Gothicana

“Have any of you gone into the woods yet?” Ethan asked after the pause.

“Corvina did,” Erica supplied. “Came out right after Mr. Deverell. It was all over the girl towers.”

“Mr. Deverell goes into the woods all the time. I don’t know if he’s brave or stupid,” Jax whistled, turning to Corvina. “Did you see anything weird? I’ve heard there are all sorts of bizarre things in there.”

Corvina finally looked back down at the group to find all of them staring at her. “Nothing interesting, at least not something I stumbled across. Just woods? And a lake. But that was it.”

“Lake?” Jade asked, surprised. “There’s a lake in there?”

“And quite a beautiful one too,” Corvina added. “It’s dark and murky. But peaceful.”

The memory of the strange feminine voice surfaced and she pushed it away.

“What’s on top of our tower?” she voiced the question she’d been thinking about for a long time. She knew the room had a piano in it, but she had no idea what purpose it served.

“Top of the tower?” Jade looked at her, puzzled.

“She means the store rooms, I think,” Ethan narrowed his eyes behind his glasses. “Why do you ask?”

Yeah, she wasn’t going to tell them about Mr. Deverell playing the piano there. She wasn’t an idiot.

“Just curious,” Corvina replied with sincerity. “It’s all so new to me.”

Troy gave her a soft smile, his blonde hair and blue eyes glinting in the sunlight. “It’s a store room. Every tower has one on top. The admin people keep old stuff that had originally belonged to the castle there. No one really goes up there.”

Just like the woods. And just like the woods, Mr. Deverell ventured into places other people didn’t go. But why come to one of the girls’ towers? Was it because of the piano? Was her tower the only one that had it? And if so, why come to play at night? And why did none of the other girls hear him? Was the room soundproofed in some way or was everyone else just too used to the odd castle sounds at night? That seemed most likely, since she was the only new girl in her tower, all of the others having been around for at least a year or more. Maybe she wouldn’t have heard the music either had she been asleep that night.

Questions still circled her mind. The more she observed him, the more she felt herself falling into her curiosity. There was something about him, something she couldn’t put her finger on, that made her realize he wasn’t a usual man. There was something... dark around him, but what was it hiding? It made her want to take a harder look and try to understand what it was and why it sparked something in her.

“The driver who dropped me here told me the castle is rumored to be haunted,” Corvina asked, changing the topic. “Is that true?”

“The town,” Ethan scoffed, “likes to demonize shit up here. They think we all have orgies and worship the devil or something. I’m not surprised they’d think it’s haunted too.”

“They have good reason to,” Troy pointed out.

“It’s a load of bullshit,” Ethan argued back. “You know better than to believe some old wives’ tale.”

What tale? Corvina looked at them both in confusion, seeing Troy pull out the grass at his feet, and Ethan looking at his roommate with agitation as though it was an argument they’d had before. Why?

Before she could speculate, Jade abruptly brushed her shock of white hair back, glaring at Ethan. “Whatever you believe or don’t, you have to admit it’s weird.”

“Wait,” Corvina interrupted, bringing up a hand to silence whatever Ethan had been about to say. “Can someone tell me what’s going on?”

“I’m equally confused, girl,” Erica chimed in, looking around at them.

“And me,” Jax agreed.

There was pin-drop silence for a long moment before Jade sighed. “I forget you don’t know half the mad shit circulating around here sometimes.”

Her roommate looked down at her pink nails, worrying her lips as she began. “It’s one of those crazy stories kids tell around the bonfire, you know? One that makes most people here very uncomfortable.”

“Those who believe them, you mean,” Ethan corrected.

Corvina nodded for Jade to go on, intrigued enough to discard Ethan’s commentary.

Her roommate took a visible breath. “They say there was a group of students at the university about hundred years ago, a good few years after it was founded.”

“Okay,” Corvina encouraged when Jade hesitated.

“It’s all hearsay but this group of students... they’d go down the mountain to the village – that’s the town now – and take someone into the woods with them for ‘fun’,” Jade emphasized the word with finger quotes in the air.

“For real?” Erica exclaimed from her side, disbelief evident in her voice. “Why?”

Troy shrugged, picking out more grass. “Who the hell knows? It’s a story.”

“The story,” Jade picked up again, giving them a glance, “says they did terrible things to their hostage for a while before finishing in some kind of sacrificial orgy. I don’t know the exact details or anything,” her voice trailed off.

“No one does,” Troy supplied, looking up at Corvina. “But it’s said that after a few times, people at the university found out what was going on and decided it was enough.”

Corvina listened with rapt attention, the light in the lawn shifting as a cloud passed over the sun, the tower behind them casting long, eerie shadows on the ground.

Jade looked at her with her solemn green eyes and swallowed. “A different, larger group of Verenmore students followed them into the woods one night and found them surrounded with the blood.”

“What happened then?” Corvina asked, invested in the tale.

“They lynched them.”

A chill stole over her.

The sensation of ants crawling over her skin returned tenfold. Corvina gripped her arms as a shudder wracked her frame.

“Jesus,” Jax muttered from his place, exchanging a look with Corvina. “That’s... something.”

“Yeah,” Troy threw the grass. “They’re said to haunt these lands, the woods, the castle, everything, still looking for their killers. It’s said that they still take a sacrifice on the night they were killed.”

“Don’t tell me,” Erica voiced her thoughts as Corvina felt her jaw slacken in realization.

Jade nodded, holding her own arms. “Yup. They were all murdered in the woods on the night of the Black Ball.”