I followed Alice out of the Refectory, and despite the tears stinging at my eyes – this had been the worst birthday of my life, and I missed home so much already – I offered to walk back to the dorm with her.
‘I’m fine,’ she snapped, in a particularly porcupiney manner. ‘Go and hang out with your newfriends.’ Her tone made the very concept of friendship sound absurd and unreasonable.
‘No, Alice,’ I said faux-sternly, folding my arms against the chill of the night. ‘I want to make sure you’re safe.’
‘How very noble of you,’ she seethed, a strange tension writhing through her body.
‘Look, what’s your problem?’ I asked, raising my voice against the ringing in my ears. ‘I’ve been nothing but nice to you since we got here.’
She shook her head, as though I could never understand her. Then she shot me a vicious look and swivelled on her heel, leaving me standing on the mist-slicked cobbles alone.
As I watched her walk away, a stubborn upward tilt to her pixie chin, I found myself not wanting to go back inside to find Nat and Sara. They had actively made the situation with Alice worse, Sara shrieking hysterically and Nat rolling up her sweater sleeves like she wanted a piece of the action herself. It wasn’t just that they were high, I realised. It was that they were drama leeches. They loved the fact my roommate hit someone on my birthday. I got the sense that they’d tell the story with their fellow thespians first thing in the morning, embellishing and exaggerating for greater effect.
Nor did I want to go back to the dorm, on account of the fact I would probably encounter Alice summoning Satan for a cup of tea and a catch-up. If I was honest with myself, she utterly terrified me. Not in a ‘you look like you want to murder me but you’re probably fine’ way, but in a ‘you look like you want to murder me and you probably will’ way. I decided I would sneak in when she was asleep – assuming she was the kind of demon who required rest in the first place.
Despite the cold, I decided to go for a walk around the old convent building and see the statue of Sister Maria, which was supposed to be insanely creepy. I wouldn’t normally walk alone at night, but there were so many people milling around campus that it felt somehow safe. Also I was nineteen, and therefore immortal.
As I gathered my bearings and started to walk, a silvery fog drifted around the tree-lined walkways in eerie whorls that licked at the feet of the convent. With the hypnotic plainsong of my footsteps on cobbles, I slipped into some kind of exhausted trance, my mind pleasantly scrubbed free of thought or precognition.
Following the walkway around the convent’s perimeter, a few images broke through the haze: a cigarette butt smouldering warm orange at the base of a twisted hazel tree; a howler’s moon hanging low and bright in the sky; Salem stalking up a drainpipe and through an open window on the third floor of the old convent. When the black cat looked back over her shoulder before disappearing into the room, her eyes flashed a brief ruby red. I looked around for the source – a reflection of something? – but found none.
Before I knew it, I was standing not at the statue of Sister Maria, but at the foot of the North Tower.
I felt the sudden, stomach-yanking sensation of missing a step.
Why had I gravitated towards the North Tower with no conscious desire to do so? Was the pull of it so magnetic?
I felt insane just thinking it. Yet looking up at the tower from the wonky cobbles below, its proportions seemed all wrong. It stuck up too high above the rest of the convent, and leaned slightly towards the north. There were no windows apart from the arched orifices in the Observatory at the very top, where there had once been telescopes (the nuns got really into astronomy in the late 1800s).
It was from those open maws that the victims had fallen to their deaths.
At first, there was nothing in the incidents to point to murder. Sam Bowey died first. He was Janie’s new boyfriend – a similarly quiet musician from County Durham – and he fell from the tower just weeks after they got together. Janie testified that she had broken up with him just hours before his death, and so coupled with reports that he was failing his classes, the police believed it was suicide. Case closed.
Until Janie died too, less than a week later.
Her death was different, because her body showed signs of a struggle. She had finger-shaped bruises on her upper arms, scratches on her face and chest, and significant bruising around her neck. It was believed that she was hoisted over the windowsill by the throat. And even though today that would have provided abundant forensic evidence, this was in the eighties before DNA testing was in widespread use.
At that point there were still no real leads, no genuine suspects. Nobody had seen anything suspicious; even the students in the dorms adjacent to the North Tower hadn’t seen anyone coming or going.
The police followed all kinds of lines of enquiry to find a motive. It seemed a huge coincidence that two new lovers could be killed within six days of each other by a total stranger, so they started looking at other students who knew them both. Maybe someone in love with one or both of them, who had acted from jealousy. That avenue was mostly fruitless – any evidence they uncovered was flimsy and circumstantial at best. It was an investigation built on gossip and hearsay.
Finally, two weeks after Janie’s death, Fiona Taylor and Dawn Middlemiss died on the same night. They fell within minutes of each other, their shattered bodies stacked on top of each other like a dreadful cairn at the foot of the North Tower. Their bodies were ravaged by awful, almost subhuman claw marks. The police suspected there was a serial killer at large, and Carvell was closed with immediate effect.
Despite years of inquiries and investigations, the murders were never solved. The killer was never caught.
But now, standing mere metres away from where those broken bodies had been found, an utterly ridiculous and yet frankly terrifying prospect came to me: what if the tower itself was the murderer?
It had overridden my own conscious thoughts to draw me here. Was it haunted? Possessed? Or was I simply too intoxicated?
An owl hooted nearby, snapping me out of my reverie. Before I turned to head back to the dorm, another strange impulse overcame me, and I felt my body moving about five seconds ahead of my brain.
I closed the distance between the tall, arched doorway at the foot of the North Tower and grabbed the wrought-iron handle with my hand. It was icy to the touch. When I tried to turn it, a rusting mechanism jarred.
Locked.
The brief spell broke. I let go.
Relief washed over me like a fine, cool mist.