Nocticadia: A Dark Academia Gothic Romance

Four years later …

“Lilia?” a voice cut through the void.

I blinked my eyes open and found myself hunched over the drain of a yellowing sink.

“Earth to Lilia,” the familiar voice said again.

Confused, I turned to find my coworker, Jayda, standing alongside me, and I pushed up from the sink I’d been cleaning. It was in the haze of confusion that I remembered scrubbing the sink, during which I’d caught wind of a strange, but familiar scent, like rot and dirt. So heavy was the odor that I’d fallen into memories again.

A sheepish grin tugged at my lips and I cleared my throat. “Sorry, I must’ve spaced out.”

It happened sometimes. Something would trigger thoughts, and those thoughts had me slipping into the most horrific memory of my life. One that never failed to pull me under so deep that I lost sight of my own reality.

It’d been four years since my mother’s death, yet I remembered every detail. The scents. The sounds. The cold.

“I was just saying, I’m going to work on the office next door.” Forearm across her nose, Jayda coughed. “I don’t know what the hell the last person in here ate, but that does not smell healthy. So, I’m gonna leave all these latrines to you,” she said on a chuckle.

Still spacy, I grabbed the rag I’d dropped on the floor and tossed it into the sudsy bucket beside me. The usual nausea gurgled in my belly, and I tried to hide the shakiness in my arms by busying my hands–wiping them on my scrubs and swiping up the bucket for the next sink. “You’re the sweetest.”

Snorting, she stepped toward the door, but paused. “You sure you’re okay? You look a little pale.”

“Fine. Totally fine. I just fell deep into thoughts.”

“Real deep, from the looks of it. Seriously, you don’t mind if I start on the other room? Just figured the two of us could get out early if we hustle.”

Half-smiling, I shrugged. “I don’t mind.”

In truth, I hated cleaning the bathrooms, the patient rooms, the offices, but I suspected it was the closest I’d ever get to working in an actual hospital. The dream of medical research seemed to fade every day, my body growing weary of life. At my age, I should’ve been finishing up my bachelor’s degree and trying to decide whether to take the MCAT or GRE, but with as few classes as I was able to squeeze in at the community college around work, it’d be a decade before I reached that point in my schooling.

“Thanks, girl. Early pregnancy and sewage do not mix.”

The bathrooms in the hospital’s basement reeked as a general rule, but the stench on the air right then was particularly potent. “I got it,” I said, waving her on. “Get out of here. I don’t need to be cleaning your puke up next.”

Chuckling, she slipped out the door, and alone, I exhaled a long, shaky breath. Hands braced at either side of the sink, I closed my eyes and attempted to clear my mind.

Screams. Black worms. Vacant eyes.

With a shake of my head, I buried those thoughts in the shadows of my mind, refusing to let them consume me. No. Not tonight.

What sounded like the faint plink of water reached my ears, and I opened my eyes to the reflected stalls behind me in the mirror.

At the very last stall, I spotted something I hadn’t noticed when I first walked in—the soles of socked feet beneath the door.

I spun around, my heart clenching with the shock of the discovery. Those were definitely feet beneath the door. “Is someone there?” I asked, knowing damn well that someone was, in fact, there. Above the feet, I caught sight of the hem of the familiar hospital gown that every patient wore.

Patients who shouldn’t have been using the basement bathroom assigned to staff.

A faint splashing sound reached my ears again. Given the position of the feet, the person likely wasn’t indisposed right then, but they could’ve been vomiting.

“Do you need some help? Because I can run and get someone, if you do …” I hiked my finger over my shoulder as if they could’ve seen me.

No answer.

I tiptoed closer. “Are you sick?”

Still no answer.

I finally reached the stall door, peering through the skinny cracks. Long, straggly, red hair lay draped across a patient gown, half-opened enough to revealed a pale mottled back and white underwear. An uneven purplish tone colored the limbs that I could see, particularly the leg and hand.

My first thought was livor mortis, but I pushed that thought aside.

A stinging dryness settled in my throat, and I swallowed a gulp.

Please just be okay.

I gave a slight knock, noting the minute swing of the unlocked door, and hoped the person would volley back an undignified protest to my prying.

They didn’t say a word.

I pushed open the door.

The person’s head rested just below the seat inside the toilet, those straggled bits of hair hiding the face.

I reached out a trembling hand and gripped a slender shoulder, tugging just enough to totter her to the side. She rolled onto her back, knocking her head on the wall of the stall, and the moment her hair fell away from her face, I stumbled backward.

The familiar milky glow of my mother’s eyes stared back at me.

Movement flickered in my periphery, and a rush of air flew out of me when I snapped my attention there and just caught sight of a long, black, slithery object slipping down the toilet bowl.

An icy fear gripped my muscles. I blinked. Triple blinked.

I swung my attention back toward my mother. Another black, slithery form glided past purple lips, down her plum-colored cheek to the tiled floor. It wriggled straight for me.

A scream tore from my chest as I jumped backward, tumbling onto my ass.

The worm came at me, fast and determined.

Before it reached me, though, it slipped down the floor drain, halfway between me and my mother’s lifeless body.

The crash of the door sent another shudder through me, and I jolted upright as Jayda came bounding into the restroom.

“Lilia? You all right? I heard you scream.”

Nose stinging with the threat of tears, I shook my head, unable to form the words.

Frowning, she stepped cautiously toward me, eyes scanning the room. “What’s wrong?”

“We need to call someone,” I managed, pointing toward the stall.

“Call someone?” Expression carved in confusion, she turned toward where I pointed. “Lilia? Are you okay?”

I swung my attention back toward the stall to find nothing. Not a single trace that anyone had been there. “I, um …” Humiliation burned in my cheeks as the shock of reality settled over me. “I …” My mind scrambled for a reason, something to steal away the possibility that I’d lost my damn mind.

Jayda stepped over my legs and cracked the door of the next stall, jumping back on a scream. “What the hell!”

My pulse hammered.

Had she seen them, too?

Burying her nose in her arm, she gagged and stepped back. “Hang on … I’m … I’m gonna call someone down. Just hang on.”

Frowning, I pushed up from the floor, as she exited the bathroom, and peered into the stall next to the one where I’d seen my mother. A ball of dark fur with a long naked tail floated on the surface of the toilet water. A rat.

That explained the smell, at least.

Heaving breaths sawed out of me, as I leaned against the wall across from the stall and slid to the floor again.

A heavy weight weakened my legs. A numbing cold pulsed through my limbs and chest. No doubt, I was having a panic attack, because a cold, clammy feeling settled over me, like ice water filling my lungs, and I was pretty sure that if I hadn’t sat down, I’d have passed out.

Eyes closed, I breathed through my nose in counts of four. Over the incessant thud of blood pounding in my ear, I could hear Jayda’s calm voice, as she made the call to maintenance.

A simmering nausea shot up from my stomach into my throat, but I swallowed back the urge to throw up. Acids burned in my sinuses, and I clenched my eyes tighter, breathing harder through my nose.

Daring to lift my lids, I stared at the empty stall, hating myself for having slipped into another episode in front of my coworker. On unsteady muscles, I pushed to my feet again, and thankfully, the sickness from before settled from my throat back down to my belly. Breathing through my nose helped.

At my neck, I clutched the small vial of my mother’s ashes that I wore, hanging from her old rosary she used to keep in her pocket. It was a silly superstition my mother had told me once. She’d always worn a ring of my grandmother’s strung on a necklace. When I’d asked why she wore it all the time, she’d told me that the dead never harmed those who carried something that belonged to them. I didn’t even believe in God, but my mother did, and a part of me felt compelled to keep the rosary for that reason.

My muscles flinched when the door flew open again.

Jayda stepped just inside, keeping her distance. “I called maintenance. They’re on their way down. You okay?” Her reassuring voice reminded me of my mother’s. At twenty-three years old, she was only a few years older than I was, but life seemed to have aged both of us.

“I think so. Just … a little rattled.”

“No, honey. I mean, are you okay?”

I knew what she meant. Everything seemed to make me jittery nowadays. Who knew what had triggered the episode that time. Maybe the smell. Maybe I’d seen the rat and processed it as something entirely different. Wasn’t the first time that’d happened. Jayda had witnessed a couple incidents when I’d seen something that wasn’t there.

“I’ll be fine.” The three words that’d become my mantra in the last four years.

I’ll be fine.

For the most part, I had been fine, except for the times when something had triggered flashbacks.

Or I’d seen the occasional hallucination of my mother.

Was I okay, though?

I guessed that remained to be seen.