When I woke, laid out as if on a slab, I didn’t know whether I’d been unconscious for five seconds or five hours. Above me, the sky, starless. Beneath my splayed palms, something chill and damp. When I lifted my head, my brain seemed to roll in my skull, and I had to close my eyes again.
After several deep breaths, I eased myself onto my elbows and looked around. I was in Old Court, lying in the middle of the lawn. My thoughts came slowly, hobbled, and it took a few seconds to remember leaving the dinner. Then, it tumbled upon me: the memory of Bryn, his impenetrable expression. Lumbering, gasping, to my feet, I wheeled on the spot, taking in every doorway, terrified of what it might be hiding within. But my eyes confirmed I was alone. I rubbed my face with a dewy hand, puzzling how I’d got from the staircase to here, why nobody had come to help me. All I wanted was to speak to Alexa. Fuck. I felt suddenly, piercingly awake.
The glow of the street lamp did little to illuminate the courtyard, and not a single window shed light onto the square of dark grass. The silence felt heavy, like fog, as if it might subsume anything I tried to say. Shambling off the grass and onto the path, brushing uselessly at my rumpled trousers, I looked toward the room where I was staying. The one below Bryn’s. I couldn’t be there tonight, I knew that now for sure, I’d been stupid ever to think it possible. Imagine lying in the blackness, wondering when he’d come. I had to find Tim.
Perhaps he was still in hall. I wondered whether there was any way I could sneak back inside, into the comfort and safety of company, without looking like a madman. Unlikely. As I wondered what I’d say to the other guests, I spotted something on the path: something small and spectral white, a patch of brightness in the gloom. Feeling like a man condemned, I inched slowly closer until I could see what it was. When I realized, I almost threw up. It was that page, from the auditions, that sickening photo of Bryn. How? There was no reason for it to be here. I tried to look again, to confirm what I was seeing, but couldn’t meet his faded, monochrome gaze. The humiliation of returning to hall was nothing compared to the terror of standing in that tomb-like quiet. I set off, half running, under the archway into New Court.
But when I found my trembling way to the staircase down which I’d plummeted, I found that the doors at the bottom were locked. The dinner must be over, the guests must have left. How could it be that nobody had noticed me, sprawled on the ground? Had not a single person passed through Old Court? I wondered whether there was another way back up to hall, whether I could sneak in and find a waiter to help me. But the thought of looking through the kitchens, creeping amongst the hanging pans, the freshly sharpened knives, made my stomach turn.
The bar would be closed now. Maybe Tim was in the common room. Even if he wasn’t, I could grab a few hours’ rest on one of the sofas, with the TV blaring reassuringly in the background. If I was lucky, a few international students might be hanging around too. Yes, they’d be a bit perturbed to see a ragged old bloke curled up and shivering in front of their telly, but we’d all just have to get along.
Hurrying to the common room, a pain in one leg making me lurch like the undead, I looked at the clock above chapel. It showed exactly two. I searched for shreds of comfort in the scene: the lawn, pristine as ever, silvered by the moonlight, the paving stones tessellating tidily around its edges. The library, with its precisely ordered shelves of logic and reason. The bedroom windows, some darkened by ivy, revealing nothing. Still, not a soul anywhere.
I thought again how quiet it was. No, it wasn’t just quiet. There was a total absence of sound, as if the college were something sealed: a castle trapped in a snow globe or an insect fixed in amber. Increasing my pace, I bundled into the common room, desperate to hear the familiar sound of quarrelling around the quiz machine, the soft clicks and clunks from the pool table.
But there was nobody there.
With a steadying hand on the wall, I made for the banks of old sofas that faced the television. Vacant. The screen showed a man with huge sunglasses, gesturing at women in bikinis, no music to match his exaggerated moves. I grabbed the remote control and pressed the volume button, up, up. Then the mute button, on and off, on and off. Nothing. A thought, almost laughable, danced through my head: I’d gone deaf. Burst both eardrums as I bumped down the stairs. I didn’t know whether that was medically possible, but I also knew that it hadn’t happened, because I could hear perfectly well the shuffling of my scuffed shoes against the carpet.
In the silence, the jabbering of my mind was loud, voices clamoring over one another, tuneless. Where else to look? Christ, not the chapel, with its ancient corners and stone-eyed saints. Not the musty library, long shut. My nerves were drumskin-tight. Everywhere, an overwhelming sense of wrongness.
Hang on. The night porter would be on duty, making sure there were no students climbing the college walls or setting up their own personal traffic calming systems on the lawn. Sure that a word from someone else would break this unsettling charm, I blundered out of the common room and around the courtyard, the clapping of my feet a sarcastic applause.
At the lodge I knocked, waited. No answer. Finding the door unlocked, I slipped inside and approached the old, broad desk, with its signing-in book, its piles of letters. I dared to hope that the porter wasn’t far away, as his jacket was slung over the back of his chair, his mug of coffee half-drunk. There was also a very faint smell of smoke, which would suggest that he’d had a cigarette break recently. Maybe he was out now, strolling around Old Court or checking the bike sheds. That would make sense, although it was strange that he hadn’t found me splayed on the lawn.
As I waited for him to return, I distracted myself by studying the framed photographs on the walls. Rugby teams and drinking societies, fixed forever in sepia. I supposed there’d be a photo of me, somewhere—perhaps a shot of the undersized college orchestra or the rowing squad I’d been an unhelpful part of. Not on a wall, but possibly in a filing cabinet somewhere, and however far I travelled from Cambridge, I would always be here, tethered to that moment.
The thought gave me no comfort, so I turned to examine the shelves, the staff pigeonholes labelled with names I didn’t recognize. Sat down, stood up again. Nobody came. My breath became shallower, as if the air itself might be too thin, as if it wouldn’t be enough to support my voice if I needed to speak, to shout. How much fucking longer?
I threw open the door of the lodge and almost fell back into New Court, my fingers worrying at the hem of my jacket. The smell of smoke was stronger now, even though there was no sign of the porter. As I paced the pavement outside the lodge, my eyes landed on the clock above the chapel. Its iron hands showed exactly two.
How strange, I thought, for such a clock to stop. Without knowing why, I made my way back into the lodge and searched the walls for a watch, a phone, anything that would confirm the time.
There, a clock behind the desk. The time, digitally displayed down to the minute: two.
At first, I had no reaction at all. Then a rush, like blood from a frightened face: I must have spent at least ten or fifteen minutes in the common room and the porters’ lodge. It wasn’t possible that the time was still two.
What came back to me then was the film I’d seen with Bryn, where the students get lost in the woods, where they follow the river but arrive back where they started. My body trembled as if I might shake myself apart, and I fought to suppress the idea, circling now, that perhaps it was possible that time would never move forward again. I turned unsteadily in small, pointless circles—what the fuck was that burning smell?—before deciding: I wouldn’t wait for Tim, or for the porter, or for anyone else. I’d just go. I’d sleep on a bench, on a pavement, rather than stay here.
As I put my hand on the small door to the street, something dreadful ran through my head: an idea that, when I went outside, all of Trumpington Street would be silent too, shops and colleges closed up, pavements bereft of bodies. What if I walked for hours but heard no cars or footsteps or any other sounds of life, and what if nobody stirred when I pummeled doorbells and cast stones at bedroom windows? What if I kept going until it should be morning, but morning didn’t come?
With no other paths before me, I pushed at the door, set within the ancient gates. Locked. Of course it would be, this time of night. I pushed again, then began to hammer, laughing senselessly, feeling the wood uneven beneath my palms, firm against my battered shoes. After a minute or so without progress my knees folded and I dropped to the ground, and I listened to my breath, cragged, the sawing of a bow on strings.
But beneath this, out of the distant quiet, crept a sound. Something—how can I say—something that sounded long and angular, something that might have been music.
I leapt to my feet, eyes darting left and right. Then I looked up, directly up, at the blackness that seemed to be descending on me, falling, faster and faster, as if it were the essence of nothing, time was nothing, and I were nothing, nothing, nothing.