunity, the kind of thing usually reserved for my more successful peers. I often came across former classmates conducting at the Proms or talking on Radio 3, and it had started to feel like I’d only imagined sitting behind them in the lecture hall. Like it was another person who had walked beside them down those hallowed corridors. I smelled burning and swore as I retrieved my blackened breakfast from the toaster. No. Of course I couldn’t go back.

The letter lay on the kitchen counter for a couple of weeks, and my eyes danced over it each time I heaped coffee into the pot. As I drove to rehearsals, Frances’s words rolled around my head like a screw come loose, and when I stood at my music stand, baton in hand, the crotchets and quavers in my score seemed occasionally to collapse into her elegant type. Now and again I set the wrong tempo, forgot to cue a soloist, and the singers shifted gradually from amusement to exasperation. Once, when I turned up late for a pre-concert rehearsal I blamed it on a death in the family, which I almost convinced myself was true. All the while I had a sensation like a toothache, low and dragging.

I suppose most people would have told their partner what was bothering them. But I didn’t say a word to anyone. I moved through the quotidian moments, the dinner and the cleaning up, and the hour in front of the TV, an actor playing the part of a man who was fine. At night I’d lie in bed, mine the only eyes open and staring into the dark, feeling that the world around me had been invisibly altered. Our moonlit possessions—my slippers sitting lumpish by the door, her hairbands knotted on the bedside table, the mirror hanging slightly askew—seemed to have been swapped when I wasn’t looking, little domestic changelings, and everything was imbued with a kind of menace that I couldn’t prove and couldn’t explain. All of it, I knew, was powered by my fear that, if I went back to college, he’d be there too.

In the end, my reply was inevitable. After going out of my way to buy some fussy note paper from an overpriced museum shop, I wrote Frances a prim reply declaring that I’d be honored to accept the invitation. But, months later, as I headed back to the place where it all began, I wondered whether I was looking not for honor but for vindication.

It all started in the first years of the new millennium, beneath a frail, late-September sun. My stepdad paced around the car, pink-faced, panicking that he was going to get a ticket. Meanwhile, my mum and I dumped cardboard boxes (all of which seemed to have coat hangers poking oafishly out) onto the pavement. One box had split at the side and was spilling my two-for-one bottles of antibacterial facewash onto the curb. I stood back to let a family wheel their matching luggage noiselessly past.

“Bloody hell,” my mum breathed. “Amazing, isn’t it?”

I looked up and inwardly thrilled at the towering building that had stood golden for more than six hundred years. Through the enormous wooden gates was a square courtyard, where sandstone walls looked down on a pristine lawn striped in shades of sage and pear. On the far side of the courtyard was a chapel, its leaded windows jeweled with brightly colored medieval glass. This, the prospectus had said, was New Court. Somewhere beyond was another courtyard, fourteenth century, the oldest not just in this college but the whole university, imaginatively named Old Court. The whole thing felt a long way from my sixth form, which could have passed for an abandoned Soviet gymnasium.

“It’s alright,” I mumbled, turning to watch the bicycles, some of which really did have wicker baskets on the front, sailing up and down Trumpington Street.

I’d already visited the porters’ lodge and had been directed toward H staircase: one of several lettered staircases in New Court, each of them an ascending spiral of student rooms. Having liberated my possessions from the car, we started shuttling them to H2, a ground-floor room containing a piano that sounded surprisingly terrible. With every box I delivered, I told myself: this space was mine, and I would belong here. I was a book, slipping neatly onto a new shelf.

I was collecting the last of my boxes when I noticed a girl on the college steps guarding a gigantic suitcase. A pretty girl, peering at a bunch of papers, her brow creasing slightly as her gaze passed from one page to the next. Her hair was arranged in two buns, and she wore that style of flared jeans—low at the hips, pockets studded with diamanté—popular with the MTV stars of the time. Behind me, Mum asked loudly whether I’d remembered my hay fever tablets.

Perhaps I would never have introduced myself anyway. Certainly not in front of my mum and stepdad, whose unnecessarily smart outfits and palpable confusion set them apart from the other parents moving about the place. In any case I didn’t get the chance because, somehow, out of nowhere, he was there. He had a broad, open face that you might have described as timeless, the kind that could just as well belong to a Premier League striker as a World War Two fighter pilot. Billowing around him was a dark, wool coat with a gray scarf, an affront to the mildness of the day—neither fashionable nor unfashionable, clothes that couldn’t be pinned to a particular era. Dark hair crept from beneath his collar, which to me (someone who could count his chest hairs on two hands) seemed almost indecent. It also contrasted strangely with his long, slender fingers. Most striking was his poise. I was used to my peers holding typical adolescent shapes: slouches to signal disinterest, furtive hunches to disguise cans or cigarettes. But he had an ease, a gravity that I recognized in teachers or police officers or politicians. While I drifted, an untethered balloon, he was a monument that had stood for centuries.

I paused where I stood, as if taking stock of my CD collection, and I saw him say something to the girl. The expression on her face made it clear they were strangers to one another. He moved close to whisper in her ear, his smile revealing small, straight teeth.

Then, something odd: the girl stepped back, chin tucked, her mouth a stern line. She seemed alarmed, or offended, and I wondered if she might walk away from this guy. Maybe even slap him. I remember that he reached for her narrow wrist—cautiously, as if handling a bird—and turned her hand palm upward. I wasn’t sure, but it looked as if something moved in the pale bowl of her hand.

Then the girl threw back her head and gave the most astonishing laugh, like the jangling of bells. When she turned her face to him again, chattering wildly, her fingers landed gently on his forearm. They were conspirators now.

My stepdad called out to my mum, anxious for them to get back on the road. It was a four-hour drive, remember? Arms straining beneath the last battered box, mortified at the smallness of my possessions beneath the illustrious Cambridge sky, I turned and passed through the enormous gate and across the courtyard to my room, past that strange and spellbinding theater, feeling like I’d missed my cue.

Typical, that I start the story at the point he entered it.

I know where my mum would start. She’d say that she’d known since I was a baby, when I’d clap along to her Culture Club cassettes perfectly in time, that I was going to be a musician. She’d tell you about the piano lessons that began when I was five, the ones she worked overtime to pay for, and the book tokens I brought home from junior school talent shows. She’d describe the scales and arpeggios that thundered through our tiny house, the evenings when “You Can Play Simon and Garfunkel: Book One” drowned out her favorite soaps. Later, the Bach suites whose leaping left hand parts required hours of repetition, the Poulenc pieces whose liquid harmonies still sounded wrong even when I’d checked the score five or six times. With no small pride, she’d tell you how, after some adventures with the clarinet and saxophone, I took up the bassoon (so exotic, she’d say), which led to the youth orchestras, the town hall concerts, the teacher who was the first to say that I really should think about Oxbridge. And, even though she wasn’t present for any of it, Mum would describe yet again my bizarre Cambridge interview, during which I played an impassioned Brahms piece on the piano while an interviewer in a dressing gown fiddled noisily with his kettle. Who cares what he wore, she’d say. He offered you a place, didn’t he? She’d paint you a picture, filled with music and applause, my arrival at Cambridge the triumphant finale to my teenage years.

But my mum’s version is half a story, a Disney version of a tale that was Grimm. Because, in my version, music was my joy and my curse. At the poorly performing small-town school I attended, being academically successful—and making an effort to be so—was considered unforgivable. Classical music was for the snooty and the precocious. And the bassoon? A provocation, a gift for piss-takers. The only people in school who liked me were the teachers, and I’m sure even some of them thought I was a bit much.

Things didn’t get any better for me once we’d skulked up to sixth form, when it became customary for my peers to spend their weekends Down Town in pubs choked with cigarette smoke, in bars offering free sambuca to girls in boob tubes. I went “out” perhaps a handful of times, but I didn’t like it. Too many people there would recognize me from high school and deliver some wisecrack:

“Oi! Thought you’d be home, playing with your horn.”

“A bassoon isn’t a horn. It’s a woodwind instrument.”

“I wasn’t talking about your bassoon.”

During those A level years, I socialized almost exclusively in the sixth form canteen with Gaz and Ben and Reedy, guys I’d known since junior school and who enjoyed nothing about classical music except for the fact that the German word for bassoon is Fagott.

But at Cambridge, coolness surely wasn’t going to be a prerequisite for social success. On my interview day, I’d noticed how other male applicants had shunned the gels and pomades used by my school colleagues and instead wore their hair in the bouffant style of minor royals. They wouldn’t have lasted five minutes in The Rose and Crown. I told myself, surely even I couldn’t be weird in a place where teenage boys and girls wore gowns to dinner. In any case, by the time I found myself juggling those boxes in front of college, I knew that university was an opportunity for reinvention. Your near-total lack of experience with the opposite sex? Erased from the record. That time you farted thunderously during the minute’s silence and made Becky Baxter gag? Like it never happened. My high school days were over before Facebook had conquered the world, and I was free to rewrite my history.

So, in those first weeks of first term, I started turning up at room parties as if I were the kind of person to do that kind of thing. On hearing the distant thump of a bass speaker I’d head toward the sound, a sailor drawn to the siren of sociability—and on discovering a gathering I’d slip inside, into a room of hulking boat crew or moody thesps dressed in beanie hats and band T-shirts (The Strokes, Gorillaz, Sigur Rós. I knew none of them). Although I didn’t drink, and never had, I’d take six-packs of cheap lager and set them ostentatiously on whatever desk or table was serving as the bar, like a dinner party guest presenting a fine claret to the host. Then I’d nod at people as if casting a reel, hoping to catch hold of a conversation, fiddling with my clunky, bottom-of-the-range Nokia if I found myself alone so as not to look too unhinged.

Which is how I met Tim, a neatly dressed medic living on G staircase, who introduced himself at one room party after he overheard me apologizing for standing on some girl’s foot.

“Northerners unite,” he said, giving my hand a vigorous shake. “Give me some more of those flat vowels, they’re like music.”

“Where are you from, then?” I asked.

“Derby.”

“That’s Midlands at best.”

He laughed as if I were a great wit. “In Cambridge, everything past Leamington Spa is a savage wilderness. Believe me, we’re on the same team now.”

I learned that Tim came from a small, unremarkable village, the kind of place you either left at eighteen or lived in your whole life. His mum and dad both did something artsy for their local council, and they were surprised but happy when their son chose sciences. When he got his place at Cambridge, Tim’s fond classmates clubbed together and bought him the watch he now wore every day, about which I noticed two things: it was acutely ugly, and Tim treasured it. He asked about my own family with genuine interest, and, while I could tell he was the kind of person who would handle the whole truth gently, I gave him the easy, edited version: mum pretty cool, stepdad a bit of a wet lettuce but fundamentally decent. When I was conspicuously silent about my dad, Tim didn’t push it.

After that night, I saw him often. We’d regularly study together in the college library, bolstering one another when our spirits failed: Come on, just another twenty minutes. Sometimes, we took our books to a glossy American coffee chain that had recently arrived in the city, rewarding ourselves with creamy, syrupy creations whenever we managed a solid stint of focused work. Whenever I found myself frustrated by an essay, Tim would attempt an impression of the music I was writing about—his cor anglais was particularly poor—and if he flagged over the Functional Architecture of the Body, I’d make him laugh by asking for his advice on fictional medical conditions such as Lancashire Gut and Symphonic Toe.

Tim also introduced me to other friends he’d made: a couple of guys from his staircase, one Scottish and one Welsh; a shy girl Tim had nicknamed “Casio” because of her near-supernatural abilities in calculation, who wore her Cambridge scarf and hoodie with unironic pride. Yes, we went to the odd room party. But, alongside our geographical accord and our silly sense of humor, our relationship seemed shaped by a shared commitment to make the most of this Cambridge opportunity. To do the work, and to do ourselves justice. In other words, Tim was exactly the kind of friend my parents hoped I’d make.

But it’s worth noting that Tim was the one who had made and shared friends with me. And I didn’t make other friends so easily. As the only first-year musician in college, I had no ready-made clique. And when I asked others what subject they were reading, their barely concealed eye-rolls revealed that this was a boring conversation starter, something of a faux pas. The same went for my “fun fact” about The Eagle down the road, it being the pub where those scientists discovered DNA. Half the time, it seemed people could hardly understand my northern accent anyway.

For a while, I tried to broaden my appeal. I pretended to enjoy the indie bands that were popular at the time, like Arcade Fire (whose universally loved debut album just sounded a bit chaotic to me). I watched shows like Little Britain and The Mighty Boosh, laughing along with everyone else without understanding the jokes. I bought a pair of chinos, for fuck’s sake. I ran through all the repertoire I could think of, desperate to find something that would connect with a wider audience. But Cambridge insisted that I know my place and, outside my catch-ups with Tim, my life was like a tune played to an empty hall.

If I ever felt lost, I lay in bed and listened to my favorite composers. Mostly English twentieth-century figures like Britten, Delius, Quilter. Music that feels nostalgic for another time, somehow. My favorite was Peter Warlock: a beer enthusiast who wore a devilish goatee and enjoyed naked motorbike rides, delighted to horrify his respectable neighbors. In his work, memorable melo-dies dance above darkly surprising harmonies. Elizabethan and folk sensibilities mix with modern influences, giving the music a liminal, timeless quality—like something once loved, now lost, half-remembered. Like how ghosts would sound. In fact, one of his first compositions was a set of three songs titled Saudades, a Portuguese word that describes regret for days gone by.

Apparently, Warlock was also good at falling out with people, and he often found himself on the wrong side of composers, conductors, music publishers. Funny, to think of our heroes having friends, losing them. Hard to imagine them buying birthday cards and dressing up for weddings, arguing with the neighbors over the encroaching wisteria. Maybe that’s another reason I liked Warlock: we both knew what it was like to be on the outside of a circle.

It was during this time that I saw my first Cambridge ghosts. Some were genuinely horrifying, with waxen faces and cavernous black eyes. Others were less polished, formed of rumpled bedsheets. Many were the “sexy” variety: brides with torn veils and clinging dresses, schoolgirls with blood on their cropped shirts. All were at my first Cambridge formal.

Formals were smart, silver-service dinners that took place in college every Wednesday and Sunday. I hadn’t been to any, partly because I hadn’t been invited to join any of the drinking societies (those alarming groups made famous by frothing articles in the Daily Mail) who made up a large part of the dining crowd. But Tim had asked me to join him for the Halloween formal, insisting it wasn’t to be missed. And, that night, I could see why.

Even in its normal state, our dining hall was spectacular. It was a huge, rectangular space, with room for at least two hundred diners, paneled with treacle-dark wood and papered with opulent Gothic designs. The two long walls were sentried by stained-glass saints in their leaded landscapes and, between them, old, oiled masters in gilt frames who looked disapprovingly down at the tables that stretched across the room in their white linen shrouds. Rafters arced high above us, as if we stood in a great cathedral, while colossal chandeliers blazed coldly in the yawning dark. That evening, the hall was particularly dramatic: the candelabra were gauzed with fake spiderwebs, the bright tablecloths blotted with something that was supposed to be blood.

Not realizing how much effort people would make with their costumes, I’d worn my standard college gown with some fangs, face paint, and a chocolate medallion on a red ribbon. As for Tim, he assured me that the brown bath mat around his shoulders made him a werewolf.

“Not sure we’re in line for the fancy dress prize,” I said to him as we joined the long line of monsters filing into the hall.

“That depends,” Tim replied. “What if I’m not just a guy in a bad costume? What if I’m a guy dressed as a guy in a bad costume?”

“I think, if you get anywhere near the prize, Margaret Thatcher will rugby tackle you to the ground. You got any idea how long it took him to set his hair like that?”

“Ha, true. I hope his mate isn’t planning on a career in politics, because photographs of that costume are not going to age well.”

We’d just found ourselves a spot when two girls—one dressed as a cat, the other as a zombie—appeared. Tim gave them a broad smile. “Hey! No, no, have a seat.” Then, turning to me: “Have you met?” I shook my head as they took their places beside us.

The cat was called Berenice. Petite, with dark, bright eyes and a slightly unflattering bob. The zombie was Alexa, model-tall and boyish, with a knot of long, dark hair that exposed an inexpertly applied rubber wound. The two of them had a chilly kind of distinction, but when I went to shake their hands I immediately felt overly formal. They offered neat smiles that didn’t quite reach their eyes.

Under the pressure of Tim’s gaze, I asked Berenice and Alexa lame questions that went nowhere. Yes, the two of them were settling in well enough, yes, they’d been to The Eagle.

“You know it’s where they discovered DNA?” I asked, cringing immediately.

“Yes,” replied Berenice. “And where they apparently forgot about Rosalind Franklin’s contribution to the work.”

Not knowing what she was on about, I made for safer ground. “What subjects are you doing?”

“I’m a medic,” Berenice said, distracted by a bread basket offered by a waiter. “That’s how I know Tim.”

“Philosophy for me,” replied Alexa, vaguely.

“Hang on,” I said, “Didn’t you do that quiz in the bar …”

“Play Your Descartes Right. Don’t remind me. The Philosophy Society made me do it.”

“Oh. I thought it was good.”

She looked at me as if I were an insect she’d never encountered before.

“What about you?” Berenice asked me, relentlessly polite. “What’s your subject?”

“Music.”

“What do you play?”

“Piano.” Then, apologetically: “And bassoon.”

Alexa jumped in. “You’re in the university orchestra, right? I knew I’d seen you somewhere. I play violin.”

“No way! We can walk to rehearsals together sometime if you want.”

She gave a tight smile. I realized that it sounded like I was flirting, which I definitely was not. Flustered, I busied myself with the wine that I didn’t actually want but had brought because, apparently, it was customary. While I was planning to share my bottle with Tim, I’d heard that some people would drink a whole one to themselves before dessert, a fact I found astonishing. I was hardly planning to rush mine, whose bouquet was best described as “gas station forecourt.”

The fellows had assembled at high table and were poised to say Grace when a group of students bowled messily into the hall. Even if the volume of their voices hadn’t got my attention, their outfits would have. One was dressed like Louis XIV, complete with powdered wig and heels, while another clanked about in what appeared to be a real suit of armor. There was also a flapper in a vintage gown, a riot of tassels and feathers. Behind them, five or six others, decked out in the most detailed and decadent costumes, all shimmering in the candlelight like characters slipped from a cinema screen.

But most noticeable was the one leading them, dressed from head to toe in red—his jacket, shirt, and trousers all the vivid color of a Valentine’s rose or a poisonous insect—and carrying a bottle of champagne in each hand. Even in the low light I recognized the impish smile, the steady stride. It was the guy I’d seen on my first day, the one on the college steps. He was the one who led this strange and glittering crew as they clattered between the long tables, the one they jostled to sit beside as they claimed the vacant spaces immediately to my right.

The gong rang. Everyone rustled to their feet, and I peered at the latecomers as they intoned ironically along with the fellow who led us in Grace. At the “Amen,” the guy in red mimed bursting into flames, and the characters around him laughed. Ah, I realized. He’s the Devil.

At the second gong we sat, and the waiting staff, preternaturally tolerant, began to file into the room, bearing some thematically acceptable starter (probably pumpkin tart). I hardly noticed, though, too distracted by the figures beside me. On the group’s periphery, Louis XIV talked loudly at the armor, whose raised visor revealed a face cold and perfectly handsome as a Greek marble. The flapper—an animated, Sloaney kind of girl—threw bits of her seeded roll at them, scattering crumbs across the linen. But the one who called their attention was the Devil, the true conductor of this impromptu Danse Macabre. When he poured champagne into his friends’ glasses he moved with a casual stagecraft, and when he called for a toast it was with the gravity of an operatic hero. Even that suit, which should have looked ridiculous, only accentuated his pale skin and his commanding frame. He seemed part of college’s elaborate furniture—not, like me, a visitor passing through.

A conscientious host, Tim brought Alexa and Berenice into the conversation, found topics we could all get on board with. The girls talked about the formals they’d already attended in other colleges (Queen’s terrible, John’s outstanding), about their membership of various college sports. But, while I nodded along—no, Berenice, I did not know that about mixed netball—my brain was occupied by the fact that although, as instructed by my mum, I’d waited for the people around me to receive their starters before tackling mine, the group on my right followed no such etiquette. In fact, the Devil was directing them in some kind of race, where each person was attempting to finish their own food before their companions’ had touched the table. These people had a wildness about them. But it appeared to be an acceptable kind of wildness, one that the staff were willing to suffer rather than challenge.

The mains followed. Several times, poor Tim had to repeat his questions because I was so absorbed by the group beside me. At one point they laughed loudly about their school days, using slang I’d never heard like “beak” and “pig,” and I realized that many of them had studied at the same place. It astounded me that a group of mates could end up not just at Cambridge but at the same college. Nobody else from my whole year ended up at Oxbridge.

But wherever the conversation went, focus always came back to the Devil. Faces turned toward him. Eyes searched, unthinkingly, for his. When he touched those close to him, just a gentle brush of his fingertips at their shoulder, their faces lit up as if the contact were electric. Some of the group became kittenish when he spoke to them, touching their faces and fussing with their outfits, while others seemed, consciously or otherwise, to copy his gestures, mirroring him as he stretched and reclined. I leaned close myself, drawing the attention of the flapper, who—with no malice whatsoever—told me it was lovely that I’d managed to look spooky even though I didn’t have “a proper costume.” More than once I tried to catch the Devil’s eye, smiled stupidly whenever he said something that sounded like a punchline. When I overheard him asking for the salt, I grabbed the nearest shaker and practically threw it down the table.

But the only one who noticed me was Louis XIV, who jogged my elbow. “Crikey,” he said, pointing at the wine I’d brought. “Never seen one that color.”

I leaned toward him, delighted to be of help. “It’s a rosé,” I explained.

A look of glee spread slowly across his painted face. Then, folding his lips into exaggerated, obscene shapes, he parroted back my northern vowels: “It’s a roh-sey.”

Unsure how to react, I looked silently across the table at Tim, who only shook his head at Louis like a teacher assessing a particularly foolish pupil.

“I’m aware of that,” Louis went on, arching a precision-drawn eyebrow. “I’m just not sure I’ve ever come across one that looks quite so … noxious.”

I glanced at my bottle, wondering what color a rosé was supposed to be. “The guy in the shop said it would be nice with dinner,” I said, apologetically.

“I’m sure it is, if your dinner is mushy peas and gravy.”

The armor smirked. The flapper looked exasperated and threw a napkin at Louis, who shrugged at her: But it’s true. She told him he was a pig, and he looked back at me with a boozy smile as if to say: That’s true, too.

A small, proud part of me wanted to challenge this guy, tell him to get some manners. But if I had—which in itself would have violated all social codes by souring the atmosphere—he would surely have said it was just a joke, right? Banter. After all, I couldn’t prove the edge in his voice, the derision in his eyes. Maybe, he would say, I was imagining it.

Which is why I laughed along.

Unfortunately, this only served to highlight the contrasting reaction from Tim, who had observed our exchange in disdainful silence. Louis fixed his eyes on Tim, thoughtful—as if Tim were a shopkeeper who owed him some small change. Then, to my alarm, he reached suddenly across the table. But he didn’t, as I feared, grab Tim by his bathmat or slap him across the face. Instead, he lunged at Tim’s glass, made a movement that produced a small chink. I looked closer. There, sunk at the bottom of the lurid rosé sea, was a penny.

Flapper, armor, and Louis leaned in, made exaggerated oohs and aahs. This was one of the Cambridge traditions I’d heard about but hadn’t yet seen in practice.

“You know what to do,” said the armor, his voice sonorous inside his helmet.

They all began to beat their hands rhythmically on the table: Down it, down it. But Tim shook his head, continued calmly with his meal. The beat became faster, louder, rattling the cutlery and stuttering the candles, and I stared meaningfully at Tim, sure that the fellows would object at any moment. But neither they nor Tim batted an eyelid. Even as the beat became frenzied, Tim worked at his plate like a parent ignoring a wheedling toddler. Down the table, the Devil looked on.

Eventually, the thumping died away. Louis gave a soft, sustained boo.

In that moment, I remembered how I’d adapted my behavior to survive at school. I’d learned to minimize the daily calls of “swot” and “nerd” by keeping my hand down in class, arriving at school early so that nobody would see me grappling with my stupid bassoon case. But there were new rules here, and I’d found myself transgressing yet again. Now I cringed at Tim’s clothes: the supermarket shirt, too short at the wrists, the cheap watch chosen by his classmates. His accent, like mine, a big, sore thumb.

At something of a loss, I snatched Tim’s glass and drank.

As I gulped, pink streaking down my chin and onto my shirt, I heard the hammering of fists, invigorating, the jangle of glassware. When the wine was gone, I discarded the penny and upturned the glass above my head with a flourish, pretending not to notice the drops that landed coldly in my hair. Even Louis cheered. I still haven’t forgotten the slow smile that slid across the Devil’s face.

This was the moment when things turned, like when one of those magic eye pictures suddenly comes into focus. I’d always been careful with alcohol, had avoided the willy-waving of competitive boozing. But that only meant I didn’t know what it felt like. What if I was really the party guy, the mad one, and had just never realized it? It hadn’t been so hard, draining that glass. And everyone had loved it. I didn’t know whether it was the drink or the applause, but I had a pleasant, floating feeling. Maybe I was one of the people who could handle it. Maybe, I thought, as I gave myself a generous top-up, I could stop worrying about what might happen and just let go.

I woke with my face pressed against linoleum. There was an acrid, bitter stink. Heaving myself onto all fours, I saw that the communal bath was smeared with a vivid pink puke, as if it were my actual guts blocking the plughole.

I must not have bothered to close the door after coming through it, as I had vague, flipbook memories of clasping the toilet as figures whispered along the corridor, some giggling, some muttering in disgust. Feeling a chill at my knees, I looked with dismay at my new trousers, torn. A plastic clock on the wall showed it wasn’t even midnight. Jesus. My stomach spasmed, and something burned up my throat and out of my mouth.

Once the heaving had passed, I paused to rest my reeling head on the cool rim of the bath. Then I switched on the tap and tried to rinse the mess away. Only partially successful, and disturbed by the colors swirling, psychedelic, around the plughole, I slumped against the wall and tried to work out where the fuck I was. Beyond the bathroom door were stairs leading both up and down, and a pair of doors labeled S5 and S6, which meant I must be in Old Court, on the second floor. What I was doing here, I had no idea.

Directly opposite was a window, its leaded panels dimmed by the night. It took me a moment to realize what was wrong. Although the window was closed, locked, and two floors up, there was a figure on the ledge outside.

Against the lightless sky, the shape was vague and leached of color. The overall impression was of something crouching. I’d seen no ladders, no bits of scaffolding around college that might have been stolen, scaled. But the thing didn’t look like one of the college’s gargoyles, as it seemed very gently to stretch and sway. Surely not. I wanted to call out, just to be sure. But, if there really was someone out there, I might startle them and send them toppling to the ground. Through the diamond shapes of leaded glass, I couldn’t tell whether the shape was facing away into the courtyard or toward me.

For a moment—I know this sounds strange—I felt like I was the one in danger. But I didn’t have time to think about it before the thing that might or might not have been a head turned slowly, like an optical illusion that seems to move both left and right at the same time, before my senses became slow, before the room tipped and dropped again into darkness.

The next time I creaked open my eyelids, I saw only a dreamy gloom. And within it, a figure reared and swayed.

Too confused to be afraid, I found myself entranced by the languorous movement of arms and legs. Around me was a low humming, a murmuring of words I couldn’t quite make out, and also the slightest scent of smoke, sickening. The figure before me twisted, shifted (was I still unconscious? I didn’t think so, although I did seem to be lying down) and the murmuring grew in intensity, became more of a feeling than a sound. Then the shape raised its arms—

—and its hands exploded into two livid balls of flame.

Consciousness crashed down around me—Christ, what the fuck—and I tried to stand, but something pulled at my hands and feet. Panicked, I began to thrash, heard myself whimpering like a child.

But it was only the tangle of soft blankets, on someone else’s bed. Eyes wide and sweeping the dimly lit room, I now saw people chattering casually, holding bottles and plastic cups, shifting to the steady pulse of a large speaker on the floor. Everyone was spattered with blood. I almost cried out again, but I stopped myself. Costumes.

Across the room was the figure that had erupted with fire: the Devil in his blazing red. He was standing on a desk, above an Anglepoise lamp that threw dark shapes across his face and sent shadows crawling up the walls. The flames were gone from his hands now and he was busy performing a deep bow, soaking up claps and whoops. Some kind of trick, then? I sat up, swung my legs onto the floor—gingerly, as if my bones were made of glass—and, in a movement that took supernatural levels of effort, heaved myself to standing.

Thanks to the standard-issue furniture and washes of magnolia, college rooms usually had a budget-hotel-chain look about them, an air of incompleteness, like a paint-by-numbers waiting for an artist. But this was a cross between a gentlemen’s club and a children’s party. On one wall, a large neon sign cast a feverish glow over several gilt-framed charcoal drawings (hung, in clear violation of college rules, on nails). In one corner were shelves full of massive, sprawling plants, some alive, beside a collection of badly painted masks. Beneath these, staggering piles of books, their spines creased to softness, very unlike the handful of pristine textbooks standing rigid on my own bookcase.

As I stepped through the crowd, my heartbeat slowing to match the easy thump of the music, I passed an ornately beautiful chest of drawers, a telescope, the occasional balloon, a disassembled bicycle. A table bearing wine, champagne, and a vat of bright pink jelly. Also, on the floor, a boxy thing made of wire mesh, covered in grubby cloths. Beneath the smell of smoke and beer there was a hint of something foul, like rot or sulphur. Almost animal.

On a set of shelves, coils of rope. Piles of coins, a ceramic hand. And on the wall ahead of us, a round mirror, timeworn and slightly convex, about the size of a dinner plate. The glass itself seemed black, but so highly polished that it reflected the whole room. Beautiful and extremely strange. The place was baffling: a room to be accessed with a password or through a wardrobe.

A loud thud made me spin on my heels. The Devil was on the floor now, his audience closing around him like truffling pigs. There, up front, was the suit of armor, helmet removed and pale eyes sharp. Beside him the flapper, looking bleary, the feather in her headband drooping queasily. The two of them put their bodies between the Devil and the crowd, as if shielding an exam paper from cheating eyes.

This wasn’t how I wanted to meet him, face-painted and only superficially conscious. But I didn’t dare miss my chance. When he lifted an empty wine glass, I grabbed a bottle of red from the mantlepiece and strode through the crowd, forcing my way with firm elbows and feigned apologies until I was in front of him.

Before I could speak, he turned, very slowly. And I swear I felt his gaze, in my body, like the chime of a struck bell. There was something playful in his expression, as if to say: It took you long enough.

What he actually said was: “Feeling better, Count?”

“Oh … fine,” I replied, my voice like a broken bagpipe. I offered the bottle, but he shook his head.

“You’ve been sleeping the sleep of the dead,” he said. “Well, thankfully not quite, since someone sensible put you in the recovery position.”

The flapper gave a braying laugh before pouting at me as if I were a stray animal. “Aw, babe,” she said, “there’s a bit of sick on your chin.” She handed me something to wipe my face, and I realized it was one of her silk gloves. “Don’t worry,” she said, “they aren’t mine.” All the while the armor stared, assessing, as if he might set me a trial or ask me a riddle.

There was something about the Devil’s presence that caught me off guard. Not his face, striking though it was. Rather his voice. Not loud, but full and grounded, as if it came not from his throat but from the earth. “We found you in the bathroom a bit worse for wear,” he said. “You didn’t seem sure where your own room was, so we brought you here.”

“Oh … Is this your room?”

“Certainly is. Excuse the smell, that fire trick demands a fair amount of butane.”

Fearful of my own stink, likely of puke, I tugged my cape tighter around me and hoped my makeup hid my reddening cheeks. But he laughed again, turning his body to separate us from the others. When he clasped my hand in introduction—Bryn, Bryn Cavendish—I seemed to feel the flames still beating in his palm.

I smiled, ruefully. “I really am sorry …”

“Don’t be. You’ve been a much more civilized guest than some. Sajid is particularly messy tonight.” Bryn arched an eyebrow at a glazed-looking chap sitting on the floor, legs outstretched like a rag doll (ah, I realized with satisfaction—this was Louis, minus his wig). “His father is our family lawyer, so I have to play nice. You won’t be surprised to hear he’s a Wykehamist.”

I wasn’t surprised, but only because I had no idea what this meant. Even so, this introduction was different to the ones I’d had with other students, those polite, stilted interactions about where we’d come from and what we were studying. This was like being reunited with an old friend.

Just then a girl, swathed in cobwebs, shook Bryn by the shoulder. She had a dreamy look, as if she were half asleep or heavily medicated. “Hey,” she said, ignoring me. “You promised.”

Bryn rubbed his chin, theatrically pensive. “What are you offering?”

“One of my famous traybakes. Either that or my eternal soul.”

“Traybake sounds ideal.”

Before I could ask, Bryn took a deck of cards from his pocket and fanned it, face up, allowing us to see all the suits in all their randomness. Then he turned the deck over, shuffled it, and settled it in one hand. The back of the uppermost card glinted with an intricate design that looked like the mechanism of a clock.

“You need to be careful with this deck,” he whispered, as if sharing a great secret. “Because it’s haunted.” He fanned the cards again, face down this time, and held them toward us. “Pick a card,” he said, “and point to it.”

Eagerly, I made for a card, but the girl did too. I withdrew casually, as if I’d only ever intended to smooth my artificial widow’s peak.

Wary of being led, the girl moved her hand up and down before touching a card around the middle of the spread. Carefully, Bryn lifted the uppermost cards, so we could see the chosen one at the bottom. The two of hearts.

“Don’t tell me what it is. But remember it.”

Bringing the cards together, he fluttered the deck, cutting, slicing. His hands moved like those of a virtuoso, with the fluidity and grace that comes from years of practice. After a final cut he allowed the deck to sit, neat and still, in his palm.

“Now,” he continued, “the only one who can find your card is the spirit that haunts the deck.”

The girl sighed ostentatiously. “Is the spirit’s name Bryn, by any chance?”

“If you like. Maybe you should summon the spirit, like they do in stories, by speaking its name three times.”

They grinned at one another, mischief sparking between them. Then the girl leaned forward, bringing her face close to his, and whispered: “Bryn. Bryn.”

She came closer still.

“Bryn.”

I felt envy, tightening like a screw. But not of Bryn. Of the girl who, in that moment, had his unqualified attention.

We all looked down at the deck, sitting on his open palm. Nothing happened. Behind us someone roared, the loser in some drinking game.

But then—and I’d swear this is how it happened—while Bryn’s hands stayed completely still, the top portion of the deck began to move, all by itself, millimeter by inexplicable millimeter. The girl and I gasped. That top portion continued to shift, so far that it eventually teetered on the bottom portion as if it might topple off altogether. But it didn’t. In fact, after a pause, it inched back into place, slowly and strangely, so that the cards were all aligned again. Only now, there was a single card left poking from the otherwise tidy deck.

Bryn eased it out, held it up for us to see. The two of hearts.

“You’re ridiculous,” the girl murmured, unable to stop one corner of her mouth curling upward. “How did you do it?”

“Yeah,” I said, softly. “How?”

A seriousness passed over his face. “You don’t want to know,” he said, the drama gone from his voice. “Not really.”

The girl punched him on the arm, allowing the contact to last a little longer than necessary. Then, summoned away by her friends, she disappeared reluctantly into the crowd.

“Make sure the traybake has cherries in it,” he called, bright again. “I like cherries.”

I stared, bewitched.

Before he could move away, I fired questions at Bryn, as if blowing on kindling to sustain a tiny flame. It turned out he was reading Maths—this was in spite of his parents encouraging him to read Music, a fact that gave us our first piece of common ground and couldn’t have delighted me more. Bryn had grown up in London, an only child, had hated the private school to which he was sent to board. “So how did you get into magic?” I asked.

“My dad’s a magician,” he said, with a discernible glow of pride. “He was on TV for a time, when I was a kid. And he’s achieved a kind of … notoriety in certain circles.”

This made so much sense. “Wow. And he taught you?”

He nodded. “When I was five or six, he put on a performance for my birthday. He started with stuff I thought was shit, like pulling coins out of ears, you know. But then he wheeled out this set of old-fashioned weighing scales, like the Statue of Liberty carries.”

He held out his hands, palms up, moved them up and down in contrary motion.

“He balanced little metal weights on one side, to show how that side would go down and the other would go up. Then he put a weight on each side so that they were balanced. All the while he’s giving us some spiel about how these things are Ancient Egyptian, or maybe from an Arabian sorcerer …”

“More like Made in China?”

“Ha, exactly! He gave us some chat about ancient, mystical knowledge, about how we measure the worth of things. Then he gave me a rock and a feather, told me to put them on either side of the scales. So I did. And both sides stayed completely level.”

I was slightly underwhelmed. “I guess there was some kind of mechanism?”

“That’s what I said. So he let me take the thing apart, to prove me wrong. Showed me the bar connecting both sides, stiff and straight. Honestly, I couldn’t work it out.”

“It’s a pretty odd trick.”

“I know. When I got older, I searched every magic shop I knew of, trying to find it. It sounds weird, but it was the first thing that made me think that impossible things really could happen. More than Santa and tooth fairies and all that shit.” Then, shrugging: “But since I never found it, maybe I made the thing up.”

“So,” I said, “were you disappointed when you realized that magic isn’t real?”

He looked at me, a brightness behind his eyes. Then he laughed loudly, clapped me on the back. “You’re funny.”

It seemed that while I had spent my formative years watching Masters of the Universe and eating Frosties straight from the box, Bryn had spent his questioning the nature of reality.

This childhood memory made me think of my own father: of the day he left home, of the flat he’d moved into. Of what that flat looked like at the end, its carpets matted with hair, its corners laced with cobwebs. I brushed the memory away, focused on holding Bryn’s interest. “God, I wish I’d learned magic as a kid,” I said, weakly. “Although, to be fair, pretty much anything would have been cooler than wind band. But,” I added quickly, not meaning to confess my lack of street cred just yet, “the past is the past.”

Bryn looked into his glass, and for a moment I worried I’d made things awkward. Then he asked: “Do you believe in fate?”

“Fate? No.”

“So you believe that, from here, there are millions of potential futures ahead of you, and it’s up to you to choose your path?”

“I guess.”

“I think I agree. But what about potential pasts? How many million versions of the past might there be—or have been—to bring you to this exact moment?”

“What?”

He refilled his glass with a wine different to the one I’d offered. “We see time running in one direction. Morning to night, young to old, right? But time and space, they’re not reality. They’re tools we use to understand reality, to help us make sense of things our minds can’t manage.”

“Okay …”

“So, if we’re all moving forward in time, why can’t we see the future? Most laws of physics work as well backward as they do forward.”

I frowned. “Bryn, I’m a musician. I’m out of my depth here.”

He took a long drink, continued as if I hadn’t spoken. “I mean, what can we be absolutely sure about other than the moment we’re living in? We have no trouble imagining a million different futures stretching out ahead of us. So why not a million different pasts?”

I paused. Blinked. “Run that by me again.”

Before he could reply there came the sound of raised voices—the crowd surged, as if the room itself drew a breath, and bodies jostled one another. Then, an abrupt quieting, like a TV being turned to mute. I realized: the music had gone off.

There in the corner, a space cleared around him as if he were infectious, was the guy I’d met as Louis, who I now knew to be Sajid. At his feet, scenes of minor carnage: a glass receptacle, broken cleanly at the neck, lying on a sodden, crimsoned carpet.

A shout from the armor. “Sajid, not the decanter!”

And from the flapper: “That was from his dad, you fucking idiot.”

Teetering on his aristocratic heels, Sajid looked blearily at his hands as if expecting something to be clasped there. “Balls,” he mumbled. Then, grinning messily at Bryn: “Heirlooms are hand-me-downs by another name, right?”

Bryn stepped into the space the others had cleared. He didn’t rush to reassure Sajid, like I would have: It’s fine, I never liked that thing anyway. Nor did he show irritation. His expression remained blank and unreadable, as if he were hearing distant voices over radio waves. The only sounds in the room were the whispers of tipsy concern, of costumes rustling.

Sajid arranged his face in a cartoonish frown. “Master Cavendish. My sincere apologies.”

I looked anxiously around, wondering whether this party was over.

Then Bryn smiled. But it was a commiserative, almost pitying smile. “Don’t apologize to me,” he said, his eyes bright. “Since this was a ‘hand-me-down,’ you’ll have to apologize to the people it came from. My dead relatives.”

Sniggers from the crowd suggested this was understood to be some kind of game.

Bryn took something from a drawer, something I couldn’t see. Then he beckoned Sajid into the center of the room, allowing the rest of us to gather around the two of them. With Sajid in position, Bryn asked certain people to take up some of the candles that flickered on tables and shelves, and as we settled into a circle we made ghostly “oohs” and evil cackles. The tension had become something else now, an anticipation that travelled through us like electricity in a circuit.

Bryn called to a ghost pirate. “Could you turn off the light, please?”

At a soft click, the room became very dark, very quiet. We were able to discern one another only vaguely in the low light of the candles, the seething glow of the red neon sign. Collectively, we leaned in, scouts around a campfire.

“I’ll call my relatives now, so that you can apologize,” Bryn said. Then, placing his hands on Sajid’s shoulders: “Just do as I say. Because if we don’t do it right … We might summon something else. And whatever we summon, it might not leave us. Understand?”

“This is a very silly game,” Sajid slurred.

Now I saw what Bryn had taken from his drawer: a pile of photographs. He riffled through them until he found one of Sajid. “Here,” he said, holding it out. “Make an offering of yourself.” Then he took a penknife from his pocket. “Stab the picture.”

Sajid looked appalled. “That’s horrid!”

Bryn feigned puzzlement. “But it’s just a silly game.”

Sajid glared. But he took the knife. Bryn held the photograph by its edges, pulling it taut. Then, Sajid attacked the image of himself, jabbing and tearing at it with the blade until the photograph came apart between Bryn’s hands. The crowd simultaneously laughed and winced.

Approaching one of the candle bearers, Bryn touched the ravaged pieces of the photograph to the flame and dropped them, glowing, into a nearby mug. Then, he made for the broken decanter, which still contained a little liquid. Lifting it carefully, he poured the liquid into the mug, creating a red mulch. Back in the circle, he offered this to Sajid.

“Drink.”

In the guttering candlelight, the crowd made delighted noises: eww, gross. Sajid would surely apologize properly, and we’d turn the lights back on and leave it at that. Right? But Sajid—unreadable now, suddenly steadier on his feet—only stared at Bryn for ten, twenty seconds. Bryn, congenial, stared back. To a collective cringe, Sajid took the cup.

Then, throwing his head back, he poured the liquid all over his closed mouth, allowing it to run down his neck and over his white, brocade blouse. Wiping his lips with a ruffled sleeve, he twinkled at Bryn, triumphant: “Mmmm. Delicious.”

The room held its breath at this grimy act of defiance.

But Bryn only shrugged: It’s your funeral.

As we watched, Bryn suddenly made a strange collapsing movement—like a marionette would if its strings were cut—so that he stood hunched, head bowed, hands covering his face. The rest of us stood rigid, deathly silent. Though it wasn’t possible, it seemed the room had got even darker—around me, mere suggestions of cheekbones and eye sockets, brush strokes of seething red. Bryn seemed to be speaking softly through his fingers, but I couldn’t make out any words. Then he twitched violently, and out of the dark:

Bang.

The crowd shrieked, grasping at one another, dissolving into horrified laughter: What the fuck was that? For a few seconds we strained to see in the shadows, perhaps imagining a shape moving among us. Within the hubbub, whispers: I don’t like it, I’m frightened. Then, a cry, and a finger, pointing.

Following the finger, we saw it. The door of Bryn’s closet had clattered open.

There was general glee and confusion as we confirmed to one another that, no, none of us had gone near the closet. And we’d all seen that Bryn hadn’t either. The whole spectacle had a daft, ghost-train-delirium about it—but, one by one, we stopped giggling when we spotted Bryn: seemingly oblivious to our hilarity, turning slowly within our circle like the second hand of a clock, as if his eyes tracked something the rest of us couldn’t see.

Having turned a full three hundred and sixty degrees, Bryn stopped moving, focusing somewhere over Sajid’s shoulder. Then he raised a hand at nothing, a solemn gesture of welcome. The person beside me shivered. I wanted to shout at the crowd: Do any of you realize how much skill it takes to manipulate an audience like this?

In the silence, Bryn kept his eyes in the space beyond Sajid, occasionally nodding. Then he took a step toward Sajid.

“He’s sent you a message,” Bryn said.

His hand moving quickly, like the biting jaw of a snake, Bryn reached into the neck of Sajid’s shirt and took from it something rectangular. Then, encouraging us to use our candles as tiny spotlights, he held the thing out for the group to see. It was a card, a little bigger than a playing card. And on it was a picture of a robed man, one arm pointing up, the other pointing down. Around his waist, a snake biting its own tail. Below him was written: The Magician.

We laughed at the cheesiness of it, as if he’d produced a string of hankies or plastic flowers. Sneering, Sajid let the card fall to the ground.

Unbothered by either reaction, Bryn turned and, saying nothing, pointed at Sajid’s remarkably skimpy breeches. Despite raising a contemptuous eyebrow, Sajid turned out his pockets. Nothing. It was only when he put his hand right inside his costume, inside the shorts he wore underneath, that he discovered another card. Bryn snatched it from Sajid and held it aloft.

This card also showed a man, but this man was strolling, looking up at the sky, unaware that his next step would take him off the edge of a cliff. Beneath him was written: The Fool.

We laughed again. Me loudest of all.

Looking slightly rattled (and who wouldn’t be?), Sajid made to leave the circle. But the ring of bodies tensed and flexed to block his exit. Bryn looked on, smiling. Then, very slowly, he pointed at the mug abandoned on the carpet, its lip still blackened with the now-coagulated liquid Sajid had refused to drink. Keeping his eyes on Bryn, Sajid bent at the knees and picked up the mug. There was something inside it now, something that looked dirty, or even—inexplicably—singed. Another card.

When Sajid had peered apprehensively at the card for long enough, Bryn took it from him and held it up for us to see. On it was a golden, winged thing blowing a trumpet, and below, bodies crawling from graves. The word beneath: Judgment. In the shadows, the closet door gaped as if horrified.

Sajid tossed the mug at Bryn. “Being scared of dead things is for juvenile intellects,” he said, waspish.

Boos and hisses from the crowd, as if to say: Bad form. But Bryn only smiled. “Careful,” he said. “Remember what I told you. Just because they’re dead doesn’t mean they’re gone.”

Bereft of clever comebacks, Sajid forced his way out of the circle, grabbing the wig he’d dumped on the table. As he went, the audience broke into a patronizing applause. God, this was the best fucking thing that had happened to me since I’d arrived at Cambridge. The room was just refilling with low, delighted chatter when there came out of the darkness an awful, despairing cry.

We turned, craning necks, searching, until Bryn himself flicked on the light.

Sajid stood at the door, his horrified face dripping with a viscous pink ooze. The stunned crowd gave a collective gasp, which gradually turned to shrieks of laughter as people passed the punchline around: someone had filled Sajid’s wig with vodka jelly.

Holy shit, it was the greatest trick you’ve ever seen. The crowd roared, unsympathetic, as Sajid thundered out of the room and slammed the door. I laughed so hard I thought I might be sick again. Finally, the room rearranged itself, with Bryn at the center, the armor at his side. The flapper also resumed her guard, but not before stealing a freshly lit cigarette from a skeleton’s mouth.

Actually, I really did feel sick. The smell of wine, the cigarette smog that began to fill the room—it all set off a sinking feeling in my stomach, a feeling of the floor falling away. I looked helplessly around, as if relief might be somewhere in the books, the bottles, the strange black mirror.

There must have been something peculiar about the mirror’s surface, because the reflected bodies seemed to bend and lurch in unnatural ways, out of sync with the laughter and music that swelled about the room. Each echoed figure was odd, misshapen. Even Bryn looked grotesque. Fearful of what my body might be about to do, I stumbled out, searching for the bathroom I’d vacated earlier, unsure as to whether I wanted Bryn to regret my departure or not notice it at all.

Afterward, I thought about Bryn’s father, what he’d passed on to his son. Magic, a language few could speak. A power to manipulate reality as others saw it. Remembering the familial pride that had brightened Bryn’s face, I imagined him with Cavendish Senior, hunched over playing cards, dice, delighting in a successful piece of misdirection; the two of them sharing a stage, making grand, simultaneous bows. It must be nice to have a family history that you could be proud of, the kind to be kept in a velvet-lined box and shown off to guests.

I also thought about what my own dad had passed on to me. Things that definitely weren’t magic. Some charity shop cutlery. A stained toiletry bag with a blunt razor inside. Mementoes I didn’t need, since I was happy to forget.

I suppose my dad gave me music, since Mum says I didn’t get it from her. She used to remind me about his incessant whistling—Do you remember, love, how he’d come down the path, tweeting away?—and how he, peculiarly, was the one who introduced me to classical music. He used to play it in the car, Mum said, and his friends from the bookies used to laugh and call him maestro. With him, as with me, a blessing and a curse.

After the party, I was keen to cross paths with Bryn again. The problem was, I only ever saw him in snatches, imperfect glimpses at odd times. Once, during my short and ill-judged rowing career, I was cycling to the river at 5:30 a.m. and saw him across the road, strolling in the direction of college. But he didn’t look drunk or shabby, as if he might be getting back from an all-nighter. He looked fresh, his coat unbuttoned in spite of the gusting rain. (I raised my hand to wave, but the maneuver sent me wobbling toward a lamppost and I aborted it halfway through.) Another time, when I woke in the night and looked idly through my curtains, I saw him crossing New Court by himself, looking up at the stars. He was gone before I could find an excuse to dash outside. Even when I spotted him moving up and down our halls, it was always at a distance. He was a suggestion, disappearing around a corner, or a figure leaving a room just as I entered it.

On the rare occasions I found him settled in college, he was surrounded by people, impossible to reach, with two figures in particular stationed always beside him like diligent sentinels. First was the suit of armor, in reality a Law student named Jamie. I’d learned Jamie was one of those people known to everyone, a “face” at the Pitt Club, student union, all the rest of it. His dad was Something Very High Up in the civil service, which is why Jamie had grown up in Asia and America as well as the UK. He had a wary demeanor and sharp, inquisitive features that seemed to suggest he was storing up every word you said, and I imagined he was the kind of person whose influence depended less on charm and more on duress.

Bryn’s second sentinel was the flapper, a Politics student called Sarah whose brother had been at the same school as Bryn. Glossy and gregarious, she’d set up a new college society for women in politics but abandoned it after she forgot to turn up to its inaugural meeting. She’d also been fined in our first week for running naked laps of Old Court—not realizing, she claimed, that the provost was visiting the master at the time—but clearly thought the fine a reasonable price to pay for the adventure.

However, these figures featured little in my Cambridge days, which were governed by the rhythms of the music faculty (harmony and counterpoint on Mondays, German Romanticism on Wednesdays, the carelessly defined “world music” on Fridays). In the mornings, I’d be scribbling furiously on the front row of the lecture hall, or at my piano analyzing obscure baroque sonatas. Later, if I didn’t have a supervision—a small group session during which I marveled at other students’ knowledge and struggled to showcase my own—I spent long hours with Tim and his friends in the library. Some weekends, the girl Tim called Casio would cook for us, and I’d do jobs like peeling potatoes and washing dishes as she made sausage and mash or cottage pie, hearty, unassuming dishes that reminded us of home.

Sometimes, when the autumn air was particularly crisp, our little group would head to Magdalene Bridge and hire a punt. Tim would take his place at the stern, bouncing us from one bank to the other while the rest of us encouraged him to give it some welly. And we’d inevitably fall silent as we moved along the exemplary green expanse of The Backs, past the pale, imperious face of King’s Chapel, all of us conscious that these days were opportunities we’d only be given once. On one of these punting trips, someone asked about “the guy who showed up at Halloween dressed like a Butlins redcoat,” and Casio butted in, keen to show that she knew Bryn’s name (even hearing it gave me a superstitious thrill, as if our speaking it might conjure him up right then and there). But Tim upstaged her by revealing two things: first, that “this Bryn bloke” had chosen to study at our college because his father had studied there too, back in the day. Second, that this knowledge had come from Berenice, who was in fact Bryn’s cousin. Astonishing, I thought. The family resemblance wasn’t strong.

Hanging out with Tim and his friends—it was nice. But when I joined them for another study session, I had a strange sense that I was looking for answers in the wrong place. A feeling that I was late for something, that there was somewhere else I was supposed to be. First term ticked reliably on, and somehow, for all its undoubted gifts, each Cambridge day began to feel like a birthday party where the guests hadn’t turned up.

After that punting trip, I decided: I was being too passive. If I wanted to be a part of Bryn’s story, I was going to have to write myself in there. One evening I saw him heading up to hall as I was on my way out. And, I reasoned, if he was eating in college, he might well swing by the bar afterward. So, taking a stool at the bar with a decent view of the place, I set myself up like a cop-show rookie on his first stakeout. I felt too awkward to ask for the pint of orange squash I actually wanted—so I half-heartedly ordered an ale and settled in with my well-thumbed biography of Peter Warlock.

As I skimmed favorite paragraphs (about Warlock decrying Christianity, about him half-joking about selling his soul), faces came and went. Computer scientists, choral scholars, rugby “lads.” None of them Bryn. Tim texted—Me and Casio are watching Memento, want to join?—and I told him I was busy. Time crept by. Feeling obliged, I bought another pint and drank it unenthusiastically, even though my head was unexpectedly beginning to swim.

I’d just decided to head to the toilets when two students arrived at the bar. Had they not caught my eye, I might have kept my nose in my book. Berenice, neat and preppy now that she was out of her Halloween garb. And Alexa, intimidatingly cool in fishnets and fingerless gloves.

Caught, I gave them a meek wave. “Alright?”

Berenice eyed me as if I were a particularly cryptic crossword clue. “Fine, thanks. Did you have fun at Halloween?”

Alexa smirked. Christ, I had no idea what they’d seen of me after the main course. But it can’t have been good. “Still getting used to these Cambridge customs,” I said, the ale making me unusually frank. “Seriously, sorry if I got carried away.”

Berenice’s posture softened. “You’re hardly the first.”

Then, seeing an opportunity: “It was good to catch up with your cousin, though. At his afterparty.”

She folded her arms. “You know Bryn?”

“A bit,” I replied, irritated by her surprise. Then, flashing my knowledge like a fake ID at a bouncer: “He’s very talented, isn’t he? With the magic?”

“True,” she said. Then, somewhat confidentially, “I just wish he didn’t make it so creepy. All bones and fake blood, it’s foul.”

Curious, the softening of the girls’ manner when they assumed I was known to Bryn. I wondered whether those painful, early conversations would have gone better if I’d been able to drop his name.

Alexa jumped in, eyes shining. “But the creepy stuff is part of the show! And it’s family tradition.”

Berenice made a face. “Not our side of the family.”

Alexa lifted an eyebrow at me, keen to show her own credentials. “You know Bryn’s dad was notorious for being into the occult?”

What the fuck? “Oh, yeah,” I replied, hoping they wouldn’t probe. Then, using my titbit from Tim: “His dad was at this college, right?”

Competitive now, Alexa leaned in. “Well, did you know that he also stole a chalice from some religious society, to use in a black mass?”

I made a surprised face, conceding the point, wondering why everyone else’s families were so much more interesting than mine. “Well,” I said, “it’s nice to have a hobby.”

Alexa laughed, a warm, open sound.

Berenice smiled ruefully. “Sure,” she said. “But Bryn’s hobby might have the accommodation officer asking why his room is covered in burn marks.”

“Shit,” I said. “You think he’ll get in trouble?”

“Always does,” Berenice replied, “and always gets out of it again.”

“You know, I haven’t seen him around much lately,” I said, as if surprised.

“We left him smoking in Old Court just now. He was hiding from an old school friend who wanted him to go to some club—”

I forced the rest of my pint down, stifled a burp. “Ha,” I said, “sounds like Bryn.” Then, sliding off my stool, edging toward the exit, I waved again. “I should let you get on. Good to see you.”

As I stumbled out, Alexa called: “See you at orchestra.”

Even Berenice offered a quiet smile. I gave them a goofy thumbs-up, immediately regretted it, and dashed out of the bar, ignoring the fact that I was now beyond desperate for a piss.

Old Court was silent and wine-dark. There was nobody circling the smooth cassock of lawn, no other soul inside that dim, sepulchral space. Dammit. We must have come so close to crossing paths.

But then, a slight movement, an adjustment in my perspective, and there he was: standing, stone-still in the darkness, between dull haloes cast by the Dickensian lamps. How had I not seen him? In my delight, I almost called out—but his posture made me pause. His head was tilted back, and he was staring up at the wall, a strange, satisfied smile on his lips. Like an indulgent parent, or an artist admiring their own work.

Scampering noisily around the lawn, I tried to draw attention to myself. But even as I neared him, Bryn didn’t move. He just kept staring, his focus somewhere around the second floor. It was only when, almost at his shoulder, I coughed—twice—that he finally turned his face to mine.

Offering a smile and a wave, I was about to ask him how the rest of the party had gone (perhaps even be a little forward and ask him when the next one would be). But the sentence faltered before it could begin. Bryn’s expression was faintly blank, as if he were puzzling over a mathematical equation or hearing voices other than mine. Was he annoyed with me?

No. It was worse than that. He didn’t recognize me.

I clenched my fists, forcing my nails into my palms, infinitely less painful than the disappointment and the shame. Without stopping, I made my way past him and around the courtyard, as if that had always been my intention.

Wait, I told myself. It was understandable. When we met, I was in costume. And it was dark. And we were drunk. Maybe I should have said: You did the trick for me, the one with the haunted cards, remember? But that would have meant reminding him how I’d passed out, post-puke, in his bed, and perhaps it was no bad thing to wipe that episode from the collective memory.

Having made a full, senseless circle of the lawn, I began to trudge in the direction of the bar. But no. Here, uninhibited by hangers-on like Sajid, I had a chance to make an impression on Bryn. It might even be a funny way to start a conversation—me, asking him to work out who the hell I was.

Steeling myself, I turned back, my smile ready. But the courtyard really was empty now. Was the door to Bryn’s staircase swinging slightly, as if it had just fallen shut? I kicked at a pebble, swore through my teeth.

And then, that quiet again. This time it was gaping, vast. As if the music and chatter of the bar were coming from a great distance. Or even getting further away. I became aware of the pull of my breath, the clicking of my tongue behind my teeth. The total absence of sound gave me a strange notion, then: that not only was the courtyard vacant but the student rooms too, and that if I went into them at random—not just here, but all across college—I’d find laptop screens staring coldly at nothing, radios talking to themselves. Half-written essays, mugs of cold tea, never to be finished.

There was something else now, too, a horrible smell, maybe some kind of fertilizer applied to the flower beds. It was the stink of hooves, pattering, spattering mud, of ragged things exhumed by foxes. It made me queasy.

Unsettled, I looked up at the place Bryn had been staring at. There, between the second-story bedroom windows, was a shadowy thing, just about visible against the night-washed stone. Something long, flattened. It was easily the size of a man, but it made me think of a spider, or a beetle, spindly limbs inching imperceptibly in the dark. The sight of it gave me a jolt. A spread of ivy, or something?

Without knowing why, I called: “Hello?”

My voice was small, a penny landing in a prodigious well. No reply. But, as I stared, part of the thing seemed almost to shudder, the movement like a muscle shivering beneath skin.

Then, a scream like broken glass, so piercing that I felt it in my bones, so all-encompassing that I couldn’t tell which direction it came from. I spun, frantic, body desperate to move and brain at a loss as to where to go.

But it was just a student, behind me, in a disheveled evening dress, being chaotically piggybacked out of the bar by a bloke in a rugby shirt. Jesus Christ. I watched, chill with adrenaline, as the pair stumbled through the door, letting it clatter closed behind them before tottering away. Silence settled again.

I glanced back up at the wall; there was nothing but darkened stone. Just a trick of the light, then. I moved away carefully, as if holding my trembling self together.

But when I was within touching distance of the archway, I burst into a blundering sprint, crashing into New Court and toward H staircase. Because as I hurtled for the safety of my room, past the people who jumped, puzzled, out of my way, I realized that—thanks to that awful scream—a warmth had begun to spread unstoppably around my crotch.