"My grades are good," I say loudly into the empty stairwell. "Grades are... great. I think I'm on track to ace my finals for the semester, actually."
There are, according to campus legend, a few ways to rile the ghost on the third floor of the English building. The main way is by being a good student... or, rather, by being open about being a good student. That makes her mad enough to appear and, sometimes, attack.
Hers was the boilerplate campus ghost story: honor-roll student dating a football player, he broke up with her, her life fell apart, she ended it all by jumping out that window there. I'm sure, if I asked students at other colleges, they'd have an identical version mapped out against a different building.
But that's not the point right now. The point is it's almost midnight, I'm in the stairwell just outside the third floor, and I have a ghost to piss off.
"Got friends," I add, since she also hates when people have a healthy social life. "I actually have friends who like to be around me. It's great."
I wipe at my eyes.
"So, you know. Things are going fantastic. No regrets."
And now, time to lock it in with the sentence that allegedly drives our ghost friend absolutely batshit. Never mind that it's not true. Never mind that, as of right now, I'm really not thinking about the future past this night. I've been lying my ass off 'til now, so what's one more?
"I think this might be my best semester yet."
The air pressure seems to drop all at once, sending me a little dizzy. There's a scraping sound from somewhere deep within the building... not on the third floor, not in the offices that were once the study room the ghost allegedly haunted. Further down. I feel it more than I hear it. A heavy, lurching noise, like someone dragging something large across metal.
You know that childhood memory that we all seem to have even though it can't possibly be real? That feeling of sailing down flights of steps, practically flying, feet barely touching as your hand grazes the banister? I swear I'm doing that, the worn souls of my sneakers barely skimming the metal-capped marble steps as I circle down the flight of stairs. It's not far — three stories in an Old Campus building is squat and scalable compared to the buildings on New Campus — but I still can't outrun the noise. By the time I'm in the atrium, windowed double doors separating me from the darkness of campus, the sound has come to a final decisive thump.
And it's on the floor below me.
There is a lower floor in the English building, but no one but English majors really has a need (or a desire) to go down there. The basement houses the archives, but it's nothing special unless you're writing a very narrowly focused paper for a literature class. Old theses and dissertations from past students, literary journals, alternate translations of epic poems, that sort of thing. Barely anyone goes down there for understandable reasons; there's certainly not anything down there that literally goes bump in the night. Unless, of course, there is. Unless it's her, and the rumors have gotten everything right except the floor she chooses to haunt.
The basement is down a separate stairwell at the back of the building. I stare at the door leading to the stairs, thinking about the cacophony that had just resounded beneath my feet. I don't know what ghosts are meant to sound like. They probably aren't meant to sound like a whole bit of world rearranging. It could be something, someone dangerous. But would that be so bad? Would the end result not be the same?
So I descend, slower this time, walking rather than flying. Not cautiously. Just dully. I swipe my ID card, listen for the click of the lock releasing, and pull the door open.
"Just squeeze around the side," a voice from beyond the blue box says. "Sorry, there's not really anywhere to park in here."
Maybe on some other night, I'd try to wrap my head around the fact that a giant wooden shed, phone booth sized and phone booth shaped, is blocking my way. But I do as the voice suggests, squeezing around it, and the door of the archives swings shut behind me. I look at it from the other side, the words POLICE PUBLIC CALL BOX emblazoned across the top. It reminds me of the emergency campus police posts along the walking paths, little poles every few yards with a speaker in the side and a blue light perched on top, ready to summon help. I think back to last night, walking a back trail alone, wondering what asking for help might do for me. The nearest pole mocked me with an "OUT OF ORDER" sign. Underneath, someone had scrawled "KEEP RUNNING" in ball-point pen.
"An extra pair of hands will make this go more quickly," the voice goes on. It's English, gentle but assured, the sort of voice suited to reading audiobooks of Victorian tragedies. "Check those shelves over there."
I look up, and I see the speaker. Maybe it's my sudden immersion in English major life, but nothing about him strikes me as especially strange. A shoulder-length mop of hair, green velvet jacket, silk cravat pinned just so to flow into a matching waistcoat. Once your Shakespeare professor shows up for a 7am class yellow-stockinged and cross-gartered, nothing surprises you, I guess.
"These?" I point vaguely to the shelf to my right, which is filled with dissertations: some leather-bound, some ring-bound, some stapled.
The man looks up at me, beaming like an old friend. He nods, sending his messy locks bouncing briefly. "That's the one." And he turns back to the shelf he's perusing, fingers flying across the spines. "We're looking for Y Gododdin. Three D's. Not the actual poem, of course. A paper on it."
"Right." I don't actually remember agreeing to help him, but I also don't see a reason not to.
"Bit late at night to be doing research," he says pleasantly, still skimming through documents. It's conversational, not accusatory, and I'm not used to that. Where I grew up, how I grew up, every statement is layered with meaning, and every layer is a slightly different flavor of "You've done something wrong." I hear it at parties, I hear it in classrooms, whether it's intended or not. Somehow this stranger has fully avoided that, and for a moment I don't know how not to feel accused. Like it's my fault I'm missing the implication.
Apologizing isn't right here because he doesn't appear to be accusing, so I go for my second-string coping mechanism: humor. "Time's pretty meaningless on a college campus."
He chuckles. "Fair enough." He looks up at me, away, and up again. As though realizing for the first time that I'm here and he doesn't know me. "So sorry, I've gotten used to having someone around, I just took it for granted. I'm the Doctor."
"Which one?" There are more PhD's in the science-based departments, but I think we might have one or two.
"One of several," he says simply, and that's fair.
I introduce myself. First name only. He says it back to me, and it sounds so much nicer when he says it. I've never really been fond of my name, but now I'm starting to wonder if it's more that I'm not a fan of the tone most people say it in. I'm used to it being invoked only when something goes wrong, and otherwise never said at all. He says it like it's worth remembering.
"I thought I'd met all the professors in the department," I say, moving over a few shelves. Y Gododdin is Welsh poetry. I should be looking in a section broadly covering that sort of thing. "Are you new?"
"Oh, I don't work here," he says pleasantly.
"Then how did you get in?"
He gestures to the police box. "Usual way."
I have no idea what to make of this, even with my growing acceptance of campus oddities. I turn away to think it over, to decide where this all fits in my mind right now, and my hand rests on the spine of a leather-bound document. Y Gododdin: A Model for the Modern Heroic Elegy. "Is this it?"
The Doctor crosses the room to meet me, his swift step out of tune with his appearance. He's closer now, and harder to avoid looking at. As he pulls the dissertation off the shelf and leafs through it, I consider him. About my height. Age... thirties? Maybe? I'm terrible with guessing ages. He could be younger, or much, much older. And there's a lightness about him. Like a sad poet who suddenly remembered that there are nice things in the world and is absolutely bursting with the notion. Even now, he's clutching the dissertation like it's a birthday present.
"Yes! This is the one! Perfect, thank you." He beams at me. Then, like a puppy with too many inputs, all of them equally exciting, he shuffles briefly in place before hurrying to a battered doctor's bag on the floor nearby and tucking the book inside. "I'll return it once I'm done with it," he says, to me or to the air, I'm not sure.
"For research?" I ask, and even as the words leave my mouth I feel stupid. No, silly, for a bit of light reading. Obviously.
"Just to show it to someone," he says, rummaging in the bag a bit more. "Sometimes, people need to see what will be, to help them decide to keep going. Which reminds me." And he pulls out another book: smaller, paper-bound, and very new. The cover is black with colorful swirls. He holds it out to me, still kneeling by the bag. When I don't move, he shakes it a bit, encouragingly.
I take the book from his hands, peering at the title. I don't recognize it. But I recognize the author.
It's my name. Well, sort of my name. The first name is mine. But the last is one I've mulled around in my head for a while: one that's easier to pronounce on sight, that sounds less "ethnic," that wasn't "comically" mispronounced by prank callers and my grandfather's coworkers during the Gulf War. I told myself if I ever became an actress, or a writer, or something that gave me worth, that would be the name I used. The key word being myself. I hadn't told anyone else.
I start to open the book, but the Doctor takes it back gently. "Ah... best you not look inside."
"How..." I blink at this stranger with his blue box, with a book that can't exist, with a name I've been guarding in my mind.
"There are a few of these," he says casually. "And others."
If it's a prank, it's an amazing one, and I don't think anyone would fault me for letting myself lean into it. "Do they mean anything?"
"Everything means something to someone." He snaps the bag shut and hops to his feet. "Everything is someone's favorite something. And that means everything, don't you think?"
"What are you actually doing here?" I ask.
The Doctor walks over to the big blue box, opening the door. "Same as you," he says cheerfully. "Ghost hunting. Except I prefer to leave behind a little more than footprints." He pats the bag. "Now if you'll excuse me, I have another young lady to speak to."
He closes the door, and I watch the blue light on top of the box illuminate, hear the scraping of metal, and the box fades away. And then I walk back to the dorm and slide into bed, any previous plans forgotten.
Maybe it's a dream, and maybe it's not. Maybe that Doctor really did slip backwards in time and showed another young woman on the edge that she not only graduated, she threw her whole heart and mind into something. And maybe something about it would mean as much to her as mine did to me, and the legends of the ghost on the third floor would vanish, replaced with one of the other dozen ghost stories that haunt the campus.
Or maybe I'll wake up tomorrow and realize I went to bed sad, and my subconscious patched things up with characters from a video I borrowed from the boy down the hall. (I should borrow some more.)
But I'm not sure that matters. What matters is that the Doctor finds you and leaves you changed, whether it's during an alien invasion in your hometown or on the worst night of your life through a little television stacked on top of packing crates. And ideally, we are better for it.
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