Chapter 6: Applied Silence and the Thing Beneath the Frequency

The timetable arrived under the dormitory door at five-thirty in the morning, slipped through the gap with a precision that implied either a very small hand or no hand at all.

Callum was already awake. He had been awake since four, lying on his back in the narrow bed with the stone ceiling doing what stone ceilings do — nothing, specifically, but doing it with great conviction — and cataloguing the sounds of the building the way he had catalogued the sounds of the Ridder Street house: the particular groan of a structure settling into cold, the whisper of draughts finding their established routes, the faint metallic complaint of a radiator that was either heating or pretending to. Dunhollow's sounds were different from Skerwick's in ways he was not ready to name yet. They had a quality of intentionality that buildings were not supposed to have. When the house on Ridder Street creaked, it was because timber aged and contracted. When Dunhollow made noise in the dark, it felt, with a specificity that he kept filing under *impressionistic, insufficient data*, like something turning in its sleep.

The timetable was printed on the same woven paper as the acceptance letter. He noticed this before he noticed what it said.