SPECTRAL.

† T W E N T Y T H R E E †

     I COULDN'T GET PETE'S WORDS OUT OF MY HEAD. They haunted me the way a sound lingers in an empty hall long after it's gone. Because it would be best if you hadn't. Those his exact words. And I had done both.

     That night, I lay on my bed, eyes wide open, watching the shadows on the ceiling stretch and twist into grotesque shapes. The air in my room felt heavy, charged with something unseen, something waiting. I could still hear her voice—Laura's voice—soft, tremulous, human once, but now... now it came like the wind scraping through broken glass.

     I remember sitting up, my hands trembling, the sheets cold and damp with sweat. I kept asking myself what Pete meant when he said that. Why shouldn't I look at her? Why shouldn't I speak to her? What consequences? But it was too late for that question now. I had seen her face.

     It wasn't even a face anymore. It was something melted and pale, as if fire and grief had sculpted it into something unholy. Yet beneath that monstrous ruin, I had seen something else—something human. The faintest echo of who she once was.

     Laura Haskins.

     That name wouldn't stop echoing in my mind. The way he had said it. And then it hit me again, she was once human. She was once someone real. A cheerleader. At Oregon University.

     I sat there, stunned, staring at the wall as my mind spiraled back to what I had seen before. The fragments. The face in the mirror. The whispers. But now, every instinct inside me screamed to know.

     I needed answers.

     That was when the thought came—sudden, clear, unavoidable: the library.

     I didn't even think twice. I threw on my hoodie, slid into my sneakers, and stepped out into the night. The campus was half-asleep, lampposts flickering in long corridors of fog. My breath rose like thin smoke in the cold air as I walked, fast, my heartbeat matching the rhythm of my footsteps.

     The library sat at the far end of the courtyard, that old building with its stone facade and tall arched windows that always seemed to watch. The automatic doors groaned open when I approached, and for a moment, I thought I heard a faint whisper escape the air between them.

     Inside, the smell of dust and paper hit me—old knowledge, old ghosts. The place was almost empty, except for the faint hum of fluorescent lights and the quiet buzz of the ceiling fans.

     I walked straight to the archives section, where the students life books were kept, the thick, leather-bound volumes, stacked neatly in a glass cabinet. I had been here before, during my research if you could remember. Back then, the place had felt harmless. But now, with what I knew—or thought I knew—everything seemed to breathe differently.

     I ran my fingers along the spines, feeling the embossed years under my fingertips until I found it. I pulled it out carefully, the book heavier than I remembered, and set it on the table. The leather cracked softly as I opened it. The pages smelled like dust and time.

     I flipped through slowly, scanning the photographs—smiling faces, frozen moments of youth. And then I saw it again.

     The cheerleading team.

     They stood in neat rows on the bleachers, all of them radiant, all of them smiling. The sunlight in the photograph gave everything a warm, nostalgic glow, like it had captured the last perfect day before everything went wrong.

     But my eyes kept darting from one face to another, searching, comparing. None of them resembled the ghost I had seen. None bore the grotesque face that haunted me.