CC: Stains on the Marble

Her lungs stung with each breath she took in, the air like needles against her cheeks as she sped over the cobblestones. The sun had long set, the moon had not shown itself that night, and the sky hung heavy, as if smothered under damp wool. With each strong lash of wind leaving her face raw, she clung onto her scarf tighter, slick with mist. She hurried to reach the faculty library in time. The only thing aiding her vision were the streetlights, bleeding their reflection into the river as pale, shivering veins of light. Their reflection calmly rocked with the wind from a distance, the river pretending to sleep. In the distance, she could spot her destination. 

An imposing neoclassical building overlooking the river, two high floors with five large windows. The one in the middle stood out as an Oriel: a projecting bay window with pointed arches, stone mullions dividing the window into vertical sections, and intricate tracings of curving, flowing patterns in the stone. Beneath it, two gargoyles bore its weight, their mouths open in silent strain. Inside, dust and candle soot clung to the glass, muting the light into a dully, milky eye. The other four windows were Palladian windows, typical of a neoclassical building: large central arched apertures flanked by two narrower rectangular ones. As she drew closer, the wind had died down, and the air grew thinner. They stretched high and narrow, imitating the columns of an old temple— a cathedral to reason, built to keep the outside world looking in. Her steps faltered, noticing her surroundings shifting: a thick fog had crept around her feet, rising from the river like breath from a grave. Slowly, one by one, the streetlights were snuffed out, swallowed by the fog. But the fog followed her, folding itself in her wake like a living thing. She stopped. It stopped too. She hurried up the steps, releasing an unbeknownst breath once the large doors slammed behind her, echoing through the old colony marble hallways. She was met with the faint smell of chalk and cobalt. The statues loomed over her, demanding tribute before she passed, their imported alabaster eyes sharpening at the sight of her. The building’s exaggerated grandeur never uplifted, its marble pressing down, masquerading as enlightenment. 

She quickly found a seat for herself upstairs in the corner, hidden behind the bookshelves. She scattered her notes and books on the table, her lamplight highlighting the only illuminated spot on the entire floor. Her eyelids kept dragging down like wet cloth as time slurred. With the clock ticking, her eyes blurred over the lines she was reading, muddling the repetitive words together: Civilising mission. Universality. Humanity. Rule of law. Empire. Transport. Europe. The same gospel, recited endlessly. She forced herself to keep reading.

Thomas Macaulay’s A single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. 

Then John Mill’s Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians. 

Then A.V. Dicey’s The rule of law is the distinguishing mark of civilised nations.

She huffed at the amount of work still ahead of her, glancing over at the pile of books on her desk: Civilising Mission: the legal justification of empire. Trade, Property, Sovereignty: all one word in Latin. Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law. Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History. An Empire of Laws.

The whispers that had been present thickened nearer rather than louder, voices slipping over one another like pages turning underwater. Irritated, she turned around to hush the people behind her, only to find the place completely empty, the noise severing mid-breath. Her stress for the upcoming paper had made her callous towards the emptiness of the library despite it being the middle of exam week. She shook it off, believing it to be her messy mind, trying her best to ignore the fear within her heart. She looked up to the portraits, the reflection of their nameplates catching her eye. A chill went up her spine. They looked down on her, judging her dishevelled state. She shifted in her seat when her soles clung to the marble. She then felt a slow, tacky pull. She looked down to find a black ooze spreading onto the marble floor beneath her, slow and viscous, smelling faintly of ink and rot. She stumbled back off of her chair, frantically looking across the floor to find growing stains, multiplying like bruises across the stone. But in a blink of an eye, they all disappeared. She looked back at the portraits, only to find the nameplates had gone blank, disappearing as well. Panicked, she considered going home due to her mind’s tricks on her, but the illuminating books called her back into focus to finally get the paper done. She sat back down, heart thumping, and started to reorganise her notes, but something was missing. No, many things were missing. Footnotes had disappeared, and even quotes that she was reading faded into thin ghostly lines before completely vanishing from the page. More and more kept disappearing, her heart sinking as she grew more confused. The whispers grew louder, reciting the very words she was looking for. As she moved her arm, she knocked over her cup, her coffee spilling onto her notes with all her primary sources. She cursed at herself, now having to start over with the most vital part of her history paper.

She quickly rushed to the list of archives, finding the relevant hallway for the sources: Hallway A: Archives on Empire on Shelf G: Goods & Others. She had never seen this hallway before, typically having gone to Hallways 1 to 10. She rushed to the other side, walking through the maze of shelves. But the familiarity of the halls was lost—  the building seemed larger and the bookshelves longer than she remembered them. The deeper she went, the more the aisles warped: corners folding back on themselves, rooms repeating, shelves whispering as she passed until the layout was completely unrecognisable to her. Finally, she reached a dark wooden door, the grain warped like veins under skin. A tarnished golden plaque glimmered at the top: Hallway A: Archives on Empire, reading out how it was sealed off in the 1800s. So she turned around, intending to find a worker, only to see long rows of bookshelves, which she did not remember passing by. But it was late, no one was there, and this paper was too important to turn her back on now. So, she continued on, finding the door was unlocked. It cracked open before slamming shut loudly despite its lightness. The hall yawned before her, the walls filled with portraits of famous legal scholars. With each step she took, she felt the eyes of the portraits dragging after her, their brows furrowing, the varnish gleaming like sweat as she grew closer. Their eyes were varnished the brightest, and their smiles were sealed in oil and authority. What shocked her more was the fact that their portraits were there in the first place: vile men celebrated with their own spot in the halls of an infamous law school representing human rights. Again, her mind was playing tricks on her: illusions of the dark. She glanced at their names, rewardingly carved into the marble walls. She recalled how her last name always looked misplaced on the department door in her university— too soft for marble. Her nausea was overwhelming. The air tilted and the whispers pried behind her eyes, splitting her head.

She rushed into the room at the end of the hall with books, shakily looking through the rows of books, but she could not recognise any of the authors and their stories of the past. Nothing made sense: the hallway that she had never seen before, the portraits of false heroes, and the books of witnesses with their names etched in cramped brown ink and titles already half-erased. In a moment of triumph, what she had been looking for had revealed itself. An old book with the original writings of her key primary source. She brought it to a nearby desk in front of the window overlooking the river— the Oriel. It was narrower than she thought. Outside, the world bent away beneath her, a drop into fog and shadow, while the leaded glass cut lamplights into shards that trembled across her hands. When she opened the book, it was the work of someone else with the author’s name scratched off. Frustrated, she slumped, not wanting to go through the hassle of looking for the correct manuscript. She figured that she should find her bearings and calm down so the noise could stop. 

After a few minutes, the whispers hadn’t died down, so, to distract herself and out of curiosity, she started to read the book. She discovered that the work was more relevant to her paper than what she originally wanted. She sat back up and started to write, but the whispers grew even louder. This time, she heard a familiar voice: That’s not really relevant to European law, is it? She shot around, expecting to see her professor, but again, no one. The whispers surrounded her, coming from all spots of the room, and more and more memories voiced out to her, insulting her paper, insulting her. She turned back to the book, continuing to write her notes aggressively, ignoring the voices. European law is not the place to reopen history. Focus on integration, not empire. The memory of her professor’s words had twisted from false sympathy to sneering mockery. Integration was empire, she snapped back under her breath as she almost tore into her notes with her pen. The walls started to crack with dry screams, and the black ooze had returned, slow and pulsing. The room filled, cold liquid climbing up to her knees, dark and heavy like oil. It reeked of salt, almost brackish. She stood up, ready to make way for the door, but it had disappeared, and there was no way out. She looked to the window, confronted with her own reflection, a moment too slow to follow her. But as her vision curdled into darkness, her reflection thinned like ink rinsed from glass. She looked down at her body, her hand having become translucent. A scream tore itself loose from her throat, raw and coarse as if she had just coughed up salt water, looking back up to see nothing but the river before her sight was taken from her.

“How long has she been here for?” The detective stood over the girl, her skin the colour of the river’s underbelly. 

“It looks like since around 3 am,” the policeman replied with experience, the cold muffling his breath. 

“And no one saw anything?” The detective crouched down to her, the fog hugging her corpse. 

“No, just the person who found her this morning. She said she heard pages turning,” the policeman chuckled, “I mean, it was raining last night. Odd way of describing the wind, right?” 

The detective didn’t answer, his eyes drifting around before settling on the neoclassical building. “Was she a student?” he asked. 

“Yeah, just found her student ID, and these,” The policeman pointed to her bag surrounded by wet pieces of paper. 

With his pen, the detective lifted the bag, revealing written notes half-melted, their words completely illegible due to water damage, but still wet and moving as smudged blotches of ink left. A fresh thin line of ink could be seen flowing down within the cracks of the cobblestones into the river. “How was she found?” The detective stood back up, inspecting the nearby bridge. 

“The lady saw her body hanging onto the branch stuck over there. Half of her was still in the river. We had to pull her out,” The policeman sighed. 

“So, she jumped?” The detective asked matter-of-factly, the fog curling inwards. 

“Looks like it. It always happens this time of year,” the policeman shook his head. 

“And the building?” 

“You mean the campus library? Apparently, it was closed,” The policeman explained, “Every door locked and sealed. But—” the policeman hesitated.

 “What?” The detective pressed. 

“W— well, the floors and walls were all damp, but no mould, like the place was recently doused with water,” the policeman shivered as he recounted. 

The detective took a beat and looked back at the building: two high floors with four large Palladian windows on the second floor. 

“Ah, it’s probably nothing,” the policeman continued, “It’s such a shame though, she was so young. Just another one that couldn’t handle the pressure. It looked like she was studying.”

“More like writing a paper, judging from the books and papers,” The Detective continued to inspect her until he noticed the only thing that could be made out from the notes. It was written deeper than the rest, pressed into the pulp like a bruise: The Law of Forgetting.