The girl in the sketchbook kept following Sarah.
She was less a person than a shape of panic, an image that sat at the edges of sight with the same wide, terrified eyes and the mouth pulled into a silent, endless scream.
She arrived when Sarah woke and wouldn't leave.
She sat at the back of lecture halls, loomed over her while she ate, and lay on her pillow at night with a pressure that made sleeping feel like glass against her skin.
Sarah told herself it could be explained.
Julian was an artist; he saw things other people missed.
Maybe he had been clever, a cruel intuition rendered with charcoal. Maybe it was coincidence.
But the thought sat like a cold stone in her gut, Julian had not drawn a face he saw in a mirror.
He had drawn the way the air around her felt, the heaviness, the held breath. He had sketched the shape of her haunting.
After their encounter at the chapel, Julian disappeared.
It was as if the bench where he'd sat never bore him.
She scoured courtyards, checked the sculpture yard, walked the narrow corridors and the studio terraces.
No smudge of charcoal, no folded page, no discarded sketchbook. His absence felt deliberate.
He had looked at her, wept perhaps quietly inside his own skin, and then retreated.
The knowledge that someone who read silence had chosen not to stay, because the silence looked too familiar stung sharply.
The days blurred.
Sarah moved among people like mist.
Professors' words blurred into the background.
Her hands once confident and precise, felt clumsy, like they belonged to someone she did not know.
She ate by herself, notes on the table cold and undisturbed.
The academy's beauty, the carved oak, the stained glass, the manicured lawns, felt ornamental and brittle.
It gleamed like a set dressing and left her hollow.
On a gray afternoon she drifted to a place she rarely went, the art hall in the West Wing. The doors protested when she pushed them open.
She stepped into a cavernous room smelling of turpentine, linseed oil, and dust.
Light came in thin through high arched windows and threw long bands across the polished floor.
Student pieces leaned in the corners: torsos of clay with blank eyes, canvases wrapped like corpses, twisted metal forms that looked like bodies mid-scream.
The art was skilled and cold, forms perfect but without warmth.
A handful of students worked quietly, bent low over blocks of clay or stretched canvas.
Their presence made the air feel ordinary.
Sarah wandered past portraits and landscapes, feeling oddly watched by painted eyes on canvas.
Then she noticed the empty frame.
It sat between two heavy paintings, ornate and gilt though the gold had flaked away.
Where a canvas should have been there was nothing, only the old damask wallpaper inside the rectangle.
No plaque, no title, no artist's name.
A curated absence.
The empty frame hummed at her, louder than anything the other paintings said.
The papered rectangle appeared darker than the rest of the wall, like ink had settled in its depths.
It felt like the place in her mind that wouldn't answer: the bright gap in the memory of the drive to Blackwood.
She moved close without thinking.
The wallpaper inside the frame seemed to breathe.
Her fingers brushed the glass that filled the gilded opening.
The pain hit like lightning.
It wasn't a tiny static shock; it rushed up her arm and struck the nerve with a white-hot, bursting sting.
Her muscles clenched, her shoulder lifted, her eyes squeezed shut.
Light filled her head, blinding, almost blue-white and a high ring shivered in her ears.
She made a sound and jerked her hand back as if it had been burned.
When sight returned, the room had changed.
Those students who had been there vanished.
The girl at the window, the boy bent over clay had gone.
The hum of pencils and low conversations was erased.
The dust motes hanging in the sunbeam froze as if frozen mid-fall.
The hall was emptied as if someone had dropped a curtain and taken the people with it.
Her chest tightened into a small, hot knot.
She spun, looking for any sign of movement.
The windows offered back only reflections.
The canvases stared.
The empty frame seemed to pulse in mute rhythm.
She pressed her fingers to the place where the shock had crawled and felt a prickle that did not leave.
Panic rose.
The kind that makes your lungs forget how to behave. The silence seemed made of something physical, heavy and viscous.
She tried a sound, a small cry for help, but it would not come.
The exit door stood closed though she had not latched it.
Her steps sounded too loud in the vaulted space.
She sank to the floor by the empty frame and pressed her forehead to the plaster to feel the cold.
She thought instantly of Julian's charcoal; the ache he'd put on paper, the open mouth without sound.
The frame had revealed something and then cleared the room, as if it had demanded privacy for what it was showing.
It had not only struck her body.
It had isolated the world around her, like a camera pulling focus to a single, unbearable object.
She did not go straight back to her room.
She moved through the outer gallery, hands trailing across cool stone, listening for ordinary life, the shuffle of footsteps, the murmur of voices, the familiar discord of someone practicing scales.
Nothing answered.
Practice rooms slept in darkness.
The student lounge was a hollow shell. Each shut door felt like an eyelid closed over the face of the building.
The silence made the halls feel staged.
Her fingers found the satchel at her side and the velvet-wrapped journal inside it.
The small weight steadied her like a talisman.
It proved something: some things remained real when the rest blurred. She thought of the drive to Blackwood, the long stretch of highway, then a narrowing of color and a rustling away of sound.
The memory hovered like a half-remembered tune she could not finish.
When dusk fell the lamps along the paths blinked on, pale and watchful.
She walked under them with a new wariness, shoulders tight, each shadow like a closed mouth.
The girl from the sketchbook lived at the corner of her vision now, patient and unblinking.
At her dorm she sat on the narrow bed with the journal heavy on her lap.
She opened it again, turned the pages not to read but to remind herself that paper existed, that ink could be trusted.
Between blank pages a faint smear of charcoal caught her eye, a small mark she did not recognize.
It looked like the smudge of a careless hand, like the trace of someone else's impatience.
For a breath she pictured Julian's fingers, dark with charcoal, closing his book too quickly, and she pictured, too, the drawing of the screaming face.
She closed the journal slowly and held the small ordinary object to her chest.
Outside, the campus went on looking like its tidy self, paths swept, lamps glowing while she carried a new knowledge inside her....
"something in the academy could reach out and strip away the ordinary, make the building into an empty stage, and leave her alone in a room cleared for the thing she could not yet name"!!