At a boarding school, Matthew and his friends launch a ridiculous investigation into a string of missing socks and end up staking out the halls for a culprit no one can quite explain.
Matthew woke with the grim certainty that Mondays at boarding school were designed by someone who hated teenagers. He stretched across the creaky bed in room 311, blinked at the ceiling, and immediately knew something was wrong again.
Not because of the maths assignment due after breakfast. Not because of the English test waiting like a threat in his timetable. It was worse than both.
His second black sock had vanished.
Again.
Matthew knelt beside the bed and yanked open drawers with enough force to make the metal handles rattle. He checked under his pillow, inside his trainers, even in the stupid gap behind the radiator where the cleaner had once found a packet of crisps, a library book, and one extremely offended spider.
Nothing.
From the next bed, Kuba watched him with the kind of interest usually reserved for accidents and celebrity gossip. “You know,” he said, grinning, “at this point you should stop looking for socks and start building a case file. Your room looks cursed.”
Matthew threw a balled-up T-shirt at him. It missed by a mile and landed on Kuba’s alarm clock.
The joke stopped being funny once Sandra and Vera got involved.
They lived one floor up, which meant they had access to the kind of gossip that travelled through boarding school faster than homework deadlines. According to Sandra, the disappearing socks were probably connected to the P.E. teacher, because the thefts had started shortly after the new gym lockers arrived. According to Vera, the tutor’s lazy cat had finally developed a criminal career. According to Kuba, there was a secret society of sock collectors operating beneath the school in a tunnel nobody had discovered yet.
Matthew was not willing to rule that out.
By evening, the four of them had formed the Disappearing Socks Squad, which sounded less ridiculous when written down in Kuba’s notebook. They made a plan involving a night patrol, a hidden camera borrowed from Kuba’s phone, and a bait trail of melted cheese because Sandra insisted the cat would never ignore it.
“Assuming the cat is the culprit,” Matthew said.
“Assuming?” Vera repeated. “Matthew, at this point I’m prepared to accuse the entire building.”
Night dropped over the boarding school with the usual slow creak of pipes, distant footsteps, and the occasional door slamming somewhere down the corridor. Their dorm went quiet except for the heroic suffering of someone snoring behind the wall.
Sandra crouched by the doorway with a torch in one hand and a bright green face mask still smeared across her cheek, because she had forgotten to wash it off after dinner. In the pale light, she looked less like a detective and more like a ghost that had lost an argument with a slime monster.
Kuba checked the camera one last time. “If we catch this thing on video, I’m uploading it the second the internet comes back.”
“You have no internet,” Matthew said.
“Which makes this even more dramatic.”
They waited.
Minutes dragged. Matthew began to wonder whether they were about to spend the whole night staring at a plate of cheese while discovering absolutely nothing, which would be humiliating in a way that only boarding school could manage.
Then came a rustle.
Not from the room. From the corridor.
Something skidded across the floor with a sharp clatter, followed by a pause so complete that Matthew could hear his own heartbeat. Then, very softly, from somewhere near the bathroom door, came a meow.
Sandra nearly dropped the torch. Vera froze with her hand halfway to the camera. Kuba mouthed something that looked suspiciously like a swear word.
The phone camera caught a shape moving behind the bathroom door. Not fully human. Not fully cat, either. Just a sliver of shadow, a shoulder, and something pale swinging from one hand like a ribbon.
Matthew stared at it.
Then the bathroom door began to open, inch by inch, with a slow, deliberate creak....