Where the Ivy Bleeds

Prologue

Blackvale was a town where the shadows always seemed to stretch a few inches longer than they should. Down the hill, the Friday night streets hummed with the distant, muffled bass of college bars and the sharp scent of burning autumn leaves. But up here, isolated from the neon haze, the Gravemont campus was trapped in an eerie, suffocating stillness. Its Gothic spires and heavy, ivy-choked stone dormitories looked less like an institution of higher learning and more like a sprawling cathedral to the dead.

Inside Bancroft Hall, the ancient floorboards creaked under the weight of a century's worth of secrets. Jenna Miles, an eighteen-year-old freshman who had been entirely too eager to escape the suffocating grip of her parents, was just settling in for the night. She was halfway through her evening skincare routine, wiping a damp cloth across her face, when the obsolete landline on her desk abruptly shattered the quiet.

Her head snapped toward the sound, her pulse spiking. She and her roommate, Michelle, never used that phone. Nobody did. It was a plastic relic of a bygone era, bolted to the wall like a ghost.

It rang three times, stopped, and then immediately began to chime again.

Jenna set her towel down, fighting off the sudden chill crawling up her spine. It had to be a prank. The campus had been buzzing all week with morbid excitement over the twentieth anniversary of the Gravemont Massacre; it was only natural that some upperclassmen would try to weaponize the freshman paranoia.

She walked over to yank the cord from the wall, but before her fingers could clamp around the plastic clip, the line cut to the automated voicemail. The harsh, high-pitched beep echoed off the concrete walls.

Silence stretched for a beat. Then came a sound that made the hairs on her arms stand up: low, deliberate breathing. Heavy and wet.

A raspy voice tore through the static. "Do you believe in ghosts, Jenna?"

The breath caught in her throat. She reached for the receiver, ready to demand who the hell was on the other end, but a sharp click cut her off. The line went dead.

She stared at the plastic receiver, her anger flaring hot to mask the cold dread pooling in her stomach. Idiots. She turned back to the bathroom, trying to shake the unnerving realization that the caller knew her name.

Then, the overhead lights flickered and died.

Jenna froze in the sudden pitch-blackness. A second later, the power surged back on, but the ambient noise of the building—the low hum of the mini-fridge, the distant rattle of the pipes—had vanished. The silence that followed was thick, heavy, and unnatural, as if the building itself had stopped breathing.

You're being ridiculous, she thought, grounding her heels into the floor. It's an old building. Bad wiring. She forced herself to finish her routine in front of the mirror, deliberately refusing to look at the dark corners of the room reflected behind her.

When she finally stepped back into the bedroom, the only illumination came from the stark, blue-white glow of her laptop screen.

That was when she saw it: the heavy wooden dorm door was unlatched, resting ajar by a mere fraction of an inch.

A cold sweat broke out across her collarbone. She was certain she had locked it. She was obsessive about it. But Michelle was supposed to be back late tonight, she reminded herself. This had to be Michelle.

"Michelle?" Jenna called out. Her voice was too quiet, swallowed instantly by the shadows.

No answer.

Each step felt heavy as she padded across the linoleum floor. Her fingers tightened around the cold brass doorknob, pulling it shut until the lock clicked firmly into place.

Behind her, the faintest rustle of fabric sliced through the quiet. A shuffle.

She whirled around, her back hitting the door. Nothing moved. The closet was shut. The shadows remained perfectly still. A nervous, hollow laugh escaped her lips, sounding entirely fake in the empty room.

Determined to sleep this night off, she marched toward her bed to shut down her computer. As her hand hovered over the trackpad, a soft, mechanical click echoed from the hardware.

The tiny indicator light next to her webcam flashed to life.

Jenna froze, her hand suspended in the air. The lens stared back at her like an unblinking eye. She hadn't touched a thing. Suddenly, her eyes drifted downward to the glossy, black reflection of the screen.

There, looming directly behind her shoulder, was a towering silhouette. A man. He was close enough that she could almost feel the heat of his breath radiating against the bare skin of her neck. He wasn't moving away; he was watching her watch him.

Her mouth opened to scream, but the air caught like glass in her throat.

Before she could draw a breath, the laptop screen cut to pure black, plunging the room into absolute darkness.