Felix should probably investigate the stranger. But the stairs alone seemed to be an insurmountable obstacle. Whoever it was would probably find their own way out. There was nothing in Mulcture Hall any more, not for a human.
Felix closed his eyes and drifted back to sleep.
HARRIET
Harriet adjusted the focus of her camera to capture a fern growing out of the top-floor banister, its fronds curling towards the light from beyond the collapsed roof. She caught a glimpse of darting movement in the periphery of her vision and spun around. Glass crunched under her feet, as her heart tripped over itself.
There was nothing but her own shadow, cast across the stairwell in the last remnants of twilight. She needed to calm down. The building was making her skittish. She was alone here. She was safe.
Harriet’s phone rang, distracting her from the shadows. She pushed back her headphones to answer.
“How do you get iPlayer up again?” her gran asked, instead of a greeting.
Harriet patiently guided her grandmother through the process of selecting Autumnwatch on BBC iPlayer – a nightly occurrence.
She should tell her gran where she was. She had been the one to suggest Harriet come to Mulcture Hall to take photos for her project, after all. They’d walked past it when they’d toured the University of Warwick campus on an open day the year before. But her gran definitely hadn’t meant that Harriet should come here alone, at night. She would be worried about her safety.
When she heard the theme music of Autumnwatch playing, she said, “I’ve gotta go, Gran – I’m finishing my photography coursework. I’ll see you later.”
But her gran had already hung up. She hated it when Harriet talked through her favourite programme.
Norma had raised her ever since she was ten, after her parents had died. When she’d been accepted into university, Harriet had originally paid for a room in halls on campus, wanting to live away from home for the first time. But a few weeks before classes had started, her grandmother had tripped fetching the post in the morning and broken her ankle.
Harriet had cancelled the rent payment so that she could live at home and look after her. It was only a thirty-minute commute to the university, and the campus library was open all night, so she always had somewhere to go after the bars had closed. She never opened any of the books, but the WiFi connection was very strong, which was all she ever needed anyway. At least there, she didn’t need to go to bed at 9 p.m. so that she didn’t keep her gran awake.
Harriet usually filmed make-up tutorials in the stacks, recording herself contouring her cheekbones against a background of law books. It was less embarrassing to do it at night, when the only people who saw her were exhausted PhD students running on caffeine. She could handle talking to them. It was the students her own age who made her nervous.
It was starting to rain through the broken roof, in cold, heavy drops that ran straight down the nape of her neck. Shivering, she suddenly missed her overly warm room at home. She could picture her gran sitting under a blanket on the sofa, with the electric fire roaring and the cat stretched out on the hearth.
Twisting to watch the flight path of a plane as it passed overhead, her foot caught on something. Harriet tripped over the edge of the stairwell, with nothing below her but five storeys of open air and the concrete floor of the foyer. She dropped her phone, throwing her hands out to grab on to something.
Her heart thundered. Her camera fell first, unhooking from around her neck and crashing to the ground into a thousand shards. Then Harriet followed.
It happened too fast for her to scream anywhere except inside her own mind. Her head bounced off a jutting steel beam, spraying blood as she twisted over once, twice before she landed with an audible crack of bones on the floor.
A pool of blood dripped from the split in her skull, gathering on the lurid green moss. Everything went black.
There it is. The death that started it all. It’s interesting, seeing it from this angle. I’ve only ever seen it from the past before. It would have been easy to stop it happening. Just a little bit of pressure here and there – a nudge to take her down the stairs instead of walking up them. And nothing would have happened the way it did.
Father was always doing things like that when he was here. And later, when he…
Sorry, sorry, you don’t know about that yet, do you? I suppose I should go in chronological order. Everything just makes more sense if you look at it backwards.
For now, let’s go back to where Harriet Stoker is lying in her own blood. She’s undeniably, irrevocably, dead. Below her, a fern is being slowly crushed. Above her, the shadows are gathering to watch.
FELIX
Felix flung open his eyes, gasping. A golden burst of energy spread through him, shocking him awake. He jumped up, shuddering like he’d just had a shot of caffeine.
What had…?
The intruder. The one with the music. Something must have happened to them. He hadn’t felt fresh energy like this in decades. He hadn’t expected to ever feel it again.
Felix ran through into Kasper’s bedroom. To his relief, he was awake too. Felix couldn’t imagine anything worse than being the only one to wake up.
“What year is it?” Kasper asked, opening one eye to squint at Felix. He was shirtless, stretching his arm over his head. The muscles all along his torso lengthened and contracted. There was a shock of blond hair in his armpit.
Felix exhaled. “Last I remember was 2009. You?”
“2011 – a cat died in here. You were sleeping.”
Felix was disappointed he’d missed a cat ghost – and then felt promptly sick at
