A Lesson in Vengeance

by Victoria Lee

  “Nothing happened,” Alex said after several seconds. “It’s not moving.”

  “You have to wait for it.”

  “You know that when the pointer moves, it’s because we’re moving it, right? Like, they’ve done studies on this.”

  I ignored her and closed my eyes. I’d stolen the Margery Skull; it sat at the head of our altar, close enough that I could have touched it. A part of me wanted to. The urge was almost overpowering. Maybe if I did…Maybe that’s what this ritual needed.

  I shifted forward, eyes still shut, fingers reaching. My touch grazed cold bone, and in the same moment, the planchette moved.

  My eyes flew open. The pointer had darted across the board to cover the number 5.

  “What does that mean?” Alex said, and I shook my head.

  The Dalloway Five.

  The candles guttered as if from an unseen wind. The room had gone chilly, and a strange sensation crept up my spine. My fingers quivered with the effort of keeping my touch on the planchette light; I refused to lend any credence to Alex’s theory. If the board spoke, it wouldn’t be because I forced matters into my own hands.

  I’d never tried this kind of thing before. I didn’t know what to expect.

  Be real. I need you to be real.

  “Are you really here?” I whispered. “Is this…Margery Lemont? Or—”

  I stopped myself midsentence and stared at the lettering on the board indicating the word yes. But the planchette had gone still, the numeral 5 still visible through its aperture.

  This wasn’t enough. The incense, the candles—even Margery’s skull smooth against my palm. It wasn’t enough.

  I’d read about this. I’d read dozens of books, hundreds, researching for my thesis. I knew how magic worked. I knew what these kinds of spirits required.

  “We have to make a sacrifice,” I told Alex abruptly. “Like the original Dalloway Five did in their séance, with the frog. If the Dalloway Five really were witches, they were powerful. Why should they speak to us if we don’t give them something in return?”

  Alex’s mouth twisted, skeptical. “Well, I forgot to bring along my handy-dandy sacrificial goat, so…”

  But I already knew what Margery wanted.

  I released the planchette and grabbed the letter opener—the one I’d used to open the Ouija board box.

  “Felicity, don’t you dare—”

  I sliced the blade into my palm. White fire cut along my veins, dark blood welling up in its wake. Alex lurched back as I held out my arm, but she didn’t leave the circle, didn’t retreat—just watched wide-eyed as my blood spattered the crown of Margery Lemont’s skull.

  The candles blew out.

  Even Alex yelped. My heart pounded in my chest—too fast, too wild. Was that a figure stepping out from the shadows, eyes gleaming in the darkness like polished coins?

  Alex struck a match, and the specter vanished. The place where it had stood was pitch black, and yet I could still feel its presence. Maybe it hadn’t disappeared. Maybe instead it had expanded, consuming us.

  Alex and I stared at each other across the board. Alex’s shoulders shifted in quick, shallow little movements, her tongue flicking out to wet her lower lip. It felt colder now than before, like the temperature had dropped several degrees when the candles went out.

  It’s all right, I wanted to tell her, but my tongue was a dead thing in my mouth, heavy and ill tasting. As if I’d swallowed grave dirt.

  Margery Lemont had been buried alive.

  My blood was sticky against my palm, the scent of it high and coppery in the air, overwhelming the musk of incense. Alex lit the candles again—just the three nearest her. Their light cast unnatural shapes along the board, most of the letters fallen into darkness.

  Neither of us were touching the planchette anymore, but its aperture was fixed over the word yes.

  “Did you move the pointer?”

  Alex shook her head.

  My teeth dug into my lower lip. Together, we both tilted forward once more, our trembling fingers meeting atop the wooden planchette.

  “Are the stories true?” I asked. “Were you really witches?”

  If the ritual account of Flora’s death was true, it had been clearly Druidic in inspiration: some bastardization of Greco-Roman reports that the ancient Celts performed human sacrifice at the autumnal equinox—that the future could be read in the way the victim’s limbs convulsed as they died. Even the way in which the sacrifice bled had prognostic value.

  The town midwife’s diary told a version of the story in which Flora Grayfriar’s body was found with her skin half-burned and her clothes in ashes atop a wicker altar. Silver mullein leaves were strewn about the ground, a wormwood crown laced through her hair, her throat wet with blood.

  I knew the answer to my query, but I wanted Margery to say it nonetheless.

  The planchette shifted under our hands, my breath catching in my chest—the planchette moved aside, then returned immediately to yes.

  So many new questions swelled inside me. Too many. It was impossible to ask all of them. Impossible to ask with a board and a pointer the question I really wanted to know:

  What can you teach me about magic?

  I was about to ask the Dalloway Five the purpose of Flora’s death, what ritual they were trying to perform that night at the autumn equinox—if they were even responsible for her death at all—when the planchette moved again.

  “Get the notebook,” Alex gasped, and I snatched my moleskin back into my lap and uncapped my pen with one shaking hand.

  The planchette shifted across the board in jagged jerks under our touch.

  “I…A…”

  The air was frigid now, a bone-deep ice that crystallized in my blood. I didn’t dare look away from the board, which meant that when the planchette finally went still—when I finally turned my gaze to the notebook—I could barely read my own handwriting.

  “What does it say?” Alex urged after I’d been silent for several seconds.

  “It says…” I shook my head, swallowed; my throat had gone dry. “It says, ‘I am going to kill you.’ ”

  I looked up. Alex stared at me from the other side of the board, both her hands clenched in white fists against her knees. Her face glowed greenish in the candlelight, eerie, and—

  Something grazed the back of my neck, a cold finger tracing down my spine.

  “Alex,” I choked out.

  “Are you okay?”

  The touch vanished; I felt a breeze ripple through my hair as it passed. I was too afraid to look over my shoulder. “I swear, something just—”

  The shadows deepened, coalescing like smoke. A figure rose behind Alex like a ghastly silhouette, long hair undulating like waves about its head, its hands like sharp claws reaching.

  Reaching for her throat.

  “Alex, behind you!”

  She spun around, and in that same motion the specter vanished, bursting into shards and scraps of shadow that faded into the night.

  Margery.

  “Nothing’s there,” Alex said.

  But I could still sense her: Margery Lemont’s spirit had its talons dug deep in my heart, my blood turned to poison in my veins.

  I shook my head. “It was…She was there, I swear. She was right there.”

  How did the poem go?

  And then the spirit, moving from her place,

  Touched there a shoulder, whispered in each ear,…

  But no one heeded her, or seemed to hear.

  “This is bullshit,” Alex declared.

  “No! Alex, don’t—”

  Too late. She swept the planchette from the board and stabbed the incense out. “It’s not real, Felicity. Calm down.”

  No. No, this was all spiraling out of control. We had to end th
e séance properly. Margery was still here, lurking, the veil between our world and the shade world gone thin and diaphanous at Samhain. It was only too easy for her to shift into our sphere.

  I’d prepared for this possibility: a tiny bowl of ground anise and clove to be ignited over a charcoal briquette—enough to protect against the cruelest spirit, or so I’d been assured by the library’s copy of Profane Magick.

  Alex scattered the spices across the floor, rendering them useless.

  That was the moment, I decided later, that set everything in motion, the moment the devil’s wheel began to turn, my blood spilled on Margery’s skull and Margery’s hands tangling in the threads of our fates. We’d cursed ourselves. I am going to kill you, she’d made me say. And she was right.

  It had an absurd sense of inevitability about it. I kept thinking about the séance the Dalloway Five had held, the one that was interrupted. About Flora, dead three days later. How each girl died in mysterious circumstances which couldn’t be explained, until finally Margery herself was buried alive. It was almost like whatever spirit they’d raised had cursed them—and wouldn’t rest until every one of those girls was dead.

  But at the time, I let Alex convince me. Once the lights were on, it all seemed rather ridiculous: The candles had guttered because we’d left the window open, which also accounted for the chill. The figure I’d seen behind Alex was her shadow stretching and shifting in the candlelight. Everything had a reasonable explanation, and Alex was right. The spooky atmosphere, the old school legends, Samhain: we’d let it get to us; that was all.

  I didn’t tell her how I couldn’t stop dreaming about Margery after that night, or how I slept with anise and clove under my pillow to keep her away.

  A few months later Alex was dead, and now…

  Now I can’t hide from the truth.

  The postcard never emerges. I search everywhere in the following days, even the hole in the back of my closet, but it’s no use. The card is gone, vanished into the place where lost things go.

  Or, perhaps, into someone else’s possession.

  I started reading We Have Always Lived in the Castle this morning for my thesis. I wonder if Merricat’s brand of magic would work here—if I could tie a black ribbon in knots and bury it in the back garden with a murmured incantation, and tomorrow I’d wake to find the postcard back on my wall, where it belongs.

  Not that I do that kind of thing anymore. If the postcard is lost, it will have to stay lost.

  Later in the day, right before we’re meant to head to Art History, Ellis knocks on the frame of my open door and says, “Let’s skip.”

  I’ve just finished packing my notebooks into my satchel; when I look back Ellis is leaning against my wall, arms folded over her chest and one heel tipped against the baseboard. She’s wearing trousers and a starched-collar dress shirt, the formality of her cuff links and suspenders somewhat undermined by the way her hair is pulled up in a messy knot, like she just woke up.

  “Class, you mean,” I say.

  “I was thinking we could go into town instead,” she says. “There’s this little antiques shop on Dorchester I’ve been meaning to explore.”

  The whole thing smells suspiciously of pity. Bridget Crenshaw might have evaded the torment of being partnered with me for our project, but that hasn’t stopped her from trying to turn half the school against me. Incredible how much damage one girl could do in just two days.

  I’d heard about it from Hannah Stratford, of all people. “You know you can talk to me,” she’d said, after accosting me in the cafeteria line. “If you want.”

  I hadn’t understood what she meant, not until she went on:

  “My sister was sick like that, too. She tried…you know. To”—Hannah had lowered her voice to a stage whisper—“kill herself. She’s better now, but I just…I figured, if you needed to talk—”

  “I didn’t try to fucking kill myself.”

  “Oh!” Hannah’s face had flushed the same mauve color as her fingernail polish. I doubted her embarrassment even had anything to do with the mistake; she’d just never heard me swear before. “I only…I heard…”

  I’d stared at her, letting her fumble her way back to safer ground.

  “It’s just, Bridget said—”

  “Bridget said,” I’d repeated, and Hannah stammered an apology, finally flitting out of line to go join the queue for sandwiches instead.

  Bridget said.

  So now I wasn’t just a murderer; I was suicidal, too.

  I didn’t understand how Bridget could have found out. Not the killing myself part—I’d never tried to kill myself—but…

  The fact that I’d been gone last semester was no secret. I’d spent four months at a private residential facility tucked away near the Cascades, listening to people with rows of degree certificates on their walls explain to me that it wasn’t my fault, that I’d had no choice, that just because I took my knife and sawed through that rope and killed my best friend, that didn’t make me a psychopath. As if I didn’t know that already.

  News travels fast at Dalloway. The rumors must have reached Ellis by now.

  But even if this is pity, it doesn’t change the fact that I want nothing less than to go to that goddamn class and sit there and watch Bridget Crenshaw make tragic faces at me from across the room.

  “All right,” I say, and take the notebooks back out of my bag.

  * * *

  —

  The antiques shop is housed in an old Victorian positioned between a bookstore and a Thai restaurant. A narrow deck curls around the face of the house, a few ancient rocking chairs gazing out over the road. If we were nearer to the water, I could have imagined an old widow perched in one of those chairs, dressed in black but still peering through her binoculars at the sea, waiting for her love to finally come home.

  Ellis precedes me up the stairs. The deck looks like it was whitewashed once, but it’s now more gray wood than white paint. A little bell tingles over the door as we go inside. Ellis smiles over her shoulder at me, and I can’t help grinning back; it’s so very Ellis to be charmed by something that old-fashioned and simple.

  A shriveled woman sits behind the front desk. She gets to her feet when we enter, although that doesn’t make her more than an inch taller at most.

  “Can I help you girls with anything in particular?”

  “We’re browsing,” Ellis says.

  The woman’s smile is as wobbly as her knees. Her hands grip the edge of the counter like she needs to hold on to keep her balance.

  Alex will never be this old.

  “Well, if you need me…,” the woman says, and I can’t look at her anymore. I turn away, pretending fascination with a nearby lamp carved in the shape of a naked lady.

  Ellis wanders farther back into the store, and I follow, watching her pale hands drift over the shapes of old furniture and cloudy vases.

  “I love these,” Ellis says. She holds up a handful of marbles, all different colors. She rolls a few into my outstretched palm. Each sphere has its own unique starburst at its center, dye exploding into glass and glinting in the lamplight.

  “They remind me of my grandmother’s house,” I say.

  Ellis gives me a quizzical look.

  “She had vases filled with marbles and cut flowers. Seashells, too. It was a beach house.” I’d taken one of those marbles and swallowed it once, hoping, I think, that the magic they held would grow inside me like a seed, would become a part of me.

  “Which beach?”

  “Beaufort. On the Outer Banks of North Carolina.”

  “I’ve never been,” Ellis says. “Maybe that’s embarrassing to admit since I’m from Georgia—I could have gone anytime.”

  “You’re not missing much.”

  That was a lie, although I’m not sure why I told it. I’d loved
my grandmother’s house. I loved the way the sea crashed in against the rocky shore. I loved the dunes held together by repetitive wind patterns and tall grass. I loved the way the dock felt under my bare toes, the smell of salt, and the crabs we caught in little wire cages.

  I’d also loved the sound the steam made as it escaped the crabs’ shells when we boiled them alive.

  Are they screaming? I’d asked my grandmother, simultaneously horrified and fascinated, and she’d covered the pot with a lid to stop me watching.

  “Where in Georgia?” I ask. The conversation has fallen into a silence that doesn’t feel entirely natural. Or maybe it’s that I want Ellis to keep talking about herself, about mundane things—hometowns and summer holidays—normal topics normal people discuss.

  “Savannah. Does your grandmother still live in that house?”

  “She died a few years ago. The house belongs to my aunt now.”

  “Too bad.” Ellis pours the marbles back into their bowl. “You must miss her.”

  I dip my hand into a basket of lace shawls that smells like dust. Ellis examines a sculpture of a soldier astride a rearing stallion, the horse’s mane tangling in the wind.

  My grandmother died three years ago now. Sometimes it’s hard to remember the topography of her face or the sound of her voice. I wonder if we all fade from memory so quickly after we pass. I wonder if one day I’ll forget what Alex sounded like, too.

  “Isn’t this much better than class?” Ellis asks when I don’t answer. “Why sit in a stiff metal chair staring at dozens of laminates”—she trails her fingers along the line of the horse’s flank—“when you can touch?”

  I stare at the movement of her hand, a work of art in itself somehow: elegant knuckles and almond-shaped nails, a smudge of ink on her thumb.

  She catches me looking. I draw one of the shawls out of the basket; I drape it over my shoulders, a mourner in white.

  This time, I smile. “It’s better.”

  Ellis laughs and steals a wide-brimmed hat from a nearby mannequin, perching it atop her head. It makes her look like a character from an Agatha Christie novel; she has become a hard-boiled detective in herringbone with a nose for blood.