by Victoria Lee
Perhaps I was never haunted. Perhaps this whole time Margery knew, and Alex knew, they wouldn’t have to chase me.
They knew I’d come looking.
* * *
—
The darkness lends a sense of intimacy, of import. We move through it like specters, silent—we become part of Godwin House, sprouted from the uneven floor and shadowed corners, descendants and daughters of witches who died centuries ago.
And then we’re outside, we’re in the forest, following the witches’ footsteps deep enough that the house vanishes into the night’s open mouth, until the dark space beneath the trees hangs heavy enough that even our breath sounds muffled. An owl hoots somewhere nearby, warning of our passing. The Greeks believed witches could transform themselves into owls to stalk their prey. I can’t stop thinking of the figure Ellis saw in my teacup: the bird, dangerous situations.
“They aren’t coming,” I say after we reach the clearing. The forest seems to close in around us, sharp-toothed and hungry. I take off my mask; I can’t stand feeling half-blinded, unaware of what lurks just out of sight, in the corners of my eyes.
“They’re coming,” Ellis replies.
I don’t believe her, but I get ready anyway. My bag has everything we need, materials retrieved from the hole in my closet wall: candles and herbs, a vial of goat’s blood I bought from the butcher in town.
When a twig snaps I lurch upright, half expecting to see her, Alex. But it’s just Kajal emerging from between the trees, a smudge of dirt on her knee and a scowl on her face.
“Morrow,” she says. “What are you doing here?”
I know the moment she spots Ellis, from the way her spine stiffens, the reflexive half step back and away. I turn to look just as Ellis is lifting the goat’s-head mask away from her face.
“It’s me,” she says.
“What the fuck, Ellis!”
Ellis draws a cigarette case out of her pocket. She pauses long enough to light one and blow smoke toward the stars before she says: “I’ll explain when the rest arrive.”
I’m caught there between them, Ellis pale and serene, Kajal shifting her weight from foot to foot as she clearly debates running back to Godwin. But she doesn’t. She stays, watching in wary silence as I finish building a circle out of candles and black tourmaline. Ellis might be right—we aren’t in any danger from Margery or her kin—but the protection of the crystals make me feel better all the same.
Clara and Leonie arrive over the next fifteen minutes, Leonie appearing perfectly coiffed and all but presidential, as if she were somehow transported to the middle of the woods by hired car rather than by traipsing over twig and stone. Clara looks rather worse for wear, but she doesn’t complain. Perhaps she’s pleased to have been invited at all.
Ellis stands at my side, her fingers pressing against the back of my elbow: careful, steadying. I doubt she knows how much I need that anchor right now.
Leonie recognizes Ellis’s mask. I can tell from the way she hesitates but doesn’t flinch when she sees it—the goat’s skull is less horrifying if you’ve seen it before. Perhaps she’s one of the Margery coven’s newest members, inducted while I was rotting away in a hospital bed.
Does she know, then, that I was once a sister too?
That I was excommunicated?
“Ellis,” Leonie says slowly, carefully, “what is that?”
Ellis, who had resumed wearing the mask after she finished her cigarette, tips it away from her face again. “It’s a mask, Schuyler. What does it look like?”
“Where did you get it?”
“From me,” I interject. “She got it from me. I was part of…Well.” I can’t say it out loud; even though I’ve been excommunicated from the Margery coven, it feels like their rules still bind me. Leonie’s dark gaze holds mine, steady and knowing. “I gave it to her,” I say.
“I thought we could play a little game,” Ellis says, finally discarding the mask altogether and smiling at us, her acolytes, gathered for her homily. “You’ve heard of the Dalloway Five, I presume.”
Nods all around.
“Your book is about them,” Clara ventures. “The witches.”
“That’s right. And you know my style—I’m a method writer. They say the Dalloway girls were witches, or at least that they had séances and cast spells. So I must as well.”
Clara gazes adoringly at Ellis as if Ellis had just offered her true and everlasting friendship for the low price of her eternal soul. Leonie and Kajal exchange looks.
“I think it’s a wonderful idea,” I say at last, because it’s clear these two aren’t convinced but are too nervous to contradict Ellis to her face.
“Me too,” Clara adds.
Kajal twists a lock of black hair around her finger. “I suppose it could be fun….”
One left. Ellis turns her gaze toward Leonie, and Leonie sighs, then nods. Our pact is sealed.
“We need a name,” Clara says. Her tone is too bright for the setting, at odds with the heavy tree cover and the treacherous vines snaking underfoot.
A name. It feels irreverent somehow to name what we’re doing. Then again, to Clara this is a game. She doesn’t understand how magic can pull you in, pull you under. Every spell is a pomegranate seed on your tongue, binding you to the underworld.
Maybe not for everyone. But it is for people like me.
the red berries of the mountain ash
and in the dark sky
the birds’ night migrations
“What did you say?” Leonie is looking at me strangely; I must have spoken aloud.
I swallow. “ ‘The Night Migrations,’ ” I say. “You know, the Louise Glück poem.”
Blank stares answer me. My discomfort aches inside me like a swallowed rock.
“From Averno,” Ellis says after a moment, and when I turn to her, she’s smiling. “In which the poet writes of Persephone and her marriage to the underworld. The poems circle the same question: how one’s soul could possibly endure when life’s beauty vanishes from reach.”
“Yes,” I whisper.
Alex wrote an essay on those poems. Her copy of Averno probably still resides on the Godwin House shelves.
Ellis nods once, as if a decision has been made.
“Welcome,” she says, “to the Night Migrations.”
The silence that follows stretches out like a long ribbon, silky-smooth; we are all like changeling children hanging on to Ellis’s every word.
“There are rules,” Ellis continues. “First: no talking about the Night Migrations. Not unless we’re here in the woods, or at any other meeting location.”
“This isn’t Fight Club,” Kajal says.
“No, but it’s more fun this way,” Ellis answers. “Second: Felicity and I choose when and where. There will be no argument or discussion on this point. Third, you will know the week’s meeting time and place from a note we slide under your door. Since you won’t be discussing the Night Migrations with anyone else, you won’t know what time the others are told to arrive. But I will tell you that the arrival times are staggered. The journey to our meeting location is part of the experience. As in life, every woman must make her journey alone.”
Ellis’s gaze flicks toward me then, and I think I catch a glint of something like amusement in her gray eyes—although that might just be the candlelight. If our game were real, the journey of the Night Migrations would play out as it does in the real world: born alone, die alone. Now, one of the Averno poems reads, her whole life is beginning—unfortunately, it’s going to be a short life.
“And what is that?” Kajal says distastefully, pointing at the circle I’ve constructed, then at the assortment of mouse skulls lined up along the rock. All of them collected last year, all found in Godwin House. I hadn’t thought them uncanny until later, after Alex died.
> “You don’t get to play the game if you don’t follow our rules,” I say.
Beside me, Ellis smiles.
* * *
—
The next morning my memories of the initiation are blurry, oil paint bleeding into water. I remember the way the others looked on the forest floor, dead leaves and bracken scattered in their laps. I remember painting the blood on Ellis’s brow, Ellis gazing at me as if she could see through my mask and into the heart of me.
My fingers were still on her skin, wet and scarlet, as she murmured my name.
Whatever else the others felt, I knew what I saw in Ellis’s eyes last night.
Euphoria.
The most vital part of any occult ritual is the closing. Witches, Druids, and Auguries might interface with creatures of the Dead, but we are also obligated to protect the mortal world from arcane influences. When we open a door, we must also shut it, or risk inviting Evil in.
—Profane Magick
Alexandra Haywood, the elite mountaineer and the second-youngest girl to summit Denali, has disappeared while attending her boarding school. She is 17. Haywood was recently in the news for her involvement in a physical altercation with fellow climber Esme Delacroix. An anonymous detective speaking to the Associated Press said the police are considering multiple theories. Divers are scouring the campus lake in case of an accidental drowning, but detectives have not ruled out the possibility that Haywood ran away to avoid public scrutiny over the assault.
—Excerpt from an article by Mariely Reyes, journalist at Sport Climbing Quarterly
“I got something for you,” Ellis says.
She has appeared in my doorway without invitation, which is becoming something of a habit. She’s wearing a tweed waistcoat and a cravat, one hand tucked behind her back.
I look at her forehead for signs of the bloody sigil we painted there last night, but her skin is clear and clean.
I shut my laptop halfway, so that the technology doesn’t offend her vintage sensibilities. “Not more tea leaves.”
“Better,” she assures me, and comes into the room without being asked. “Put out your hand.”
I do. She places on my palm a package wrapped in brown paper and tied with a neat length of twine. I glance up and she nods, so I tug at one string, and the bow unravels, the paper falling away to reveal—
“Ellis.” My voice comes out half a gasp; I’d be humiliated by that gasp if I weren’t so busy staring at the tarot cards that fan out between my fingers. They’re matte black, lined only with the faintest threads of metallic gold tracing out the shapes of skeleton figures, a glossy jet finish poured into the cages of skulls and bones so they glint in the afternoon light. “These are…”
“I thought you’d like them,” she says.
I drag my gaze away from the cards and back to Ellis’s face. A small smile has caught about her lips, a smile that feels genuine not because it splits across her face or crinkles the corners of her eyes but because of the softness to it—and the way her gaze lingers on mine. I hold out the deck of cards, and she chooses one from the middle, then flips it over to show the Magician.
“Whatever it is you’re trying to do,” I interpret, “you will succeed. All the power you need is in your hands.”
“I certainly hope so,” she says.
I pack the cards away in a position of honor on my shelf, right next to the candles and my one photo of Alex and me, taken by the lake with evening sunlight blazing like fire in Alex’s hair. The photo used to live in the closet with all the other paraphernalia of my old life; I only managed to look at it again last night. And then, gazing at the pair of us and the smiles on our faces, I felt guilty shoving her back into the dark.
“Is this her?” Ellis asks, coming up to stand at my shoulder.
“That’s her.” I stare at Alex’s face: the soft uptilt of her nose, her cinnamon-dust freckles and red bow lips. The Alex in that photo had no idea she would be dead within the year.
“You look young,” Ellis says, and I suppose I do. I’m laughing, one arm slung over Alex’s broad shoulders, like I think I’ll get to keep her forever.
“It was two years ago. I was sixteen.”
We’d just moved into Godwin House. When this photo was taken, I still didn’t believe in ghosts.
Ellis looks for a second longer before finally turning away, taking claim to my desk chair, and leaving me to sit on the edge of my bed. “There’s something else,” she says. “I’d like to finish my book by the end of this year, which means we don’t have much time. I still need to figure out how the deaths happened.”
“All right.” I reach for my notebook, grabbing it off the desk where it sat by Ellis’s elbow. She hands me a pen.
I hold the pen for a moment, the weight of it like a bad omen. Maybe last night was a mistake. It’s not too late to take back my agreement and put an end to this.
But then Ellis starts talking, cutting the thread that twines through my doubts.
“First,” she says, “the hypothetical victims. Four deaths, one for each of the Dalloway witches—not counting Margery Lemont, of course, my narrator.”
“A bit morbid,” I say. “We aren’t going to be acting this out ourselves, are we?”
Ellis laughs. I realize now it’s the first time I’ve heard her laugh, the sound bright and clear as winter bells. “You’re delightful,” she says. “Of course we will. We will each have the singular opportunity to inhabit the histories of Flora Grayfriar, Tamsyn Penhaligon, Beatrix Walker, and Cordelia Darling. It will be like a game.”
“A game,” I echo.
Ellis nods. “A game. Don’t be a spoilsport, Felicity—this will be fun.”
Fun.
I grip the seat of my chair with my free hand, palms gone damp. The prickle at the nape of my neck must be the breeze drifting in through the cracked window, chilled as it rolls off the lake.
Ellis and I have very different ideas of fun. But she needs this. And so, it seems, do I.
“Fine. I presume the magic isn’t real in your book, considering your position on the subject. The witches aren’t really communing with the devil, they’re just laboring under the oppressive weight of societal expectation.”
“Oh, yes,” Ellis says, and kicks out one foot to knock the sharp toe of her oxford against my shin. “Witchcraft is just a metaphor for female grief and anger. I told you that.”
“Right. Of course. How could I forget.”
“That’s why this will be good for you, Felicity,” Ellis says. “So that you don’t forget.”
It feels the slightest bit juvenile, the two of us sitting around in my room like this, talking about hypothetical murder—a scene better suited to children at sleepover parties, huddled under the covers clutching flashlights. But Ellis has likely never worn pajamas in her life, never mind attended sleepovers. Perhaps our plans become sophisticated by the mere virtue of her presence.
“Let’s talk about method,” Ellis muses, propping her chin against one hand and gazing out my window as if she can glean ideas from the pattern of the shadows in the woods. “Each of the Dalloway Five died a different way: Flora was stabbed, Tamsyn strangled, Cordelia drowned—”
“I’m not stabbing anyone,” I say.
The look Ellis gives me is a shade shy of derision. “Felicity, this isn’t—”
“I’m not fake-stabbing anyone, either.”
She sighs. “All right, we can each take on a different murder. If I have to consider stabbing someone, then it’s only fair that you strangle Tamsyn.”
“Good, the easy one. All I have to do is string her up on a noose. Forty feet above the ground.”
That’s why people thought these deaths were magic—they all happened in incredible, impossible ways. There’s no explanation for how Tamsyn Penhaligon’s corpse was found swing
ing so high up that tree, too high for anyone to have climbed without the branches breaking under their weight.
“Yes,” Ellis says, “but the murders don’t need to be exact replications. We both know historical representation of fact is more or less political propaganda. We need to find ways for the Five to have died that approximate their recorded causes of death. A story told again and again is never the same story as the original. So Leonie should be strangled, as in the Dalloway myth, but not by a noose. What about—oh.”
“What?”
Ellis sits a little straighter in her chair now, eyes glimmering with an unseen light. “A garrote.”
“You mean like…” I gesture as if tightening an invisible wire around my neck.
“Precisely. Minimal blood, silent; it’s ideal. They used to use it during war, to kill sentries without alerting other enemy soldiers.”
I really don’t know where she acquires such information. I’ve read Ellis’s first book. It has nothing to do with war, which means this wasn’t part of her research.
But I have to admit, I like the idea. It seems…Romantic, with the capital R, conjuring visions of dashing heroines and vicious assassins, of hazy London streets and the click of horse hooves on stone, gas lamps burning, the flick of a cloak in the dark.
It seems like precisely the kind of fate that could have met a person in 1712.
“A garrote,” I echo, and find myself tracing a circle on my notebook, over and over: a circle of piano wire perhaps.
“Do you like it?”
Pleased is not an expression I’m accustomed to seeing on Ellis Haley’s face, but it’s infectious; I find myself smiling back at her as I write down the method: garrote.
“All right,” I say when I look up again. “You know, one of the interesting things about the Dalloway case was that there were no suspects—everyone just claimed the girls’ deaths were the inevitable price of witchcraft.”
Margery’s directly so, if you consider being buried alive by vengeful townspeople to be a fitting end for her magical crimes.