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I take one step forward.

The shape stays where it is.

I take another. The light from the bracket I’ve just passed reaches a little further, and I see the hem of a garment, long, dark, hanging ragged around what might be feet. The smell is stronger now, terrible and foul.

“Are you⁠—?”

The shape moves.

Not all at once. Its head tilts first, as if it had only now registered that there is a sound in the corridor. Then a shift in the shoulders, slow, uneven, followed by a squelching sound that turns my stomach.

Then the whole of it slowly lurches forward into the candlelight and I gasp.

I see the hands first.

The hands at the sides of the garment are the color of old wax, grooved with blackish-green fluid, the fingers bent out as if they’ve been broken.

Then the face.

The horrible face.

The lips are gone. The skin around the mouth has pulled back far enough to show the teeth, which are intact, and they are the single most frightening thing about her. That smile. That forced, unnaturally wide smile with white teeth that almost glow against the waxy, peeling skin.

The eyes are open.

The eyes are white, too, cloudy, and underneath the white, something is…moving. Like a bug trapped beneath the eyeball, skittering back and forth, this pulsing moving thing.

Then the thing in the eyes stops moving.

It stops because it has found me.

For a breath that lasts a long, long time the thing inside the skull looks at me. Not quite seeing, but registering what I am.

I need to run. I need to scream and run because I know what this is.

But the scream has died in me and I can’t move.

I can only watch as the teeth part.

A sound comes out, the sound of air being pushed out of collapsed lungs, scraping over a voicebox that has gone fallow. There is no word or language in it, it is turgid air pushed out of her chest into the corridor, into my lungs, into the back of my throat.

I nearly choke on it.

The thing moves again.

Away this time.

The feet drag toward the second staircase, broken, sideways, the hem catching on the stones, the wet creak of a knee.

Then she rounds the corner and is gone.

I stand in the passage with my hand against the wall and my knees shaking and my heart galloping in my chest, threatening to run loose.

The smell doesn’t leave with her.

The smell stays in the corridor, on my clothes, everywhere.

Then I suddenly find my strength again. I turn and run back toward Avelene’s room. The candles pass me in a yellow blur and I’m at her door with my fist on the wood. I knock twice and she doesn’t answer, and I knock louder, not caring if I wake up other students, and I hear a stumble in the room, and the latch rattles, and the door swings in.