The Letter

The letter arrived on a Tuesday in a black envelope with no return address.

Wren found it on the doormat of her bedsit in Camberwell when she came home from her shift at the bookshop, and she carried it up the four flights of stairs to her room without looking at it because she was tired, and the kettle was first, and the letter could wait.

The kettle boiled.

The letter, on the kitchenette counter, was still black.

Wren made the tea. She sat down on the bed. She looked at the letter.

The letter was addressed:

Wren Mercer Flat 4, 17 Goldthorn Road London SE5 9JT

The address was in handwriting. Old handwriting — the kind of handwriting Wren had seen, once, on a card her grandmother had received from a man who had been her grandmother's tutor at Cambridge in the 1950s. Slanting. Confident. A capital W with a flourish that took up more space than it should.

There was no postage stamp.

There was no postmark.

Wren looked at the envelope for a long time.

Then she slid her finger under the flap, and she opened it.

—

The letter inside was a single sheet of cream paper.

The cream paper had the weight of something that had been pressed, somewhere, by hand. It had a faint watermark when she held it up to the lamp — two crossed quills inside a circle of laurel — and across the top, in the same slanting capital-W handwriting as the envelope, was a heading:

The Drevenwood Institute founded 1671 enquiries by letter only

Wren had never heard of the Drevenwood Institute.

The letter said:

Dear Miss Mercer, It is with considerable pleasure that we write to invite you to take up the William Drevenwood Research Fellowship in Comparative Memory at the Institute, commencing the Michaelmas term of this year. The Fellowship is unfunded by external bodies. The Institute provides full lodging, full board, a stipend of £24,000 per annum, and access to the Drevenwood collections. The duration of the Fellowship is one academic year, renewable at the discretion of the Master and Fellows. You will be one of seven Drevenwood Fellows in residence during the academic year. We require no application from you. Your candidacy is settled. If you wish to accept, please be at the corner of Endell Street and Shorts Gardens on the evening of Friday the 28th, at the hour of 8 pm. A car will be sent for you. We do hope you will come. Yours, with very great anticipation, Professor Olwen Brynmor Master of Drevenwood

Wren read the letter twice.

She put it down on the bed.

She picked it up.

She read it a third time.

She thought, with the orderly clarity that came over her when she was confronted with something she absolutely did not understand: this is a scam.

She turned the letter over.

On the back, in pencil, in a different hand — a hurried hand, a hand that had written quickly because it had not wanted to be seen — was a single line.

The line said:

Wren. Come. We have been waiting twelve years.

—

Wren did not sleep that night.

She made another cup of tea. She made a third. At three in the morning she opened her laptop and she typed Drevenwood Institute into the search bar, and the search bar returned nothing — no Wikipedia, no university register, no Google Map result, no news article, no Reddit thread, no Companies House registration, nothing — and Wren sat looking at the blank search results for fifteen minutes, and at the end of the fifteen minutes she added the word postgrad to the search, and the search bar still returned nothing, and at the end of another fifteen minutes she added the word missing to the search, and the third result was a local newspaper from a town called Lower Hartmoor, in Shropshire, dated June 2013, with the headline:

Six students of the Drevenwood Institute confirmed deceased after Hollow Hour fire

Wren stopped breathing.

She did not click on the article for thirty seconds.

When she clicked on it, the article was — for a small, terrible moment — completely blank. The page loaded, the headline appeared at the top, and the body of the article was simply a single grey rectangle, the way an old newspaper article sometimes loads, with the text still cached on a slower server somewhere.

Then the text loaded.

The article said:

Lower Hartmoor — A fire at the historic Drevenwood Institute on the evening of Sunday, the 9th of June, has claimed the lives of all six postgraduate Fellows in residence. A seventh Fellow, Miss W. Mercer, age 5, daughter of the late Professor Halford Mercer, is the only known survivor and was recovered from the south wing in the early hours of Monday morning.

Wren read the article three times.

Wren had never been to Shropshire.

Wren had never heard of the Drevenwood Institute.

Wren had been five years old, in June 2013. Wren's father — who had been an academic, who had been a quiet man with thinning hair and a smell of pipe tobacco and books, who had once carried her on his shoulders through the British Museum and let her name the bones of every dinosaur — Wren's father had been Professor Halford Mercer, but Wren's father had died, the family had always said, in a car accident on the M6 in 2013, on his way home from a research trip he had not told anyone about.

Wren did not remember her father.

Wren did not, in fact, remember anything before her sixth birthday.

She had been told this was because of the trauma of losing her father. She had been told this by every family member, every counsellor, every paediatrician she had been taken to between the ages of six and fourteen. She had been told this so many times that she had stopped, at fifteen, asking, and had begun simply to nod when anyone brought it up.

She had never been told about a fire.

She had never been told about a place called Drevenwood.

She had never been told that she had been five years old, in June 2013, in the south wing of an institute that no longer existed, that she had been the only one to come back from a fire that had killed six people.

—

She read the article a fourth time.

The article was the same.

She read the line — the only known survivor and was recovered from the south wing in the early hours of Monday morning — six times.

She sat for a long time on her bed in her bedsit in Camberwell, with the letter on her knees and the laptop open beside her, and she said, into the very quiet room —

'But I'm not dead.'

The laptop screen flickered, twice.

Wren did not move.

The laptop screen settled.

She read the line on the back of the letter again.

Wren. Come. We have been waiting twelve years.

—

On the Friday evening, at eight o'clock, Wren stood on the corner of Endell Street and Shorts Gardens in a coat she had bought from a charity shop that afternoon because none of her own coats had felt right, with a small overnight bag at her feet containing two changes of clothes and the letter and the article she had printed out at the library, and she waited.

She had told her flatmate she was going to a friend's wedding for the weekend.

She had not told anyone else.

The car was a black saloon. It pulled up at exactly eight pm. The driver did not get out. The back door opened by itself.

Wren picked up the bag.

She walked to the car.

She stopped at the open door.

She looked into the back seat.

The back seat was empty.

She got in.

The door closed.

The car pulled away from the kerb.

—

The driver did not speak.

The car did not turn on the radio.

The car drove north for what Wren's phone — when she finally remembered to check it, twenty miles up the M1 — said was forty-three minutes. Then the phone lost signal.

Then the phone lost the time.

Then the phone went black.

Wren sat in the back of a black saloon car, on a Friday night in October, somewhere north of London, with no phone and no signal and no map and a letter in her bag from an institute that had burned down twelve years ago, and at some point she realised — calmly, the way she realised most things — that the driver had not, in fact, said where they were going.

She had not asked.

She did not ask now.

The car drove on, into the dark, north and then west and then, when the road narrowed and the trees began, north again — and at some point in the third hour, when the lamps of the last village were behind them, when there were no other cars on the road, when the only sound was the soft hum of the engine and the wet sound of the tyres on a road that had begun, very gradually, to feel less like a road and more like a path — Wren saw, ahead, between the trees, the first lights of the Drevenwood Institute.

The lights of the Drevenwood Institute were not yellow, the way village lights were yellow. They were not white, the way streetlights were white.

The lights of the Drevenwood Institute were, every one of them, a faint and unmistakable blue.

The car slowed.

The car stopped.

The driver, for the first time in the journey, turned in his seat.

The driver was — Wren saw, in the small overhead lamp that had just come on — a young man, perhaps thirty, with a kind, tired face, and he was wearing a dark suit and a small silver pin on his lapel in the shape of two crossed quills inside a circle of laurel.

He smiled at her.

He said, in a voice she had never heard before — warm, slightly amused, a voice that felt as though it had been waiting a very long time to say what it was about to say —

'Welcome home, Wren.'

The door of the car opened by itself.

Wren picked up her bag, and she stepped out, and the lights of the Drevenwood Institute, all of them, blue, rose up around her like a quiet held breath.