The morning I arrive in Ashridge, the sun refuses to get up.
My weather app says sunrise was at 5:26 a.m. The bus rolls into the valley at 6:17. The sky is the color of bruised fruit—purple fading to charcoal, as if someone dimmed the world and walked away.
“Cloud cover,” the driver mutters when he catches me staring. His voice sounds like it’s been dragged over gravel. “Always like this. Fog hangs low in the bowl.”
He means the valley; he means Ashridge—a bowl of hills with a town poured into it, roofs like dull coins, a river stitched through the middle. But there’s no fog. There’s no sun either. Just a stalled, aching almost-dawn that refuses to commit.
At the bus stop, a wooden sign says WELCOME TO ASHRIDGE in hand-painted letters. Someone has carved thin claw-marks across the word WELCOME. Maybe kids. Maybe I’m imagining how deep they go.
I step onto the empty street with one suitcase and the ghost of everything I can’t carry. The air smells faintly like smoke, though there’s no fire. When I rub the railing of the bus shelter, my fingers come away gray. Ash. Fine as flour. My brain supplies a memory I don’t need: air thick with dust, blooming out of a crash like smoke out of a wound. I blink it away.
A woman in a wool coat hustles past with a paper bag clutched to her chest. She doesn’t look at me. No one does. Doors are closed. Blinds are drawn. It’s Monday, but the town looks like Sunday asked it to keep a secret.
My aunt finds me first. Mara. She folds me into a brief, brittle hug that smells like peppermint and laundry soap, then takes my suitcase handle like we might break if we touch any longer than that.
“You made good time,” she says, not looking at the sky, not looking at the ash.
“My app says it should be—”
“It’s never what the app says,” she answers, crisp. “Come on. We should be inside before the bell.”
“What bell?”
But she’s already walking. Her boots crunch over grit that isn’t sand. When we cross the street, a pickup slows to a crawl. The driver keeps his eyes forward. He’s mouthing something under his breath. Prayer, maybe. Or rules.
That’s what Ashridge is full of, I realize: rules no one wants to say out loud.
Mara’s house crouches halfway up a hill like it’s trying not to be seen. Shingle roof, peeling paint the color of old paper, a porch with two rocking chairs and a planter full of rosemary and rusted nails. Across the narrow road, a larger house looms at the ridge line: four stories of weathered stone, blank windows like dark coins, a slate roof veined with moss. The big house looks empty the way a stage looks empty before a curtain rises.
“That place—” I start.
“Don’t,” Mara says. “There’s no need to look at Hillcrest.”
Hillcrest. The way she says it lands in my mouth like a pit. Sour. Heavy.
Inside, her home is warmer than the world, crowded with secondhand furniture and framed bird illustrations. She shows me my room at the back—a narrow rectangle with a window that takes up most of one wall. The glass is old, wavy; it bites the light and gives back a tremor.
“There’s tea in the kitchen,” she says. “Toast, jam. I have to get to work. You can rest. Start at the school tomorrow, yes?”
“Tomorrow,” I repeat, because it feels like a word that might hold if I say it enough times. Tomorrow. A new schedule. A new town. A new life flattened against the old one like tracing paper.
Mara hesitates in the doorway. “A few things, Evelyn.”
I look up.
“Lock the back door. Always. Even in daylight.” She swallows. “Don’t…don’t wander near the river after dusk. If you must be out, keep to the road, not the tree-line. And if the bell rings while you’re outside—if you hear it when you shouldn’t—you come home. Do you understand? You run.”
I wait for her to smile, to say she’s kidding, to soften the words with the kind of laugh that means forget I said that. She doesn’t.
“What bell?” I ask again.
“The church bell,” she says. “But it only rings at proper hours.” A beat. “Usually.”
She leaves me with tea and toast and a handful of sentences that feel like rocks in my pockets. I wash my hands. The water turns gray for a second before it runs clear.
At 6:59, the sky still hasn’t decided. The hills ring us in, dark humps stacked like sleeping animals. On my phone screen, a golden sun icon sits stupidly above a line of numbers: 7:00 a.m., sunrise +1:34. I refresh. The phone insists the day has begun. Outside, the town disagrees.
I peel back the curtain. Hillcrest sits across the road, backlit by that strange not-light. Its windows are smeared from inside with something like dust, or soot, or the press of a palm. There’s a for-sale sign slanted in the yard. No one will buy it. Some places don’t belong to money.
Movement catches at the corner of my sight. A figure stands at the far end of the road, half in the shoulder’s shadow. Tall. Still. Watching. A boy, I think. Or a man who hasn’t decided which way to grow. His clothing is dark; his hair looks darker. I can’t see his face. When a stray dog trots between us, the boy doesn’t flinch, doesn’t shift his weight, doesn’t—
Blink.
I blink. He’s gone. The road is empty. Something like frost slides along my spine and leaves wet footprints.
I pour tea and forget to drink it. I put my clothes in drawers that stick at the corners. I set my mother’s scarf in a careful fold at the bottom of the top drawer like I’m laying down a line I won’t cross. I count the birds on the framed illustrations over the desk: thrush, heron, red kite, nightjar. The last one makes me think of jaws, of night with teeth.
At 7:13, the bell rings.
I don’t mean a phone. I don’t mean some timer Mara set. I mean a deep, iron sound rolling over the roofs like something heavy pushed in slow circles. One. Two. Three. The notes climb out of the valley and vanish into the dark.
My body answers before my mind does. I put the cup down. Tea slops over the rim and stripes the saucer. I walk to the window and stand to the side, the way my aunt stood when a neighbor knocked without warning. The bell tolls nine. Ten. Eleven.
“Proper hours,” I whisper, absurdly.
The twelfth stroke breaks, shivers, then splits into a thirteenth that shouldn’t exist.
When it stops, the air somehow gets quieter. A leaf skims down the glass and leaves a gray streak like the touch of a dirty finger. In the street, a cat lifts its head and listens to a silence I can’t hear.
My phone buzzes.
Unknown number: Welcome to Ashridge. Keep your curtains closed.
I stare at the message until the text blurs. I type Who is this? and delete it. I type Wrong number and delete it. Finally I send: Who are you?
Read. No answer.
By 7:29, the sky lightens by a fraction. Not sunrise. More like a bruise healing. Two houses down, a door opens; a man steps out with a bag of trash and puts it by the curb. He doesn’t look left or right. He moves quick. The bag splits, ash spilling like powder sugar. He jerks, grabs it, goes back inside without cleaning the spill.
I try to eat toast. The jam tastes like strawberries left too long in the sun. My hand smells like metal after I touch the back door lock. The house breathes around me, wood settling, pipes speaking in old-man throat-clears.
On the fridge is a list in my aunt’s sharp block letters:
bolt the back
after dark: curtains
DO NOT feed any strays
shoes inside at night
don’t whistle
The last one makes me snort, then not. I imagine letting a sound out and having it come back to me with new teeth.
Sometime after eight, the light gives in. The hills silver at the edges. The roofs unflatten. Color bleeds back into the world—the dull red of a mailbox, the tired blue of a pickup, the clean white of the church cross that tilts like it’s reconsidering grace.
I lace my boots and step onto the porch because part of me wants to prove the rules are just feel-good superstition, and part of me wants to know what kind of town writes rules like a recipe for survival. When I pull the door shut behind me, the new light catches a pattern on the porch boards. Four parallel scratches, no more than a hand-span long. Fresh. Wood curls at the edges like small pale tongues.
Cats, I tell myself. Wild dogs. Real life things with simple explanations.
The air is cool and tastes like the inside of a tin. Across the lane, Hillcrest stares with all its windows. The for-sale sign ticks in the slight breeze. Something flashes high on the third floor—sun on glass, I think, except there still isn’t any sun, just a brighter shade of ash. I squint. The window is open by an inch, and I swear—absurd, impossible, laughable—I swear I see a hand draw back from the sill.
“Can I help you?”
The voice comes from behind me, low and almost amused, and I jump so hard my boot heel skids and knocks a rosemary pot into a spin. A boy stands at the bottom of the porch steps I didn’t hear him climb. He’s taller than me by a head, dressed in black like he forgot other colors exist. His hair is dark and needs a fight with a comb; his eyes are—
I can’t place the color. Too light for brown, too dark for green. They hold the weird gray of the sky and reflect it back unbothered.
“I—” I start, eloquent as always.
“You shouldn’t be outside before the light takes,” he says. It isn’t a warning, exactly. It isn’t a threat. It sounds like someone reciting the shape of a rule everyone else already knows.
“Is that on the list too?” I ask, and immediately hate the way I reach for humor when I’m unsettled.
He glances past me at the door, at the porch, at the scratches I’m standing over. His mouth tightens by the smallest degree. “Some things don’t make the list.”
“Like?”
He lifts one shoulder. The gesture says: either you know or you don’t. It also says: I’m not going to be the one to teach you.
“Do I—” I clear my throat. “Do I know you?”
“No.”
“Then how do you know me?”
He looks at me like I’ve missed something obvious. “You’re new. Everyone knows you.”
The thirteenth bell still lives under my skin; it thrums when the wind moves. “I thought people here didn’t look at strangers.”
“They don’t,” he says. “But they still count.”
We stand in the not-sunlight and try to figure out who’s going to move first. A crow clacks from the telephone wire. The sound echoes like a door knocked in a long hall.
“What’s your name?” I ask.
He hesitates. His gaze flicks once to the Hillcrest windows, then back. “Lucian.”
“Evelyn,” I say, and he nods like he already knew.
Somewhere behind the houses, from the direction of the church, a low sound rises—so low I feel it in my sternum before I hear it in my ears. It isn’t a siren. It isn’t a horn. It’s a long, leveled note, like metal disturbed under the ground. The hair at the back of my neck prickles.
Lucian’s eyes cut to mine, quick. “Inside,” he says softly.
I laugh because that’s the reflex, because I’m new and annoyed and tired of being told what to do in a place that won’t admit it’s afraid. “It’s daylight,” I say, gesturing at the gray.
For half a breath he just watches me. Then, very carefully, he says, “Not here.”
The low note stops. The silence that follows is shaped like a held breath. Across the lane, one of Hillcrest’s upper windows closes with a sound like a jaw setting.
The porch boards flex under a weight that is not mine.
I look down. New scratches ribbon the wood a foot from my boot, thin curls lifting where nothing touched them. Air moves over my ankles the way a hand might, gentle, testing.
Lucian doesn’t blink. “Evelyn,” he says, with my name like the only thing in the room that isn’t going to lie to me. “Inside. Now.”
Behind me, in the dimness of my aunt’s house, the back door bolt slides home—snapped by no one I can see. And from somewhere beneath the porch, something exhales, long and patient, like it has been waiting for daylight to make its first mistake.
