A Lesson in Vengeance

by Victoria Lee

  “No, I think it’s endearing,” Ellis says, which serves to make me feel even worse. “I’ve been reading about it for my book, of course. I think I’m going to write Tamsyn Penhaligon as a fortune-teller, so I’d better learn how to fortune-tell myself. Do you mind?”

  I arch my brows questioningly.

  “Can I read your tea leaves?” Ellis clarifies.

  “Oh.” I almost don’t want her to. Every time I’ve read my own future in the cards, it’s been dark and incomprehensible. I’m not sure I want Ellis to see me so keenly. But I find myself saying, “All right,” and the grin that splits Ellis’s face is almost worth it.

  “Fantastic. Go on, pick up your cup….No, other hand. Left hand. Swirl what’s left of the tea three times from left to right.”

  “Now what?”

  “Now put the cup upside down on your saucer and leave it there.”

  I do. The clink of china is too loud in the quiet room. “I can’t believe you decided to learn how to read tea leaves.”

  “Method writer, remember?”

  Perhaps it’s not that Ellis learned tasseography that surprises me. It’s that she chose to learn about it from that book she’s now perusing so closely, finger skimming down the text on the page as if to keep her place. It’s easier to imagine her learning from experience instead of from a book: Ellis in some smoky London salon, lounging on a silk chaise and smoking opium while a veiled mystic reads her future from the grounds.

  We sit there for about a minute before Ellis gives me permission to rotate my cup three times then lift it upright.

  “Which direction is south?” she asks, and when I tell her she makes me point the cup handle that way, then reaches across the table to slide my saucer toward her.

  Ellis curves over the cup, her gaze flicking from the little bundle of leaves clustered opposite the handle to the flecks smeared about its belly. Her face is set in a mask of concentration; I wish I had the ability to slip into her mind and page through her thoughts, to read them as easily as she seems to read me.

  “Was I supposed to think of a question?” With tarot, usually you ask a question. I don’t know if the same holds true for tea leaves.

  “Oh, I have no idea. I suppose I can read your fortune more generally, if that’s all right with you.”

  It’s very all right. I’d rather her ask a broad question and be unable to interpret the answer than ask anything specific myself—like whether Alex’s ghost will leave me alone. Like whether I’ll ever be able to piece myself back together again.

  “There’s a cross,” Ellis says. She flips through the tea leaf book to the index, trails her finger down the long list of keywords until she finds the right one. “That represents death—not surprising, perhaps, given your history. It’s toward the bottom of the cup, which signifies events that occurred in the past.”

  I lean forward a little, trying to peer beyond the fall of Ellis’s errant hair and into the cup. I can’t make sense of any of it, of course.

  “A mountain,” she says. “That’s usually powerful friends. Oh, and apparently you’re going to be very successful in your career, that’s nice. Maybe that’s where you meet said powerful friends?” She trades me a quick grin. “We also have something that looks like a hand.” She has to check the book again, flipping back and forth between chapters. “That means relationships, either you helping other people or them helping you. Or it means justice. But that seems like quite the departure from the other interpretation, doesn’t it?”

  “I think you’re very bad at this,” I inform her with a wry grin.

  She smiles and tilts over the teacup again. “All right, last one. This looks kind of like a bird…that means dangerous situations. But it could also mean you’re being watched by spirits—I’m not sure which. Perhaps the ghosts of the Dalloway Five come to haunt their witchy inheritor?”

  Spirits. Or spirit, singular. I’ve tried to ignore the heaviness in this house, but after last night…that handprint on the window, right after I realized the truth…it’s too much of a coincidence. My tongue tastes metallic.

  Alex used to say I was too obsessed with the Dalloway Five, with magic in general. She told me I was being irrational. She told me I was crazy.

  But I’m not irrational, and I’m not crazy.

  Some things are too dark to be seen—or explained.

  I must have shivered visibly, because Ellis shuts the book and pushes the cup away, her gaze meeting mine across the table.

  “Don’t worry,” I tell her with a false smile, “I’m not frightened by some soggy—”

  The crash of ceramic shattering is so loud it feels like a gunshot. I’m on my feet, dizzy, staring across the room, where a potted plant just fell off the fireplace mantel, scattering pottery shards and black soil across the hardwood floor.

  It’s her. I knew it. She won’t leave me alone. Not now, not ever. It’s her, it’s her—

  Those words are stuck on a loop in my head now, trembling in my mind. Ellis pushes the saucer aside and tilts in closer, her eyes as wide and gray as cold pond water.

  “Felicity,” she starts, reaching for me; I flinch away.

  “It’s her,” I gasp. I want to press a hand to my face, but I don’t dare close my eyes. Even here, even with Ellis, Alex won’t leave me alone. “She won’t ever…She…”

  “Talk to me, Felicity.”

  I suck in a shallow, sharp breath and force myself to look away from the plant. It must have been freshly watered; dark liquid seeps along the floor, staining the fringe of the nearest rug.

  “What’s going on?” Ellis demands.

  I sit, but I’m shaking badly enough that Ellis must feel it when I brace an elbow against the table. “Nothing,” I say, trying to calm myself.

  But Ellis has scented blood, my soft underbelly exposed, and in this context—as in all contexts—she is nothing if not a shark. “Tell me.”

  I twist my hands together in my lap, hidden under the coffee table. An exhale heats the nape of my neck; I wonder if Ellis can see Alex behind me, her skeleton fingers closing around my throat.

  “You’re going to think I’m stupid.”

  The look Ellis fixes me with then is tight and disapproving. “I would never think you were stupid.”

  You’ve done it now, a voice scolds in the back of my head. Because it’s too late. I’ve gone and made this an enigma for Ellis to unravel. I have to say something, or else she’ll never stop picking at the knots—and if I unspool at Ellis’s hands for a second time, I’m not sure I’ll ever manage to stitch myself back together again.

  I grimace. “It’s…” Spit it out. No evasion, nowhere to hide. “Do you believe in ghosts?” I ask. “Real ones.”

  To her credit, Ellis doesn’t laugh.

  “I believe that ghosts are a culturally universal phenomenon,” Ellis says. “Whether I personally believe in them is neither here nor there; plenty of people do, and perhaps they know something I don’t.”

  I almost want to laugh. It’s just that the response is so characteristic, so terribly Ellis, that I might have predicted it.

  For all that I’ve been hiding from Ellis, she’s hid nothing from me. She’s an open book.

  “How academic of you.”

  “That’s me,” she says. “An intellectual.”

  Ellis’s gaze is wary still, but the fear has relaxed its grip on my shoulders, and they slump now, my hands going limp at last. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m imagining things.”

  Ellis says nothing. She waits in silence, and I keep talking to fill it.

  “But…ever since I came back here, to Godwin House…I feel like she…Alex…like she might be…” God. I need to stop prevaricating. I need to put words to this phenomenon. I need to call it what it is, name the thing and steal its power. “I think she’s haunting me.”


  Ellis’s gaze flicks down to the teacup, its muddled leaves with their messages of death and betrayal. My betrayal, of course, of Alex.

  “And why shouldn’t she?” I go on, voice dropped to a whisper now. “Ghosts are restless spirits. And she died because I…I’d want vengeance, too.”

  “You think she believes you murdered her,” Ellis says.

  I shrug. “I don’t know what Alex thinks.”

  But I know what everyone else does. I see it written in the surreptitious glances, the whispers behind cupped hands. I remember Clara’s fingers miming scissors at the Boleyn party. Before, in my muddled mind, I’d thought they’d blamed me for cutting the rope. Now I know they don’t believe my story of what happened at all.

  For several long moments Ellis just looks at me, eyes narrowed and her mouth set in a flat line. I almost expect her to renege on what she said yesterday, to tell me You’re right—you’re a killer, to launch into a typically Ellis inquisition about why I did it and how it felt. How convenient for her to have a real-life murderer right here, prepared to color in the white areas of her fictional psychopath.

  But then—

  “All right,” Ellis says. “Enough of this. You’re going to help me with my project.”

  “What project?”

  “My research for my novel,” she says. “I need to somehow reconstruct the experience of the Dalloway murders, so I was thinking I would plan them. If I take their deaths as inspiration, if I design a modern version of the murders as I think they could have happened—if I take all the steps but the last—then I can write it. And”—she arches one brow—“you can help me.”

  This time I really do laugh, the sound barking out of me like a dying person’s cough. “Why?” I say. “Because you think I know something about murdering people?”

  I did lie to her, after all. I lied, and the memory of it still hangs like smoke in the air between us, poisoning our lungs. There’s too much I managed to forget about that night with Alex, and Ellis knows it now.

  What else does she think she knows about me?

  What else does she suspect?

  “No.” Ellis pushes the cup and saucer aside and leans over the table again, her elbows planted on the wood and her chin resting atop a shelf of both hands. “Because you know everything there is to know about the Dalloway Five. Because you’ve researched them—you’ve clearly done your homework. Not to sound too utilitarian, but I’d like to capitalize on that.”

  “There’s a whole occult library at this school,” I inform her. “You could just go there.”

  “It’s not only that. You didn’t kill anyone, Felicity, not maliciously, and you aren’t being haunted. There are no ghosts, there’s no magic, and you didn’t kill Alex. I’ll prove it to you. Besides,” she adds, “if you help me with this, maybe you can go back to your old thesis. You know so much about the Dalloway witches; that knowledge shouldn’t go to waste. It’s all those horror novels making you believe in ghosts. Reality is reality. It’s pretty clear you’ve strayed far from that in recent weeks. Don’t you think it would be grounding, to look history in the eye and name it what it is?”

  “I haven’t lost my grip on reality,” I argue, but it’s a moot point. I have. I demonstrated that just yesterday. I want to argue that plenty of people manage to believe in ghosts and witches without others questioning their sanity, but I suspect Ellis would find some way to twist my words.

  “Help me,” Ellis says. “I want to reenact the Dalloway murders. Not for real, of course—but we could figure out how they were done. Because it wasn’t magic, no matter how impossible they seem. Maybe someone wanted to frame them, to persecute the Dalloway girls for the crime of possessing their own agency. It would have been easy, back then, to convince people that five odd, educated girls were witches. We’ll go through each death, one by one, and figure out how they were accomplished without the use of magic. And of course, it will be good for me to understand the mechanics of it all, for my book.”

  A ridiculous proposition. I know that. I know it. But Ellis watches me with eyes lit from some arcane internal light, one long strand of black hair fallen into her face. All I want is to compulsively tuck it back behind her ear—it’s intensely distracting—but I find myself saying: “Fine.”

  “Fine?”

  “Fine. I’ll help you. We’ll…” A giggle rises in me, helpless; I’ve never been a giggler. “We’ll re-create the Dalloway murders, and you’ll write your book, and then we all live happily ever after. Not the Ellis Haley ending I expected, but I can appreciate a plot twist as well as the next person.”

  Ellis rolls her eyes, and I spare a thought to wonder if I’m the first person who has ever managed to make Ellis Haley do something so pedestrian as roll her eyes.

  “This will be good closure for you,” she says, rising to retrieve the broom to clean up the broken pottery. “Trust me.”

  “I don’t,” I tell her, but we both know that makes little difference.

  Whether I trust Ellis or not, I need to do this. I need to understand what happened the night Alex died. I need to know if some shadow of Margery Lemont has curled up in my heart, guiding the movements of my hands and the words in my mouth. The ghost raised by the Dalloway Five didn’t rest until all of them were dead. I need to know if I’m cursed by that same fate. If raising Margery’s spirit in our unfinished ritual cursed me and Alex. If it killed her.

  I need to face whatever caused the broken ceramic shards on the floor, the misty handprint on my window.

  I need to face the truth.

  I don’t tell Wyatt I’m researching the witches again.

  Maybe it’s because I know what she’d say. I can visualize the precise character of the disappointment that would settle over her features. I can even imagine her deciding to call my mother, who would call Dr. Ortega, who would ask if I’ve been taking my medication.

  Better to wait, to prove I’m healthy—stable—before I tell Wyatt the truth.

  And there’s research to do, not just for myself now, but for Ellis as well if I’m going to help her write this book. I reread my old notes a dozen times, but they’re full of references to primary source material, questions scribbled in the margins that I meant to answer later, when I could go back to the occult collection.

  There’s no other option. I need to access the original sources before I can get anything else done. Wyatt gave me a signed permission slip last year, which is what it takes to get into the occult library as a student. They say it’s because the books are old and rare, but really it’s because the administration is afraid more students will turn out like me. I have no idea if my old permission slip will still work, but I smile at the front desk librarian anyway as I pass it over with my student identification card.

  “Good evening,” I say, and I notice even as I’m speaking that my voice has taken on crisper enunciation—my mother’s accent, laden with all its connotations of privilege and power. “I need to access the occult collection. Felicity Morrow.”

  The librarian examines the slip and then scans my card. She shakes her head.

  “I’m afraid your permission to view this collection has been revoked,” she says, passing my ID back across the desk.

  Of course it has.

  “Are you sure? Can you check again?” I ask.

  The woman just spins her computer monitor to show me the screen, where it says my name and, in bright-red font, disallowed.

  I know for a fact that Ellis has been going into the occult section; that’s where she got the book on tasseography, after all. Still, something in me balks at the prospect of asking her to go for me. I don’t want to open up the possibility for questions I can’t answer.

  So I return to Godwin House and pack myself a sandwich and a water bottle, then go back to the library and claim a carrel on the fifth floor—the emptiest floor, housi
ng the school’s encyclopedia collection. I occupy myself by reading the rest of my latest Shirley Jackson book, then type out a few new paragraphs of material for my European History essay.

  Eventually even those few students who had ventured up to the fifth floor drift away, the last of them packing up when the lights flicker, a sign that the library’s about to close for the night.

  I’ve been one of those reluctant students before, lingering as long as possible to finish just one more chapter, one more page. The librarians will come through any minute, checking to make sure all the students have egressed and gone back to their houses; I know that much from experience. But I also know they won’t check everywhere.

  I take my sandwich and go sit in the stacks, eating my late dinner and listening to the echo of heels on hardwood as one of the librarians makes her rounds through the carrels.

  Then the sound of a door shutting and the lights turn off, plunging me into darkness.

  I pull out my flashlight and flick the switch. The amber beam of light casts a narrow channel through the gloom. The stacks feel taller like this, looming watchful in the darkness as I pass. Perhaps this wasn’t such a good idea; my skin prickles at the nape of my neck as I take the elevator to the basement, which encloses the occult collection. I’m afraid to look behind me, knowing that if I do I’ll find her there, dripping lake water on the tile floor, eyes like black pits above sharp teeth.

  I dart out of the elevator as soon as it hits ground; the doors can’t slide open fast enough. Only it’s worse once I’m ducking under the velvet rope and shouldering through the door into the occult section. If Alex haunts me, haunts the school—if Godwin House is the epicenter of her power—then this would be the epicenter of theirs. The Dalloway Five.

  I find myself gazing through the iron grate at a leather-bound copy of Malleus Maleficarum, my breath coming in shallow gulps, afraid to look too deeply into the shadows.

  This is my problem. Despite my fear, despite all the ways this obsession ruined everything for me, I want to be back here. I’m drawn to these books like a moth to a struck match. I can’t stay away.