Chapter 3
SILAS
Roxana has taken to sleeping in late over the past few months, and so when I step outside, I shut the door behind myself carefully so as not to wake her.
I don’t even make it down our porch steps, and I’m already pulling the collar of my coat up to shield my throat.
The weather is humid and cold, the kind of chill that gets under your skin and seeps into your bones.
It’s only about six hundred yards from our house to my building.
And yet, these days, I feel a visceral aversion to taking that walk each morning.
Because fog, like vaporised milk, swirls inertly over the dull, wet grass, its blades short and its shade a dying, diseased sort of green rather than the fresh hue it boasts in summertime.
The university halls are all made of grey Cumbrian slate, and their shapes emerge ominously from the heavy mist, sharply slanted roofs and turrets menacing and uninviting.
The campus used to be an asylum for fallen women in the eighteenth century, famous for its harsh, reprehensible practices.
On a day like this, it’s all too easy to imagine the horror my workplace once housed.
It doesn’t help that the weather has been not only freezing, but murky and dark for months now, with not a single sunny day in between.
It’s February, but it feels like we’re collectively stuck in late November.
And perhaps we are, trapped forever in the time of that dreary incident and unable to move past it.
Because how does one move past a thing like that?
Thirteen people—most of whom I had known for well over a decade—gone from one day to the next, for no good reason and with no explanation.
Granted, I was luckier than most. I lay in bed with a dreadful cold that night, having excused myself from that committee meeting.
Which I would have considered very good luck indeed, even had it not saved my life.
But save my life it almost certainly did.
And my luck didn’t end there. Of all the people who came face-to-face with him, Wilson chose only to spare my wife.
My pretty wife in her little black dress that must have raised many an eyebrow that evening.
Same as for his acts of brutality, Wilson gave no reason for his only act of mercy.
And when they finally let me bring Roxana home, her body redolent of cigarette smoke and terror, she could not give me one either.
“He shot Willow right in front of me,” she said. “Then he pointed the shotgun at me. And I ... I asked him if I could bum a fag off Willow first before he killed me.”
“You did what?” I turned to her, my mouth hanging open.
“He lowered the shotgun, and I fished a packet of smokes out of Willow’s pocket. There was a small smudge of blood on it. I took a cigarette out, lit it, and smoked.”
“You stole cigarettes from a dead woman?”
“Is that stealing? She had no use for them anymore. Anyway, I sat on the vanity top and smoked. And he just watched me. I mean, he really watched me. Hardly blinking at all. I smoked until nothing but the filter remained, because I thought he was going to kill me the minute the cigarette went out. But when it did, he just asked if I wanted another, and I did, and I smoked that one too, and he still wouldn’t take his eyes off me. And then he walked out.”
The university chapel comes into view, an unassuming one-storey slate building with an intersecting gable roof and an arched wooden door set deep in its stone frame.
Bar the modest iron cross sprouting from its top and the stained-glass windows lining it all around, the building looks nothing like a place of worship from the outside.
Buildings can be like people in that regard.
Who would have judged Andrew Wilson to be a homicidal maniac by looking at his benign visage?
Not me, and I, too, carry things inside me that may not be expected of me at first glance.
And Roxana? I could write a whole study on the deep, dark depths of her, secret to the whole world, secret even to herself on occasion.
I should feel nothing but gratitude that she survived.
And the fact that I don’t isn’t merely because of my jealousy—a sentiment I do not find completely unjustified, all things considered.
After all, I know from firsthand experience that Roxana has a proclivity for older men and that controversial, forbidden dalliances aren’t beneath her.
If she could have slept with me, it is not such a leap to believe that she could step out of her own marriage and sleep with a man married to someone else, too.
But no, that’s not the reason my gratitude is impure and tainted bitterly with guilt. I feel guilty because ... when they first called me and told me what had happened, there was a mix-up, and they said that Roxana was among the victims. My world shattered, of course it did.
But ... admittedly, there was a small part of me that felt horribly, horrifyingly relieved.
Finally, here was the end to the charade our marriage had become!
Tragic, of course, but potentially less painful than all its other possible conclusions.
All because Roxana refuses to evolve, refuses to accept that matters cannot be the same between us as they were when we first met, simply because we are not the same people anymore.
We were never those people. We were only pretending to be whoever we wanted each other to be until we couldn’t pretend anymore. And that’s when all hell broke loose.
By the time I join the paved path running between the main university buildings, my feet feel very cold despite the waterproof shoes I’m wearing. I rub my hands, my fingers numb.
“Professor Moore!” A sing-song voice reaches my ears from behind, and a hand touches my shoulder, its squeeze dainty.
I turn my head, and my eyes land on the face of Poppy Jones, a freshman from my World War History class, a tall girl with big blue eyes and shiny blonde hair always tied up in a ponytail.
Despite being almost her opposite in terms of appearance, she reminds me so much of Roxie when she was young. So fun-loving and easy to please.
Even though I’m always happy to see Poppy, I glance around to make sure we’re not being watched.
Not by my colleagues or her classmates, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with a professor sharing a walk with a student.
But by Roxana. Even though I know that she’ll be in bed for hours to come, I’m instinctively scared of her seeing me with Poppy and misinterpreting the situation.
The last thing I need is to repeat last year’s fiasco with Mia Campbell and have Roxana breathing down my neck for months to come.
But the air is clear, of course, and my dreary morning has just gotten a lot brighter.
When I finally arrive at my oak-panelled office, I barely have time to shrug off my coat when someone knocks on my door.
“Come in.”
The door creaks open to reveal tweed-clad Mrs Stubbs, my scowling secretary, with her hair pinched into a tight, greying bun and her thick round glasses sitting low on her thin nose.
“Lovely morning to you, Beatrice,” I say to her cheerfully, only for her to completely ignore my greeting, just as she has done for the past ten years.
Just as well. Whoever Mrs Stubbs doesn’t ignore, she pesters almost incessantly with her “research” into ghosts, evil spirits, fairies, and the like, a bizarre hobby she took up after her husband’s untimely passing. I would rather have her hostile silence.
“Bates says you need to go through Wilson’s back office and take what you want today. Has to be cleared by the end of the week,” she instructs me in a cold, scolding tone of voice.
“Right, Beatrice, thank you,” I reply, clearing my throat, and she walks out, shutting the door behind her before I get the chance to ask her for a cuppa.
Never mind. Given the looks she graces me with anytime I ask her for a hot beverage, chances are that the tea would come with a dash of spit anyway.
I’ll make it myself and then head to my first class of the day with bright-eyed Poppy no doubt already waiting for me in a front seat of the lecture hall.
I don’t get to stop by Wilson’s office until the late afternoon, once I’m done with classes for the day.
I probably could have used the spare hour I had in the middle of my day to do it.
But it’s not like I’m in any hurry to get home.
And truth be told, a part of me wanted to avoid the task of sorting Wilson’s things for as long as possible.
The whole campus is rumoured to be haunted by the tortured souls of the asylum era of the building; women who never made it out of here alive, succumbing to torture, abuse, and neglect dressed as ‘innovative medicinal practices’.
But after November 30 last year, to me, it’s this particular corner of our history department building that is haunted.
Haunted by the man whom I thought I knew, but didn’t, because within him, all along, there must have been the sinister seed of what he would do, and I never saw its first tentative shoot, nor its full bloom, not until it was too late.
Haunted by his victims, snuffed out so suddenly and abruptly by him that it feels like they did not have enough time to depart in full, and some part of them still lingers like a shadow separated from its caster.
And haunted by me too, perhaps, by a version of me that no longer exists, the one who thought that such horrors only ever happened to other people in other places.