A Lesson in Vengeance

by Victoria Lee

  Nothing comes. Of course it doesn’t. I’m just—

  It’s paranoia. It’s the same strain of fear that used to send me lurching awake in the middle of the night with my throat torn raw. It’s guilt reaching long fingers into the soft underbelly of my mind and letting the guts spill out.

  I don’t know how long it is before I can open my book again and turn my gaze away from the door and to the words instead. No doubt reading murder books alone in an old house is half my problem. Impossible not to startle at every creak and bump when you’re half buried in a story that heavily features library crimes.

  The afternoon slips toward evening; I have to turn on more lights and refill my tea in the kitchen, but I finish the book.

  I’ve just turned the final page when it happens again:

  Thump.

  And then, almost immediately after, the slow drag of something heavy across the floor above my head.

  This time I don’t hesitate.

  I take the stairs up to the second floor two at a time, and I’m halfway down the hall when I realize Alex’s bedroom door is open. Bile surges up my throat, and no…no—

  But when I come to a stop in front of Alex’s room, there’s no ghost.

  A girl sits at Alex’s desk, slim and black-haired with fountain pen in hand. She’s wearing an oversized glen check blazer and silver cuff links. I’ve never seen her before in my life.

  She glances up from her writing, and our eyes meet. Hers are gray, the color of the sky at midwinter.

  “Who are you?” The words tumble out of me all at once, sharp and aggressive. “What are you doing here?”

  The room isn’t empty. The bed has sheets on it. There are houseplants on the windowsill. Books pile atop the dresser.

  This girl isn’t Alex, but she’s in Alex’s room. She’s in Alex’s room, and looking at me like I just walked in off the street dripping with garbage.

  She sets down her pen and says, “I live here.” Her voice is low, accent like molasses.

  For a moment we stare at each other, static humming in my chest. The girl is as calm and motionless as lake water. It’s unnerving. I keep expecting her to ask Why are you here?—to turn the question back around on me, the intruder—but she never does.

  She’s waiting for me to speak. All the niceties are close at hand: introductions, small talk, polite questions about origin and interests. But my jaw is wired shut, and I say nothing.

  At last she rises from her seat, chair legs scraping against the hardwood, and shuts the door in my face.

  The girl in Alex’s room isn’t a ghost, but she might as well be.

  A day passes without us speaking again; the door to Alex’s room remains shut, the only sign of the new occupant’s presence the occasional creak of a floorboard or a dirty coffee cup left out on the kitchen counter. At noon I spot her out on the porch, sitting in a rocking chair with a cigarette in one hand and Oryx and Crake in the other, dressed in a seersucker suit.

  I split my time between my bedroom and the common room, venturing once to the faculty dining hall to load up a box of food and abscond with it back to Godwin House; nothing seems worse to me than the prospect of trying to eat while all the English faculty wander up to me to remind me how sorry they are, how difficult it must be, how brave I am to come back here after everything.

  If I keep moving—bedroom, common room; common room, bedroom—then maybe the cold won’t catch up to me.

  That’s what I tell myself, at least. But in the end I can’t outrun it.

  I’m in the reading nook when it happens. I’ve curled up lodged on the window seat at the end of the ground-floor hallway, shoes kicked off and sock feet tucked between the cushions, the books from Dr. Wyatt’s summer reading list stacked on the floor by my hip. My eyelids are heavy, sinking low no matter how hard I fight to keep my gaze fixed on the page. I’ve lit candles even though it’s still late afternoon; the flames flicker and spit, reflecting off the window glass.

  A moment, I think. I’ll just close my eyes for a moment.

  Sleep swells around me like groundwater. The dark pulls me under.

  And then I’m back on the mountain, hands numb in my gloves as I cling to that meager ledge. The storm is unrelenting, sleet battering the nape of my neck. I keep thinking about dark water rising in my lungs. About Alex’s body broken on the rocks.

  The snow beneath me isn’t shifting anymore. I perch light on its back, light like an insect, motionless. If I move, the mountain will shiver and swat me away.

  If I don’t move, I will die here.

  “Then die,” Alex says, and I snap awake.

  The hall has gone dark. The tall windows gaze out into the black woods, and the candles have blown out. My breath is the only thing I can hear, heavy and arrhythmic. It bursts out of me in gasps—painful, like I’m at altitude, like I’m still so far above the earth.

  I feel her fingers at the back of my neck, nails like shards of ice. I jerk around, but there’s no one there. Shadows stretch out through the empty halls of Godwin House, unseen eyes gazing down from the tall corners. Once upon a time I found it so easy to forget the stories about Godwin House and the five Dalloway witches who lived here three hundred years ago, their blood in our dirt, their bones hanging from our trees. If this place is haunted, it’s haunted by the legacy of murder and magic—not by Alex Haywood.

  Alex was the brightest thing in these halls. Alex kept the night at bay.

  I need to turn on the lights. But I can’t move from this spot against the window, can’t stop gripping my own knees with both hands.

  She isn’t here. She’s gone. She’s gone.

  I lurch up and stagger to the nearest floor lamp, yank the chain to switch on the light. The bulb glares white; and I turn to face the hall again, to prove to myself it’s empty. And of course it is. God, what time is it? 3:03 a.m. says my overly bright phone screen. It’s too late for the girl in Alex’s room to still be awake.

  I turn on every light between there and my bedroom, pulse stammering as I keep climbing the stairs past the second floor—Don’t look, don’t look—and up to the third.

  In my room I shut the door and crouch down on the rug. If this were last year I might have cast a spell, a circle of light my protection against the dark. Tonight my hands shake so badly I break three matches before I manage to strike a flame. I don’t make a circle. Magic doesn’t exist. I don’t cast a spell. I just light three candles and hunch forward over their heat.

  Practice mindfulness, Dr. Ortega would say. Focus on the flame. Focus on something real.

  If anything supernatural wanders these halls, it doesn’t answer; the candle flames flicker in the dim light and cast shifting shadows against the wall.

  “No one’s there,” I whisper, and no sooner have the words left my lips than someone knocks.

  I startle violently enough that I knock over a candle. The silk rug catches almost instantly, yellow fire eating a quick path across the antique pattern. I’m still stamping out sparks when someone says, “What are you doing?”

  I look up. Alex’s replacement stands in my doorway. And although it’s past three in the morning, she’s dressed as if she’s about to walk into a law school interview. She’s even wearing collar studs.

  “Summoning the devil. What does it look like?” I answer, but the heat burning in my cheeks betrays me; I’m humiliated. I want to kick the rest of the candles over and burn the whole house down so no one knows I got caught like this.

  One of the girl’s brows lifts.

  I’ve never been able to do that. Even after ages staring at myself in the mirror, I’ve only ever been able to muster a constipated sort of grimace.

  I expect a witty comeback, something sharp and bladed and befitting this strange girl with all her unexpected edges. But she just says, “You left all the lights on.” />
  “I’ll turn them off.”

  “Thank you.” She turns to go, presumably to vanish back downstairs and from my life for another few days.

  “Wait,” I say, and she glances back, the candlelight flickering across her face and casting odd shadows beneath her cheekbones. I step gingerly over the remaining flames, but I still feel the heat as my legs cross over. I hold out my hand. “I’m Felicity. Felicity Morrow.”

  She eyes my hand for a moment before she finally reaches out and shakes it. Her palm is cool, her grasp strong. “Ellis.”

  “Is that a first or a last name?”

  She laughs and drops my hand and doesn’t answer. I stand there in the doorway, watching her head back down the hall. Her hips don’t sway when she walks. She just goes, hands in her trouser pockets and the motion of her body straight and sure.

  I don’t know why she’s here early. I don’t know why she won’t tell me her name. I don’t know why she never speaks to me, or who she is.

  But I want to find a loose thread on the collar of her shirt and tug.

  I want to unravel her.

  Everyone returns two days later, the Saturday before classes commence. Not in a trickle, but in hordes: the front lot is a hive of cars, the quad flooded with new and returning students and their families—often dragging younger siblings to gaze through the looking glass at their own potential future. Four hundred girls: a small school by most standards, all of us students divvied up into even smaller living communities. Even so, I can’t quite bring myself to go downstairs while the new residents of Godwin House are moving in. But I do leave my door open. From my position on my bed, curled up with a book, I watch the figures crossing back and forth in the third-floor hall.

  Godwin House is the smallest on campus—only large enough to fit five students in addition to Housemistress MacDonald, who sleeps on the first floor, and reserved exclusively for upperclassmen. Expanding Godwin to fit more students was another cause we fought against. Just imagine this place with its rickety stairs and slanted floors appended to a modernized glass-and-concrete parasite of an extension, wood and marble giving way to carpet and formica, Godwin no longer the home of Dickinson and witches but a monstrous chimera designed to maximize residential density.

  No. We’ve been able to keep Godwin the way it is, the way it was three hundred years ago, when this school was founded. You can still feel history in these halls. At any moment you might turn the corner and find yourself face to face with a ghost from the past.

  There are two others assigned to this floor with me: a brown-skinned girl with long black hair, wearing an expression of perpetual boredom, and a pallid, pinch-faced redhead, whom I glimpse from time to time half-hidden behind a worn paperback of The Enchanted April. If they notice me in my room, perched on my bed with my laptop on my knees, they don’t say anything. I watch them direct hired help to carry boxes and suitcases up the stairs, sipping iced coffees while other people sweat for them.

  The first time I spot the redhead, a flash of hair vanishing around a corner like sudden flame, I almost think she’s Alex.

  She isn’t Alex.

  If my mother were here, she would urge me up off this bed and force me into a common space. I’d be shepherded from girl to girl until I’d introduced myself to them all. I’d offer to make tea, a gesture calculated to endear myself to them. I wouldn’t be late for supper, a chance to congregate with the rest of the Godwin girls in the house dining room, to trade summer anecdotes and pass the salt.

  I accomplish none of those things, and I do not go to supper at all.

  I feel as if the next year has just opened up in front of me, a great and yawning void that consumes all light. What will emerge from that darkness? What ghosts will reach from the shadows to close their fingers around my neck?

  A year ago, Alex and I let something evil into this house. What if it never left?

  I shut myself in my room and pace from the window to the door and back again, twisting my hands in front of my stomach. Magic isn’t real, I tell myself once again. Ghosts aren’t real.

  And if ghosts and magic aren’t real, curses aren’t real, either.

  But the tap-tap of the oak tree branches against my window reminds me of bony fingertips on glass, and I can’t get Alex’s voice out of my head.

  Tarot isn’t magic, I decide. It’s fortune-telling. It’s a historical practice. It’s…it’s essentially a card game. Therefore, there’s no risk courting old habits when I crouch in the closet and peel the baseboard away from the wall, reaching past herbs and candles and old stones to find the familiar metal tin that holds my Smith-Waite deck.

  I shove the rest of those dark materials back in place and scuttle out of the closet on my hands, breath coming sharp and shallow.

  Magic isn’t real. There’s nothing to be afraid of.

  I carry the box to my bed, shuffle the cards, and ask my questions: Will I fit in with these girls? Will I make friends here?

  Will Godwin House be anything like what I remember?

  I lay out three cards: past, present, future.

  Past: the Six of Cups, which represents freedom, happiness. It’s the card of childhood and innocence. Which, I suppose, is why it falls in my past.

  Present: the Nine of Wands, reversed. Hesitation. Paranoia. That sounds about right.

  And my future: the Devil.

  I frown down at my cards, then sweep them back into the deck. I never know what to make of the major arcana. Besides, tarot doesn’t predict the future, or so said Dr. Ortega, anyway. Tarot only means as much as your interpretation tells you about yourself.

  There’s no point in agonizing over the cards right now. Instead I check my reflection in the mirror, tying my hair back and applying a fresh coat of lipstick, then go downstairs to meet the rest of them.

  I find the new students in the common room. They’re all gathered around the coffee table, seemingly fixated on a chess game being played between Ellis and the redhead. A rose-scented candle burns, classical music playing on vinyl.

  Even though I know nothing about chess, I can tell Ellis is winning. The center of the board is controlled by her pawns, the other girl’s pieces pushed off to the flanks and battling to regain lost ground.

  “Hi,” I say.

  All eyes swing round to fix on me. It’s so abrupt—a single movement, as if synchronized—that I’m left feeling suddenly off balance. My smile is tentative on my mouth.

  I’m never tentative. I’m Felicity Morrow.

  But these girls don’t know that.

  All their gazes turn to Ellis next, as if asking her for permission to speak to me. Ellis sweeps a white pawn off the board and sits back. Drapes a wrist over her knee, says: “That’s Felicity.”

  As if I can’t introduce myself. And of course it’s too late now; what am I supposed to say? I can’t just say hi again. I’m certainly not going to agree with her: Yes indeed, my name is Felicity, you are quite correct.

  Ellis met these girls a few hours ago, and already she’s established herself as their center of gravity.

  One of them—a Black girl with a halo of tight coils, wearing a cardigan I recognize as this season’s Vivienne Westwood—takes pity on me. “Leonie Schuyler.”

  It’s enough to prompt the others to speak, at least.

  “Kajal Mehta,” says the thin, bored-looking girl from my floor.

  “Clara Kennedy.” The red-haired girl, her attention already turned back to the chess game.

  And it appears that concludes the conversation. Not that they return to whatever they’d been talking about before; now that I am here, the room has fallen silent, except for the click of Clara’s knight against the board and the sound of a match striking as Ellis lights a cigarette.

  Indoors. And not only does no one tell her to put it out, MacDonald fails to preternaturall
y manifest the way she would had it been me and Alex smoking in the common room: Books are flammable, girls!

  Well. I’m hardly going to leave just because they so clearly want me to. In fact…I belong here as much as they do. More than they do. I was a resident of Godwin House when they were still first-years begging for directions to the dining hall.

  I sit down in an empty armchair and pull out my phone, scrolling through my email while Clara and Kajal exchange incredulous looks—like they’ve never seen someone text before. And maybe they haven’t. They’re all dressed as if they’ve just emerged from the 1960s: tweed skirts and Peter Pan collars and scarlet lipstick.

  Ellis finishes the chess game in eight moves—a quick and brutal destruction of Clara’s army—and conversation resumes, albeit stiltedly, as if they’re all trying to forget I’m here. I learn that Leonie spent the summer at her family’s cottage in Nantucket, and Kajal has a pet cat named Birdie.

  I don’t learn anything I want to know—and frankly, nothing I didn’t know already. Leonie’s family, the Schuylers, are old money; and I’d seen Leonie around school before, I realize, although she had straight hair then, and she certainly hadn’t been wearing that massive antique signet ring. The surnames Mehta and Kennedy are equally storied, their wielders frequent guests at my mother’s holiday home in Venice.

  I want to know why they chose Godwin…or Dalloway altogether. I want to know if they were drawn here, as I was, by the allure of its literary past. Or if perhaps their interest goes back further, paging through the years to the eighteenth century, to dead girls and dark magic.

  “What do you think of Dalloway so far?” Leonie asks. Asks Ellis, that is.

  Ellis taps the ash from her cigarette into an empty teacup. “It’s fine. Much smaller than I expected.”

  “You get used to it,” Clara says with a silly little giggle. More and more I dislike her; perhaps because she reminds me too much of Alex, and yet not enough of her, either. Clara and Alex look alike, but that’s where the similarities end. “You’re lucky to be in Godwin. It’s the best house.”