The bell tower of St. Jude’s University did not ring at dawn, as it had for three hundred and forty years, but cracked down the middle with a sound like a giant bone snapping, a fracture that split the air and shook the dust from the rafters of the lecture halls below, a catastrophic silence that fell over the campus like a shroud of gray wool, muffling the distant barking of the dogs and the...
The rain had been falling for three days, a steady, grey curtain that turned the windows of the sanatorium into mirrors of our own exhausted faces. I sat in the corner of the day room, holding a small glass vial of amber liquid that I had distilled from the roots of the nightshade growing wild in the overgrown garden. It was my only possession that did not belong to the institution, a secret...
You stand before the gate. It is iron. It is rusted. The rust is deep. It eats the metal. It eats the light. You are a soldier. You wear the gray. You are old. Your knees ache. You are tired. You want to leave. You do not leave. You look up. The building is tall. It is stone. It is cold. It is empty. It was not always empty. It was full. It was full of sound. It was full of life. Now it is...
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