J.T. Ellison is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of more than 30 novels and 20 short stories, and the EMMY® award winning co-host of the literary TV show A Word On Words. She also writes urban fantasy under the pen name Joss Walker. With millions of books in print, her work has won critical acclaim and prestigious awards. Her titles have been optioned for television and published in twenty-eight countries. J.T. lives with her husband and twin kittens in Nashville, where she is hard at work on her next novel.
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In the beginning, there was a simple bridge that led to the sea. A marsh of cattails and sea flowers spread beneath it. The edge of the lake licked the lower pylons when the rains were heavy, and the sea touched the railings when the storms were severe.
It was rare to have a lake so close to the ocean, but this land was different than most. It kept secrets. It’s said that there was something about it that drove people mad. It made them do things they wouldn’t normally do. It hypnotized. It seduced. The sea called, and the body answered, helpless against the pull of the tides.
There was a bog near the bridge, on the other side of the forest. The things that disappeared into that place… Animals. Trees. People.
Yes, it was beautiful, but it was dangerous. So many were lost over the years, women who vanished into the woods and never returned. Why someone would build a school in this desolate area was a forever unknown. The architecture was classic Gothic, severe verticals with arches and buttresses, harled stone two feet thick to keep out the worst of the winter nor’easters, turrets and mullioned windows and chimneys sticking up like fingers from the expansive roof – it looked like it belonged in the British countryside, perched in decaying solitude upon the moors. But the building was well maintained, inside and out. Each room had a fireplace and a view – facing south over the gardens, west over the lake, north over the marsh, and east over the sea. To the cliffs. To certain death.
So many felt that siren call to the sea. Others went into the forest and didn’t return. Not enough that people didn’t want to send their girls there. Just an adequate supply to stoke the rumors. The cooler months were especially amenable to the darkest of tales about the school’s lost inhabitants, and the girls were happy to oblige with their own fanciful stories. They claimed graves of the children born to the women who studied here lined the kitchen wall, marked with tiny white crosses that only showed when the grass died. No one could ever find them, but they were there. A cemetery in consecrated ground offered a home to the bones of the people who first built the school; it was by the folly near the garden gate, and if you went there at midnight during the dark of the moon, you could talk to the founders of the school and hear their warnings. The third floor had a gray lady, and if she appeared, you were certain not to graduate. There were tunnels from the basement to the cliffs.
Isolation and cold breed a certain kind of madness that disguises itself well.
A consortium bought the school in the eighties, spiffed it up with a fresh coat of white limed paint and beautiful landscaping, and rebranded it as the Bridgend School. They established four houses within the confines of the building, sectioning them off so the individual members could build character together. They were named after the original builders: Bromley, Camden, Easton, and Xavier. The consortium did their best to dispel the rumors that plagued the institution, made a slick brochure, appealed to the wealthiest of the wealthy, and it worked. Bridgend was the destination school for the young ladies of the northeastern elites for quite a few years.
And then a student supposedly leaped from the cliffs, and all the old nasty rumors came out of the woodwork. Rumors, and stories, and secrets. This is one.
(C) J T Ellison 2023