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The main course was lamb two ways: thick slices of fillet, fleshy at the center, with an earthy stew on the side. Feeling obliged, I spoke for a while to the woman on my left, while Tim told another guest about the food we’d been used to, back in the day: the watery fish pie, the gluey stir fry, served with rather less fanfare. All the while my nerves rang softly, like the echoes of a chord around a concert hall.

The wine refills kept coming, and I gladly accepted them. At one point I spilled a glass of water, and everyone did that thing of gasping overdramatically. Plates disappeared as smoothly and silently as they’d arrived. A gooey chocolate thing appeared, and I dripped a long brown blob of it onto my shirt. Tim, sipping his water, told me I was a mess.

From somewhere came the sound of a knife striking glass. As the voices around me fell silent, there was a plummeting in my stomach, and the knowledge hit me all over again. All these people, all this spectacle. It shouldn’t be necessary. We shouldn’t be here.

Frances was standing. She thanked us all for making this scholarship a reality and expressed her hope that it would run for many years to come. She joked about her love of music but lack of talent, and everyone laughed obligingly. Then she began to talk about Bryn. About the time Bryn lisped his way through his first theater role as the Artful Dodger, about his intense but brief passion for the trombone (which ended when he left his brand-new instrument in the back of a taxi). About the singing lessons in which his teacher had described his voice as angelic. Looking at the candlelit faces, turned toward Frances like adoring shepherds at the crib, I thought: He was a better performer that any of you know.

The feelings exhumed by Frances’s tales came in a sequence: total admiration, abject jealousy. Then fury, melting into hatred and fear. Guilt. Finally, back to admiration again. A repeating bass line that had begun to sound when he’d walked into this very hall, that Halloween night, decked in blood red.

But always, always, rolling inexorably toward guilt. All these years it had followed me down every overlit supermarket aisle, onto every overstuffed bus. It had hunched in the corner of every utilitarian music room I’d ever used, lay beneath the frame of every bed. The memory came to me of Bryn at our first rehearsal, crouching on the windowsill, eyes aflame, and I wished there was a door in the world that would open onto that unsurpassable, deathless moment. I’d close that door and lock it behind us.

His life was too short, Frances said, faltering into banality. But it was an extraordinary life. Now, through the scholarship, Bryn would help others to live extraordinary lives too.

Immeasurably weary, I rubbed my eyes. It was too gloomy, the lights were too low.

Turning, I caught sight of a figure in the doorway, past the long tables, standing completely still. The light from the staircase was behind it, leaving its features imperceptible. It seemed at first to have the casual, youthful stance of a student, but on second glance I thought: No, it’s surely an adult. Yet the neck, the limbs, seemed out of proportion, the angles somehow wrong, and the thought was like a rush of cold, snapping me into wakefulness. Behind the figure, the corridor was unusually quiet. There were no waiters moving smartly to and fro, no distant clangs from the kitchen.

Frances talked on, saying that she still spoke to Bryn every day.

When I looked back at the doorway, the figure was gone.

No, it wasn’t. It was closer now, halfway down the main hall, standing between the long, empty tables. Without the light from the corridor behind it, it was even harder to see. But it was tall—or was it just thin? Its face, indecipherable.

Dinner guests leaned forward in their chairs, silently encouraging Frances Cavendish in her sentimental ramblings. I tried to catch Tim’s eye, but even when I gave a meaningful cough, louder and more theatrical than I’d intended, he didn’t react.

I looked back into the hall, but the figure was gone again. Now, there were only the tables, as empty and lifeless as before. My heart momentarily forgot its rhythm, my nerves sang again, discordant. Where the fuck had this thing gone? And how had it moved so quickly? This was a big hall, and to get halfway down it in the blink of an eye didn’t make sense. No, it made one horrible kind of sense. I scanned the corners of the room, the doorways leading to those corridors we undergraduates had never been allowed to explore. Nobody there. I suddenly felt stiflingly hot.

Frances talked saccharin, greetings-card slush about how, when we love someone dearly, they are always with us. Sweat dampened the nape of my neck, so much so that the lightest breeze landed like cold fingers on my skin, and I felt compelled to look behind me. As I twisted, awkwardly, the legs of my chair complained against the floorboards. Some people tutted, but I ignored them. Only the old masters, forever fixed in their frames, were behind me, looking over my shoulder. Come on, I told myself. Don’t start seeing things that aren’t there.

Discomposed now, I took hold of the tablecloth and very gently lifted it, as if the answers might be waiting for me on the floor. Under the table, Tim’s shoes. A napkin, possibly mine, beside a fallen potato. I felt the person next to me shift in their seat, probably in irritation.

I let the tablecloth drop before draining the rest of my wine. Now, the person next to me seemed to be sniggering.

The lamb sat heavy in my stomach. The thought of it, pink mulch, made me queasy. There was an odor of something acrid, maybe a pan blackening on a hob or a dish left in the oven too long.

The laughter irritated me, like someone eating with their mouth open. I lifted a bottle of wine from the table, relieved to find it fairly heavy, but it almost slipped through my clammy fingers. Shit. Laughter again. I turned to my neighbor, ready to give them a look of disdain.

But it was Bryn beside me, his eyes huge and dark.

I leapt out of my chair with a shout, bumping the table and rattling everything on it. With a little collective shriek, people grasped for their wine glasses. Frances paused, but I barely noticed—I was scrambling out of my chair, voice strangled in my throat.

He was still there, staring up at me.

I might have cried out to the room: Don’t you see him? Why can’t anybody see him? But I could barely breathe, let alone make a sound.

I staggered from him, bumping my neighbor, not realizing that the tablecloth was still gripped in my hand. There was another gasp, louder this time, as the candelabra teetered, spattering the table with wax. Tim jumped up to steady it then, rising slowly from his seat, reached out his hands, fingers spread. He looked like someone on a bridge, imploring: Don’t do it.

Then I fled, leaping from the dais and stumbling down the long, judgmental room, casting chairs out of my way as I went. Nobody called after me as I burst through the double doors, knocking a trolley, and sending a tray of coffee cups crashing to the floor. Even if they had, I wouldn’t have listened. Because I was getting the fuck out of here, out of college and out of the city. Yes, I’d hoped that my presence here, my service to Bryn’s family, would put something to rest. But he wasn’t interested in my justifications or my explanations. All he wanted was to take me back to that awful moment, and I couldn’t face it, I couldn’t face—

Before I could finish the thought my feet tangled at the top of the staircase, and I fell, all the way to the bottom, each step a reprimand for every time I’d thought myself on his level.

The last night I’d been really drunk in Cambridge was the night before our graduation. I’d celebrated my underwhelming 2:2 by going to a club and drinking shots, all with revolting names like “brain hemorrhage” and “baby puke.” After a large kebab and a short stumble home, I dropped into a sweaty, fretful sleep at about three.

Then, I had the dream again.

There, in that uncanny kitchen, was that sound, knock knock knock. That door, about to whisper open.

And when I woke, whimpering, that certainty. It really was him. Coming back.

It made me think of a story I’d read about Peter Warlock, from his friend Augustus John. A favorite story of mine, once. In it, John describes how Warlock took his friends on a road trip to a Norfolk inn to hear some traditional folk songs. This night of music and beer was going well until, in the middle of an animated discussion, Warlock dropped to the ground, still and lifeless. Failing to revive him, all Warlock’s horrified friends could do was respectfully cover his body and let it lie in the bar until morning, at which time they would make their sad arrangements. But when they returned the next day, they found Warlock sitting up, waiting, in better shape than the rest of the party. Extraordinary, to think your friend is gone forever, to find yourself wrong.

The story rang differently now. I’d always known that Bryn wouldn’t let others get in the way of what he wanted. I just hadn’t realized something bigger: that he wouldn’t be stopped by such a trivial thing as being dead.