Early Summer, The Dream Beneath the Western Hall

I had begun to believe things were becoming calmer again.

Writing those words now feels almost embarrassing, although I think it is important to admit that I truly believed them. After the quiet days in the conservatory, the lavender baths, the evenings spent painting, and the long mornings devoted to ordinary preservation work, I had started convincing myself that the strange experiences of the past several months might have been exaggerated by exhaustion. Isolation has peculiar effects upon the mind, particularly in a building as old and complicated as this one. I found myself wondering whether loneliness had slowly taught me to expect impossible things until ordinary sounds acquired meanings they had never possessed. The Archive itself even seemed quieter, as though whatever had unsettled it had grown content to rest. I wanted very much to believe that I was simply settling into the rhythms of this place at last.

The day gave me every reason to continue believing it.

Rain drifted gently across the observatory roof while I reorganised the upper herb shelves and repaired several linen wrappings that had torn during the winter storms. It was patient work that required very little thought beyond keeping my hands occupied. Clio spent much of the afternoon asleep inside one of the folded linen baskets beside the conservatory fountain, while Muninn disappeared somewhere into the eastern halls for several hours, returning only occasionally to leave some curious little object upon a shelf before vanishing again. The building itself seemed unusually peaceful. The ordinary sounds of settling timber, distant pipes, and rain against the glass were enough to make the Archive feel inhabited rather than haunted, and I realised how desperately I had missed that feeling.

By evening the fog had become so dense that the cliffs disappeared entirely beyond the windows. Instead of making me uneasy, the weather seemed almost comforting. The Archive felt insulated from the world beyond its walls, like an old house content to weather another storm in quiet solitude. For the first time in many weeks I went to bed early without feeling compelled to continue working simply to avoid sleeping.

The dream began so gently that, at first, I did not recognise it as anything unusual.

I found myself walking through the western halls carrying a lantern whose light reached only a little way ahead of me. Rainwater echoed somewhere beyond the stone walls, and the corridors appeared exactly as they always have, with one unsettling exception. Every door stood open. Preservation rooms, storage chambers, catalogue vaults, restoration workshops—every threshold lay exposed as though someone had walked through the Archive before me opening each one in turn.

I remember feeling an immediate reluctance to look inside them.

The rooms themselves appeared almost entirely dark, yet each carried the unmistakable impression of quiet breathing. I do not mean that I heard creatures hidden within them. It felt instead as though the rooms themselves possessed slow, measured respiration, each inhalation rising gently from the darkness before fading away again. Even within the dream I understood, without knowing how, that I should continue walking and resist the temptation to look directly into any of those open spaces. There was a certainty that if I allowed myself to truly see whatever waited inside, something waiting there would become equally aware of me.

The sound that followed shattered the dream completely.

It was Clio.

I have heard her hiss, cry, complain, and call to me countless times over the years, but I have never heard anything resembling the sound that woke me. It was a scream of such unmistakable terror that I was awake before I had fully understood I had been dreaming.

At first I believed the darkness around me was simply that of an ordinary night.

It took several moments before I realised something was wrong. Every lantern in the room had gone out, although I distinctly remembered leaving one burning before going to bed. The rain had stopped entirely, and the silence pressing against the walls felt unnaturally complete. Then, somewhere beyond the study, I heard the building itself strain beneath an immense weight.

The sound did not resemble footsteps.

It was closer to the slow complaint of ancient timber carrying a burden far greater than it had ever been built to support.

Clio stood near the doorway with every hair along her back raised, staring fixedly toward the western hall without once looking away. Through the observatory windows I could hear Muninn striking the glass again and again with enough force that I later found several loose feathers scattered across the sill. Neither of them behaved as though reacting to a passing noise. They behaved as though something had arrived.

The movement came again.

This time it seemed to travel beneath the floor itself, accompanied by a deep dragging sound that reminded me less of footsteps than of tremendous weight shifting through saturated earth. Interwoven with it came the slow creaking of timber within the walls until, for several long moments, the Archive no longer sounded like a building at all. It sounded alive.

I remained where I was, lantern in hand, unable to persuade myself to move toward the door or away from it.

That was when the knocking began.

Three slow impacts sounded against the western hallway door.

They were neither loud nor violent. Their restraint frightened me far more than force would have. The rhythm was unmistakably familiar. It matched the measured intervals of the bells beneath the Archive so precisely that I counted each pause before the next knock arrived.

When the sequence repeated, another sound emerged beneath it.

Water.

Not dripping from a ceiling or running through old pipes, but moving with the steady, immense rhythm of distant tides. I could not tell whether it flowed beyond the door, beneath the floor, or somewhere inside the walls themselves. The entire building seemed to resonate with it.

I do not clearly remember crossing the room.

My next coherent memory is of backing away from the door while holding the lantern so tightly that my hands ached. Clio had pressed herself against my legs, and Muninn continued throwing himself against the observatory glass with desperate persistence. Then, without warning, the knocking ceased.

For several moments nothing happened.

At last something touched the opposite side of the door.

There was no scratching, no attempt to force its way inside, and no sound I could identify as hands or claws. The wood simply bent inward ever so slightly beneath a slow, steady pressure from something whose size I could not begin to imagine.

I remained awake until dawn.

None of the lanterns would relight before sunrise, despite every wick being perfectly dry and every reservoir still holding oil. When daylight finally reached the windows, the darkness lifted as though nothing unusual had occurred. The halls were empty. The western corridor showed no sign of disturbance. There was no standing water, no warped timber, and no damage of any kind.

Part of me has spent the entire day attempting to explain the experience as the lingering confusion of a dream carried into waking.

I would probably have succeeded if I had not examined the study door before locking it this evening.

The lower edge of the frame was damp.

The moisture tasted unmistakably of salt.

Pressed into it, so faintly that I almost overlooked it, was a broad impression where something very large appeared to have rested quietly against the wood.

Not pushing.

Not forcing its way inside.

Simply waiting.

— M