Welcome to Dorley Hall E-Book

Alyson Greaves

• Herausgeber: Neem Tree Press
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Serie: The Sisters of Dorley
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 726

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

What if the only way to fix toxic masculinity were to erase it entirely? Mark Vogel is like the older brother Stefan never had, but one day he disappears without a trace. A year later, after encountering a woman who looks near-identical to Mark, Stefan becomes obsessed. He finds that dozens of young men have disappeared over the years, many of them students at the Royal College of Saint Almsworth, and most of them troubled or unruly. Why are students going missing? Who are these women who bear striking resemblances to them? And what is their connection to the selective student accommodation on the edge of campus, Dorley Hall? Stefan starts studying at Saint Almsworth for one reason and one reason only: to find out exactly what happened to the women who live at Dorley Hall, and to get it to happen to him, too. An electrifying début by Alyson Greaves, Welcome to Dorley Hall is an intense exploration of gender and society that will appeal to readers of Torrey Peters, Imogen Binnie and Gretchen Felker-Martin.

Leseprobe

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Published by Neem Tree Press Limited, 2024

Copyright © Alyson Greaves, 2022

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Neem Tree Press Limited

95A Ridgmount Gardens, London, WC1E 7AZ

United Kingdom

[email protected]

www.neemtreepress.com

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-915584-63-2 Paperback

ISBN 978-1-915584-64-9 Ebook UK

ISBN 978-1-915584-65-6 Ebook US

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher at the address above.

Printed and bound in Great Britain

Content warning: this story engages with some dark topics, including but not limited to torture, manipulation, dysphoria, self-injury, nonconsensual surgery, and kidnapping. The characters are carrying a lot of baggage, and the exploration of the premise might be triggering for trans readers.

Royal College of Saint AlmsworthHouses of Residence: Dorley Hall

1

Welcome To Dorley Hall

16 OCTOBER 2012 — TUESDAY

“I’m telling you, I’m worried about your brother.”

“He’s fine! It’s just teenager stuff. That’s what Dad says.”

“We’re teenagers, and we’re not like that.”

“Older teenager stuff, then. Something happens in your brain when you turn eighteen that turns you into a massive prick. It’s the hormones. They go into overdrive.”

“Russ, I’m serious. He didn’t come to my birthday this year—fine—and he barely had one of his own—okay—but now he won’t even reply to my texts!”

“Stef, seriously, it’s nothing. He’s at uni now; I bet he’s decided it’s uncool to keep texting his little brother’s best friend. It also probably is, dude.”

“If you talk to Mark, can you please just tell him to text me back?”

“Fine, if it’ll make you feel better, but I’ve barely talked to him in ages. You’ve talked to him more than I have this year.”

“Barely. Russell—”

“Stefan! It’s fine. He’s fine. He’s probably just depressed about his acne. Now shut up; teacher’s coming.”

Stefan obliges and stops glaring at Russell. He glares at his World History textbook instead, in the unlikely event that he can intimidate it into making sense. Next year he can finally drop this stupid subject and never look back, but for now he really needs to commit whatever a castellan is to memory, and decide from the evidence supplied whether they were in servitude to the counts or ruled over them with an iron fist. Assuming castellans even had fists. Or iron. They could have been giant cats for all Stefan knows.

He’s too distracted. Too worried about Mark.

It’s not normal to be close with your best friend’s older brother, especially when he’s four years older than you. But not only do the Rileys and the Vogels live on the same road, very nearly opposite each other—with the cardboard telescope from Stefan’s subscription to Junior Science Magazine (plastic lenses free with first issue!) you can watch TV in the Vogels’ house from Stefan’s bedroom window—but Stefan very nearly shares a birthday with Russell’s older brother.

Every year on September 2nd, Russell, Mark and their dad trek over the road to Stefan’s house to celebrate his birthday, and every year on September 3rd, Stefan, his mum, his dad and his baby sister return the favour, visiting Russell and Mark’s extended family for fun, festivities, and rather more expensive cake and presents than Stefan’s parents can afford.

But this year, on Stefan’s fourteenth birthday and Mark’s eighteenth, it didn’t happen, and no-one saw it coming. Yes, Mark’s had a hard year, though no-one seems to know exactly why—Stefan’s asked and Mark’s refused to answer—but their shared birthday has always been important to Stefan and, as far as he knows, to Mark, too.

Stefan told himself that Mark was just busy, that he’d have a chance to catch up at Mark’s birthday the next day. And then the next day came, and Mark made only the most cursory appearance at his own party. He talked to no-one but his dad, sliced off perhaps the smallest piece of cake physically possible, and disappeared back upstairs to his room, there to hide behind his blackout curtains with his computer and his plate of death-by-chocolate with sprinkles.

Stefan’s thought about it every day since. Mark’s been not just a science tutor to him, but also the older brother he never had—Stefan’s sister is eleven years younger than him and just awful at physics. Mark’s absences, more and more frequent this year, have been crushing. Mark’s birthday was Stefan’s last chance to see him before he left for university, and he didn’t even look him in the eye.

8 NOVEMBER 2012 — THURSDAY

Russell’s been out of school all week and no-one will tell Stefan why. He’s texted, he’s called, he’s asked the head of year and the lunch lady; he’s even stopped by the house and banged on the door for what seemed like hours.

Nothing.

So when his phone starts ringing and Russ’s name comes up, Stefan doesn’t care that it’s almost midnight, that he has school tomorrow, and that he’s royally pissed off with Russ for ignoring him. He picks it up before the third ring.

“Russ? Is that you?”

“Stef. I’m at your door. Can you come let me in? I don’t want to ring the bell and wake your parents.”

“Sure, Russ, sure. I’ll be down in a second.”

Normally, Stefan would argue: he’s not allowed visitors this late. But Russell sounded so drained, so worn-out that he wants to see him in person just to make sure he’s not deathly ill. He throws on his dressing gown and some winter socks and takes the stairs down three at a time. He practically drags Russell into the living room and deposits him on the good sofa, the one that still has a nice bounce to it.

“Russ,” he says, “you look terrible.”

“It’s Mark,” Russell says. “He’s missing.”

It takes a while and the intervention both of Stefan’s parents and of two mugs of hot chocolate each, but Russell eventually gives them the whole story.

Mark hadn’t originally intended to live on campus. The Royal College of Saint Almsworth isn’t far out of town, and for a fraction of the money required to rent a dorm room, Mark could have bought a crappy car and commuted. But Mark wanted a fresh start—new friends. Russ doesn’t know what happened with Mark’s old friends, but they stopped visiting or texting a long time ago.

Mark went off to live in dorms and reportedly had an uneventful first month at Saints. But it wasn’t long before his professors started to find him “disruptive” and “disrespectful”; he was asked to leave a lecture for the first time about a week before his disappearance, and by Friday had stopped even showing up.

Then on Saturday, he didn’t return home to his dorm.

According to the police, Mark entered Legend—popularly considered the worst nightclub in Almsworth; also the cheapest—at 19.24 on Saturday, November 3rd, and left at 01.44 after collecting his coat. The attendant was the last person to see him.

“We’ve been waiting to hear something since Tuesday, when they told us he was missing. But they have no leads, no evidence, not even a fucking suicide note! Sorry, Mrs Riley.”

“That’s okay, dear.”

“A suicide note?” Stefan says. “You think he might have killed himself?”

Russell shrugs. “That’s what Dad thinks. I mean, he won’t say it, but that’s what he thinks. I mean, it makes sense, right? He’s not been the same since Mum died, and then his friends stopped talking to him. Then he moves out to the dorms and he’s still lonely, so he gives up. On everything.” Cupping his second cooling hot chocolate in his hands, Russell finishes, “I just wish he’d talked to me first. I would’ve told him not to be so bloody stupid. And now he’s probably dead.”

It shouldn’t make sense. Stefan should be arguing for him, telling Russell there has to be another explanation, that this is all just a huge misunderstanding. But he can’t. Because Russell’s right.

“Jesus Christ,” he whispers to himself.

“Stefan Riley,” his mum says, “you do not have the same leeway as Russell. You do not take the Lord’s name in vain in this house.”

“Sorry.”

19 JANUARY 2012 — SUNDAY

Stefan’s mum never remembers to buy the stuffing.

They’ve been eating on the cheap ever since Dad was downsized and Mum was forced to cut her hours or join him on the dole, and while as a family they’ve become expert at providing acceptable meals on a budget, every so often Mum gets nostalgic for a real Sunday lunch, and saves up until they can afford a proper roast chicken with all the trimmings.

Plus, this one’s going to be a celebration: Dad might be going back to work!

But she always forgets the sage and onion stuffing mix. Just Stefan’s luck that he happened to be hanging around the house with nothing to do; the perfect candidate for the half-hour walk to the big Tesco near the university.

He’s waiting in line for the self-checkout machines, exact change in one hand and box of stuffing mix in the other, when he sees her.

Stefan doesn’t normally talk to strangers. It’s not that he’s shy, necessarily, but he’s not the biggest fan of being around people. He fidgets under inspection, and when people look at him for too long it makes him feel hot and uncomfortable. Pretty girls especially.

But this girl, one ahead of him in the queue and just now stepping up to a checkout, seems to be so anxious she’s having difficulty operating the machine. The checkout next to her opens up and Stefan nips in and watches her scan her food with shaking hands, sometimes needing two or three tries to get things to register.

Poor girl. He wonders what she’s so upset about.

He puts his stuffing through and is about to leave when she drops her debit card. When he scoops it up for her and holds it out, she looks at him like she’s seen a ghost.

“Um,” he says, still holding it out.

“Oh!” she says, coming to her senses. “Thank you.”

God, but she’s pretty. Bright blue eyes, a river of blonde hair that frames her face and looks like she put a lot of work into it, and a cute little nose that—

Stefan frowns. There’s something familiar about her. Something he can’t quite put his finger on.

The woman—Melissa Haverford, assuming it’s her debit card in his hand—shakes herself, takes the card from him, smiles her thanks, and marches out of the store. She wobbles a little as she rounds the corner to the exit, as if she’s not quite used to the modest heels on her boots.

Stefan watches her go, puzzling over the encounter. It takes him a moment to realise she left her shopping behind. He mutters a word he’s not allowed to say in the presence of his mother, drops his box of stuffing into her plastic bag, slings the whole thing under one arm, and leaves Tesco at a jog.

She’s not far down the road.

“Hey!” he yells, wincing at how loud and deep his voice is. “You forgot your shopping!”

She doesn’t look around, starts walking even faster. Which turns out to be a mistake: the pavements are still slippery and the inevitable doesn’t take long to happen. She goes down onto her butt; it looks like a pretty painful fall, but at least it gives Stefan the chance to catch up with her and return her groceries.

“Hi,” he says, looking down at her. She looks every which way but back at him.

“Thanks,” she mutters, and Stefan frowns. Even her voice is giving him déjà vu! She’s said not three words, but something about her alto tone nags at him. Her face, her mannerisms…

He finally places it: she’s just like Russell’s mum! Her face and her voice are still etched into Stefan’s memory. It’s been a good few years since she died, but she always had a kind smile and a coke for him when he went over to see Russ and Mark. Suddenly, Stefan knows exactly why everything about this girl seems so familiar. He offers her a hand up, and as she takes it, he says, “Do you know Mark Vogel?”

“W— what?” she says, her face now pale enough that the blush on her cheeks looks almost comical.

“You look like him,” Stefan says. “I thought you might be a cousin or something. Melissa, right?” She nods dumbly. “Do you know Mark?”

“Oh, um, I used to,” she stammers. Her voice cracks a little, and Stefan scolds himself. She probably struggled with Mark’s death the same as he did, and clearly didn’t expect her Sunday morning grocery shopping to be interrupted by some pipsqueak fifteen-year-old unearthing buried grief.

“Shit,” he says. “Sorry. If it’s upsetting to think about him, I mean. I shouldn’t have…Sorry…” He trails off, cheeks burning.

She doesn’t look scared anymore; she’s smiling, and it’s horribly, wonderfully familiar, just like everything else about her. It’s the same indulgent, patient smile Mark would turn on him when they went through Stefan’s homework together, and Stefan made an obvious error.

“It’s okay,” she says. “He’s been gone for a while now.”

“Yeah. I miss him.”

The girl, Melissa, puts a gentle arm on Stefan’s shoulder, takes her shopping out of his hand. Gives him back the stuffing. Favours him with another smile. Broader; happy. Nostalgia grips him and holds him in place.

“I’m sure he’d miss you too, Stef,” she says, and squeezes his shoulder.

She’s halfway up the road and boarding the bus back to the university before Stefan realises he never told her his name. Confused, he watches the bus pull away, clutching his box of sage and onion stuffing, his shoulder still warm where she touched him.

14 SEPTEMBER 2015 — MONDAY

Stefan sits alone for his first class in AS English Language. Around him, his new classmates—some of whom he knows, most of whom he doesn’t—settle into their chairs, chatting, laughing. He doesn’t mind being alone; he needs to concentrate. His GCSEs were only average, so the next two years need to go well if he’s to get into the Royal College of Saint Almsworth and qualify for one of their small number of assistance grants.

Saints has a fantastic and highly sought-after Linguistics programme, and Stefan curated his choice of subjects at AS-level to give himself the best chance possible: English Language, English Literature, German and Psychology. He doesn’t have a second-choice university; it’s Saints or it’s nowhere.

He saw Melissa Haverford only once more, a year ago, outside his then-new part-time job at the Tesco. She didn’t see him, or pretended not to, and climbed into a waiting car less than a minute after he spotted her. She looked different: more adult, more poised.

Stefan has a theory about that.

On his sixteenth birthday, his parents told him he wouldn’t need a part-time job. Dad was working full time again and Mum had found a job she could do on a laptop from the front room, so she could keep Petra in her sight at all times. Enough money for the family and for an allowance! But he took a job anyway, because working at the big Tesco gave him an excuse to wander over to the Saints campus on his lunch break or on his way home, the better to look for Melissa, or Mark, or clues.

Mark isn’t the only boy to have vanished. Stefan’s painstaking research indicates that, going back at least two decades, between two and six boys have vanished almost every year while attending the Royal College. Like Mark, they rarely disappear on campus. Some go out into town and never come home; some leave campus at the end of term and never get off trains they were seen boarding; some leave suicide notes and vanish into the night. Unruly boys, most of them, with bad reputations around campus. A woman in the admin office implied, when Stefan pretended to be a reporter following up on the disappearances, that the school was better off without them!

Stefan’s not convinced the school is without them, though. It wasn’t hard to get pictures of most of the vanished boys, and after a few nights spent memorising their faces, he was pretty sure he’d recognise them even if they… looked a bit different.

So far, he’s seen five. Six, if you include Mark—or Melissa. Five other girls, all of them so startlingly exact a match to their missing counterparts that they’re either unusually similar-looking siblings, or could they be the missing boys?

Compared to the photos, some of them have definitely had some work done—a brow-reshape here, a tracheal shave there, in addition to a catch-up girl puberty—but if Stefan was given to gambling, he’d stake all his savings on them being the same people.

He’s convinced someone at Saints is helping closeted trans women start new lives. And comprehensively, too: Stefan’s looked it up, and the facial surgery he thinks some of the girls have had runs to thousands of pounds. And then there’s the faked disappearances and the new identities they’d need. Maybe whoever is doing this prioritises girls escaping unsupportive families? It makes sense, thinking about Melissa: her dad’s always been rough around the edges, and after his wife’s death he became…well, Russ has always been reluctant to talk about it. His dad got moody, is all he’ll say.

He’s still pondering the question when he gets home. It preys on his mind as he collates his notes from the day’s classes, as he showers, and as he sits up in bed, reading on his phone, too wired to sleep.

It lines up. Even the rumours of the boys being “unruly” prior to their disappearances; in that last year here on Rectory Street wasn’t Melissa, when she was still Mark, so depressed as to be barely functional? Easy to imagine trans girls in similar situations expressing their frustration outwardly instead.

As for who is helping them, he doesn’t have any names, but he has an address: all the girls live at Dorley Hall, an older dormitory on the edge of campus. It’s reserved for girls from disadvantaged backgrounds, and if anyone qualifies as disadvantaged, it’s trans girls so afraid of their families that they feel they have to pretend to die before they can transition.

Stefan closes the book on his phone—he wasn’t reading it, anyway; he’ll have to go back a couple of dozen pages to pick up from where his mind started to wander—and opens the camera app. He switches it to selfie mode and examines himself on the screen.

He needs to get into Saints. He needs to find whoever is doing this, whoever is helping these women, because his parents, well, they’re nice enough, but they’ve always been religious and rather strict about it.

In the camera, he runs a finger over his pronounced brow, his masculine jawline, his high hairline, and sighs.

If there’s one thing Stefan’s sure of, it’s that he’s not a boy.

He sure looks like one, though.

12 OCTOBER 2019 — SATURDAY

He hates how fucking cold his room is. It’s costing him almost £600 a month and the view out of his tiny window is mostly of an advertising hoarding but the worst thing is undoubtedly the way he has to do his assignments under the duvet if he doesn’t want his typing fingers to seize up. It’s not even that cold out! It’s just that the shape of the building and the curve of the street together contrive to funnel wind right through the tiny window into his room, his bed, and his bones. He’d run his little oil heater all the time if he could afford it, but he can’t.

He can’t afford anything much anymore.

Two whole years at Saints, waiting fruitlessly to be found. Is he wrong? Was he imagining it all? Whatever mechanism the Dorley people use to identify closeted trans women clearly hasn’t worked on him. And he’s looked! He’s looked everywhere. He spent all his spare hours searching, scouring, hoping, convinced there was some secret he hadn’t found, some code word he hadn’t learned, some sympathetic ear he hadn’t caught the attention of. He even went to Dorley Hall and asked to see Melissa or to talk to someone who knows her, pretending to be on some innocent errand, but they turned him away. He wasted enough time on his search that he almost failed his second year and had to retake two exams over the summer, all the while staying in an overpriced, undermaintained house-share with people he barely knows. And he can’t even go back and live with his family to save the money, because Dad got an amazing opportunity in London last year, and now his childhood home belongs to someone else.

It’s not like he had much of a home to return to even before they moved away. His few acquaintances have all moved on, and Russ, the only one who hasn’t, doesn’t speak to him anymore. Shouldn’t have told him he thought Mark was still alive. “People die, Stefan. Move on, Stefan. Get over it, Stefan. Leave well alone, Stefan! Shut the fuck up or piss the fuck off!”

His twenty-first was the most depressing birthday of his life. No Melissa or Mark or whoever; nobody at all. One of the girls at work gave him a cupcake and he ate it alone.

Worse: he had thought he looked unrecoverably boyish at sixteen, but it turned out puberty had a few more tricks left up its sleeve, and it deployed them at regular intervals. It’s not that he’s unattractive—before his third year at Saints, when he started wearing his bad mood on his face and not just under his skin, girls hit on him relatively regularly—but he’s so… male. He knows that’s not a very helpful way of thinking about it, but if what he sees glaring back at him from every mirror, window and piece of cutlery he encounters is at all accurate, then even the world’s most accomplished plastic surgeon would have their work cut out. Probably a Nobel-worthy feat, carving an attractive, feminine face from his caveman mug.

“Not helpful,” he tells himself again, trying to divert his thoughts from the track that usually ends in alcohol, Netflix and a perplexing inability to cry, even though sometimes it feels like he’ll die if he doesn’t. “Not fucking helpful.”

He’s given up. Officially. But it’s harder than he expected.

It’d be easier if he could be certain. He’s read about dysphoria, devoured every description of it he could find before he had to step away from the websites he found them on, lest he drink even more. These sites are full of people who are moving on and living their lives while he hides in a cold, drafty room and dreams of a friend who probably hasn’t thought of him for years. He envies their certainty.

Although he’s read about dysphoria, and while sometimes he thinks he can almost feel it, most of the time he just feels numb. And that’s not something he can work with. Yes, sure, he’s still pretty certain he’s not really a boy—say it, Stefan: you’re twenty-one now; it’s not boy you’re failing at, it’s man—but he can’t say, after all these years, that he’s a girl. Without that conviction, that rock on which to rebuild his life, he’s stuck. And all the time he’s obsessing over what he can’t have, he’s missing out on what he can.

Would he be happier as a girl? Almost definitely. But he’s had to admit that it’s a dream, and he has to live in reality. Whatever happens in the shadows at Saints to give trans girls a new start has passed him by, found him unworthy, or never existed in the first place, and there’s nothing he can do about it. It’s time to make the best of what he has, and what he has is a masculine body and no money.

He’s told no-one of his theory. Even if they—whoever they are—can’t or won’t help him, he wants them to keep helping others, and secrecy is obviously an important part of that. He thinks of Melissa in that Tesco sometimes—beautiful; scared—and for her, and everyone like her, he’ll keep the secret.

Plus, if he told anyone, they’d think he was fucking crazy.

Fuck it. Stefan’s housemates invited him out tonight and, as part of his deal with himself to get the hell over it, he’s going to go. Surprise them all: the hermit gets drunk with other people for a change.

The party is on campus, in one of the new luxury dorms out where the old Psychology building used to be. The place was a building site for years, one he walked past almost every day during his first year at Saints. As he looks around, he keeps seeing things he half-recognises, altered, recontextualised.

Everything changes but him.

This was a bad idea.

But then someone from last year’s Psycholinguistics class spots him, waves him over, offers him something to smoke, and he re-evaluates his plans to leave. Maybe he’ll stay awhile, get high, and reconnect with people. If he’s going to commit to his new goal, to just be a guy, or some approximation of one, then step one should be to stop being so fucking miserable all the time. Hang out with friends. Remember what it’s like to be a person.

Forget his obsession with something that probably was never real in the first place.

He meets Christine an hour or so later. Auburn-haired and seriously pretty, she’s sitting cross-legged on a snooker table, drinking from a bottle, laughing with another girl. A mutual acquaintance makes the introduction and after checking with her friend, she pats an empty spot of green baize, inviting him up. Feeling a little light-headed, he hops up on the table. He almost loses his balance finding a way to arrange his limbs without making potentially unwanted contact with the girl. A pointless exercise, since she giggles at him and stretches her legs out onto his lap.

No, she’s not drunk, she tells him piously; she’s high, and she’s happy to share. They swap trivia about themselves as they do so, and he’s pleased to find she’s studying Linguistics, too. Planning to specialise in speech and language therapy. He’s impressed, because she’s much earlier in her degree than he is, and he doesn’t have any plans at all. She encourages him to look into speech therapy. Very rewarding, she says. There’s no money in it, but if it’s money you want, piss off to the Business School and become a heartless bastard.

He laughs.

She hops off the snooker table and beckons him to follow, snatching a half-bottle of something alcoholic as she leaves the room. The building’s unfinished, and dangerously exciting to explore together. They poke drunken heads into rooms marked as construction sites, stagger down flights of stairs that lead to doors that won’t open. Eventually end up on the roof.

There’s something calming about a clear, starry sky. The Royal College is far enough out from Almsworth proper that the light pollution from the town mostly doesn’t reach it, and as he looks up into the infinite he feels, for the first time in a long, long time, almost content.

Maybe he can’t be a girl. Maybe he shouldn’t be. But maybe he doesn’t have to be a guy, either. A thought for another day. What he can do is make friends, meet nice girls, and drink and smoke with them under the stars.

He tells her about his family, who still text all the time. His little sister’s ten now, and learning to play the trombone; both existentially terrifying concepts. She laughs and, with only a little hesitation, kisses him on the temple. She’s glad she took a chance on a good-looking guy tonight, she says. It’s just a shame she has a lot of work on, or they could stay up all night.

He offers to walk her home, but she declines with a smile. She’s not turning him down; she thinks she’d like to see him again. It’s just that she lives on campus, and it’s a very short walk. Whereabouts? Dorley Hall.

“Oh, hey,” he says, warm from the alcohol and loquacious from the weed, “I know a funny thing about Dorley Hall…”

13 OCTOBER 2019 — SUNDAY

The bright overhead lights aren’t the only reason he’s got a pounding headache when he wakes up—that he imbibed basically everything Christine handed him last night is probably a major contributor—but they aren’t fucking helping. Where is he, anyway?

He opens his eyes a crack, but can’t see anything useful until he forces himself to sit up and angle his head away from the lights above. His fingers close around a thin, cold bedframe and through the glare and the headache he realises his bed for the night was a small, hard and completely unfamiliar cot.

Did Christine take him to her place? He looks around, but she’s nowhere in sight. The room itself isn’t much to look at: bare concrete walls on three sides, and a clear glass wall and door on the fourth. It looks like it leads into an equally bare, though less brightly lit, concrete-walled corridor, and when he stands up, staggers over to the door and leans on the handle, it doesn’t move.

The floor is concrete as well, and cold against his feet.

Wait. Why are his feet cold?

He looks down: his shoes are gone. As are his socks and all his clothes except his underwear, replaced by a green smock that goes down to just above his knees and just behind his wrists.

He tries all the walls, the door again, the joins where glass meets concrete. He pulls the tiny mattress off the cot; he pulls the cot away from the wall. Nothing. Grudgingly he remakes the bed, sits heavily on it and cradles his headache in his hands, waiting for whatever is happening to happen. Perhaps it can bring him a painkiller when it does.

A few minutes later, the shriek of an intercom system obliterates the eerie silence, and a voice he doesn’t recognise addresses him over a speaker he can’t see.

“What do you know, Stefan Riley?”

2

Cell

13 OCTOBER 2019 — SUNDAY

“I don’t know anything!”

“Don’t lie to us, Stefan Riley.”

“I’m not lying!”

“Tell us what you know about Dorley Hall, Stefan Riley.”

“Nothing! Is that where I am?”

“Tell us what you know, Stefan Riley.”

The voice is crackly and distant, like the hold music when you call a big company over a bad connection. It’s probably a woman’s voice behind the distortion but it’s impossible to be certain. And, God, he wishes she’d stop using his name like that. Like punctuation. Like a club.

“Nothing!” He really yells it this time, breaking his voice and hurting his ears when the tiny concrete box echoes it back to him.

Stefan doesn’t know why he lies. There are good reasons not to tell everything you know to a faceless person interrogating you over a loudspeaker, but none of them apply: he’s not trying for leverage; he’s not trying to avoid punishment; he’s not trying to outwit his captors. If he were rational, he might make the argument that he doesn’t know who captured him, and that if he reveals the scant information he’s gathered over the years it could threaten the girls from Dorley Hall—if his theory is even right—but he’s too tired and scared to look objectively at his thought process and start making excuses for it.

Simply: he’s overcome with shame. Telling them his suspicions about Dorley Hall inevitably leads to him having to answer searching questions and ends with him confessing everything. And he’s never opened up to anyone before; not to Mark, not to Russ, not even to strangers online or to a private diary. He’s never so much as whispered it to himself.

Anything to avoid making it real.

Because he knows what he looks like. What he sounds like. In his mind, even the most compassionate person would laugh in the face of his confession. Laugh at his face. He can’t be a girl. Can’t be anything other than a man. To think otherwise would be ludicrous.

God. He hopes she can’t see him.

The demands for answers don’t stop coming, so he lies back down on the hard, cold cot and wraps the thin mattress around his head to block out the voices from without, and from within.

* * *

Tap tap tap tap tap.

The sharp, echoing sound intrudes on his dream, causing Stefan to react unexpectedly: he falls out of bed.

It takes him a few seconds to come back to reality, and when he does, he wishes fervently that he hadn’t. He’s still in a concrete box, still wearing an ugly green smock made from some of the itchiest material he’s ever encountered, but this time there’s no-one yelling at him over the intercom. Instead, an attractive woman taps idly on the glass door.

He’s a little more ready this time. His hangover’s retreated, and his shame and self-loathing have become less overwhelming, easier to deal with; easier to hide. Once more becoming one of those unpleasant things you learn to live with, like tinnitus or a persistent toothache.

He’s not on show, is he? A quick check: no. The scratchy smock is making his genitals feel just as vaguely uncomfortable as the rest of him, but at least he’s not flashing the girl.

Tap tap tap tap tap.

He hauls himself to his feet. Runs the back of his hand across his face. Stubble. Ugh. He hasn’t seen a mirror since he got here, but it’s inevitable that the late night, the alcohol, the bad sleep, the brief but potent anxiety attack, the inability to access a shower and—most pointedly—the concrete prison have him looking more or less as awful as he’s ever looked.

The woman looks him up and down, so he looks right back. She’s blonde, the sort of blonde that takes bleach to achieve, and wears her hair short in what Stefan thinks is called a pixie cut. He’d describe her as impish, but that might just be because of the hair.

He doesn’t recognise her at all.

“Hello?” he says, after a while. He has the impression she’s evaluating him, but for which traits or for what purpose, he can’t even begin to guess. If he’s right about everything, then it’s a reasonable bet he’s at Dorley Hall somewhere; does that mean she’s one of the trans women they help?

If he’s wrong, and the way she narrows her eyes suggests he might be, then he could be anywhere.

Shit. Maybe Dorley Hall really is just a dorm.

But then why was he interrogated so urgently?

“Was that you this morning?” he asks. “On the intercom?”

“No,” she says. A deeper voice than he was expecting. It reminds him of Melissa’s. And, God, about Melissa, is he wrong about her, too? He was so convinced, for so long. Is Mark dead after all? What the hell is he supposed to think? “Who spoke to you on the intercom?” the girl demands.

“I don’t know. That’s why I asked.”

He immediately regrets even the slightest bit of impertinence. Whoever this girl is, he needs information from her, and the best way to get it is to play along without fuss. All she has to do is let him know what game she wants him to play.

“Eat,” she says.

“Eat what?”

She rolls her eyes. Points down. On the floor, by the door, is a metal tray with a banana and a cereal bar on it. Either it came up from under the floor or through the door by itself somehow—unlikely; he can’t see any mechanism by which that could have happened—or she walked in while he was sleeping and left it there.

“Right,” he says, scooping up the tray. He places it carefully on the cot and starts peeling the banana. “Thank you,” he adds. Keep her happy. Speedrun that Stockholm Syndrome.

She sneers at him and spins on her heel to walk away down the corridor.

“Wait!” he calls, slightly muffled by banana. When she stops, he swallows as quickly as he can. “What’s going on? How long am I going to be here?”

She doesn’t turn around. “You’ll find out, in time.”

“When?”

“Soon.”

“You have to give me something!” he yells, his desperation not entirely played up. The thought of more time in this glass-and-concrete coffin is not an appealing one. “Anything!”

She hesitates. “Don’t scratch your stomach,” she says, and starts walking again. It doesn’t take long for her to vanish from sight, but he can still hear her, even through the thick glass; her footsteps remain evenly spaced for about ten seconds. Maybe fifteen.

So, that’s something to add to the puzzle of this place: he’s at the far end of a long corridor. Not a super helpful fact in isolation.

He finishes the banana and the cereal bar. It’s nothing like enough food, considering he’s still recovering from his hangover, but it takes the edge off. He puts the tray back on the floor by the door and resolves to keep an eye on it to find out how they get the food to him.

It occurs to him, far too late to do anything about it, that the mysterious blonde girl might have drugged the food, but he dismisses the thought almost immediately. Why would they need to drug him? They’ve got him pretty comprehensively trapped already.

She told him not to scratch his stomach. Why?

He turns away from the glass door and lifts up his smock, runs a hand across his belly. It has that irritated feel skin gets when you wear scratchy fabric for a long time, sure, but nothing seems—

There. Right there. A raised bump, slightly smaller than his pinkie fingernail. A darker spot right in the middle. He’s familiar with the sight: in the summer of his second year at Saints he got so listless that at one point he spent two straight weeks in bed. He only got out of bed when his leg started hurting and only left the house when his leg didn’t stop hurting. The doctor prescribed a course of anticoagulants, and told him to move around more and maybe avoid taking all his holiday hours at once in the future.

A red dot in the middle of a raised lump: exactly what it looked like after he injected heparin into his stomach for a weekend.

He’s been stuck with a needle.

Breathing heavily, barely even thinking about being seen naked any more, he lifts up the smock and searches his body for any other telltale marks. He doesn’t find any until he pulls the garment all the way off and sees in the crook of his left elbow another red dot, this one in the centre of a flowering bruise. Like from a blood test.

They took some of his blood and they injected him with something.

What the hell are they doing to him?

* * *

He wakes to the same cold cell, to the same unpleasant smock, and to an itch around the injection site in his belly so overwhelming he immediately sinks his nails into his forearm to keep from scratching. Searching for a distraction and finding nothing in the cell aside from the nasty little metal toilet in the far corner, he locks his limbs, closes his eyes, and goes over what he knows.

What he thinks he knows.

The Royal College of Saint Almsworth has a problem with boys who disappear. It’s passed largely under the radar because the boys don’t vanish on-campus, and because it turns out that most universities have people who end their lives or simply vanish. If Saints’ tally is slightly higher than most? Put it down to a quirk of the local area.

He knew a teacher at his secondary school whose son had gone for a late-night stroll from his university dorm and didn’t realise he was walking on a frozen lake until suddenly he wasn’t anymore. There was a memorial in the assembly hall; Stefan got his mum to help him make an apple crumble. The teacher hugged him, thanked him, and wept on his shoulder.

These things happen.

All of that: fact. But Stefan’s having to face that it’s the only genuinely verifiable information he’s got. The girls he’s seen? That they look like some of the missing boys means little. They could be relatives. It could be coincidental. Or his memory could have played tricks on him, made him see similarities where none existed because he wanted it with all his heart to be true.

And the barest hints of rumours he picked up about Dorley Hall? They could so easily have been about something else entirely. This, for example: kidnapping random people and doing…what? Psychological experiments? Is there someone out there watching him on a screen, waiting for him to snap, timing him against the last person?

That’s it, isn’t it?

He clenches and unclenches his fists, stretches his back, and thinks hard. What have they done so far, really? They’ve put him in uncomfortable clothes, they’ve fed him, they’ve taken a blood test and they’ve (probably) injected something into his belly. He’s supposed to think it’s a tracking chip or an electric shock device or something; likely it’s just saline. After a couple of days of this, there’ll be a form to sign, a pat on the back and a small cheque.

It’s just an experiment. It has to be.

He relaxes on the cot, satisfied with his reasoning. He was wrong about Dorley Hall. So what? He’s no worse off than he was yesterday morning, and if he gets paid for his participation then he’s actually up on the day. The unscheduled days off work might get him fired, but screw it. He hates that place. Maybe he’ll go work at the retail park instead. They have a gym there; he can get in shape, start his new life properly.

Kidnapping? Fake injections? Interrogations by intercom? All very clever, for sure, but there’s no sense letting the imagination run wild.

Stefan closes his eyes and gets some more sleep.

* * *

Clearly some part of this experiment has to do with enforced boredom. With no phone, no books and no TV, Stefan is probably supposed to be out of his mind by now, but he’s survived twenty-one years inside this body randomly gifted to him by chance and genetics, and he’s good at passing unwanted time. Meditation’s fine. Sleep’s better, if you can manage it. But yoga’s best.

He’s not done it for a while—his last year has been less about self-improvement and more about self-destruction; another effective way to pass time—but the mattress off his cot is thin enough to work as a mat, and there’s enough space in his cell to stretch out in most directions. It’s nice to get back to it. He has always liked the way it makes his body feel: not entirely like itself.

The blonde girl comes back with another tray of food, and due to the position he’s maintaining he gets to watch her shift quickly from bored indifference to irritated astonishment.

“Hiya,” he greets her, upside down.

“What the hell are you doing?” she demands, losing control of her voice and wincing when she does so. In Stefan’s mind, he writes another note on the whiteboard: bleach-blonde girl’s voice gets deeper when she’s annoyed. He’s not entirely given up on his original suspicions.

“Yoga,” he explains, and carefully unfolds himself back into an upright position. Which ends with him facing away from her, so he turns with what he hopes is a gentle smile and adds, “It’s relaxing.”

“It’s time to eat,” she says, her alto lilt returning. “Step away from the door.”

He does so, and she opens it, almost throws the tray on the ground, and closes it again. There must be a fingerprint reader or something; she doesn’t have a key that he can see, but the locking mechanism is opaque, and he can’t see the front of it.

“Thanks,” he says.

“You’re not fooling me, you know,” she says.

“I’m sorry?”

“You know what I mean. Sociopath.”

She’s walking away when she says it, so doesn’t catch Stefan’s frown. “Sociopath” isn’t accepted terminology, as far as he knows. He’s no expert, despite his Psychology A-level and his single semester of Psycholinguistics, but he’s sure of it. Shouldn’t it be “antisocial personality disorder”, or something?

Maybe part of this experiment, whatever it is, involves acting as unsympathetic—and possibly unqualified—nurses, to examine how people behave under misdiagnosis.

Shady.

Assuming it is an experiment, of course. Stefan’s had a pretty good run of being wrong about things; it’s important to remember his supposition is nothing more than a guess with a fancy name.

Well, he can’t do anything about it for now. He looks over the lunch/dinner/breakfast on the tray and decides that the bowl of soup and glass of orange juice can wait a couple of minutes while he cools down.

* * *

The fading of the overhead lights brings Stefan back to awareness. Over the past few hours he’s eaten his vegetable soup, remembered his way slowly and carefully through the plots of pretty much all his favourite novels, and obligingly stepped to the back of the room so the blonde woman can collect his empty tray.

It takes about half an hour for the lights to dim from their approximation of sunlight to a twilight glow, which brings with it some concerns. If they’re lining up their fake day-night cycle with the real one, it means Stefan’s been in here for only about a day; he thought it’d been nearly two. Clearly, his time-passing techniques aren’t as good as he hoped.

He’s cooled on his theory that this is all an experiment, but hasn’t come up with anything to replace it yet, and can’t forever block out the voice in the back of his head that’s screaming at him to become seriously worried, perhaps even to panic. He quiets it for the moment—how would panicking actually help him?—by reminding himself that they’ve still done nothing but steal his clothes and isolate him. They’ve even fed him, and the hearty soup put paid to his worries that they’re intending to starve him.

The bump on his belly is a concern, though. On cue, it itches. He digs his nails into his forearm again.

The lights in the corridor have dimmed as well, so it takes Stefan a while to realise that someone’s watching him from the other side of the glass door. She’s squatting, hands casually flopped over her knees, and she’s frowning at him. The sudden presence of another person flips a few more of the “panic!” breakers in his head, but he closes his eyes for a second, concentrates on his breathing, calms himself, and stands. As casually as he can, he walks the length of the cell to meet the woman.

He squats, imitating her. As he does so she puts a phone on the floor, torch pointing up, providing enough light to see her face properly.

It’s Christine. From the party.

“I’ve turned off the cameras,” she says. “We need to talk.”

3

Death by Chocolate

13 OCTOBER 2019 — SUNDAY

It gets easier every day.

She won’t claim it’s not hard, being out in the world as a girl, as a woman. But it’s a thousand times better than what she used to be.

She used to be so angry.

She also, she muses as she drums the first two fingers of her right hand against the bench, used to smoke, and right now she’s missing it more than anything else she’s had to give up. She makes a fist, calms herself, and watches the horizon.

The Royal College of Saint Almsworth sits at the base of Almsworth Hill, a shallow bump in the landscape only worthy of a proper name because the surrounding countryside is so persistently flat, and Christine Hale sits at its very top, on a bench dedicated to someone whose name has long since rubbed off, waiting for night to fall. She has a marvellous view of the campus, but it’s difficult for her to appreciate it properly right now.

Beware decisions made in haste. Something her father said a lot; mostly to the newspaper, occasionally to her, when she couldn’t successfully avoid him. If he could see her now…

If he could see her now, the old bastard would probably have another heart attack. Absently she clicks her left wrist in remembrance of him. It still hurts sometimes.

But the man had a point, and Christine hates him even more for it: she made a rash choice, didn’t think it through, and now she’s made everything worse.

She’d kill for a cigarette.

Her phone screen lights up: it’s Indira, her Sister. Her sponsor. God, won’t she ever be disappointed if she finds out what Christine did last night!

“Chris-teenie!”

“You know that’s not my name. You picked my name.”

“Wow. You’re in a mood.”

“Just, you know,” Christine says, “memories.”

“Sweetheart! You’re not…backsliding, are you?”

“No. God. Absolutely not.” The thought of it is enough to cause Christine to shudder.

“Do you want me to come home and look after you?”

“I’ll be fine. Really. Just thinking about Dad again. And I thought you were in London this weekend?”

“You know I’d come back for you.”

“You’re sweet.”

“Always!”

“So,” Christine says, standing up from the bench and stretching, “not that it’s not lovely to hear from you, but…?”

“Why did I call? Aunt Bea texted: there’s a new boy. Thought I’d warn you.”

“Oh? Who brought him in?”

“Pippa.”

He’s not set up for an easy ride. Pippa’s hardly the ideal sponsor, from what Christine knows of her, but she’s also the only candidate left unassigned this year, and Christine happened to know she was at home last night, so manoeuvring poor, drunk Stefan Riley into the bushes outside the hall, within earshot of Pippa’s open window, and screaming her best and most well-practised horror-movie scream…well, it had been the only workable idea she could come up with on such short notice. She could have gone straight to Aunt Bea, but there are unpleasant rumours surrounding the way she deals with threats to the hall. Better he only wishes he was dead, right?

Besides, he’s got to have done something. In Christine’s experience, most boys have.

It was God’s own luck that it was Christine he ran into last night. He got only a few incriminating words out before she kissed him in a desperate attempt to shut him up, but he still managed to reveal way more knowledge about Dorley Hall than any outsider is supposed to have. Clearly, someone needs to have a talk with Aunt Bea about opsec.

“Poor lad,” Christine says.

“Hey, Pippa’s probably raring to go.”

“I repeat: poor lad.”

“He’ll be right as rain in no time. Remember what you were like when you joined us?”

“Please, Dira, I thought we agreed Memory Lane was a bad place?”

“For you, not me.”

Sun’s going down. Time to move. “Look, Dira, I’ve got to go.”

“Okay, sweetheart. You’re sure you’re okay?”

“I’m sure.”

“And you’ve eaten?”

“Yes.” She hasn’t, but if there’s one thing Dorley Hall isn’t short of, it’s leftovers to heat up. She’ll take something up to her room later.

“Okay. Kiss-kiss.”

Christine, feeling conspicuous, says, “Kiss!” but doesn’t make the face to go with it, the one she knows Indira’s probably making at her phone. It’s hard not to feel like she’s always being watched. An inevitable side-effect, Indira told her; either it’ll go away eventually or she’ll get used to it. She slips her phone into her bag and starts walking the shallow stone steps down the hill.

Saints, as a campus, is a slapdash mixture of styles, ranging from the very old—the entrance to the Student Union Bar looks like a village pub because that’s what it once was—to the turn-of-the-millennium complex by the lake and the obnoxiously new Computer Science building. Christine gives that a wide berth; more bad memories. Dorley Hall isn’t of a character with even the oldest buildings, having been here before Saints was Saints; it’s a red-brick monstrosity, crawling with vines and wearing its origin as a private hospital on its sleeve. It looks, quite frankly, haunted and isn’t actually on the campus proper, being set out at the edge of the grounds, where grassy scrubland meets dense woods, bracketed from the rest of the university by a thick semi-circle of empty land which, mysteriously, has never been earmarked for development.

It’s home, and it looms reassuringly.

Two girls from the upper floors are vaping on the steps up to the main entrance, so when Christine lets herself in to the ground-floor kitchen she smells like strawberry bubble gum. There’s no-one inside except Vicky, eating at the kitchen table. She smiles when she sees Christine, and surreptitiously drops the contraband paper bag that had been sitting on the table into her lap.

“I saw nothing,” Christine says.

Vicky, through a mouthful of omelette, indicates gratitude, and Christine leaves her to her dinner, heading through the dining hall and, using her finger, through the locked door to the floor below.

The security room’s empty. Not surprising for this time of night, this early in the programme. Everyone’ll be studying or relaxing somewhere, with a laptop open if they have to monitor their charges. Christine ducks in and flicks through the screens and finds Stefan. Good: he’s sitting perfectly still. Dozing, probably. She scrubs back through the footage, identifies a suitable start point, and taps the information into her phone. It’s the work of another second to have her phone talk to her laptop, which is up in her room and already connected to the network, and loop the signal.

She loops the video for the connecting corridor and the stairs down, and disconnects the camera feeds for good measure. Her phone gets her through the biometrics on the door down to the lower basement and doesn’t leave any trace of her in the logs.

You can take the boy out of the hacker, but you can’t take the hacker out of the girl, no matter how many Linguistics lectures she attends.

* * *

“Where am I?” Stefan demands.

The girl, Christine, looks almost disappointed. “Where do you think?” She’s wearing a light hoodie unzipped over a pale blue t-shirt, dark grey leggings and a pair of running shoes. Appallingly casual and comfortable-looking, compared to Stefan’s scratchy smock. Like she’s popped in to see the prisoner after a nice healthy jog.

“Dorley Hall?”

“Bingo. You’re under it. Specifically, the lower basement. When all this was a hospital—” she waves a hand around her, causing the light from her phone to flicker eerily on her face, “—this place was the morgue. Or the laundry. I’m not sure.”

“Did you bring me here?”

She looks uncomfortable. “Yes and no. It’s complicated.”

“Well, then—”

“I know, I know. I’m working up to it.”

Stefan sits back from his squat, crosses his legs in front of him and rests his chin on tented hands. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Look. Okay. Look.” She’s strangely nervous for a kidnapper. “When you said to me, last night, that you know about Dorley Hall, what exactly do you know?”

“Ah. That was you on the intercom this morning.”

“Yes. Please answer the question. It’s important.”

He could stonewall her, show her just how unimpressed he is to be on the wrong side of a cell door, but such an approach would only extend his stay, so he starts outlining his theory. As he does so, Christine’s frown slowly deepens, and that’s it. That’s all the proof he needs that his earliest read, his first idea, was and is ridiculous.

He trails off, feeling beyond foolish.

“No, please,” Christine says urgently, “finish. I need to know everything.”

Stefan shrugs. “I mean, that’s more or less it. I thought this was a place that helps trans people get away from unsupportive families. Helps pay for transition stuff. But it’s not, is it? It’s not, and I’m just an idiot.”

“Why were you looking at Dorley so hard in the first place?”

“A friend disappeared,” he says quickly. Best she doesn’t get the opportunity to consider why else an apparent man would look so hard at such a place. “My friend’s older brother. He was…kind of like an older brother to me, too.” He smiles involuntarily, remembering Mark as he used to be. “When he came here, to Saints, he went missing one night. Officially missing; declared and everything. No leads. Just gone. But then, a year later, I saw him. I mean, I saw a woman I thought was him. She looked exactly like what he would look like if he’d been a girl. And I thought, maybe…maybe he was a girl all along? Maybe she pretended to run away so her dad wouldn’t find her. Because, I mean, Russ didn’t say it out loud, but I’m pretty sure he was—” Christine’s staring at him now, expression unreadable, and he cuts himself off. “But I was fooling myself. Because he’s dead, isn’t he? And she was just some girl who looked a bit like him.” He blinks rapidly; whatever this place really is, he’s certain he doesn’t want to cry here.

“Shit,” Christine says, and flops down onto her bottom, unintentionally mimicking Stefan. “Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit. I’m an idiot, Stefan Riley.”

He flinches. “Don’t call me that,” he says, before he can stop himself.

“Why not?”

“I don’t like it.”

“Whatever. Look. If you promise not to tell anyone what you just told me, ever, then I can get you out of here.”

“Why? How?”

“Why is because the lives and freedom of a hell of a lot of people, including me and people I care about, rely on no-one ever knowing what you know, and how is because I put you in here, in a roundabout way, and I can get you out again.”

“What do you mean, ‘what I know’?” Stefan blinks. “I was right? It’s real?”

Christine looks pained. “Yes and no. Look, do you agree, or not?”

It’s real. It’s fucking real! “Yes and no” could mean anything, but if any part of it is true, that means Mark—Melissa—might still be alive! And it means Stefan has to face up to his gender fast, whatever it may be, before all this slips away from him. Before Christine gets him out.

But he can’t say it. He’s never told anyone