Nocticadia: A Dark Academia Gothic Romance

Tick. Tick. Tick.

I hawked the clock, until at precisely ten-oh-eight, I headed out for Mel’s dorm room. The hallways were never quiet, always bustling with late night study sessions. The commons room at the end of the hallway buzzed with the same physics students cramming for another exam, just as they had the week before. Each of them made obvious because they plastered the chalkboard with their equations and often yelled ‘bazinga!’ from The Big Bang Theory whenever they solved it correctly. It was the only time the entire corridor smelled like weed, too.

When I reached Mel’s room, I only had to knock once before the door swung open, and she peered out into the hallway, looking left and right. A hard yank of my arm had me tumbling forward into the room.

“Hey, a simple come in would’ve worked.” I scowled, rubbing the raw spot where her nails had dug into my skin, and glanced around her room, significantly bigger than mine, with a small living room and a hallway that I presumed led to a bedroom.

Ignoring my complaint, she jerked her head for me to follow, and led me down the small hallway to a door she swung open on a bedroom, as I’d suspected.

What I hadn’t expected was for her to lead me to another door, a closet, where at its rear stood yet another small door.

“What in the wannabe Narnia is this?” I asked, staring at the frame which appeared to be half the size of a normal door.

“Decades ago, when the dorm was first built, it housed children, like an orphanage. The settlers were terrified of the savage monsters,” she said in air quotes, “coming and taking the children in the middle of the night. So they built these little doorways leading to the cellars to hide them in the event of a raid.”

“I’m guessing the raids never happened.”

“You guessed right.” Hinges groaned as she opened the door on a creepy stone stairwell, and from the shelf of her closet, she nabbed an LED lamp. “C’mon. Gang’s waiting to meet you.”

“Gang?” Hopefully that wasn’t crazy talk for a pile of dead bodies. I followed her down the staircase, where the air grew thicker and colder. Rubbing my shoulders failed to keep the chill off my skin, and when we finally reached the bottom of the stairs, shivers wracked my bones. “Jesus, you should’ve given me a heads up to wear a sweatshirt.”

“Don’t be a wimp.” Tiny bells on her bohemian skirt clinked as she led me down a narrow corridor off the staircase that curved to the left.

I couldn’t help but think how freaking creepy it would’ve been to stumble upon something while wandering the passage alone. “What made you want to explore down here? I feel like this is the perfect place to hide dead bodies.”

An impish curve of her lips told me Mel definitely had a dark side as she glanced over her shoulder, leaving me to wonder if I was stupid for having followed after her. “The dead have stories,” she said. “Have you had any encounters yet?”

“What? Like, ghosts?” Of course I had–a man in a bird mask, though I hadn’t yet worked out if he was the result of too-little sleep, or real. Either way, I had no intentions of mentioning him.

“Yes. The whole campus is plagued with hauntings, but this building? It’s the worst.”

“Why is that? The Crixson Study?”

“In part, yes.” She kept on down the dark hallway, while my gaze wandered the ancient stone walls that seemed to close in on us, the deeper we ventured. Again, I couldn’t imagine her exploring down there by herself. “In addition to the experiments, it’s also where exorcisms were conducted on kids, back when the place was a monastery. Apparently, some of the builders who worked on the university were superstitious about all that, so about a third of the crew left, and others refused to venture into these little passages, so they were never properly investigated and got sealed.”

“The exorcisms …. Is that during the time of Dr. Stirling?”

“You’ve read about him?”

“Yes.” The memory of my readings and the tortures he inflicted certainly didn’t put me at ease, as we walked through the tunnels.

“So, in the mid-to-late seventeen-hundreds, the place was sort of a dumping ground for heretics and those accused of witchcraft. They sent anyone with mental illness here, as well, thinking they were possessed. In the early eighteen-hundreds, an asylum opened. That’s when things got really disturbing.”

“How so?”

“They began torturing the patients, and discarded them in mass graves on what is now Bone Bay. These hideout tunnels became solitary confinement for a number of patients. Where they were starved and left to die.”

“Jesus. That’s messed up. How do you know all of this?”

She shrugged, running her hands over a stretch of wall that, when I looked closer, appeared to bear scratch marks in the stone. “I spend way too much time reading. But also, there was an investigator back in the eighteen-hundreds, who disguised himself as a patient. Before he mysteriously disappeared, he apparently sent one of his friends encrypted journal entries that detailed the tortures he’d witnessed. They’re part of the no access journals in the library.”

“So, how did you get access? I work in that department and can’t get my hands on them.”

“My father is a massive donor for the library and chairman of the Board of Overseers. Administration and board members have access to just about anything. And Kelvin, but there’s no bargaining with him. He’s too much of a straight shooter.”

The corridor finally opened up on a moderately-sized circular room with no windows or doors. A shiver spiraled down my spine as I imagined being trapped there, like the patients she’d mentioned. Candles lit the space where three others sat on large, multi-colored cushions–an Asian guy with pink hair, a young woman with short black pixie hair and tawny skin, and a collection of piercings in her ears, nose, lip and eyebrow. And Briceson, who tipped back a fifth of what I recognized as Jack Daniels.

“Lilia!” he said in a more spirited tone than the last time I’d seen him.

With a slight smile, I waved. “Hey.”

The pink-haired guy crossed his arms, eyeing me up and down. “So, you brought fresh blood, Mel?”

“This is Lilia. Lilia? This is Ken.”

Pink Hair waved a hand over himself, then lit up what I guessed to be a joint, given the way he held it between thumb and forefinger and took a puff.

“Seems you already know Briceson. And this is Catalina, who we call Cat, for short.” In response to her unenthusiastic wave, I gave a curt nod, and the dark-haired girl went back to reading the book in her hands. Squinting, I could just make out The Anti-Christ by Nietzsche on its cover.

A bottle of Patron sat in the middle of the circle, which Mel swiped up and poured into a shot glass.

She kicked back the mouthful, filled the glass again, and handed it off to me.

With a shake of my head, I declined, and she shrugged, tipping back a second shot.

Scattered about the room sat beaten up boxes filled with manila folders, and two laptops. Other equipment lay about that I didn’t recognize–electronics of some sort that Briceson tinkered with, between stealing sips of whiskey.

“What is this?” I asked, gaze wandering their secret little gathering space.

“Welcome to Anon Amos.” Mel slumped onto one of the open cushions and flicked her fingers toward Ken, who passed the joint to her.

“Wait. What? That’s you?”

“Yeah, we’re kind of the underground version of Snopes, here at the university.” Voice hoarse, she blew off the smoke and passed the joint to me. Again, I declined, and she shrugged, handing it to Cat instead. “If it’s true, we dig up facts. If it’s false, we find proof to back that.”

“So, when I asked you about the Crixson Project?”

Never taking her eyes of mine, Mel stretched toward Briceson that time and flicked her fingers. From one of the banker’s boxes, he grabbed a stack of folders and handed them over. “These files were stolen by two computer science majors back in two-thousand-five. They hid the files down here, never speaking of them. Both were expelled the following year, but since then, this has become a dumping ground for inaccessible information.”

“Hasn’t the school caught on to that?”

“Not yet.” Pushing up from the cushions, she crossed the room, flipping through the files. “So, I suggest whatever facts you’re looking for, now’s the time to dig. And when you’re done, you’ll tell me what you supposedly know about one of the participants.” She shoved the folders against my chest and sat back down beside Cat, who still didn’t bother to put her book down.

Strange that she didn’t require me to offer up my end of the deal first.

I took a seat on the floor beside one of the candles at the opposite end of the room, and laid the folders out in front of me. No idea why the hell I was so nervous, like opening a vault of dead bodies. Oddly enough, it was when I cracked open the first folder that a cold dread brush the back of my neck. Rubbing my hand over it failed to settle the disturbing feeling, especially when I flipped the first enclosed paper over to reveal a slightly familiar face.

“Warren Bramwell,” Briceson said from beside me, alerting me that he’d moved from across the room. “Doctor Death’s–”

“Father. Yes, I can tell.” The eyes may have been a different color, his hair lighter and peppered in gray that hadn’t yet touched his son’s, but their relation was undeniable. His eyes held the same striking intensity, as if he were peering into the soul. Handsome was an understatement, but perhaps that made up his sinister charm.

“The university’s very own Dr. Stirling.”

As Briceson spoke, I skimmed through the incident report which must’ve been taken by a representative of the university, the way it praised his credentials and work. “His background was endocrinology?”

“Yes. As I understand, his wife had battled diabetes since childhood. He hoped to cure it for her.”

I flipped the page to a picture of a young, dark-skinned woman clipped to what I recognized as a medical chart.

Yolanda Murdock, age twenty nine, with a history of insulin-dependent diabetes.

Another flip of the page, another woman clipped to a medical report. The next one was a blonde, thirty years of age, who also suffered from diabetes. Same with the next, and the next, and the next. After skimming the medical record of all six women, I kept on through the file to where I found a synopsis of the experiment.

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the efficacy and safety of NuBram1 Toxin on Type 1 diabetes management in routine clinical practice.

SECONDARY OBJECTIVE: Demographic and biometric data, treatment compliance, adverse drug reactions

METHODOLOGY: Serial injections of NuBram1 purified Toxin over a period of six months. Efficacy measured by increased beta cell mass and insulin levels.

At a glance, the summary painted a picture of legitimacy. Included were detailed graphs that displayed the incremental dosages given to the participants and the symptoms they reported. Digestive changes. Hallucinations. Sensitivity to light.

I frowned, reading through the report. What the hell had the NuBram1 Toxin been purified from? The answer revealed itself on the next page:

Purified toxin derived from Noctisoma larvae.

I knew it. I knew Bramwell Senior had had some dealing with Noctisoma.

An adverse event table detailed more symptoms. Horrific symptoms of suicidal ideation. Night terrors. One of the women stabbed herself in the stomach, claiming she had felt something moving around inside her. Another suffered hallucinations of her dead daughter after she’d refused to eat, telling her that she had to feed the babies inside of her.

I flipped quickly for the outcome of the experiment, and found it in a police report, for which an autopsy had been performed on the women after their bodies had been pulled from the lake. All of them had died by mass suicide. The coroner had come to that conclusion based on ongoing mental disturbances documented in the study and no evidence of foul play. The women had apparently submerged themselves into freezing waters, willingly. Two of them showed signs of stroke. All of them had likely suffered hypothermia due to winter temperatures.

I folded the file shut to grab another, when something fell from inside.

A picture.

In it stood three men dressed in lab coats–one I recognized as Dr. Warren Bramwell. The other was Dr. Lippincott. I had never seen the third man before. They flanked eight women, whose faces I scanned over.

My gaze landed on one of the women. A familiar face.

Too familiar.

The picture slipped from my fingers. My heart hammered like a drum against my ribs. Ribbons of panic wrapped themselves around my lungs and squeezed. I took hold of the vial at my collarbone and ran my thumb over the surface of it.

“What is it?” Briceson asked beside me, breaking me from my shocked spell. He lifted the picture from the floor, bringing her to my attention once more.

Hand trembling, I pointed to the woman, third from the right. “That’s my mother.”

“Wait. You know her?” Mel strode from across the room, plopping down beside me.

“I have a picture back in my room. Yes, that’s my mom.”

“Holy shit.” She snatched the picture from Briceson, staring down at what I couldn’t bring myself to look at again. “I was aware of Andrea, thanks to her little tantrum with Lippincott a few weeks back. Not sure if they ever found her after that. We’ve not been able to track down any information on the last one though, aside from her intake sheet. It’s believed she and Andrea are the two that left the study, but there’s nothing on them.”

“What name have you searched?” The toneless cadence of my voice mirrored the shock still pulsing through me. I felt like I was caught up in some suspended state of reality. Like I’d slipped underwater and taken a breath.

“Vanessa Corbin. Andrea is actually June Galloway. The locals tell me both of them lived on this island.”

Lived on the island? My mother?

“I knew her as Francesca Vespertine. My mom.”

Mel tipped her head, as if just then catching on that I wasn’t processing the news well. “You okay? You look pale.”

I didn’t know how to answer that. Was I okay? Not particularly. My brain didn’t know where to begin piecing things together. So many flitting strings clamoring inside my head, all of them in need of tying before my brain would settle. And I couldn’t. I couldn’t tie the pieces together because they didn’t make any sense to me. “Fine,” I lied.

“Where’s your mom now?”

Where’s your mom now? The question echoed inside my head, and my thoughts latched onto it like a lifeline. Dread clawed at my stomach and an itch across my forearms had me scratching there. Furiously scratching.

“She died four years ago. Both women are dead, actually.” A hollow chill twisted in my gut, churning and gnashing with the stress of feeling like I’d been broken into. Vandalized and robbed of what I’d come to know as truth. I felt numb. Like a dream. It had to have been a dream. No way my mother would’ve done this to me. To us. Every memory ended on a question mark. Every story she’d told left me wondering how many had been fairytales.

“You’re certain that June is dead, as well?” Mel’s questions remained a welcomed intrusion to the blackness pulling me in. The impossible void of not really knowing who I was in that moment.

June. Andrea. The names tangled inside my head. “As I understand.”

“How do you know this?”

I didn’t answer because it was none of her business.

“Okay, can I ask how your mom died?” Mel looked away, the expression on her face a delicate balance of empathy and intrigue. “If you don’t want to share the details, that’s okay. I understand.”

“Suicide. In the bathtub,” I said coldly, and squeezed my eyes shut on the images flashing inside my head.

Mama! Please stop!

I cleared my throat and shook my head in an attempt to bat the echo of voices away.

“Don’t you find that a little fucked up?”

From her perspective, it probably seemed that way. From mine? It made absolute sense, given what I knew about the organism and the way it hijacked the mind. It wanted a water source to mate and breed more eggs.

What made absolute zero sense to me was how my mother had ended up infected, if these women were supposedly only injected with a purified toxin. And why, after twenty years, would she have suffered symptoms? According to what I’d learned in Bramwell’s class, they began fairly soon after infection. Was the toxin capable of mind control like that, in the absence of the organism? Could it have delayed her infection somehow?

Unfortunately, nobody in that cramped and suffocating room could likely answer that question. But one man undoubtedly knew.

A heavy weight of exhaustion fell over me, pressing down on my shoulders. The burden of having to unravel a mystery that made no sense. “What is your conclusion?” I asked.

“That Bramwell Senior killed all those women and had some connection to the pathologist who conveniently reported them as suicides for him. How would that look, after all, if Dracadia–the top medical research facility in the world–was plagued by a scandal where six women died and two went missing?” It was plausible. Plausible and shady.

I held out my hand for the picture again, and turned it over to the date on the other side: January 9th, 2003. I was born November thirteenth of the same year.

Was I the reason my mother had left the study? Had someone tried to keep her from leaving?

“Do you know if Bramwell Senior is still alive?”

“He’s not. There was a big obituary in the Dracadian Gazette. He died maybe eight years ago? Before my time here. You can probably pull the obituary in the library records.”

“Then, I need to talk to his son about this.”

A rough shake of my arm dragged me from the trance I’d slipped into again. “No! Are you fucking kidding me? Did you miss the part where I said these were stolen files?”

“If my mother was a participant, if she died based on these experiments, then I have a right to get the answers.”

Cat groaned, snapping her book shut and setting it aside. “I knew it was a bad idea inviting an outsider. For fucks sake, she probably reads vampire smut.”

“Shut up, Cat,” Mel spat and turned her attention back to me. “Look, I get it, okay? If it were my mom, I’d be all over that shit, too. But you can’t just waltz up to the son of the psychopath who orchestrated all of this. If he’s smart, he won’t tell you a damn thing, and we all know Doctor Death isn’t dumb. Or he wouldn’t have gotten away with Jenny’s disappearance, the way he did.”

“You honestly think he had something to do with that?”

“I was her roommate, okay? And I can tell you there’s no way she’d have just up and ran off. He knows what happened to her. Just like he undoubtedly knows what happened to those women. But he’s not going to tell you shit. These men are powerful. That power is the reason there isn’t any information on these murders. They wipe it all out of existence.”

I had a feeling she might’ve been right about that. Meaning all those flitting strings in my head would forever wriggle and taunt me for answers I’d likely never find. “I’m not stupid. I wouldn’t outright ask him.”

“Ask him what, anyway? You have your proof. She participated in the study.”

“But she didn’t die when they did. She died four years ago. What happened in that time?”

As if she could finally see my dilemma, Mel huffed and slouched against the wall. “Well, what do you expect from him? Even if he knows the details of the study, do you think he’d come out and tell you? How the hell do you plan to ask that question?”

“I don’t know yet. I’d wanted to work as an assistant in his lab.”

She rolled her eyes at that. “Yeah good luck. He doesn’t take assistants, and he sure as hell wouldn’t want anything to do with a first year. Trust me, I know. I was so desperate to gain access to the missing files that I asked Ross out for coffee.” She made a puking gesture, which I would’ve made a point to tell her was a bit dramatic, seeing as the guy wasn’t ugly, except that my head still spun and I kind of felt sick myself. “He’s Bramwell’s beloved TA, after all. He doesn’t do dates, in case you decide to go that route.”

“What files?” I asked, ignoring her comment.

“The ones that describe the results of the toxin before these women committed suicide?” she said in air quotes. “There’s a whole section of notes missing. Daily inoculations that weren’t recorded. And what happened to this guy?” She pointed to the one researcher in the photo that I couldn’t identify. “There’s nothing on him, either. As if he never existed. He’s not even in the reports. Neither is Lippincott. No surprise there.”

It made sense why Lippincott would’ve distanced himself from the botched project, if he’d had aspirations to become provost one day. What didn’t make sense, and what continued to plague my head through all of this speculation, was why my mother had expelled worms from her mouth. As if she’d somehow gotten infected. How? And why had her and Andrea just recently succumbed to the illness?

“Well, I guess it doesn’t matter,” I said. “You’re right. He doesn’t take assistants. I already asked.”

“Probably covering his ass. Jenny was dying to work on the Noctisoma project with him. It was all she talked about. He was all she talked about.” Mel rolled her eyes again, as if it troubled her that her roommate had been so taken with him.

“He refused her, as well?”

“I’m guessing so. She went to meet with him after the midnight lab. She was never seen again.”

“And you’re convinced it was Bramwell who had anything to do with that.”

“CCTV cameras caught her leaving his secret little lab. That was the last anyone saw her.”

If that was the extent that they had on the guy, it certainly wasn’t enough to convince me that he’d murdered her. He barely gave me, or any other girl in class, the time of day, and I’d never seen him so much as react to those in class who very obviously flirted with him. Surely, the university wouldn’t have kept an accused murderer as a tenured professor. “Was he ever arrested?”

“Of course not. Are you kidding me?”

I had to figure out a way to get closer to him. Perhaps asking him for tutoring lessons, but he’d probably just direct me to Ross for that. There had to be another way. Somehow, Jenny Harrick had found her way to his lab, so it wasn’t impossible. I just needed a hook. Something to draw him in, but considering the guy showed absolutely zero interest in any of the students, I’d probably have an easier time capturing the attention of aliens in space.

Mel’s finger prodded my arm, once again dragging me from thoughts. “I swear on my dog’s grave, if you tell anyone about this place, or these files, you will regret it. Are we clear?”

“Crystal.”

“Good. And steer clear of Bramwell. They call him Doctor Death for a reason.”

While the mystery of Jenny Harrick’s disappearance was certainly a draw, as it related to Professor Bramwell, the bigger curiosity for me was Bramwell Senior. I needed to know more about those experiments and what had happened to my mother. If he’d played some role in her death.

The file I’d read made me question everything. It couldn’t have been mere coincidence that the the woman in that picture looked exactly like my mother.

The more horrifying thought plaguing my brain was that everything I’d come to know about my mother appeared to be a lie. Where she’d come from. Who she’d been.

Had she lied about her parents, as well? Was it possible I had family on the island?

The questions seemed endless, but proved to be a motivator for my investigations. Because I intended to get to the bottom of who my mother really was and what had really happened to her.

And not even Doctor Death would stand in the way of that.