iii

The first few auditions were pretty average. They included two sopranos singing the same Bach aria, both technically accurate but bland, and a kid singing Vaughan Williams as if he were rattling off the items on his shopping list. After an hour and a half, I was relieved to arrive at the gap in our schedule designated a “comfort break.”

Sipping from my own reusable cup, so as to avoid the lukewarm coffee from the dispenser, I thought about the students still fretting outside the hall. Offering yourself up to another person, only for them to say, Thanks, but no thanks. It’s hard. In any case, judges can be wrong. Had the first singer really played fast and loose with the phrasing, or was hers a more interesting reading of the music than I’d given her credit for? One of the hardest things about judging is staying open-minded—hearing a piece as if for the first time, rather than being disappointed when it’s not how you think it should be.

Back in our seats, we called in the next applicant. Through the doors came a stooping boy, his rigid smile an unconvincing show of confidence. He raised his arm as if to wave, but then thought better of it, flapping weakly like a broken bird.

“Hello there,” said the choirmaster. “Joseph, is it?”

“Yes,” Joseph replied, nodding hard.

“Good to meet you. You’ve come from Bolton?”

“Er, yeah.”

“Quite a journey.”

Joseph didn’t know what to say to that. I thought of myself, arriving at Cambridge, not yet knowing all the things that were wrong with the way I spoke, the way I walked.

“And what will you be singing for us, Joseph?”

“‘Is My Team Plowing?,’ by George Butterworth.”

I couldn’t have been more taken aback if Joseph had approached the judges, held my face in his hands, and kissed me on the mouth. Blinking, I scanned the running order again, wondered how I’d never noticed. Was this really such a popular audition piece? To hear it now, here. Of all places.

A laugh bubbled through my lips, and faces turned to me, perplexed. Reddening, I pretended to cough, thumped myself on the chest. How strange. I wanted to announce: This was mine and Bryn’s, you know. What we performed for the fellows, back when I still didn’t realize who (what) he was. I might even have whispered it to my fellow judges, had they not already turned their eyes back to Joseph, who, along with our accompanist, was fussing with some rumpled sheet music. I rubbed my forehead and my fingers came away slightly damp.

Then a chord rang from the piano—infinitely gentle, as if it came from very far away—and that falling, melancholy melody was upon me.

Is my team plowing,

That I was used to drive

I’ve seen a lot of singers in my life. I know how they transform themselves during a performance, how they can make you forget who they really are. But, as this boy sang, it was as if someone else inhabited his body. It wasn’t just his facial expressions or the way he held himself. I mean he seemed to change, right in front of us. As his voice sounded, a whisper that somehow found its way across the hall, his frame somehow became more insubstantial until I could see the ghost: thin and wan, like mist over a river, asking after those who now work the horse and plow without him. It sounds ridiculous but, as he swayed in the spotlight, the light almost seemed to travel through his limbs. I told myself it was just the shock. I hadn’t expected the song, and I certainly hadn’t expected such a performance from poor, meek Joseph.

In the next stanza he was taller, broader, his voice rich and powerful. Here, the still-living friend, reassuring the ghost that, yes, the team is working and the horse’s harness jingles still. The two characters, in one body. Joseph shone so brightly that the space around him seemed peculiarly dark now, and I found myself looking around to see if someone was dimming the house lights. Feeling my heart beginning to race against the pulse of the music, I gulped at the air. Something felt queasily wrong, almost as if the harmonies beneath the melody were darker, thicker. But no, our accompanist was note perfect.

Then the third stanza, the ghost returned again. As if the moments of my life had been reshuffled, I felt my fingers dancing over the keys, in that rehearsal room that wasn’t a rehearsal room. Time was a repeated bass line, going around and around. My heart thumped so loudly that I thought the other judges must hear it, when I realized: there was a color in the voice, a gravity that didn’t come from this ordinary boy. A magic, playful but powerful. It wasn’t possible. And yet, trembling, I knew it to be true: this was Bryn’s voice, sounding now. These were the exact turns and shapes he’d made with the music, the tugging at the tempo that we’d practiced over and over, burned into our brains. It was beautiful and horrible all at once. I wanted to grab the judges, shake them and shout, Don’t you hear him? But of course they didn’t, they’d never heard that otherworldly baritone. I could do nothing but sit, fixed in my chair, while the whole room acted as if there was nothing wrong.

The ghost—Joseph, Bryn, I no longer knew—now turned to me, its gaze so livid and insistent that I couldn’t blink. Its questioning was mock-mournful:

Is my friend hearty,

Now I am thin and pine,

And has he found to sleep in

A better bed than mine?

My lips moved helplessly along to the reply:

Yes, lad, I lie easy,

I lie as lads would choose;

I cheer a dead man’s sweetheart,

Never ask me whose.

At the fringe of my awareness were the other judges, their faces angled away from me. I was suddenly deeply frightened that if they turned toward me their faces might not be their faces at all.

A dead man’s sweetheart.

Over the years, there have been so many times when I’ve thought: He’s come for me. In the crowded pub, a shape appearing in flashes between overheated bodies. On the bus home from a concert, a body in the corner with its back turned. I’d always been wrong. But here, in this haunted place, there was no mistaking those penetrating, familiar eyes and, as I looked into them, the room at the edges of my vision became undulating ribbons of blackness, a suggestion of endless space.

I made my silent retaliation: Did you ever think that maybe you didn’t deserve her? Yes, you were witty and talented and charming and, truly, worshipped. But you were also selfish and cruel and thoughtless, and you got away with it because you lived according to your own rules. There was always someone ready to catch you if you fell.

No. I’m sorry. My phrasing was careless, I didn’t mean—

Why was the piano still playing? This song should be finished by now. Beneath the ringing chords was something low and harsh and insistent, as if some of the strings were broken. As if something were chuckling.

I did the right thing, I went on, repeating the idea like a desperate mantra. I know you wanted her, but that’s not how the story was meant to end and you know it. The ghost-man-child stared at me, unmoving, the darkness around him like a vacuum into which all air and light was sucked, and I thought: I’m going to lose it, right now, in front of everyone, I’m going to scream.

And then the room was still again, the auditorium lights soft. Silence.

Actually, not quite silence. There: a soft tapping.

Desperately trying to slow my breath, I realized that the other judges really were staring at me now. The cup I’d been raising to my lips when Joseph began to sing was hanging limply from my fingers, dripping onto the carpet, the liquid landing with a delicate pat pat pat. Crashing back into the present, I fumbled to right the cup, while Joseph hurried out to a chorus of “thank yous.” The choirmaster asked me whether I needed to get some air, as I was looking rather pale, and I leapt up, grabbed my bag. Thank fuck I always had a bottle of brandy stashed in there, in case I ever needed to add something stronger to my coffee.

Outside, sweating beneath an overcast sky, I thought of the Three Musketeers. The ghosts of Christmas past, present, and yet to come. The three wishes in The Monkey’s Paw and their perfect, terrible fulfilment. In my head came the Latin, omne trium perfectum—every group of three is complete—and I cursed myself for ever imagining that the story could have gone on without him.

As May bled into June, Alexa and I kept up our walks back to college after rehearsals, and even the drizzliest strolls were high points in my week. Not simply because they were a reminder that I wasn’t alone in worrying about Bryn. Alexa took me out of my disquiet somehow, making me feel less like myself. Even when troubled, she retained her self-effacing grace, her quirky beauty, and I imagined that, when people saw us together, they saw these qualities reflected in me.

We’d crossed the bridge on Silver Street, the river slipping like a great eel below us, and Alexa had let our conversation fall into yet another extended pause. “Are you okay?” I asked. “You seem a bit quiet.”

She shook her head. “It’s no big deal.”

“So there is something?”

For a few seconds, the only sound was the rattle of our instrument cases (hers a replacement, after the incident at Trinity) and the wet thump of our tread. When it came, Alexa’s voice was quiet, as if it didn’t want to be heard. “I had a difficult chat with Bryn.”

“Want to talk about it?”

She took time to find the words. “He’s been distant all term. I know he’s stressed about work. But sometimes I call him and he doesn’t answer or call back. I know you’ll say this is pretty standard, which it is. But it shouldn’t be. Not when he’s been so … up and down. He knows I worry about him. You know?”

Her faith in him made me shiver. After his birthday, I no longer believed this bollocks about dark moods, about Bryn being up and down. To me it sounded more like he was irritable with Alexa, making excuses to see less of her (behavior I couldn’t understand at all). Of course, there was the worrying question of what he might do if she challenged him. Would she spot something in her mirror too, something shifting silently between the bookcases in her bedroom? I sneaked a look at her freckles, like a sky of dark stars, at her eyes, which shone like faraway planets—at least, when she was happy—and felt very afraid for her.

“I told him that he shouldn’t just disappear, not when …” She paused. “But he got angry and said I didn’t understand. We couldn’t agree on anything, and it was just … It was horrible.”

“What’s he up to tonight?”

“Out with some friends at King’s.”

I nodded. “So he’s okay when he’s out having drinks with his mates.”

She tried and failed to hold back a frown. “I guess it’s cheering him up.”

I suddenly felt terribly sorry for Alexa. Her devotion seemed such a prize—how many guys would kill to date a girl like her? Funny, clever, adorable? But Bryn held this prize carelessly, always wanting more, more. And the infuriating thing was, there would always be more for someone like him. I thought again of the porter’s cracked head.

“Lex,” I said, thinking how fragile she looked as she hunched against the cold, “are you happy?”

She slowed to a stop, gave me a curious look. “This isn’t about me.”

“Of course it is.”

“He needs my support.”

“And you need his.”

“Yeah, but right now—”

“Lex,” I said, firmly, “Bryn is a great guy. But he’s all about him. That need of his to be center stage, it’s why he’s amazing and it’s also why he’s a nightmare. We let him have the spotlight because we enjoy the show. But he has responsibilities to you too.” Before she could say more, I held out my hands and presented my last words with a flourish, as if I were revealing the last step in a quadratic equation or pulling a pink-eyed rabbit from a top hat: “Don’t forget you.”

We stood in silence while the wind slipped between us. Alexa ducked further into the upturned collar of her coat, like an animal retreating into its burrow. Then, eyes on the pavement, she set off down the street. I wondered whether I’d sounded unsympathetic or disloyal, and I jogged to catch up with her, ready to backpedal. But when I touched her shoulder she nodded and, to my relief, gave a frail smile. “I know, I know,” she said, sounding tired. “Thank you.”

Don’t forget you.

If he’d challenged me, I would have argued: I never said anything specific. I merely put an idea out there and invited Alexa to interpret it as she saw fit. My words were like Tarot cards or horoscopes: things that appear to bring foresight but really uncover the knowledge already inside us. Things with more power than we give them credit for.

On my next visit to the computer room, I got the email I’d been waiting for. It was a bit formal (“Dear … Regards …” that kind of thing). In very few words, Mona explained that she’d found that Cambridge wasn’t for her. She hoped I’d have a better experience, wished me all the best for the future, and attached a link to a web page of local counselors. She didn’t ask any questions or encourage a reply. She didn’t put a kiss at the end. It was as if she’d opened the door, with the security chain still attached, and was now closing it, politely but firmly.

There was something about the tone that I didn’t buy. Something evasive in its brevity, even fearful. It was like a line written by a PR company, designed to discourage further questioning. Perhaps she was scared to tell me what she really thought, in case I told everyone she was crazy. Or maybe she was scared to talk about Bryn in case he found out.

Bathed in the blue light of the screen, I tapped out my reply. I gently offered that, far from the experience suggesting any mental weakness on Mona’s part, it might be driven by darker forces (occult felt too strong at this stage). I told her that things had been strange lately, and there were lots of things that I wouldn’t previously have believed that now seemed to make sense. Being as direct as I dared, I asked her: did she have cause to be frightened of anyone?

The next day my inbox contained a stern message, from an unfamiliar address that turned out to belong to Mona’s father. He suggested that I not contact her again, and I felt I’d be unwise not to comply.

Over the following days, I tried to focus on work. Too ashamed to go creeping back to Tim and his friends, I stayed in my room, puzzling over essay questions that I would probably have understood better had I shown up to the lectures. But the rhythm I’d found so easily in those first-year study sessions was gone, my flow unpracticed. In any case, I was distracted by a low, simmering anxiety—for some reason I kept checking that my window was properly locked, that my electrical sockets were clicked “off” as if they might inexplicably spark and set my room alight.

One night I was working late, fretting over a four-part fugue that should have been submitted days beforehand, when there was a hammering at my door. The noise almost made me fall out of my chair. From beyond the room, a voice: “It’s me.”

Opening the door, I felt an inexplicable relief. “Alexa, hey.”

She beamed, that charming, crooked smile. In one hand was a large, unopened bottle of vodka.

“Wow,” I said. “Having a big night?”

She raised her other hand to display a similarly enormous quantity of rum. “Didn’t know which you’d prefer.”

“Wait, what?”

“Don’t pretend you’re working.”

She strode inside and dumped the bottles on my coffee table, shook out her hair. It was wavy, my favorite style of hers even then. “I wanted to say thanks,” she said, taking tumblers from my shelf, giving them a subtle wipe. “For what you said. About me and Bryn.”

“Oh. I mean, I didn’t say much of anything.”

“You did, and it got me thinking. I spoke to him, about how he’s been acting. I told him he was being unfair.” She lifted the rum, I shrugged an Okay then, and she poured a preposterous amount into each tumbler, the bottle clinking unsteadily against the rims. We chinked, a muted cheers.

“So what did he say?”

“That I’m being unreasonable, that I don’t get it.”

“Shit. Was he angry?”

She nodded. “But I was too. I told him I wouldn’t stand for it. And that was it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, we ended it.”

She downed the rum and immediately refilled her glass.

I tried not to show how relieved I felt, how certain I was that Alexa was now safer than before. “Fuck, Lex. Are you okay?”

“That’s the thing,” she laughed, loudly. “I feel fine.” Then, her hands fluttering like frightened birds: “I’ve been released.”

I smiled, tentatively. “So should I be offering congratulations instead of commiserations?”

“Ha, maybe. Either way, the least you can do is have a drink with me.”

In a spirit of solidarity, I downed my drink. She laughed, and it made me feel useful.

Alexa looked so different that night. Her whole body seemed to sing with a kind of fractious energy—it was as if, at any moment, she could make her excuses and dart out of the room. But she didn’t. She stayed for hours, pouring ever larger drinks that didn’t seem to dull her sparkling expressions, both of us preternaturally cheerful. Even though I’d come to think it for the best, I’d expected to feel sadness at the ending of Bryn and Alexa’s relationship. But I felt glad. And I thought it spectacularly right when she leaned forward and lifted her hand to my cheek.

In a way, Bryn was the one who brought us together. The idea flashed through my head even as she touched her lips to mine.

Alexa stayed over that night. But we didn’t do anything beyond kiss. Going from friends to lovers felt like meeting all over again, a strange backward step, and we moved slowly to protect the friendship that mattered so much to both of us.

Once we’d gone to bed, I lay with my eyes open, my body curved behind Alexa as she slept. At one point I reached to touch her dark hair, but stopped myself, looking in wonderment at the movement of my own hand. Pulsing with satisfaction and pride, I had the feeling of being in someone else’s body, in someone else’s bed. How gorgeously strange, to be the kind of man who dated the kind of girl like Alexa.

But when sleep finally came, it was troubled and strange. I dreamed I was lying in my bed, on my back, staring into the near-total blackness. Except Alexa wasn’t there. And there was a foul smell in the room, something burnt and filthy. I realized, slowly, that on the ceiling above me was a shape. It was big, at least the size of a person, flattened, and completely still. However long and hard I looked, my eyes wouldn’t adjust, and I had only a sense of arms or legs (or a tail, for all I knew). I lay there, too confused to be afraid, distracted by the soft sound of breathing: was that mine?

In the dream, I tried to move. But I realized with terror that my whole body was paralyzed. I couldn’t cry out either, not even as the shape began to descend, extremely slowly, toward me, hanging impossibly in the air like a spider on an invisible thread. As the thing came closer, it moved into a bank of starlight, and I saw small bright spots in what might be a head. Eyes, perhaps, or teeth. Too many to count.

My body jolted as if I’d been electrocuted.

Alexa rustled around in the duvet. “What the hell?” she said, shifting irritably.

I rubbed my face, surprised by the dawn that was already creeping through the gap in my curtains, head woozing from the booze of the night before. In the smallness of the bed I tried not to touch Alexa with my clammy skin. The rustling of her feet beneath the covers sounded like someone sighing beyond the window. “Sorry. I was dreaming.”

“You’re a terrible sleeper.”

“I’m not usually.” I settled back into the pillow. Then shivered. “What are you doing?”

She frowned. “What?”

“That scratching. With your toes.”

“I’m not doing anything.”

“There. You’re doing it now.”

“It’s not me!”

“Can’t you hear it? Scratching? On the sheets?”

We were quiet for a moment. Then she leapt up and sprinted across the room, brushing frantically at her legs. “What is it?” she cried, not daring to look. “Is there something there?”

Mouth mossy with rum, I stood and threw the bedsheets back. I tried to look controlled as I told her: “Don’t panic, Lex, it’s just a mouse. Go outside and I’ll take care of it.” I wasn’t trying to look like a hero. It was just easier than explaining that there was no mouse—and that, when I leaned in close, I could hear the unceasing scratching that had previously come from my piano, only now it was coming from deep inside my bed.

Yes. By this point, I did want Alexa and Bryn to break up. I saw how he’d tired of her charms, how their relationship was potentially becoming dangerous. And I’d finally realized how I felt, in her company. I just hadn’t expected the aftermath of the split to involve me so directly.

The morning after she stayed over, I suggested to Alexa that we keep things between us a secret. Just for a bit. I said something about how it would be nicer to avoid people’s inquisitorial stares and intrusive questions but, in truth, I had to work out how to reveal all this to Bryn gently. How to explain that it wasn’t a betrayal, rather the result of powerful forces beyond my or Alexa’s control. Did I want to avoid his fury, or did I think I could maintain his favor too? There must be some mystic combination of words, arranged in just the right order, that could smooth things over.

When Alexa left my room—quickly, quietly, careful not to attract the attention of anyone who might realize that she was still wearing clothes from the night before—I told her that I’d be busy at the faculty for the rest of the day. And when she was gone, I turned my phone off and hid in the library, reading, dozing, and listening to CDs on my Discman. Now and again, I ran through the logic in my head like a lawyer practicing my closing arguments: that Alexa had already broken up with Bryn by the time I kissed her and, when you thought about it, she and I were a better fit anyhow. All three of us would be happier this way, in the end. The more I repeated these ideas, the more I believed he could even be pleased for us.

But when night came and I curled myself uncomfortably into the library sofa, I had a feeling that I was approaching something: a great corporeality, a land not yet drawn in any atlas. A dark place already visited by Sajid, Kenny, Mona (who I’d discovered drooling and fretful in this exact spot).

And as the sun set, I couldn’t stop my mind from revisiting those indecipherable words, spoken softly by Bryn in the moments before the porter’s body hit the floor.

The next day, I got an email from college apologizing for the issues in my room, reassuring me that a thorough inspection would be carried out and offering alternative accommodation in the meantime. I was baffled by this until I discovered that Alexa, well-regarded by college staff, had bumped into the bursar in New Court and complained passionately about my pest situation. I was quite pleased with the plan at first. I mean, maybe college would discover that it was mice? But then I realized where I was being sent: to the room previously occupied by Mona, directly below Bryn.

I moved rooms that evening, when the sky was turning from a bright lavender to a heavy plum. Bearing a rucksack of essentials and a box of books and folders, I crossed New Court and passed underneath the archway into the fragile quiet of Old Court. With every step, my body tensed in anticipation of meeting Bryn who, shamefully, I still hadn’t texted. But there was no sign of him. Once I’d shouldered open “my” door, I dumped my things in the middle of the carpet and looked around.

Everywhere, blank. The room seemed surprisingly cold without Mona’s floral duvet set, her slippers tucked under the bed, the neatly stacked notebooks and the calculator aligned just so beside them. It made me kind of sad. She’d been so proud to be accepted by Cambridge, had told us all how she’d dreamed of it for years. Now it was like she’d never been here at all.

Actually, that wasn’t quite true. Because there, on the wall, were ghostly marks where Mona’s extra lock had been removed. I thought of Bryn, one hand taking an apple from her hair, the other hovering inexplicably around her pocket. As I set pants, deodorant, drinks, and glasses in their temporary homes, that story came to me again, the story of the man planting little written curses on his enemies. I listened for movement above my head. Was he up there? If so, was he listening too?

Before the kiss with Alexa, I was the guy who went along with everyone else: No, you choose where to meet, no, you pick the time, no, I’ll fit in with you, you, you. I was the runner on a film set or the roadie on tour, there to help others shine, and people valued me for knowing my place. Which is why, when I thought of what I’d say to Bryn, I felt an overwhelming impulse to grovel: I’m sorry that this hurts you, to be honest I don’t even want to enjoy it.

But I was a different person now, and part of me didn’t want to apologize. Bryn hadn’t been good to Lex. He treated her like he treated everything else, without care or grace. The idea that he might still want her, in spite of his flirtations and falsehoods, and that this might cause him to be angry with me—his level of entitlement had surely reached new and giddy heights.

While I awaited a pest update, I spent as little time as possible in my temporary room. I washed and changed there. And (having been evicted from the sofa by a concerned librarian) I slept there, or at least I lay fretting in the dark before a few hours’ fitful dozing at dawn.

I suppose I could have asked to stay with Alexa. But, still feeling our fledgling relationship to be a bird that might flit at any moment, I didn’t dare make such a big move. And I felt uncomfortable asking her to stay over with me—imagine us there, clasping one another like terrified animals while Bryn moved predatorily somewhere above us. So, outside of orchestra practice, we saw each other only in the college bar or in hall. There, I’d wait until those around us were distracted before adjusting a strand of Alexa’s hair, before taking her pale hand briefly in mine.

A couple of evenings later, I had a concert at the faculty. So by the time I got back to college, the June sky was dark, only a dash of pink at its hem. Keeping my head down, as was my custom now, I dashed across Old Court as if I were trying out for track and field, my bassoon case clunking painfully at my thigh. But when I clattered through the double doors and into the corridor, something made me stutter to a stop.

The door to my room was slightly open.

Tiny, cold feet seemed to tiptoe down my spine. There were no bedders going in and out of rooms to make beds and empty bins, not at this time, and nobody else would have keys. In the soft, spring shadows, my terror seemed inappropriate. But the uncharacteristic warmth of the evening couldn’t dissipate the underlying chill, the unsteady and unnatural feeling that I’d had when I’d found Mona standing in this same spot. With the tips of my fingers, I gave the door a push and watched it swing silently open.

Inside, the room was somber, thanks to the tightly drawn curtains. A faint glow from the courtyard’s lamps fought its way between them, falling over the desk and sharpening the edges of my books, my toilet bag, my displaced belongings. From my little radio came the low murmur of strings and piano (unmistakable, the Andante from Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 2). And in my armchair was Bryn, hands folded across his chest, legs lazily crossed in his usual fashion. Much of his face was in shadow, as if the light itself didn’t dare touch it without permission. His angles, his grace, his gravity—it was elemental. He was as splendid as fire, or the sea, and every bit as terrifying.

He leaned forward to show a full smile, the kind they call devastating.

“Hi mate,” he said.

“Hi,” I replied, my voice like a lackey, low and creeping. When I stepped reluctantly inside the room, the door fell shut behind me, the sound like a single, rueful “tut.”

“So, we’re neighbors now?” he asked, innocently.

“Just for a bit.”

“Well, I hope my music doesn’t disturb you. Because if it does, I’m afraid I’m going to do fuck all about it.”

We stared at each other. Then he gave an explosive laugh.

“Only kidding,” he said. “It’ll be great. Keep your friends close, hey?”

I nodded, vaguely. “How … did you get in?”

“Thought we could have a welcome drink,” he said, holding up one of my glasses, filled with something red. “I made a start, hope you don’t mind.”

I moved toward the sofa—slowly, as if careful of quicksand—and lowered myself onto its elderly springs. I picked up a glass I’d abandoned on the floor, still shimmering with the dregs from my last serving, and poured myself a very large measure from the bottle Bryn had opened: an expensive port that I’d planned to share with my friends on a special occasion. I felt the distance between us, yawning like a great mouth. With teeth.

He raised his own glass, brightly, in a wordless toast. I copied him, but where his body was bright and buoyant, mine was sagged and heavy, a warped reflection in a funhouse mirror. “So. How’s things?” he asked, his tone aggressively pleasant.

“Oh, fine.”

“That’s not what it sounds like.”

My insides tipped and rolled. “How do you mean?”

He gestured around the room. “Well, here you are. Out of your natural environment.”

I shrugged as casually as I could manage. “There might be an infestation in my room. College is looking into it.”

“Yeah, I know,” he said, his expression congenial and bland. “Alexa flagged it, right?”

Fuck. Did he know? About us?

But how would he know? Alexa wouldn’t have said anything. Maybe it was one of the college staff. The porters and chaplains and bursars all loved him, gossiped with him as if he were one of them.

“You see,” he said, “nothing gets past me.”

I could no longer appear nonchalant, not with my hands shaking, sweat tracking behind my ear. Fuck. He definitely knew. This was it, the conversation I’d been practicing in my head all this time.

“Bryn,” I said, carefully, “I’ve been meaning to talk to you.”

He gazed around the room as if he hadn’t heard. “It’s weird, isn’t it? What are the chances?”

“What?”

He shuddered emphatically, waggled his fingers like little thrashing legs. “Eugh. Creatures in your room. After what happened to Mona.”

I rubbed my arms, which had started to itch. Silence from the corridor and the courtyard. “What? What happened to Mona?”

“And as for Alexa,” he went on, laughing, “she’s bad enough when she sees a spider. Never mind something bigger.”

(What did he mean, something bigger?)

“Bryn, please. About Alexa.”

He paused. Tilted his head: Go on.

“I can understand if you’re pissed off,” I said, cringing at my own awkwardness. “About what’s happened. With me and her. And I get that. But—I really mean this—I don’t want it to come between us.” I took a breath, realizing I was very bad at this. “I mean, as in, between me and you.”

He leaned back in the chair, his face like a lone candle at midnight mass, a brightness behind which everything else disappeared. The more he receded into darkness—and the more petrified I felt—the more I was drawn in, as if by grabbing him I could save myself from falling. But I sat, feeling the awful emptiness of my hands.

“I didn’t realize you had such a flair for the dramatic,” he said, as if impressed. “It’s the kind of thing I’d do.”

“Bryn, please, the two of you are my favorite people in the world …”

He raised his eyebrows, gave me a look that seemed to mix amusement and pity.

“… and I wouldn’t have done it if you guys were … still together,” I said, babbling. “I swear. And I would obviously have preferred to speak to you first.”

“Obviously.”

“But, come on. I know you, Bryn, and you weren’t happy—”

He leaned suddenly forward, and the wings of the armchair made him momentarily monstrous, a terrible angel, his face glowing as if he were lit from the inside. “No,” he said, his smile gone now, his voice low and bitter. “You don’t know. Say what you like about who I am, but truly, you have no idea.”

He leapt up, then—Christ, he seemed so much taller than ever before—and in shock I stood too, moving crabwise so as to keep the coffee table between us. Butchered photographs, a tin of teeth. A man mid-air in a darkened room. Actually, I thought, maybe I know exactly who you are. I just didn’t want to believe it. (Or perhaps I didn’t want to believe how exquisite I found it, how very badly I wanted to see it, to prod around like a pathologist in a butchered body.)

Eyes locked on Bryn, I tripped, thumped my leg against the corner of the desk. Winced. As the pain spread through my flesh, so did my indignation. What fucking right did he have to be angry with me? What had I done that was so wrong?

“Listen, Bryn,” I said, finding a steadiness in my voice. “Nobody was more excited than me when you and Alexa got together. I wanted you to be happy. But lately, you’ve been treating Alexa like—like shit. It doesn’t take a fucking psychic to see that she’s miserable.”

His astonished eyes followed me as I stumbled around in the shadows. My breath came in gasps, my leg throbbed like a broken heart.

I carried on, my tongue dry and stupid. “You think the world is some … some fucking voodoo doll, for you to shape and bend however you like. And you know what?” I paused, realizing that this was the worst part, that this was the darkest truth of all, “I was fine with that. But then you went for Alexa, and she’s my friend—I mean, more than that, now—and I won’t have you do to her what you did to … to Mona.”

He tilted his head, openly sneered. “Mona?”

The hastily applied bolt, the string securing the window lock. The marks on the glass. “Had she worked it out, like I have?” I cried. “Is that why you frightened her out of here?”

A laugh, sharp as a snare drum. “Ah. She did take some of my little jokes quite badly. Even so, I hardly think it was me who sent her scurrying back home.”

A horrible clarity: the thing on the bathroom sill, on the Old Court walls, in Sajid’s room. Down in the cellar. No, it wasn’t necessarily Bryn who did the scaring. Why would he, when the job could be outsourced as easily as ironing shirts, shining shoes? In these matters, as in others, someone else—something else—did his dirty work. “Not just Mona,” I added. “You got rid of Sajid. Kenny.”

“What is this, a lineup of the wettest people in college? Face it,” he said, his voice pitying now. “Some people simply aren’t built to survive this place.”

I leaned against my little sink, felt my body sag. Imagined my name added to that ignominious list. What must it be like to be those people? To see Bryn moving around college like a great comet, only ever observing his dazzling presence from a bound and grounded world? What must it be like to know that there’s another life you should be living, another person you could be if you could only follow in his wake? Please, I thought. I just want us to be okay.

But that’s not what I said. He stepped toward me and—the self-preservation kicking in, overriding my wish to be closer to him—I held out a hand: Stop.

“Bryn,” I said, firmly. “Leave me and Alexa alone. Or else I’ll tell. That it was us, at Trinity, with the porter.” Then, softer. “I wouldn’t say this if she didn’t mean so much to me.”

He looked at me for a long time, like a cat pondering a foundered bird. All the while, I stood, mute, somewhere between misery and fear.

Then he gave me a smile that would have curdled cream. “My worry is,” he said, sauntering toward the door, “that you’re going to end up getting hurt.”

The words rang in my ears as the door slammed behind him. The emptiness felt like sickness, like hunger, and when I refilled my glass my hands shook so hard that I spilled port over the carpet. The air felt stale and dead without him, and I wanted to call out, Come back, please. It was like having a knife pulled from my flesh—for all the agony and all the damage, I might have felt better if the blade had still been stuck there.

I often wonder about loyalty. Whether it can be a fixed thing, how it’s earned as well as given. Whether it’s ever offered without conditions. If the friend to whom you’ve been unfailingly loyal behaves in a way that you don’t recognize, what then? Should you be loyal to the person you thought you knew or the person they’ve become? Can you ever do both at the same time? And what if, for better or worse, you’re the one who has changed?

I said something else to Alexa, that night we walked home together, before she had the argument with Bryn that precipitated their breakup. I made her swear that she wouldn’t tell anyone, especially not Bryn, what I was about to say. Then I told her what he’d revealed to me, in the practice room that wasn’t a practice room, about his overdose. She knew already, of course. But then I told her how he didn’t actually think he would die. How, later, he’d used his “depression” as an excuse to get out of his exams. How that stuff was all, perhaps, an act.

She listened as I explained that I wasn’t suggesting any particular course of action. I was only trying to help the two of them to understand one another better. I allowed her to imagine the rest: how disrespectful his actions, how false. Not the way you’d behave toward someone you loved.

Abracadabra, open sesame, presto.

Don’t forget you.

Magic words, a language that can change the world. Or, at least, change how people see the world. Alexa had squeezed my hand and told me: “You’re a good friend.” I’d thought so too.

Hours after Bryn had left my room, when evening had turned decidedly to night, I was still on my sofa, thinking. Worrying (it came more and more, now, that sight of the porter hovering in the air like the subject of an exorcism). I hadn’t wanted to upset him. It was the last thing I’d wanted to do.

A crash from the corridor made me jump to my feet. As I stood, listening, I heard it: a dry scrabbling, like something moving low to the ground. Trembling again, I stepped cautiously to the door and creaked it open, as if Bryn himself might be back, ready to deliver the hurt he’d spoken about. But it was Alexa, squatting on the stairs beside her dropped bag, her hands sweeping at a mess of spilled coins and keys. Around her, a hairbrush and a lip balm, a mobile phone in two pieces.

“Lex!” I said, bending to take her arm. “Are you okay?”

She turned to me, her lovely hair arranged about her face as if she’d narrowly escaped a bomb blast. “I’m fine.” Her voice came thick and pillowy. She was very, very drunk.

“You’ve hurt yourself.”

She squinted at the bloodied knee poking beneath her skirt. “Oh. Yeah.”

“Come here, it needs cleaning.”

“Fuck. Am I a mess?”

Avoiding the lie, I pretended not to hear and instead helped to return her things to her bag, then led her inside and sat her on my bed while I grabbed a handful of tissues and dampened them at the sink. All the while, she was submissive as a child. I’d known she’d been out on a girls’ night, so I wasn’t expecting her, and I’d have been slightly embarrassed by her catching me drinking alone had she not been too pissed to notice. It was a miracle she’d remembered where my new room was. “What happened?” I asked, kneeling, dabbing gently at the gravel-studded skin.

“I tripped.” She rubbed her face, spreading mascara further down her cheek.

“Oh, Lex. Did you have a good time before that?”

She flopped backward onto the bed, legs dangling over the side, my bedsheets billowing around her. “It was shit,” she said, foggily. “All shit.” She fell silent, and I thought she was perhaps drifting off to sleep. But then she sat up, rigid, like a medium possessed, eyes flaring. “Have you spoken to him?”

“Who?”

“Bryn.”

“Oh. I have, actually.”

“I knew it. It smells like him in here.”

I was momentarily thrown. “What does Bryn smell like?”

“What did he say?”

I didn’t want her to worry. “He’s angry,” I said. “But with me, not you. He’ll calm down,” I added, unconvinced. “Do you want some water?”

She shook her head and sank back into the sheets, took her broken phone from her bag and, freshly disappointed by its fragmentary state, put it back again. This wasn’t going to be like it had been with Berenice—me, preparing for our dates by pressing shirts and cleaning shoes, trying each and every time to be a more polished and more competent version of the person I suspected I was. Christ, I’d held Alexa’s hair while she puked in a bin outside McDonald’s, there was no point hiding ourselves from one another now.

Which is probably why I felt able to ask those questions, ones that were scratching at my brain like animals crowded in a cage. “Lex. When you were with Bryn, did you ever think there was anything weird about him?”

“Obviously. He’s completely weird.”

“I mean, weird in a way that you might be worried about.”

She shuffled up onto her elbows. Her voice was quiet. “You already know that.”

“What?”

“How I worried about him. When he was feeling down.”

Ah, I thought. His “troubled me” set piece, pretending to have dark moods while hiding something far darker. But that wasn’t what I meant. “No, not that …” I sighed and looked around the room. Still I saw his shape spreading on the chair, his fingers around the port bottle, around the glass. It was as if he marked the air itself, making a permanent impression on every scene. “What I mean is, Lex—were you ever scared of him?”

She blinked, as if struggling to understand. Then cackled, sloppily. “Scared of Bryn? I was scared of how much I liked him.” She checked herself. “But you know that as well.”

It stung, but I’d asked for it. Maybe this wasn’t the time to talk about him. Before I could change the subject, Alexa asked: “Do you regret it?”

I scrambled up onto the bed and stroked her arm. It felt waxy and cold. “Of course I don’t. How could you think that?”

She looked agitated, her eyes overly bright, her breath shallow. I could have kissed her flushed cheeks, wrapped her in a comforting embrace, but it wasn’t the right moment. “I’m really sorry,” she said. “It was selfish of me. I know how much you, like … worship him. And now …”

“Really,” I said, feeling sick at the thought, “it’s going to be fine.”

She turned onto her side, carefully, like someone very old. I took her hand, felt the pulse skipping allegretto in her wrist. Neither of us spoke for a minute, maybe more. As I sat, I thought about the first time I’d ever seen her, with Berenice, dressed as a zombie, when there hadn’t been the faintest attraction between us. Funny.

“I don’t feel so good,” she mumbled into the pillow.

“Do you need to throw up?”

“No. I need to close my eyes.”

“Well, why don’t you do that.”

She nodded and pulled my duvet around her. I waited a moment before easing off my shoes, turning out the light, and lying beside her. I didn’t take off my jeans and T-shirt. I felt oddly vulnerable, unable to shake that impression of Bryn, his hands—his eyes—still there, in my chair, in the dark.

I thought about the things I’d entrusted to Bryn. Hopes, joys, worries, each little confidence a sign of my devotion. Perhaps these would protect me, like votives offered to a saint. Or perhaps they were the means by which I’d get burned.

One of my offerings: my deepest horrors. A group of us had gathered in the common room to watch a film about some kids getting lost in the woods, being chased for days by something awful. In the film, these kids come across a river and, if they follow it, they’re bound to get out of the woods at some point. Right? But—and this was the bit that stayed with me, the bit I couldn’t shake—after a day or two of walking, they find themselves back at the spot where they started. That’s the part where you know the normal rules don’t apply, and those kids aren’t getting out at all.

When the common room lights were back on and we’d disguised our terror with blustering laughter, Bryn and I had talked about the things that scared us. We’d wondered: can visceral things like werewolves and aliens ever be more frightening than things like spirits and demons? Or are the intangible things always the worst? Never afraid of the difficult questions, Bryn asked me: “What are you horrified by? Really?”

I thought for a while, knowing that “snakes” or “heights” was not what we were getting at. Then I told him about that day I’d asked those kids around to my house, when we were stopped in our tracks by the sight of my dad spread on the sofa, by the ripe stench of shit.

I even told Bryn the detail that I never, ever talked about, because it unsettled me deeply in a way that I didn’t understand and couldn’t explain: how, when we walked into the room that day, there had been something crouching on top of that dreadful quiet. A strange scratching sound, like a long, insistent mechanical breath. Staring at the scene, I’d wondered briefly whether it was the air itself, sick of my dad and rushing out of the room. But really it was the vinyl crackle of my dad’s record player, the music finished but the record stuck and skipping, playing the sound of emptiness—a sound, an emptiness, from another age, scored imperfectly into a circular, material memory. Was it bringing the past to us, or taking us back into the past? As the record went around and around with that maddening scratch, I had the idea that time was not to be relied on, that it might run forward and backward all at once. And although, at that moment, I knew full well my dad was alive, I felt that on some level he was already dead.

Bryn didn’t try to tell me that my dad probably wasn’t all bad, that he was clearly troubled, blah blah blah. He just listened, respectfully. Then, when I asked the same question of him, he became unusually serious. And he replied: “My greatest fear is that some of the things they say about my father are true.” Then he laughed, as if it were all a big joke.

But I knew better. I remembered Frances, at the weekend away. The empty place at the table. What did people say, about how little Louis Cavendish cared for his son? How hideous would it be for that son to believe it?

There was another question I never considered at the time: How do we know when to stop being afraid? Can we ever be sure that we’ve left the path that would lead us to disaster? Or will we always wonder whether we’re lurching toward some horror, like those kids lost in the woods following the river, heading unknowingly back where they came from?

I’d trusted blindly in the path laid out for me. Doing well at school, going to a good university. This, I trusted, was my route to something you might call success, or approval. But the path is circuitous, deceptive. Sure, you might get into a good, even great, university. But when you’re there, you may find you don’t know which way is up or down. Like the Magic Circle, an in-crowd will pass intelligence amongst themselves, cards slipped invisibly from one palm to another. If you want to become part of this cadre, you will be tested. Depending on your performance—the right school, the wrong accent—you may gain admittance, or not. As with many of these things, the surest route is to be recommended by a friend.

You will knock and knock at the door. But even if someone opens it, they might not let you in.

A feeling of panic, a scrambling toward consciousness.

It was dark. Fuzzy from the wine, I didn’t know where I was. Sensing a shape beside me, I nearly cried out—but it was just Alexa, her breathing heavy and slow.

There had been a sound. Feeling suddenly and violently awake, I shambled out of bed and moved to the window, pulling the curtain back a fraction. Old Court was lifeless. No nocturnal creatures tip-tapped around the lawn, no returning clubbers howled at the moon. My watch showed it wasn’t yet four. As I let the curtain drop back into place, I heard it: a knocking at my door.

Each knock was light and unhurried, one, two, three. It was so out of place that, at first, I felt nothing at all. Slowly, my mind unfurled its logic: someone would only knock at this time if it was urgent. But if it was urgent they wouldn’t knock like that, they’d hammer hard, to wake me up. This was such an ordinary sound. Which is exactly what made it so hideous.

I saw it clearly, now. I wondered what he’d do when I opened the door, whether he’d douse me with a bucket of iced water or punch me square in the face. But as I cowered there, feeling the hairs on my arms rising one by one, what I really feared (even though it was mad, too mad to contemplate) was that he’d speak arcane words, under his breath, words that would have me sprawled on the carpet or splayed against the wall. Or maybe he had other words, more potent still, for punishments I didn’t yet know.

For two, maybe three whole minutes, I waited, appalled by the volume of my own breath. From beyond my room, silence. I stepped slowly toward the door and looked at the carpet, where light bled in from the perpetually lit corridor. Was there a darker patch, a suggestion of feet, planted a few inches away? Hard to say. I folded, putting my hands and knees carefully to the floor. Face against the carpet, one eye closed, I peered through the gap beneath the door.

Nothing there. I pushed myself to standing, waited for the rush of relief that didn’t come, and turned to go back to bed.

There it was again, polite as before: knock, knock, knock.

I spun, heart thrumming like a moth in a jar, toes clutching at the carpet. Fuck. Who else could be doing this but him? My mind darted from one plan to another: I could wake Alexa to see if she heard it too. I could arm myself with the empty wine bottle and face him down. Or I could go back to bed, on the basis that the sound was probably only the college walls exhaling in the night, just the ancient pipes. I didn’t believe this last thought, but I tried anyway.

Very gently I put my ear against the door, the gloss paint cold against my cheek. From the other side, quiet again. But it wasn’t the quiet of empty space. It was the studied quiet of a hunter, held very still (a flash of memory: me, calling through the letter box of my dad’s horrible new flat, knowing he was inside, wondering why he couldn’t or wouldn’t answer).

Then, from out of the quiet, a whispering, murmuring. Was that Bryn? Maybe, but it sounded like more than one voice. I pushed against the door, straining to hear.

And suddenly, from the other side, a thunderous banging, like something large throwing itself against the wood, but faster than that, much faster, as if there might be many things rather than just one, hammering so furiously that the whole doorframe shook.

I staggered backward, whining, clapping my hands uselessly over my ears. Please Bryn, I begged, silently, please don’t.

Slam after slam, relentless. Praying for the ancient hinges to hold, I felt the air rasping in and out of my throat, heard a moaning that didn’t sound like me. As I stumbled backward, my feet collided with something and I fell, toppling the coffee table and everything on it.

Alexa threw on the bedside lamp, glared at me in the gloom. “Jesus,” she said, in a voice like ground glass. “What the fuck are you doing? You frightened me to death.”

I clambered to my feet, trembling. The air seemed to have shifted, become less dense.

“Didn’t you hear it?” I said, breathing hard. “That banging, at the door?”

“All I heard was you, crashing around like a fucking elephant.” Then, somewhat resentfully: “Are you okay?”

I nodded. She threw off the bedcovers, leapt up and marched toward the door.

“Alexa, don’t …”

She flung it open.

Outside, nothing.

“There’s nobody there,” she said, irritably, before returning to bed and turning toward the wall.

Slowly, unsteadily, I righted the coffee table and picked up the things that I’d knocked over. One of them: my book about Peter Warlock, a copy of which I’d given to Bryn. As I placed it carefully back on the table, I stared at the photograph on the front, taking in Warlock’s Mephistophelian good looks, his mischievous eyes shining with occult knowledge. He stared back as if to say: I did warn you.