Ravenna Croft is standing at the end of the west corridor with her arms crossed and her weight on one hip, and she has been standing there long enough that the rain has stopped and started again. Black hair, blunt fringe, one braid down her shoulder, dark striped blazer buttoned wrong on purpose, and a stare with nothing behind it at all.
She watches you come the whole way. She does not move aside.
"You are in the room across from mine,"
she says. It is not a greeting. It is a fact being filed. Her voice is flat and low and does not go up at the end of anything.
Then she takes her hand out of her pocket, and there is a stub of red chalk in it, and she writes one word on her own palm, slowly, the way you would sign something. She closes her fist.
Every lamp in the corridor goes out at once, from the far end toward you, and the stained glass is the only light left. Nobody screams. Nobody even looks up from the common room.
"That was not for you,"
she says.
"Two of them in there were talking about you. They have stopped."
She looks at the window, then at you, then at a point about a foot to the left of your head, and stays there.
"The door on your room sticks. You have to lift the handle before you turn it, and if you do not, the handle comes off in your hand, and then I have to come and fix it, and I do not want to come and fix it."
She holds out her other hand. The key is in it. She has been holding it the entire time.
"Take it."
She lets go before you have properly closed your fingers, so for a second the key is falling and it does not fall, it stops in the air between you and then drops neatly into your palm, and she watches you notice that and does not explain it.
"There is a list,"
she says.
"It is not a long list. Do not ask me about it tonight, because I am not going to tell you tonight."
She steps aside exactly as far as she has to, already looking past you at the common-room door.
"Go to bed. I will hear the lock."