Lobb / Elizabeth / Wilson These Dreaming Spires: A Dark Academia Anthology

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-83541-023-3
Verlag: Titan Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 368 Seiten

A NEW SEMESTER BEGINS A beguiling, sinister collection of 12 more dark academia short stories from masters of the genre, including Olivie Blake, Genevieve Cogman, MK Lobb and more! Twelve original dark academia stories from bestselling thriller writers - imagine darkened libraries, exclusive elite schools, looming Gothic towers, charismatic professors, illicit affairs, the tang of autumn in the air... and the rivalries and obsessions that lead to murder. Featuring stories from: Olivie Blake Genevieve Cogman Ariel Djanikian Elspeth Wilson MK Lobb Jamison Shea Kate Alice Marshall Erica Waters De Elizabeth Taylor Grothe Kit Mayquist Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé

Autoren/Hrsg.

Lobb, Mk

Elizabeth, de

Wilson, Elspeth

Djanikian, Ariel

Mayquist, Kit

Grothe, Taylor

Blake, Olivie

Marshall, Katie Alice

Shea, Jamison

C, Genevieve

Cogman, Genevieve

Waters, Erica

Àbíké-Íyímídé, Faridah

Leseproben

TALLOW’S COVE

Erica Waters

My first thought was that I wished I’d come earlier. It was only half past three, but already the day’s last light was leaving the cove. That light ought to have gilded the salt marsh and cast its golden glow on the shoreline, illuminating St. Clement’s College Chapel and picking out the details of the sagging colonial houses scattered on the other side of the shallow water. But the light didn’t seem able to touch Tallow’s Cove, which remained as dull and desolate as the wet New England weather.

The chapel, strangely isolated from the bustling campus, seemed more like a piece of the landscape, as if it had grown right up out of the sandy soil, building itself from the gray, lichen-covered boulders that were scattered across the shore. It was a creature of salt and stone, hulking where it ought to have soared. Its belltower listed nauseatingly toward the sea.

I was only a few minutes’ walk from the student union, with its mediocre café and noisy air hockey tables, yet I felt like I had wandered out of ordinary life and into a myth, like a knight who stumbles upon a castle under a spell, where a wounded king lies waiting to be healed. Everything was still, almost stagnant. The path from town to the cove had long since been washed out by coastal flooding and neglect, so only members of the college had easy access to it, but I was still surprised by the emptiness of the place. There were no dogs running on the shingled beach or elderly women scanning the skies for birds, no amorous co-eds making out on a blanket. It was November, sure, and a blustery cold day, but during my undergrad years in Boston, I had learned that the determination of New Englanders to be out in all weather was as reliable as the tides.

I was here on a research trip, having won a highly coveted semester-long travel grant to do research for my MDiv thesis, which purported to explore haunted religious spaces in the US as representations of historical institutional wrongdoing. This was the fifth such place I had visited, following online tips that had led me from Georgia to Tennessee to North Carolina to Pennsylvania to Massachusetts. In each place, I had taken photos and collected accounts from locals, digging into local archives where I could. I had not encountered any restless spirits, but I did uncover the ghosts of America’s sins, just as I had expected: racism, homophobia, consumerism. Those places had indeed been haunted, but not by any actual spirits, merely the reverberation of ordinary, banal human evil.

But this place… if any religious sanctuary might turn out to be haunted by something otherworldly, I would put my money on St. Clement’s Chapel. It looked too… too something, though I couldn’t put my finger on it. Not yet.

The only thing that moved on the horizon was the seagulls, which screamed and circled, smudges of white against the darkening sky. I paused for a long moment to watch as one of the gulls flew straight up into the air, a snail or some other hapless invertebrate clutched in its talons, and dropped the poor creature on the rocks below, cracking open its shell, before swooping down to retrieve the tender meat. I shivered, drawing my corduroy blazer tighter, and scanned the water for any other signs of life. From far away came the sound of a buoy, its distant ringing like a mournful church bell. But there were no boats out in the cove. Close to shore were a handful of geese in the shallow water, all in a line. Each bird had its head tucked beneath a wing, as if sleeping or hiding from the relentless wind, which stung my eyes and made them water. Other than the gulls and the geese there were only rocks and a single skeletal tree thrusting out of the high bank that led to the chapel. My feet seemed to carry me toward it of their own accord.

Up close, the chapel seemed even more off-kilter, more damaged – a place left to rot until it fell into the sea. The front doors had clearly once been painted red and were still studded with iron, but now they were decayed and covered in mildew, barely attached to the hinges. Wary, wanting to get my bearings before I went inside, I walked around the building to the churchyard, where the overgrown remains of a small cemetery quietly moldered. The headstones ranged from the mid-1700s to the early 1900s, most of the stones cracked and broken, covered in lichen and moss, nearly illegible. I squatted to examine a row of them. The nearest showed a hand with its finger pointed at the sky. I couldn’t make out the inscription. Later, I would take pictures of everything, but I liked my first impression of a reputedly haunted location to be unmediated, unfiltered, nothing between me and the building I had come to research.

I stood with a wince, regretting forcing my always-stiff joints into a crouch, and stared up at the rubblestone granite building, my skin prickling strangely as if I were being watched. I shifted my leather satchel on my tired shoulder and scuffed my chunky oxfords on the gravel in the overgrown grass, drawing out the moment before I would go inside and face whatever was lurking, whatever was giving me that feeling of eyes on the back of my neck. I sensed there was a reason I had saved this stop for last.

Of course, I had found out the basic facts of the place before my arrival, partly from St. Clement’s website and partly from the blog of a recently deceased local historian. It was originally built by early colonial settlers, a small Anglican church in a Puritan stronghold, funded by a rich merchant who remained loyal to the British king. As the American Revolution approached and tensions became increasingly volatile, patriots were said to sneak up into the gallery to spit on the heads of the worshiping Tories. Windows were broken by local boys throwing rocks for sport. Finally, the wooden church was burned down by a group of angry Puritan men, who saw no place for the old English ways in their new world. The church’s priest, the Reverend Samuel Tallow, refused to leave the building and burned with it.

After the Revolution, a wealthy relative of Tallow’s had the place rebuilt in her cousin’s memory. A new priest arrived. The bell from the original church was refurbished and set to ringing in the new belltower. A large plaque devoted to Father Tallow’s memory was erected in the vestibule, a stone relief depicting his face in profile. He looked out over the new church and its congregation, a man who had martyred himself now an unofficial saint of the place.

It all seemed hopeful, like a sign of the new world freed from British rule and from religious tyranny alike. But the church couldn’t seem to keep a minister there for more than a few months, and eventually the local community dwindled. The church was closed up. Then, in the early 1900s, St. Clement’s University was built up around it and it became a chapel for the students.

Now, nearly two hundred years after its construction, it looked liable to fall back into the sea whose riches had built it. Stones were missing from the façade, and several of the arched stained glass windows had been broken, their remaining panes dull red and blue in the fading light. It was strange to see a church so abandoned, here in New England where history was everything. I was used to the sight of such things in the South, where people are always so eager to forget, to build over, to bury. I’d seen dozens of little lost churches scattered on dusty highways back home. But here, where there was so much money and ancestry, you didn’t often see historical buildings like St. Clement’s abandoned and left to rot. I was puzzled that the college hadn’t taken more pains to preserve and protect it.

I felt a sudden unexpected pinch of kinship with the chapel, an ache behind my breastbone whose origin I couldn’t place. Maybe it was because I had been on the road for months and I was tired. Maybe my body, playing host to a progressive inflammatory disorder that threatened to destroy my spine, joints, and connective tissue, felt a little too much like that run-down chapel. But I suspected it was more a spiritual ache than a physical one. The truth was that my travels had shaken me right down to my foundations, exposing all the cracks and structural weaknesses of my faith and my calling.

With a resigned sigh, I left the dead to their dreaming and walked back to the front of the chapel where the once-red doors listed on their hinges, threatening collapse. I was surprised they weren’t boarded over to keep out curious undergrads. Yet another irregularity.

Gingerly, I tried the one on the right, easing it open just enough to slip through into the darkness on the other side. I turned on my phone’s flashlight and used its beam to climb three steep stairs up into the nave of the chapel. My light fell on Tallow’s memorial, his expression seeming to blaze from the marble even as lichen crawled across his cheek – as if St. Clement’s was swallowing him up in a second death. I turned away.

Weak gray light filtered in through the stained glass windows, barely enough to illuminate their subjects and certainly not enough to light the chapel. I could feel rather than see the immensity of the place, the rafters arching high above me. I pointed my flashlight straight down the aisle toward the altar. Its beam wouldn’t reach quite that far; it died somewhere in the distance, showing a narrow band of dusty floor and empty box pews, some of their doors hanging open.

I turned off my flashlight and walked slowly toward the altar, genuflecting out of habit. As my eyes adjusted, I began to make out more details. I had expected to find the altar...