Dark clouds like exploding gun shells spattered the evening sky, their expanding grey-blackness soon consumed the fiery-yellow lights of the low-set sun blossoming silently around their edges. She looked down at the dusk-dimmed view of the tents camped on the stone grounds of the campus. There was a flurry of movement, fleetingly visible around the lampposts down below. The night was settling in heavily and evening out the game among the clouds. She let the white curtains flutter back ghostly against the window and turned to the room.
She moved to the wardrobe, her naked feet slapping lightly on the wooden floorboards, and opened the door. Only few items were left on their hangers, and a large academic gown took the center. She ran her hands along the unseamed, black surface.
'You keep checking on that,' a voice said behind her. 'It's not going anywhere you know.'
She caught a sleeve and rolled the fabric between two fingers. 'Yeah,' she sighed, feeling the tiny vibrations the smooth sliding motion sent through her hand. 'It's just... it's taken so long.' She replaced the arm and shut the wardrobe, her own face stared at her from the mirror fixed on the door, she tilted her head a little, revealing the girl sitting cross-legged on the bed behind her. 'At one point it felt like we'd never leave this place.'
'We're only one night away, honey,' the girl said, laughing, and picked up her notebook, then scowled at the page for a moment and put it down.
She leaned back against the wardrobe, facing the real image of the room. 'Sooner, if it weren't for their stupid ritual,' she gestured to the notebook.
The girl clasped her hands and held them heartily to one cheek. 'The Chant,' she said in mock adoration. 'It would help if the lines made any sense, of course.' She turned a couple of pages. 'Or if it were shorter.'
'Where is your gown anyway?'
She pointed slackly to a stuffed bag at the corner, contents spilling from its open mouth. 'Folded... and possibly crumbled all to shit by now.'
Wind whistled outside and raked the glass panes. She returned to the window and lifted the drapes to stare at the pitch-blackness. The sky was a smooth, thundery, dark matt; the lampposts had gone out and only the tents were visible as faintly glowing ghosts haunting the grounds in the lights from within.
'There are no stars tonight,' she said blankly after a moment.
'Stars? Oh I assumed you were just boy-gazing.'
'No.' A smile played on her lips for a second. 'Nothing can be seen from here.' She looked at the bodies silhouetted on the trembling walls of the tents. 'Besides, I've met someone.'
'Yeah, you told me,' the girl said, leaning on her side and risking another look at the squiggly writing in the handbook. 'He must be doing better than those poor losers down there.' The wind howled again. She looked up bemusedly. 'So gallant of those administrator fuckers to let us stay in all the dorms while the boys get camped and dirty on the grounds in this weather. Could have been unnecessary of course, if they had cancelled this stupid singsong thing.'
She listened to her friend's tirade without saying anything, the glass aquiver against her palm like a shaking, frightened animal.
'Urgh!' her friend gave a loud, exasperated yell and tossed the notebook across the bed. 'I swear if I read one more line. I can't memorize all that crap. Won't, at any case. You want to brush up on your Chant?'
'Thanks,' she said, leaving the window once again and sitting on the end of the bed where the notebook lay.
'I'm just going to mumble the rest. Pretty sure everyone else will do the same and it'll sound like crap. But no worries; we're graduates now, bitches.'
She picked up the notebook and read silently.
***
They woke up the next morning to silvery light filtering through the drapes. An unbroken grey ceiling flicked with darker blemishes rumbled overhead. They had breakfast and slipped on their academic dresses in the room, then got out and were added to the drops of graduates walking the corridors to join the stream jabbering excitedly down the stairs. She had torn off the few pages of The Chant and carried them in her pocket.
They passed the tents, where dishevelled boys in wrinkled dresses were poking slit-eyed faces out in caution before leaving the tents with disgruntled downward curls of the lips. The grounds were misty and tops of trees hazed in the distance like stooping giants. They followed the stone path winding across the campus, where the buildings around loomed behind thick veils of air, and the shrubbery on both sides of their myopic party had turned grey in the fog-dulled morning. The chatter had died to a few whispers.
'This feels uncannily gloomy,' her friend said, grabbing her elbow.
She nodded, watching the disappearing caps further ahead in their funereal procession. 'Do we know what the older classes thought about all of this?'
'I've only met one. She graduated like 10 years ago or so. She's a doctor and a researcher now. Brilliant, but a bit insane if you ask me. She mentioned offhandedly that you have to finish The Chant that's all. I never asked much because it hadn't been a big deal for us then. We had just started college.'
They finally reached their destination, a large, imposing building with many broad steps a little distance inside the university gates; the dean had been leading their front. They were told to line up the steps in preparation. Several other administrators showed up, all in academic gowns, and took their place together with the dean in front. 'Douchbags', her friend muttered into her ear as she passed, heading up the steps, while she remained in the second row, owing to her short height. An excited buzz of conversation rose as the graduates took their places and were happy with their arrangement, then the dean gave a signal and everyone fell silent. She pressed her pocket and felt the paper crinkle against her leg.
The dean brought his hand down and The Chant started, in chorus, as they had been instructed. The first few seconds went ok, with no noticeable singing out of line or marked stuttering. She sang in a normal voice, straining her memory for what came next and ignoring the person slurring and dropping words next to her. A chill draught from behind caught her dress, and fog came billowing forward between their ranks. She felt extremely cold and started rubbing her shoulders. The first hint of disorganization was just surfacing in the chorus. She sang on, although a bit distracted. The air current and the fresh silvery fog. She teased the next line out of her memory. But their backs were straight to a large building.
Then the first screams sounded from behind and froze her blood. Shrill, hysterical, throat-wrenching, soul-exhaling screams mixed with an unearthly drone. She turned around, as did all others, cursing the very fact that she had to, and felt her heart sink into the deepest pit possible.
The building was gone and the stairs stretched way back, seemingly unending, into the sky, only obscured at the farthest point by miasmic layers of beating white fog. Worn-out, gaunt people in similar academic dresses, and similarly horror-struck, littered the extra steps; their faces got more hollow-eyed and ramshackle further back, their gowns in tatters. Skeletal, moaning figures topped the visible end of the stairs, some of them collapsing immediately into dusty, black-coffined heaps.
The spectral people nearest to them charged at her class as frightened shrieks swelled in the air on her side. She felt a tremendous force applied to her as their whole mass leaned forward like one, giant wave and crashed on the stone ground. They all staggered and fought and pushed and climbed onto each other. She managed to extract herself from the tangle of bodies and fled from the protruding, grasping tangle of hands into the mist ahead, her legs leaping over the ground in a way they had never done before. Cool air chilled her wheezing, whimpering chest as she bounded manically away in search of the gate.
She never reached the gate. She stopped and doubled up, panting and shaking and turning and re-turning to where screams and rattling croaks issued and echoed each other balefully everywhere around her womb of fog. Dark figures skirted her line of visibility and wrestled someone down. She ran away again, heaving big gulps of breath, the wind roaring in her ears and flapping her dress behind her, before she collapsed helplessly to the ground. She grazed her knee and turned over to sit on her bottom, trembling like the glass panes the night before.
Then she had an idea. She mentioned offhandedly that you had to finish The Chant. That doctor had done it, had made it past whatever this is. She must have meant finish reciting it, not that it was merely a ceremony one had to go through. She clawed the papers out of her pocket feverishly, found the line she had stopped at and resumed singing in a low, quavering voice.
Loud, deep moans boomed in the thick air around her like foghorns the more she sang. She clutched the paper with such strength it almost ripped in two as she traced the lines with her thumb. She had got through the first page when a hand thumped on her shoulder. She emptied her lungs and yanked free and lunged forward and was dragged back and aimed a number of hysterical kicks to whatever it was until it let go, then she applied her legs to the ground again. The rapping of her footfalls racing with her heartbeats. She brought the papers to her face, but couldn't read, so she stopped, panting noisily, and grunted and coughed line after line as her breath allowed, keeping watch out of the corner of her eyes on the shadowy figures that materialized out of the haze everywhere. She reached the last page, they were homing in on her. She blocked their sight with the creased paper and mumbled on. She made it to the last line and looked up.