Here is a little vignette I threw together. It could be the start of a longer tale if I can be bothered to write further chapters.
I hope it entertains.
My thanks to Blackrandi for her observations on the first half, but please remember that any and all mistakes are mine and mine alone.
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Whispers
Juliette sighed as she dropped the final box onto the bed of her new room.
She had gotten lucky, or unlucky depending on your point of view. Since she had been the last person to apply for a room in the dorms, and nobody else had wanted the single room on the top corridor, it had become hers.
It wasn't the room itself that was the problem. It was a nice room, not quite as large as a double dorm room, but plenty roomy, and well-lit with large roof windows which had electrically operated blackout blinds.
There were a few reasons that people didn't want this room. First, it was on the very top floor of four, right at the top of one of the old buildings that the university used to house female students. There was no elevator. Second, there was no bathroom on this floor, so to use the bathroom or shower she had to go down one flight and use the communal one on the floor below. There was a small wash basin in her room so she could brush her teeth, and had access to water for the small kettle she had brought with her to make coffee. There had been a bathroom on the floor previously, but it had been condemned as unsafe, and it was now locked shut, the university not deeming it economically viable to repair it for the use of a single student.
Those were the reasons that the housing officer gave her when she asked why such a desirable room was still vacant so close to the start of term when she would have expected it to have been snapped up by one of the first students to apply.
When she told some of the other students, however, which room she had been allocated she got a different story.
"That room's haunted" she was told, "That's why nobody wants to stay in there. Loads of girls have seen stuff."
Juliette laughed to herself. There was no such thing as ghosts. It was an old building, there were bound to be bumps and groans in the night as it settled and moved, and some girls can be so melodramatic.
Also, the house shared a common wall with one of the boys' dorms, although they had completely separate entrances, and there was no way to move from one building to the other. She didn't doubt that there would be pranksters in the boys' dorms, who, knowing that the top room in the girls' dorm was reputed to be haunted, would make noises, or do other stuff to scare the occupant. Girls may be melodramatic, but boys are juvenile.
She took a drink of water from her bottle and started to unpack. She was late moving in, having had to stay home to look after her little brother while her parents were away. They only came back this morning and she had made the three-hour car journey almost as soon as they had returned. She needed to get everything sorted tonight, as her classes started tomorrow. Most of them would just be registration, but even so, she wanted to be prepared.
Juliette was studying to be a biomedical scientist, a difficult course, and one that didn't have too many women. She wanted to make a good impression. She knew that there would be a lot of competition and that a lot of the boys on that course would disregard her simply because she was female.
She knew that they wouldn't disregard her out of the classroom though. At five feet six, with flaming red hair, green eyes, and a slim figure, with curves in all the right places, Juliette had plenty of admirers in her hometown. She had even accepted one or two invitations to step out and had lost her virginity, predictably on prom night, to a school football player called Albert.
She had had several boyfriends since then, but nothing too serious and she was not currently involved. She wasn't actively looking for a boyfriend or girlfriend for that matter, but if something came along, she wouldn't be averse to some fun. She had put herself on the pill, and also had a box of condoms in her bag, pregnancy not being her only concern.
It was late by the time she had put everything away to her satisfaction. She had not bothered to go to the cafeteria for lunch and had eaten on the journey up. A chocolate bar and packet of chips had sustained her for the evening and now she was ready for a quick shower and bed.
Grabbing her washbag, keys, and some clean clothes to change into, she went down to the floor below to check out the shower room.
It wasn't huge, as a lot of the rooms on this floor had been updated to have their own facilities, but it was clean and well-lit. There were four individual shower cubicles with frosted glass doors on one wall, opposite a bank of sinks. To the back of the room were six toilet stalls, all freshly painted and in good repair. The room smelled clean and fresh.
After her shower, and dressed in a long tee-shirt, a clean pair of panties, and flip-flops, she made her way back up to her room.
She made herself a cup of herbal tea, and settled onto her bed with the course prospectus, once more reviewing her requirements in preparation for the next day.
Her tea finished, and yawning widely, Juliette put her cup on her bedside, double-checked the alarm on her phone was set, and it was charging, and turned the light off in preparation for sleep. The room was filled with pale moonlight, coming in through the roof lights. She decided she liked it, and so didn't close the blackout blinds.
Within minutes of settling down, Juliette was fast asleep, breathing steadily.
A puddle of moonlight on the foot of her bed seemed to move. At first glance, it could have been mistaken for an errant movement of Juliette's foot as she slept, but it began to progress further up the bed, growing in size and intensity as it went. The light seemed to coalesce into the shape of a girl, no taller than five feet, and waif-like in stature. By the time the spectre was fully formed it was standing beside Juliette's bed, next to her pillow.
The spectre knelt at the side of the bed and began to whisper in Juliette's ear.