During the last week of the month, something strange happened at Greenwood.
A school custodian named Perkins was responsible for waking up early every morning to mop the basement tunnels.
His routine was simple: carry a bucket and mop down the east stairs, then work his way across to the west exit.
He had done the job for years and knew the route well enough to walk it with his eyes closed.
On Tuesday morning, however, the other custodians arrived to find Perkins curled up on the steps by the tunnel entrance.
His mop lay three steps away, and his overturned bucket was leaking a trail of dirty water down the stairs.
Perkins was trembling violently, his shirt soaked with cold sweat and plastered to his back.
Someone helped him up and got a mouthful of hot tea down his throat.
He only repeated the same sentence over and over: "There's something breathing down there."
When they asked what it was, he couldn't explain.When they asked what he had seen, he shook his head and said he hadn't seen a thing.
The school doctor diagnosed an acute stress reaction brought on by nerves and recommended two weeks of rest at home.
Perkins had to be supported on the walk back, his body still shaking all the way out the school gates.
Several students saw it happen, and by lunchtime, half the dining hall was talking about him.
Richard had just finished his oxtail soup when Warren leaned in from across the table.
Warren was clutching a yellowed piece of paper, creased from repeated folding and frayed around the edges.
"Say... do you guys know what's buried under the Greenwood sports field?"
He slapped the paper onto the table.
"Here we go again," Mason said around a mouthful of bread, clearly used to Warren's rumors.
"No, this is the real deal." Warren tapped the paper with his fingertip.
"My cousin dug it out of the old archives at the Municipal Library. It's a photocopy of an original newspaper."
Grey set down her knife and fork, her blue eyes scanning the page.
Hugh looked up from his tray, and several nearby students edged closer at the sound of the conversation.
Mason claimed not to care, but he didn't move an inch.
Warren smoothed out the photocopy.
The newsprint was blurred from reproduction, but the headline remained legible:
The Briston Evening News, dated November 1862 of the New Calendar.
"About fifty years ago." He pointed to a passage circled in red ink.
"The east side of Greenwood—where the field and the new gym are now—used to be a textile mill.
During a night shift, a factory girl named Beth suddenly stopped breathing in the silk-reeling room."
"The strange thing was how she died. She had two holes in her neck."
Warren picked up his fork and gestured at the side of his own neck.
"Like a nail driven in and pulled out. Round and deep, without a drop of blood."
He set the fork down. "Have you ever seen meat left to dry in the sun all summer?
That's what she looked like. A sturdy, healthy girl turned into a dried husk that weighed less than half of what she should have."
Grey's brow furrowed slightly.
Mason forgot to chew his bread.
"The police ruled it an 'unexplained death,'" Warren said, turning to the middle of the clipping.
"The body was sent home for burial. Poor families didn't use funeral homes back then, so the coffin was kept in the front room of the house."
"But on the third night—" He rapped his fork hard against the table. "—Beth crawled out of her coffin."
The table fell quiet as everyone listened.
"She pushed the lid open from the inside. The sound of claws scraping the wall woke the person sleeping in the next room.
Her mother heard the noise and came out, only to find her daughter standing beside the coffin."
Warren stopped his scratching gesture against the table. "Except it wasn't her daughter anymore."
"She killed her mother first."
Someone at the table inhaled sharply.
"She killed her the same way she died: two holes in the neck, drained completely dry.
After draining her family, she walked out of the house and went straight back to the mill, where the night shift was still running."
"The girls tried to fight back that night.
One struck her in the head with an iron shuttle, another stabbed her in the back with heavy fabric shears... but none of it worked.
Hitting her with sharp tools was like striking a block of iron. No blood, not even a scratch."
The background noise of the dining hall suddenly seemed sharp and intrusive.
A lunch lady clanged her serving spoon against a metal bucket, making a younger girl nearby flinch.
"What happened next?" someone asked.
"The authorities sent people in." Warren flipped the clipping over.
"The paper called them the 'Special Hygiene Inspection Team'—a weird name like that. They sealed off the building as soon as they arrived, but two inspectors died during the operation."
"How did they finally kill her?" Mason asked, swallowing his bread at last.
"They didn't."
Warren turned the photocopy around to show the smaller print on the back.
"The article ends with a single line: 'Handled appropriately.'
The factory was torn down and the foundation sealed off. The official explanation was 'sanitary hazards.'"
He pressed his finger against a line of scribbled handwriting at the bottom of the page.
"Rumor has it the thing was never destroyed. It was sealed deep underground, along with the..."
He let the word hang on his tongue before releasing it: "...vengeful spirits of the people it killed."
"The land changed hands a few times after that until Greenwood bought it for the campus expansion. The field and the gym were built right over the original site."
"So that track we run on during gym class..." Warren pointed his fork toward the floor. "...might have that thing sealed underneath it."
The table stayed silent for several seconds.
The younger girl who had flinched earlier stood up in a hurry, grabbing her tray and muttering, "I'm not listening to this," as she walked quickly away.
Warren suppressed a smile, clearly pleased with how his story had landed.
"Believe what you want, but with everything happening in the basement lately..."
He lifted his chin toward the hall. "Old Perkins scared out of his wits, rumors of equipment lining up on its own at night... You think that's a coincidence?"
Richard lifted his cup and finished the last of his tea.
He sorted through the key details of Warren's story one by one:
Two holes in the neck, a drained body, a reanimated corpse, unnatural strength, and blades failing to draw blood or break the skin.
In Appendix C of that book, alongside a general overview of the world behind the veil, there was a section on common evil creatures.
One entry described the Vampire Strain.
Vampire Strain.
They were not native to the other side of the veil, but rather mutants born from deep ether contamination.
The Vampire Strain fed on vitality, usually piercing prey with their teeth to draw out blood and ether together.
Anyone killed by a Vampire Strain retained traces of ether contamination from the feeding.
In almost every case, that residue dissipated alongside the host's vitality at death.
In very rare instances, however, if the host possessed an unawakened ether affinity, the lingering contaminant would react with the corpse.
It was not resurrection; the body did not return to life.
The ether contaminant simply took over the empty shell, driving it to move, feed, and hunt.
The book referred to the result as a Ghoul.