The bus coughed to a stop at the edge of a rain-wrowned town, and the road stretched ahead like a narrow spine of iron. I stepped down with a backpack that felt too light for the weight of the year ahead, the wind stealing a thread of my breath and steering it toward the looming building that stood, half ruin and half vow, at the hill’s crown. Hawthorn Academy—a name that sounded like a trap when spoken aloud—made the valley seem older than the hills themselves. The driver tipped his hat, wordlessly, and drove away as if to pretend the world beyond was less real than the stone and glass that waited for us inside. The building rose in front of me with the quiet authority of something that had always known I would arrive exactly this way.
Inside, the air held a damp sweetness, like old rain trapped in the woodwork for years, and the ceiling sagged with the memory of all the names that had ever learned to strike a match against fear. The receptionist wore a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes, as if she’d learned to smile for the others while keeping her own secrets tucked behind her teeth. “Room assignment,” she said, sliding a key across the counter as if it were a sacrament. The number on mine—three, with a tiny smear of something long dried to the metal—felt ceremonial, as if I’d been handed a key to a script that only the walls could read.
The dormitory corridor was a mouth without teeth, chewing at the sound of our footsteps. The walls hummed faintly, a chorus of sighs and the turning of pages that no one had bothered to publish in a hundred years. My room was the last door on the left, and when I opened it, the air thickened with a scent I could only call a memory of something burned and sweet—a memory belonging to a place I hadn’t yet learned to call home. The bed faced a window with glass that hummed when the wind hit it, as if the glass itself breathed. A small desk held a lamp that cast a pale, patient light, and a single portrait hung above the bed: a girl with the same expression I imagined mine would wear if I learned to listen to the house more than to myself.
That night, the walls grew listening. I heard the soft creak of the door as if someone stood just outside and decided not to enter. Footsteps. A heartbeat, though no chest rose to meet it. The whispers didn’t feel loud or angry, merely intimate—like a conversation you hear from the next room when the door is ajar and your curiosity has become a hunger. I pressed my ear to the pillow and learned to tell the difference between a whisper of rain against stone and a whisper of a name that wasn’t mine but could become mine if I listened long enough.
Morning arrived not with sunlight but with a pale, unseasonal glow seeping through the curtains. My roommate, a girl with copper-colored braids and eyes that seemed to measure you with the calm of a clock, appeared in the doorway as if she had always known I would come here. “You’ll learn the way the house wants you to learn,” she said, almost smiling. “That’s how Hawthorn keeps its students.” She didn’t elaborate, but I felt the word “keeps” settle in the room like a seed that would one day sprout into something I would either prune or water with fear.
The third day, the wardrobe in my room decided to participate in the reverence Hawthorn demanded. When I moved a coat on its hanger, a panel slid aside with a sigh that sounded like someone exhaling a long-held worry. Behind it lay a narrow stairwell, a hint of rust, a scent of ink and something metallic. A door at the bottom bore a plaque I couldn’t quite read in the dim light: Do Not Open. The voice inside me—the one that had learned to listen to that old house—told me to leave the moment I saw the door’s breathy invitation. But another part of me, braver or perhaps more foolish, pressed on.
The stair stretched down into the heart of the building where the quiet grew thick, as if every step stirred a memory long dormant. The walls were lined with names—etchings, not painted, as if someone had fingered them into permanence. Some names were faded, others fresh as the day they were carved, and beneath them, in a script I could barely decipher, dates that mattered and mattered again, as if history kept rewinding to see which year would finally break. In the air there was a scent of vanilla and ash, the bittersweet perfume of a ritual you weren’t meant to understand but could not resist following to its origin.
A room opened at the stair’s end that wasn’t on the floor plan I had studied in the reception area. It was a library—but no ordinary one. Books lay with their spines pressed to the dust, not as if they were shelved, but as if they had chosen their own resting place. On a pedestal rested a ledger bound in cracked leather, its pages blank and gleaming with the threat of revelation. I moved closer, drawn by the gravity of names that might have been my own someday, and I found mine in the margins of a page that did not belong to any year I recognized. The handwriting was careful, deliberate, almost affectionate, and the date beneath it was yesterday’s. The ink carried a weight that settled in my chest as if my heart had learned to count the breath between sentences.
The room’s door closed behind me with a soft, decisive click that sounded like a lock turning in a grave. In that moment, I understood what Hawthorn meant by “keeps.” The dormitory did not merely shelter its students; it gathered them, like a keeper gathering moths to a light that never went out. The memory held in the ledger was not a death tally but a collection of names the building chose to remember, so no one could forget what it required to be kept safe within its walls. The house asked for something in return—slightly cruel, absolutely inevitable: the willingness to become part of its living memory, to become a name that might be read aloud in the hush of a lecture hall as a warning and a vow.
When I emerged back into the corridor, the house felt different—less a maze and more a quiet chamber that knew the weight of every step. My roommate met me at the door with a look that suggested she already knew what I would do next. “You found the ledger,” she said, not a question but a statement of fact. “We all do. It’s how you learn the rhythm of the place.” She tapped the air with her finger, and the wall behind us shivered as though a breath had whispered through the plaster.
That night, the whispers grew more intimate still, curling around my bed like a scarf woven from memory itself. I did not sleep so much as enter a dream where the hallways stretched endlessly into a night that remembered every door I might ever open, and each opened door led to a version of me who had chosen differently. In the morning, the lamp on my desk glowed with a patient light, and on the desk lay a new item: a small, anonymous note printed in a neat hand, simply saying, Welcome. The handwriting felt like a door I had walked through in the dream, and the ink tasted faintly of iron and lilac.
I stood beneath the portrait again, the girl’s gaze catching mine with a quiet insistence, asking questions without ever voicing them. The memory of the ledger whispered through the room, a soft insistence that what I was offered was not escape but a form of belonging—a way to keep the dormitory honest about what it contained and what it protected. If I stayed, if I learned to listen to the walls as one listens to a friend who knows you better than you know yourself, then perhaps I would be allowed to leave one day, not as a student who survived Hawthorn but as a name that remained behind to guard the threshold for those who would come after.
I do not know if I will stay. The corridors have a way of making choices for you when you forget that every door creaks with intention and every whisper carries a promise. But I do know this: the Dormitory of the Damned is not a place where fear ends, but a place where fear learns to listen. And if you ever find yourself standing before it, listening to the rain on the old windows and hearing your name fold itself into the breath of the hall, remember that some doors are not opened by escape, but by the quiet, stubborn act of choosing to belong to a memory that refuses to let go.
