i

There’s that horrible sensation, when you’re drifting off to sleep: you feel as if you’re falling, and you jolt yourself awake. That night in the B&B it must have happened five or six times. So, when I got up, I was feeling more than a little groggy. Hoping a walk would help, I made my way to the river, taking a route I never had as a student. Along the way, predictable Cambridge scenery emerged from unpredictable perspectives. Uncanny, as if seen in a mirror.

I paused by The Anchor to watch the morning light shivering on the surface of the river. There was very little sound but for the gentle clack of sandwich boards being set up by punting company reps, the murmur of tourists as they corralled family members for photos. I felt a million miles from the flat in Manchester, where the wails of the neighbors’ baby would already be coming through the walls.

There, walking the Mathematical Bridge and its geometrically imperfect reflection, was a couple, hand in hand, silhouetted perfectly against the cold blue sky. It was the kind of idyllic scene you should photograph and upload to Instagram, but I’d never been a social media person. In fact, I’d thanked the universe many times that pivotal university moments—me, fancy-dressed as a French maid, or passed out on the common-room carpet—happened before Facebook became ubiquitous, so were stored only in the memories of my fellow students. At least there they could be bleached and diminished by time. To be fair, I didn’t mind posting work-related stuff online, but I kept my personal life analog. Alexa was always the same. Hated having her picture taken, championed paper diaries.

Even if I’d been more “online,” I wouldn’t have taken a picture. Things like bridges and balconies give me the creeps. I don’t like to be reminded of the distance between a person and the ground, of how far it’s possible to fall.

Seeing the couple, so easy and so comfortable, I wondered why my own route to love had been so arduous. Back at college, girls saw me as a Good Guy—the type who finishes last, the guy they talked to about other guys. That girl in Tim’s group (God, I hated how Tim called her Casio, it was so annoying) would happily ruffle my hair in front of everyone, or link arms with me as we walked, because it was so clearly a platonic gesture.

Don’t think I didn’t notice: I only got lucky in love once I became The Bad Guy.

I was back north for the interminable summer holidays. I got a job in the local pub serving pints of mild to elderly gentlemen, who paid with mounds of coppers and asked wryly about my studies, baffled as to how my understanding of motets and madrigals would serve me in real life (they had a point). Now and again I met Gaz, Ben, and Reedy, and while every meeting concluded with us saying how great it was to catch up, it felt like we were laboring to keep something alive when perhaps we should let it go.

In the end, I spent much of my free time at home. I’d help Mum in the garden, pulling weeds and deadheading roses under her careful direction, or I’d work with my stepdad on dubious home improvement projects, holding his ladder while he fiddled recklessly with old light fittings. It was nice, actually. Good to step outside my own head, to do things with my hands that produced a tangible, concrete result. To make simple progress on simple things. When our jobs were done, we’d order from our favorite takeaway and—while watching back-to-back episodes of our favorite reality TV shows—my mum and I would engage in our customary aggressive bartering: No way, a barbecue spare rib is worth at least two prawn toasts. Whenever I beat her to an answer on Family Fortunes, my mum would wink and call me a smartarse with conspicuous pride.

These were days before Zoom, before mobile phones did anything beyond calls, texts, and games of Snake. And my rugged old Nokia was fairly quiet throughout the months that sighed by. Tim called once a week, and we talked about house parties and barbecues he’d been to with people from his course. At one point, having heard the information from Berenice, he mentioned that Bryn and Alexa were in Prague, and I felt a kind of panic. Although I’d been texting them, the thread connecting us felt worn and frail—as if it might snap, allowing them to soar away from me like kites on a current.

All of which is why I was so glad to get back to college for our second year. As I passed through the gates, my feet moved with the breezy confidence of one who knows where the nearest toilets are. And when I discovered everyone in our usual corner of the bar—Bryn at the center, leaving the freshers in no doubt as to who owned the space—it felt like coming home. Together, we assessed each new undergrad: this girl, Footlights wannabe. And that guy? Pure Christian Union. We spoke to a few, but mainly to offer unsolicited wisdom in patronizing tones: Come on, nobody goes to Cindy’s on a Thursday.

First term unfolded predictably as Cambridge wrapped itself in autumn garb. I enjoyed seeing students in their box-fresh American Apparel, moving antithetically against those antiquated streets; also, observing their tweedy peers, in sensible cords and button-downs, tottering in and out of Tiki-themed clubs and neon-lit bars. Lecture timetables unfurled like college scarves, parties punctuated the weeks emphatically as fireworks. Shops sold pumpkins and jaw-breaking toffee apples. I felt as though I were listening to a piece of music that I’d heard before, enjoying it all the more now that I knew the tune and could hum along.

One evening in October, I found the common room crackling with a kind of static. The television, blasting out scenes from some musical talent show, was being ignored by those who clamored around the huge noticeboard, their bodies obscuring the usual Students’ Union announcements and poorly executed penis graffiti. I approached a third-year medic whose name I couldn’t remember. “What’s going on?” I asked.

“Check it out,” she replied. “Bryn won the Conran Award.” She pointed at a double-page spread from the student paper, pinned wonkily but proudly on the wall. On it, a black-and-white photograph of Bryn, looking supremely comfortable in front of the camera.

“The what?”

“It’s a university prize. For long form essay writing?”

This made no sense to me.

Bryn himself stood in the middle of the crowd, jostled and patted by admiring hands. Confused, I fought my way through the disciples until I found myself in front of him. “So,” I said, with an uncertain smile, “I hear congratulations are in order?”

He laughed, shook his head. “It’s no big deal.”

Jamie, standing beside him like a politician’s personal spin doctor, chipped in. “Sure. But five grand is a reasonable chunk of pocket money.”

Pocket money? I looked from Bryn to Jamie and back again. “You won five grand?” I asked, a note of hysteria creeping into my voice. “How?”

“I wrote an essay about John Dee. A Tudor mathematician. Also astronomer, astrologer, alchemist. Probably one of the most fascinating minds in history.”

“Right. As part of your course?”

“Nah, for this competition. I saw the application form online when I was on holiday and thought, fuck it. I never liked sunbathing anyway.”

I had the sensation of being slapped. My understanding had been that whenever Bryn wasn’t grudgingly slogging through an assignment or hanging out with us, he was sitting on the sofa and scratching his balls. We didn’t do extra-curricular stuff, did we? That was for the Monas of this world, no? I thought back to the hours I’d spent in my parents’ local, talking to toothless old buffers about darts, and how he must have spent the time hunched over his books. He hadn’t mentioned this to me, not once.

My brain reminded me that I ought to react, so I threw my arm around his shoulders and sputtered: “I mean, wow. That’s … awesome. So, what did you say about …?”

“John Dee? You don’t really want to know.”

“Oh I absolutely do.”

He sighed, theatrically, Go on then. “I wrote about his relationship with a guy called Edward Kelley. They did spiritual investigations together.”

I frowned. “Spiritual investigations? Like séances?”

“Not quite. Kelley claimed he could see angels, and that they were going to tell him the secrets of a universal language, supposedly the language God used to create the world. The two of them spent years trying to find it.”

“That’s weird.”

“It got weirder. Toward the end, Kelley told Dee that the angels had ordered them to swap wives.”

“Bloody hell. They didn’t do it, though?”

“You don’t ignore instructions from The Almighty.”

I wanted to ask smart questions, but my world was spinning slightly off its axis. “So this Dee guy, supposedly so smart, gets taken in by this bollocks?”

“Yeah,” said Bryn, like a minister on his fifth breakfast interview of the morning. “But my essay was about how you can’t always set logical thought and magical thought in opposition. Often, people like him came up with brilliant ideas partly because of their belief in the weird and the supernatural, not in spite of it. Dee wouldn’t have made his most important discoveries about navigation and astronomy if he didn’t believe in things like astrology.”

The more he talked, the more panicked I became. This essay wasn’t some half-arsed side project, dashed off on impulse. It was thoroughly researched, carefully thought through. How many more topics did Bryn just happen to be an expert in? How did he have so many opinions? “Shit. Well. Congrats, man. Drink to celebrate?”

“Thanks,” he said, holding up a pint in progress. “Jamie already got me one.”

I glanced at Jamie, who wrapped his arm around Bryn’s shoulder. The two of them looked like brothers, impeccable in their Oxford shirts, jumpers knotted around their shoulders, signet rings glinting on their pinkies. Both beamed, not at me but at Sarah, who clicked away with a small, sleek, digital camera. When the photoshoot was over I clapped Bryn on the back, realized I’d done that already, and mumbled that I’d be back in a bit. As I moved away, others closed in around him. At the sight of each one Bryn’s face lit up anew, an arcade machine swallowing coins.

On the edge of the group was Alexa, observing Bryn as he received his public. Following her line of vision, I saw he was now talking to a pretty fresher with a heap of blonde hair. This fresher pretended to punch him on the jaw and, obliging, he made as if to fall backward. Then, smiling, he leaned to whisper something in her ear, and the fresher held the straw from her drink between her straight, white teeth. She was conspicuously attractive, but in an obvious, unoriginal way. Like a pop singer or a soap star, respectably styled for a charity appearance.

“Lex,” I said, giving her a nudge. “Fancy a drink?”

Although Alexa turned to face me, her gaze strained for a moment longer toward Bryn. Eventually she met my eye, produced a smile as if from a switch. “Good idea.”

We found the bar in a state of lazy quiet, only a handful of students scattered around the timeworn banquettes. Alexa and I took a couple of stools at the bar and ordered the customary bottle of college red. “You’re not rowing tomorrow?” I asked.

“Fuck no,” she replied, “I quit. From now on, I’m only awake at 5:30 a.m. when I’m on my way home from a night out.”

“Very sensible. I only managed the one term last year. I miss the river, though.”

“No, you think you miss it because that would be poetic.” She held her glass toward me. “But it’s not poetic, it’s just cold. Have you spoken to Berenice recently?”

I shook my head, filling her glass, then mine. “How is she?”

“No idea. Haven’t seen her.”

I congratulated myself for still being part of the team, for passing a test that Berenice had failed.

“Speaking of which,” Alexa went on, “did you hear about Mona?”

“What about her?”

“She dropped out. Had some kind of breakdown.”

“Shit, seriously?”

“Mmm-hmm. Dominic—you know, ginger NatSci, nice guy—told me. Said she’d been acting odd last term. He even spoke to her director of studies about it, to see if they’d get her some counseling or something, but he doesn’t know if it happened. Apparently she came back last week because her parents pressured her, but she only stayed for one night and then put herself on the first train home. Told college she’s done.”

I wondered whether I should have spoken to college about Mona myself. But what would I have said? I thought about her terror in the stairwell, the queasy feeling I’d had when I stepped over the threshold into her room. Those marks, on her hands. There in the comforting hubbub of the bar, I felt a strange impulse to glance into the darkened corners of the room, to check the shadowy space around my feet.

Alexa carried on. “Classic Oxbridge. People go from being the smartest in sixth form to being average at uni, and it messes with their sense of self. I get that. But I have a coping strategy: I don’t give a shit.”

We toasted Alexa’s philosophy. But I knew she was wrong. Mona wasn’t worried about being top of her classes. She was top of her classes. Why else had Bryn shared the same breathing space as her, if not to “take inspiration” from her coursework when he’d left it too late to summon his own muse? Again I thought of her inexplicably nauseating room, the string around the window, the extra lock on the door. A peculiar image came to me of Mona, trembling under her bedcovers, and a second Mona, hovering outside the window, moon-eyed and raking her own skin with ragged fingernails. I shook my head, as if to fling the image away.

“The thing that amazes me most,” said Alexa, “is that she hasn’t emailed Bryn to say goodbye.”

“There’s still time.” Then, desperately curious: “Speaking of Bryn, great news on his prize.”

“Yeah. He’s amazing. Hard work, though.”

I paused. She gave a thin laugh and waved a hand, I’m kidding. But after a beat she sighed, leaned a little heavier on the bar. “He’s just … Exhausting, sometimes. I was with him at their Highgate house when he was finishing that essay, and he was so stressed about it. I had to keep picking his notes out of the bin, giving him pep talks. And he’d get so cranky with me.”

“Come on,” I said. “He’s not that bad, surely?”

She looked strangely at me. “Of course he is. His moods can be really … dark, sometimes.”

Yes, I remembered our weekend away. But was this different? The idea that there were sides to Bryn I didn’t see—it felt like an ache.

“But that’s the thing,” Alexa said, bright again. “Big characters need a lot of attention. And we love them all the same.”

Yes. Some people were given leeway that others were not. Bryn would still have aced his Cambridge interview if he’d turned up wearing flip-flops and Bermuda shorts, but I wouldn’t have made it through the first five minutes without my suit and tie, confirmation that yes, even with my comical accent, I did know how to walk on two legs and eat with a knife and fork.

I don’t know why I cared, but I asked anyway: “Who was that blonde girl in the common room just now?”

Alexa gave me a guarded look. “Which blonde girl?”

“The one talking to Bryn.”

Something like a sneer, then. “Some first-year English student. Dad’s a property magnate, so she’s quite the Cambridge celebrity I hear. Why, got your eye on her?”

“No! Just wondered.”

There had been something about Alexa’s phrasing, as if this girl were on a different level. It was all relative, I supposed. Alexa rested a hand on the bar and I noticed perhaps for the first time how pale the skin, how fine the bones. Little wonder Bryn’s hand always looked so powerful with Alexa’s in it. In that moment, I wanted to cover Alexa’s hand, protectively, with my own.

As we sat, silent, I thought about Bryn’s prize. There, a tugging in my core, as if something not yet marked on any astronomical chart were pulling out of my gravitational field.

Later, I wondered: Could I have written an essay like Bryn’s? Me, who spent my school days fetching up each textbook answer like a dog retrieving a stick? I’d always been good at presenting facts. But I’d failed to understand the need for original thought, for interpretation.

Perhaps I could have interpreted my beloved Warlock. I could have explored whether his drunkenness had any impact on his work. That, and his fascination with the occult. Supposedly, he believed boozing to be a route to mysticism—so, did it really help him to weave the past and present into new, unearthly chords? Did it help him as he stooped at his piano, choosing notes as if choosing words for a particularly potent spell?

As for Bryn, he hadn’t deceived me, not really. Since he was one in a long line of university-goers, this kind of thing was built into his DNA. He read, wrote, thought without even realizing it, and making a critical analysis of the world came as naturally and instinctively to him as flicking on the TV did to me. In this respect, Kenny was right: private school polish was about much more than money.

Thankfully I didn’t need to acknowledge this rightness, since Kenny was long gone.

It was early evening in November, the dark sky cloaked by a billowing blanket of cloud, when I was woken from a nap by a hammering at my door. It was Bryn, wearing a beautiful but stained dinner jacket and a slightly manic grin. His hair was styled strangely, slicked close to his skull in a way I hadn’t seen before and, for once, he was completely clean-shaven. “You busy?” he asked, slightly out of breath.

“Not overly,” I replied, my voice still thick with sleep. Then, pointing at a case he carried in one hand: “Is that a violin?”

“Do you want to do a gig?”

“A gig?”

“Those songs we played last year. Do you want to play them at an event?”

I felt suddenly, gloriously awake. “Yeah, sure! When?”

“Tonight.”

“Wait … What?”

“There’s a dinner at Trinity, for some society. There were musicians organized, but they fell through. We get free drinks. And it’s just a couple of songs.”

“But we haven’t rehearsed!”

“So? You could play those things backward.” Then, with a shrug: “And I’ll manage.”

I held up my hands, palms out: Let’s all just settle down. “Bryn, why would Trinity want musicians from another college when they’ve got hundreds of their own?”

He leaned on the doorframe. “Do you want to do it or not?”

There was a hint of exasperation in his voice. In the silence that followed, I laughed, uncomfortably. I wanted to say: This is ridiculous, we’re completely unprepared. But I knew what his response would be. What’s the worst that could happen? In any case, perhaps any terror or embarrassment would all be worth it for us to be a duo again. Which is why I finally said: “Alright.”

“That’s the spirit! You should get changed.”

“Now?”

“Course, it starts at eight.”

“Jesus, Bryn.”

We armed ourselves with sheet music and ties and cufflinks, feeble props denoting professionalism, and made our way out of college and down Trumpington Street. With each step, Bryn swung the violin case aggressively, and I might have wondered why he carried it at all were I not too busy mentally rehearsing my piano accompaniment. By the time we reached Trinity a fine rain was beginning to spot our unironed shirts. The moon hung orange in the restless sky, inauspicious.

Through the college gates, I had to skip, ungainly, to keep up with Bryn as he moved around the edge of the long, imperious courtyard. I chased him through a huge wooden door, set into one of the great stone walls, and up two, three floors of a tall, twisting staircase. I was still climbing when he reached the top, and I paused, slightly breathless, as he smoothed his jacket and approached a closed door.

“Is this it?” I called.

He said nothing, only pushed open the door—releasing the lucid sound of glasses being set carefully on trays—and beamed at whatever was on the other side. I stumbled up the stairs and followed him in.

It was some kind of reception room, the walls adorned with classical landscapes and decorative plates. Everywhere, dark furniture polished to a high gleam, velveted armchairs and ottomans that must have overheard more about politics and philosophy than I ever would. On one marble-topped table, champagne flutes ready to be received. When I sidled up to him, Bryn was speaking to one of the few people inside, a jolly man in an unusual gown. I caught the end of their exchange: “We were starting to wonder if you were coming,” the man said.

“Sorry,” Bryn replied, not looking sorry. “Last minute run-through, you know, getting everything spot on.”

“Quite right. And here we have …”

The man turned to me. As I held out my hand to introduce myself, Bryn jumped in, staring at me in a way that was fierce and overpowering. “Thomas,” he said. “Tom. This is Tom.”

I looked at Bryn, then back at the man. Nodded, blankly.

“Well, Tom,” said the man, as people began to file in behind us, “our guests are arriving. So, whenever you’re ready.” At that, he gestured to the corner, where there was a lustrous black piano, its raised mahogany lid a glowering mirror. Thanking the man, Bryn placed a hand on my shoulder and guided me away, sweeping a glass of champagne as we went.

“Okay,” I said, switching into concert mode. “Remember what we did with the intro? The tempo will be quite fluid—”

He put the glass in my hand. “Actually, I need you to do some solo stuff.”

“What?”

“Just in the background, while they’re having drinks. Play anything you like, these people don’t care.”

The room was filling with old duffers in suits and gowns. A few looked toward us, expectant. I had a low, sick feeling. “But I thought … I haven’t prepared—”

“Relax. You’re not performing for The Times music critics. It’s a room of fellows who aren’t listening anyway.”

He pushed down on my shoulder and I plopped onto the piano stool. “What happened to the other musicians?” I asked.

“I canceled them.”

I almost dropped my glass. “What? Why … why would you—”

He looked at me as if the answer were right in front of me. “So that we could come instead.”

The logic was circular, a tune on repeat. I stared down at the row of keys as if they might bite. “Bryn. What is going on?”

He shook his head, exasperated. “What’s the problem? Are you worried that they’ll find out that you actually are a musician? That you can, in fact, just about be trusted not to fuck up some basic songs?”

I flinched. Arguing with him was like trying to hold a snake. When you felt you’d pinned him on a point, he whipped from your grasp, bit back. Still harder to deny was his expression where, beneath his mask of mischief, frustration lay coiled and shimmering. Even his sleek hair, so unlike his usual careless curls, threw me off—it gave me the feeling you get when you wave at a friend in the street before realizing you’re looking at a stranger.

The room was full now, and the man in the gown was looking at us rather pointedly. Sighing, I asked one last question: “Who the fuck is Tom?”

Bryn shrugged, and suddenly the sparkle was back in his eyes. “Whoever he is, he probably isn’t drinking free champagne in the most private corner of Trinity.”

Completely lost, I downed my drink and began to play.

In our first secret rehearsal, Bryn’s power had seemed some kind of divine right. Sublime. It had felt like grace.

But music is unusual among the arts. Paintings and sculpture stick around for centuries, but music lives in a moment. Once a piece is played, it’ll never be played exactly the same way again. And the power that came from Bryn afterward did not feel holy, not at all.

While I played some old exam pieces I knew by heart, Bryn strolled about, plucking canapés from platters, chatting to guests chosen by an unguessable system. At one point, I overheard him saying that he’d be playing after dinner, which made no sense whatsoever.

In between pieces, other guests came and spoke to me. I couldn’t ask them what the event was all about, since that would have exposed me as someone who wasn’t meant to be there—but a line about “The story of our Savior” on the invitations they carried made me wonder whether this was some kind of religious thing. In fact, I was worried that one priestly looking bloke was going to make a bid for my soul, but after a monologue about some college collection of silver—used at the inauguration of the Archbishop of Canterbury, or something, I wasn’t even close to paying attention—I kind of wished he had.

Another guest who decided to say hello was a staff member who wore a gray bob and some of those colorful beads popular with women who want to appear quirky. “So, Thomas,” she said, “where did you go to school?”

Always the same question. I gave her the name of my sixth form, knowing she wouldn’t have heard of it.

She hadn’t. “And where exactly is that?”

I named the town. She seemed not to have heard of that either, and only took a vol-au-vent from a passing waiter and deposited it on the piano. “Were your parents always very supportive of your musical development?” she asked.

A memory came to me then, of something that happened when I was six or seven. Some kids from down the street had come back to mine, and as we barreled into the front room we saw a shape stretched on the sofa, silent and still. It was my dad, on his back, skin the color of raw pastry poking between his greasy vest and underpants. A cigarette, fallen from its ashtray, was slowly charring the coffee table and releasing a coil of foul smoke. It was only when the other kids started giggling that I noticed the muddy stain between his bony thighs, on the sofa, a stench like fertilizer mingling with the smell of what I now knew to be whisky. Then there was Mum, scurrying in with a washcloth, red-faced and garbling apologies that weren’t hers to make. I never asked those kids around again.

“No,” I said, taking the woman’s vol-au-vent and showily eating it.

She blinked. Searched for something to say. “You know, there are some musical items in the collection of artefacts on display tonight—”

Christ, not this again. I explained that, regretfully, I must pause our chat and start my next piece. Looking relieved, the woman tottered off into the crowd.

After I’d played some simple Mozart, a bit of Brahms, a gong sounded. Drawn by its golden tone, the guests shuffled like a hypnotist’s subjects through a side door and off to dinner. The man in the weird gown loitered at the back of the crowd, so that he could thank me for the music on his way out, and I nodded at him as if everything had gone beautifully to plan. Then I sat, waiting for the room to clear of everyone but me and Bryn, so I could ask him what the fuck had just happened.

But when the gowned man had gone and the door had fallen shut behind him, I found myself alone but for a waiter, who bustled silently about before disappearing himself. I waited, like a lost child standing stock still in a supermarket, thinking that Bryn would surely reappear soon. But as the minutes ticked by, my irritability shapeshifted into anxiety. I had the feeling, the feeling that drops like a stone, of being deserted.

Quitting my post at the piano, I headed out and checked the nearby toilets. They were empty. After that I called Bryn’s mobile several times, but only his recorded voice answered me, flat and inhuman. I even went back and peered through the door that led to the dinner, in case for some reason he’d decided to eat, but he wasn’t there.

I was about to go back down the spiral staircase when, looking down the corridor, I spotted a room at the very end to which the door was ajar. Mouth sickly with champagne, I stumbled toward it, almost tripping over my own feet, before pausing at the threshold and nudging the door open.

Electric light from the corridor bled into the room, creating a long strip of chintz across the floor, illuminating shapes within what appeared to be a large lounge. I could just about discern the limbs of chairs and small side tables, all skeletal angles, their colors muted in the gloom. To my right was a cold, gaping fireplace, either side of which were larger tables, swathed like altars, bearing towers of coffee cups and rows of dainty port glasses. To my left, where the darkness was heavier, was a gallery wall where huge frames hung, their contents nothing but still, black flags. Below them, another table, the size of a coffin. And, on it, detectable only because of the moonlight sighing through a small window, some kind of glass case—the kind for displaying museum artefacts, like Victorian medical implements or haunted dolls.

Then the darkness itself shifted, and I realized with a jolt: there was something in front of the case, something I’d been looking directly at and hadn’t seen. A figure, slightly stooped. It seemed to be facing away from me, although I couldn’t be sure. I stepped one foot into the room then immediately withdrew. The figure seemed to have moved, in the space of a blink, somehow, behind the table. For a second I thought I saw a streak of brightness where the face should be, like a row of small, neat teeth.

Another blink and the figure was back, in front of the cabinet, leaning toward it again. Impossible. My eyes, playing tricks.

I called: “Bryn? Is that you?”

Although I’d spoken softly, my voice was stark and vulgar in the silence. The figure twisted. In the dark, I still couldn’t see its face. A liquid feeling in my limbs—provoked by the memory of that shadow beyond the bathroom window, that shape slipping up an Old Court wall—made me clutch at the doorframe. I wondered whether the guests in the dining room would be able to hear me from this distance, if for some reason I were to cry out. The figure moved a little, from beyond a fall of shadow, and I was finally able to make out his face. Fuck.

“Bryn, did you hear me?” I said, my voice barely more than a breath. “What’s going on?”

In the darkness, he put a finger to his lips. Clicked a nail on the glass cabinet: tap tap tap.

I looked around for a light switch. Unable to find one, I moved reluctantly into the gloom. “I don’t think we should be in here.”

He didn’t reply. Instead, he turned to the doors of the case and touched them softly, as if he were stroking a girl’s hair. Then, suddenly, he began to tug at the lock, making the glass rattle crazily in its frame.

Panicked, I held up my hands. “Don’t! You’ll break it!”

But the doors of the case swung open. He paused, allowing the silence to settle. Then he reached inside the case and—very slowly and deliberately, as if it were the finale to one of his magic shows—retrieved something. From my position in the doorway I couldn’t see it very well, but it appeared to be a small, silver cup. With a long sigh, Bryn cradled it in his hands.

“What’s that?” I asked, hugging myself to try and stop my trembling.

He didn’t reply.

I tried again. “I’m pretty sure we’re not meant to be touching it.”

When he spoke, his voice sounded different. “Then don’t touch it.”

“Please,” I said, looking over my shoulder, “put it back and let’s go. It’s just a cup.”

He brought the thing to his lips, chuckling softly—it almost looked as if he were telling it a secret—and he looked off into the distance, a fierce light in his eyes. Was he drunk? From somewhere down the corridor a voice called something about dessert wine, and I held my breath until the sound had faded. I wasn’t sure whether I was more afraid of being caught stealing college antiques or being alone in the dark with this person.

“It isn’t just a cup,” he said.

My eyes hadn’t quite adjusted to the darkness and, were it not for the unmistakable cadence of his speech, I might not have been sure I was talking to Bryn at all. My frustration and fear were indistinguishable now, blurred by the strangeness and the murk. “Just leave it,” I said, trying to hold my voice steady. “We need to go, now.”

“You know,” he said, turning suddenly as if only just remembering I was there, “they only put this on display for very special occasions. Especially since my father’s day.”

Realization came like a storm, breaking. No, it wasn’t just a cup. It was a chalice, one used at some of the most solemn Christian occasions since the early eighteen hundreds. One that went briefly missing, thirty years ago, courtesy of the infamous Cavendish Senior. Just the right size to slip out in an empty violin case. The most shocking thing about all this was not that Bryn was ready to lie, to steal (a relic, for fuck’s sake, a priceless relic). Not even that he would make me his unthinking accomplice and put me in danger. The most shocking thing was that it was not a joke to him.

“That’s why we’re here?” I said, bitterly. “Because you’re hung up on some family story from a million years ago?”

He laughed, a mirthless sound in the dark, as if I’d surprised him. Still his face was distorted by shadows. After a while, he wagged a finger at me. “Your hero,” he said. “Warlock.”

“What about him?”

“Remember what he did, in the church?”

It took me a moment. But yes, I remembered how Warlock and his friends had broken into a church at night, how they’d joked about sacrificing a woman on the altar. How, at this, the church had been loudly and dramatically struck by lightning. Bryn must have read the biography after all. “That was a story. Probably exaggerated.”

“All good stories are exaggerated. Shall we see if we can summon something ourselves?”

As I looked helplessly on, he grabbed one of the bottles of port, uncorked it, and poured a heavy slug into the silver cup. Remembering our first illicit rehearsal, I had the sensation of the world being flipped, seen through an old, foxed mirror. “Stop it,” I said, the shake in my voice giving me away. “This is stupid.”

“What? If you don’t believe it, what have you got to be scared about?”

“I’m not scared, Bryn.”

He stepped toward me, slowly, looming out of the darkness like a moon appearing from behind a pall of cloud. In the silver glow that came through the window, his skin was luminous. As if he were made of cold stars. But as he came near he smelled darkly somatic, like iron and earth. “Yes,” he said, “you are.”

He came so close I thought he might take hold of me. His pupils were huge, a kind of cosmic blackness. Part of me wanted to step back, to escape the force of him. The other part wanted to fall at his feet and weep, clasp him around the legs and bury my face in his expensive trousers like a penitent. The more my terror grew, the more I wanted to clutch his hand, beg him to come, please come with me, let’s get out of here.

But I only stood, dumb, while he offered me the port. When I refused, he drank it himself and thumped the chalice on a side table. Then he took the uppermost napkin from a neat linen pile. “Let’s see which devils we can summon tonight. Shall we?”

To my bemusement, he lifted the napkin and very slowly draped it over himself, covering his head completely—like a bride or a mourner, mute and veiled. I stared at my friend as if we were obediently following the steps of some dark liturgy.

Then he began to speak, so low I could hardly hear. A language I couldn’t understand.

Fear danced over my skin like a breath. “What are you saying?”

He kept going, the words spilling out of him, unfathomable.

“Bryn. Stop it.”

He had hunched his shoulders now, and the pale napkin hung low in front of him. You might have thought he had no head at all. Still, that horrid burbling.

“Seriously, Bryn, that’s enough!”

Abruptly, he stopped. Silence enveloped us, like great wings. He took one corner of the napkin between a finger and thumb, began to inch it upward, and I had a profound feeling of being in a nightmare. Something told me that, when the napkin was off, Bryn wouldn’t be wearing his own face anymore. Instead, something unknowably ancient would be looking back at me. Or maybe there’d be nothing—only a flat, awful darkness where his mesmerizing eyes should be.

But no. When he removed the napkin, there he was, his hair escaping its austere style, his eyes indecipherable runes.

“Boo,” he said.

Suddenly, there was a rumble of thunder, and I staggered backward, gasping—Jesus, what was happening?—but Bryn only covered his mouth with one hand, smothering his laughter at my horrified expression. The sound was only a trolley, clanking with plates and glasses, trundling down the corridor outside.

I settled myself. “For fuck’s sake, Bryn—”

And then: a bright rectangle of gold on the wall opposite. A door to an adjoining room had been yanked open, and in its frame stood a wide, bearlike man, straining from a liveried jacket. A porter. He looked immediately in the direction of the case, his expression a simple mixture of confusion and surprise.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

Bryn looked at him, then back at me, his eyes wide and incandescent.

“Hey! You hear me?” The porter took a big stride into the room, into the shadows, fumbling unsuccessfully as I had for a light switch. “I said, what do you think—”

Bryn raised an arm, and I thought I heard unintelligible words, spoken low and level. Then the scene became a set of static images, like a story told in stained glass. There was the porter lumbering forward. Then, something else, in the dark space around him, a darkness that stretched crooked and long—was it reaching for him? The final scene in this horrible tableau: the porter, suddenly almost horizontal, his burly frame seeming to hang unthinkably in the air. It was a moment where time seemed to stretch, to break. Only the sickening crack of the porter’s head on a table as he fell made the world rush into motion again, a stopped clock shocked back into life.

And then Bryn ran, and I ran too, following faster than I thought I could go, the two of us streaming out of the room and down the staircase, across the courtyard, and onto Trumpington Street, our jackets flapping behind us, my chest burning with the frigid air until we flew through the gates of our own college and into Old Court, into the dark.

Which part of a trick is the magic part?

Is it the moment things turn, when the card disappears under a cuff, when the coin drops unseen into the pocket? Or is the magic just as present later, much later, in the audience’s retelling, in the words that recreate and refine the trick? No, I’m telling you, he definitely wasn’t hiding anything in his hand.

I’ve been over this story many times now. Backward, forward, from every possible perspective. Whichever way, it’s just as chilling.

The next day, I didn’t go to lectures. I felt a cold panic about the porter’s condition, kept imagining his head opened like a soft-boiled egg, so I wandered around college aiming to bump into Bryn in the hope he’d do or say something to put my mind at ease. But he didn’t appear in the lunch queue outside hall, and he didn’t show up in the library or the bar. Every minute of his absence, my fear intensified. Perhaps he’d already been visited by college officials. Or even, if the porter was badly hurt, the police. I imagined him in a cell. I imagined hearing news that the porter had died from his injuries. I imagined Bryn’s face smeared across the front pages, the shock of the nation that this angelic-looking, well-spoken young man was in fact a simple thug. Or, in tabloid parlance: evil.

Eventually I found him in the common room playing pool with some of the first years. He barely looked up as I waved at him, just lifted his eyes as he leaned over the cue. “Hey man,” I murmured, sidling up to him. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah, good,” he replied, not bothering to mirror my surreptitious tone. “You?”

“Fine, fine. Couldn’t be arsed with lectures today, ha.”

He didn’t reply. Elsewhere, people laughed unthinkingly at an episode of Friends they’d seen several times before.

I leaned close. “You haven’t heard anything?”

He sank a ball into the far corner pocket. “About what?”

I made my voice even quieter. “About … the porter.”

“Why would I?”

“I dunno. I’m just, you know. Worried.”

“What for?”

“He might be hurt.”

He moved down the table, sank another ball in another pocket. “You might not realize it, being so busy with the bassoon, but there are worse injuries every week on the rugby pitch.”

“I just have this feeling—”

“And nobody even knows who we are. So how would they find us? The only thing that went wrong was you barging in and making a load of noise. We ran so fast I left the fucking cup.”

He turned back to the first years as if our conversation was over, said something that made them laugh furtively. Not caring how pathetic I looked, I followed him around the table. Because I still had a question about something else, something that was my real worry, even though the idea was still a half-formed thing, a creature swimming in a specimen jar in a sideshow’s cabinet of horrors: “Bryn. What did you do to him?”

He frowned. “What?”

“The porter. You said something to him. And, somehow, he’s flying through the air.”

Around us, the buzz of chatter, the whirr and clunk of the vending machine. Bryn placed the cue very gently on the table. Then he put a hand on my shoulder and turned us away from the first years, the subtle tightening of his fingers simultaneously soothing and threatening. Speaking so quietly that his lips hardly moved, he said: “You really want to know?”

I nodded.

He stared, thoughtful, as if weighing me up. Then leaned even closer, so I felt each airy word landing on my cheek. The sensation made me shiver. “When you learn magic,” he said, “you start by manipulating objects. Coins, matches. Before long, you can manipulate other things. Like people.”

“You mean, psychological stuff? Like forcing people to choose a certain card?”

“Well, not just that.”

I stared, dumb. Did he mean …?

Then he barked a laugh and stepped backward, numb space opening up between us. “I’m kidding, you dickhead.”

“For Christ’s sake—”

“All I did was tell him to fuck off—”

I shook my head, my face hot with frustration. “Come on, he was a big guy. I hardly think being told to fuck off was enough to knock him off his feet.”

“—and he was so surprised that he came storming in and tripped over the violin case. More by luck than design, I must say, I’d chucked it by the door. Shit, Alexa’s going to be pissed that I left it behind.” He frowned as if what he said should have been obvious to me. “Guys like that, they’re only tough because people think they’re tough. But if you stand up to them, it puts them off kilter.” Then, to himself: “I guess it is magic, really. Because it’s about belief.”

I shook my head, mystified. “It doesn’t make sense,” I said, feeling surer of this than anything I’d felt in a long time. “The way he fell. It was weird. Like, not natural. The way his head—”

He slammed a fist on the pool table, making the balls shudder and roll. I flinched. “Just fucking forget it, alright?” he said, loudly, his tone dark and surprising. “You’re making something out of nothing. As usual.”

The first years looked at one another. I looked at my hands. Turning back to the table and picking up his cue, Bryn missed an easy shot and cursed under his breath. I wasn’t even sure what he meant. But I wasn’t about to make a thing of it in front of the others, one of whom, I couldn’t help noticing, was that ever-present blonde girl. Silently, one of the freshers chalked a cue. Awkwardness hung, foul as cigarette smoke.

Somewhat penitential, I asked: “Will you be in the bar tonight?”

“No, I’ve got plans.”

He didn’t expand. For a few minutes, I made supportive comments about the game—the odd “shot”—whenever the opportunity arose. But nobody replied, and so I stood in silence, unsure whether to stay or go.

Being in Bryn’s bad books was horrible. Worse than being back in sixth form.

Strangely, my one comfort during this time was Alexa’s comment about Bryn having “dark” moods, the fact that he’d behaved oddly with her over the holidays. If he was having a tough time, maybe because he was more stressed about work than he let on, then his sharpness toward us wasn’t personal. And if we were the people to whom he showed this vulnerable, irritable side of himself, it was flattering, really.

But this very active line of thinking was a distraction from something that swam below the surface of my consciousness: the question of what had actually happened to the porter. Bryn’s explanation? It simply didn’t fit with what I’d experienced, there in that funereal room. Sometimes, when I snapped awake from a dream in which I’d seen that man hanging in mid-air, I found myself unable to fathom the distance between what I’d seen and what couldn’t possibly be true. And I held my knowledge of the incident like a new kind of talisman, a tiny power that I hoped might protect me. Against what, I wasn’t sure.

I found myself in an unnerving equilibrium: feeling inexplicably and inexpressibly unsettled by Bryn while never wanting to leave his side.