A Lesson in Vengeance

by Victoria Lee

  The next night I find Kajal in her bedroom with a bottle of pills, neatly swallowing one tablet with a glass of water. Our eyes meet and she immediately frowns.

  “Can I help you, Morrow?”

  “No,” I say quickly. Only, then: “Well—no. But…I take those too.” They’re antidepressants. I would recognize this particular med’s shape and color anywhere. I attempt a smile. “I hate how they make me feel. Like I’m underwater.”

  But if I expected some kind of commiseration, all Kajal gives me is a thin grimace. “Yes, well, not all of us can afford to quit taking our medication on a whim, Felicity.”

  My hands clench in fists. “I didn’t,” I say. “I don’t— It wasn’t a whim.”

  “Regardless, we aren’t going to talk about it.” Kajal neatly screws the top back onto her medication bottle and drops it into her desk drawer. The sound of the drawer sliding shut feels like punctuation at the end of a sentence: a dismissal.

  Two nights after that terrible Night Migration, I lurch awake with sweat plastering my shirt to my spine, my nightmare still sour in my mouth. When I shut my eyes, I see bodies in the water with white fingers and cold lips. It’s Tamsyn Penhaligon, it’s Cordelia Darling, it’s Flora Grayfriar with blood on her throat.

  And as if to make things worse, my laptop crashed the night of the last Night Migration. I’m forced to borrow a Godwin House typewriter while my computer is sent off for repairs, but now, after two days without it, I discover I prefer the analog method. I like how it’s difficult to depress the keys of a Remington, that I can’t lounge with my hands sprawled over a keyboard with the words flowing unedited from my fingertips; I have to be deliberate in my choices. I must pick each key in sequence. I must think about what I want to say before I say it, or risk having to retype whole pages’ worth of argument.

  There’s something so freeing about cutting myself loose from technology in some small way. No more stressing over profile pictures or whether my social media feeds reflect the kind of golden, idealized life I want everyone to think I have. No more virus scans or junk mail or counting likes. If I want to look something up, I go to the library. If I want to talk to someone, I talk to them. And everyone I’d talk to is in this house.

  I decide that once I do get my laptop back, I won’t use it. I’ll hide it under my bed to collect dust. I need the physical anchor that my typewriter provides; I need that stability.

  “We should practice,” Ellis says, three days after the ill-fated Night Migration, after I’ve finally recovered from some of my chagrin—or, rather, was forced to recover when Ellis refused to leave me alone. I watch her from my place, curled up on her bed with a Christie mystery, as she tips her desk chair back farther and farther, as if testing how far she can go before she loses balance and cracks her head open.

  “Practice what?”

  Ellis’s chair clatters back into place. “A murder. What else?” A grin cuts across her mouth, and she opens her desk drawer, pulling out a length of twine. “The garrote.”

  “I don’t need to practice that,” I inform her. “I’m not the one writing about psycho witches.”

  And there’s a difference between talking about how something might have been done and physically re-creating it. Especially something this brutal.

  “But you are the one who’s convinced she’s being haunted by the ghost of her dead ex-girlfriend. If anything, you should go first.”

  Ellis holds out the twine, shaking it in midair until I sigh and snatch it out of her grasp.

  “What am I supposed to do with this?”

  “Do what comes naturally. Put it around my neck and act like you’re trying to strangle me.” Ellis pushes back her chair and rises to her feet, drawing her hair up into a messy bun to expose her throat. “You should come at me from behind.”

  Of course. Naturally. How else would one attack a murder victim?

  I wrap the twine around the palms of both hands and position myself to Ellis’s back. She’s taller than I am; I’ll have to drag her back to reach. If anything, that should help my cause: Her own height will put pressure on her larynx—the garrote will be harder to escape.

  I step closer, holding the cord taut. The nape of Ellis’s neck is long and slender, fair-skinned with a tiny freckle positioned off-center from her vertebrae. I can see her pulse beating in her carotid artery, just below her ear.

  “What are you waiting for?”

  Nothing. I’m waiting for nothing.

  I rise up on the balls of my feet and wrap the cord around Ellis’s throat, tugging her back a sharp half step—she makes a soft, surprised sound and grasps at the twine. She arches and ducks free, kicking her heel against my ankle so that I stumble and swear.

  There’s a thin impression on Ellis’s neck when she turns to face me again, the flesh gone slightly reddish but otherwise unmarked. “What was that?” she says, laughing. “You couldn’t have killed a child with that effort.”

  “I wasn’t trying to kill you at all.”

  “You won’t kill me,” Ellis says, and from the way she says it I get the distinct impression she finds this exchange distastefully remedial. “Really. But you have to make sure your victim can’t escape. Or do you really think you’re capable of chasing someone down and killing them by brute force when they’re already fighting back?”

  “I’m not planning to kill anyone, period,” I argue, and one of Ellis’s brows pops up.

  She doesn’t say it, but I can still hear those words hovering unspoken in the space between us: Even Alex?

  My chest aches, badly enough I press my closed fist against my sternum and press down hard. Ellis would never say I’d killed Alex. And even if I insisted on my own responsibility, I know what Ellis would argue back: People fight, Felicity, she’d say. People drink, and they fight, and accidents happen.

  I haven’t told her about the séance, or Margery Lemont. How sometimes I wonder if Margery’s spirit has burrowed itself into my body, curling up tight and cold around my heart.

  And yet here I am, pretending to murder Ellis. Putting the garrote around her throat, where, if I truly was possessed by Margery, it would be only too easy for her to take over my body and draw the twine tight.

  Possession doesn’t exist, I hear Ellis say. Magic doesn’t exist.

  Only it does. Just because Ellis can’t see it doesn’t make it not real.

  “My turn,” Ellis says. “Give me the garrote.” My palms are damp as I shove the twine back into her hands; she twists it around her knuckles hard enough the skin blanches. “Turn around.”

  I do, slowly. Knowing Ellis has no intention of letting me die doesn’t do much to quell the way my heart has started to race. What if she makes a mistake? She might not mean to hurt me, but if she draws the cord too tight, if she holds me too long, it would be an accident, and I’d still be just as dead.

  I’m about to tell Ellis I’ve changed my mind when she snaps the cord around my neck.

  I stumble back against her chest, both hands grasping at the twine. But Ellis drags it tighter, crossing the cord behind my neck and eking out a wet, convulsive noise from my windpipe. Her body is firm and unshifting, even when I jab an elbow back at her stomach, her breath hot in my ear. The twine digs in, a white-hot streak across my throat. I try to tell her to stop, but my voice doesn’t work. I can’t breathe. I can’t—

  Ellis jerks me sideways, and for one reeling second I think she’s about to break my neck. But it’s only to turn me toward the mirror.

  We’re both reflected there: me with my face gone scarlet, my throat straining against her makeshift garrote and Ellis’s fists clenched around the twine.

  “See?” Ellis says. In the mirror her eyes are bright and alive with their own internal light, shoulders rising and falling with a shallow tremor. “You can’t escape. You can’t resist—not effectively, anyway.
I’ve compressed your carotid artery, so there’s very little blood flow to your brain.”

  I can barely even understand what she’s saying. My thoughts have gone to static, blurring out at the edges. Ellis tips her head in against mine.

  “Like this, see? Even with you fighting back…you’ll be unconscious in thirty seconds. Within another minute, you’d be dead. Just like Tamsyn Penhaligon.”

  She’s going to kill me.

  The thought flares in my mind, red and lethal. Tears leak from my eyes, hot on my cheeks. I taste copper.

  Only then Ellis lets go. Color blooms back into the world, and I stagger. I would fall to my knees if not for the way Ellis catches me with an arm around my waist.

  “There,” she murmurs. “There…You’re okay. Did you think I was going to hurt you? I would never hurt you. You’re safe.”

  I’m still crying. The sobs come out hoarse and inhuman, like my vocal cords have been dragged over asphalt. My throat burns.

  Ellis’s hand is in my hair, stroking it like I’m a frightened animal. My mind circles around and around the white noise of encroaching death. Of suffocation.

  Is this how Alex felt after she hit the surface of the lake, the first shocked gasp as water came flooding in? Did she see the same haze seeping into her vision—her intoxication fading as terror clawed up her spine?

  She might have survived the fall. But even then, Alex didn’t know how to swim.

  I twist in Ellis’s arms to press my face against her shoulder, and she lets me cry, patting my head and murmuring soft, meaningless phrases as my tears and snot dampen her starched shirt collar.

  “Why did you do that?” I ask when I’ve finally gotten my breathing back under control. I withdraw enough to look at her, wiping my wet nose with the back of one hand. “You didn’t have to…to do that.”

  “We were practicing,” Ellis says, with a faintly confused tilt to her tone.

  “Right, we were practicing, not…not…You could have killed me!”

  Something complicated passes over Ellis’s face, and she lurches forward, grasping my shoulders with both hands. Her fingertips dig in hard enough it nearly hurts. “I would never kill you,” she vows, her eyes gone wide. “Felicity, I swear to you, I’ll never let anything happen to you. I’d rather die.”

  I blink against a fresh wave of tears. Ellis’s thumb skirts up to brush one of them away; her touch lingers on my cheek afterward, her skin cool where mine now feels feverishly hot.

  I suck in a shaky inhale. “You need to be more careful,” I tell her at last, my voice steadier than it was. “I’m not one of your characters, Ellis. If something happens to me, you can’t throw out that page and rewrite it.”

  Ellis looks stricken, her pupils black enough they almost consume all the gray in her eyes. Her hand on my face quivers very slightly. “I know,” she says.

  She strokes her fingers back through my hair, tucking a stray lock behind my ear. We’re too close, her hand too near my throat. She has a tiny scar on one of her eyebrows, one I’ve never noticed before; it’s mostly grown in but still visible, a hint of asymmetry in an otherwise ordered face. For some reason that’s all I can think about.

  But then she moves away, out of reach. Her larynx bobs when she swallows and, belatedly, she leans over to pick the twine garrote up off the floor. “Well. That’s what it’s like, I suppose.”

  Somehow I’d managed to forget this was an experiment.

  Ellis retrieves a dove smoking jacket from the back of the chair and slings it over her shoulders, grabbing her satchel and a notebook. “I’m going to the library to write this down. I’ll see you at dinner later?”

  She leaves me in her room, the door left ajar but all her personal effects still here lined up on their shelves and in their drawers as if awaiting my perusal. I almost wonder if she intends me to snoop. This feels not unlike an invitation, something very, very Ellis.

  I catch my own gaze in the mirror. My nose is cherry-colored still, my face slick with sweat or tears or both. My hair looks the way it does after I’ve run six miles, a tangled blond halo. I don’t look a thing like Felicity Morrow.

  I don’t snoop, but I do look at the things she has left out in the open: the row of poetry books lined up in alphabetical order on the shelf by her bed, the Montblanc on her desk, a teacup bearing not tea but a single white dahlia in full bloom.

  There are no photographs of family or friends. No secret phone charger or even so much as an uncharacteristic paper clip, although there is a row of half-burned votives along her windowsill. For some reason it seems stranger to me that Ellis wouldn’t have finished each candle in sequence than that she’d own, say, a pair of headphones.

  The impulse to start looking through her drawers is almost too much to bear. I escape while I still have the will to leave.

  The next morning, I wake to find a note slid under my door. It’s written in Ellis’s handwriting: the coordinates and time for the next Night Migration.

  But when I follow them that evening, they don’t lead to a copse in the woods or the peak of a black hill; they take me to a dingy rental car agency a mile down the road. Ellis stands out front under the flickering yellow lights, smoking a clove cigarette like a character from a noir film.

  “Good, you’re here,” she says, and stabs the cigarette out on the plaster wall. “Let’s go in.”

  I glance over my shoulder, half expecting to find the rest of the girls standing there, wearing impatient expressions. The lot is too empty, nothing but cars and puddles of oil where cars used to be. “Where’s everyone else?”

  “Just us tonight,” Ellis says. “I thought we could have our own private Night Migration.”

  The thought makes me uneasy; I can still feel the garrote cutting into my skin. Ellis saying she wouldn’t actually kill me doesn’t help matters as much as it should. I tug Kajal’s coat closer around my shoulders and stay in place. “Why?”

  She fixes me with a tight look. “Why not? If you don’t want to come, you can always go back to Godwin House.”

  I dig the heel of one shoe into the cracked sidewalk. The snow has melted, but the cold still reaches to the bone.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Of course I want to go.” It doesn’t sound nearly as persuasive as I’d like, but Ellis just smiles and leads the way through the swinging glass doors and into the fluorescent glare of the agency.

  She orders us a plain, inconspicuous sedan. I catch sight of the ID she passes over the counter—it’s her photo but not her name.

  “Your car’s in A-4,” the rental agent says as he gives Ellis the keys. “Enjoy your trip, Miss Breithaupt.”

  Outside, in the parking lot, Ellis spends far too long adjusting the side-view mirrors and switching radio channels, the car idly puffing exhaust into the night air and the heat blasting.

  “Where are we going?” I ask when I can’t stand it any longer. “ ‘Miss Breithaupt’?”

  At last Ellis appears satisfied with the angle of her seat, and she glances over at me, says, “I’m seventeen, silly girl. I can’t rent a car without a fake ID.”

  She digs out a pair of driving gloves from her inner jacket pocket and pulls them on with expert efficiency. I try not to stare at the way the leather creaks as Ellis curls her fingers around the steering wheel, grip firm and dominant. I recognize them belatedly as the same white gloves we’d found at the antiques store—Ellis must have gone back and bought them.

  We drive east, cutting along winding Catskill roads. A fog picks up as we move deeper into the forest; our headlights reflect off white gloom, eliminating the sight of anything past ten or fifteen feet.

  “Maybe we should pull over,” I finally suggest, squinting into the mist. “I don’t understand how you can drive in this.”

  “Don’t be a coward, Felicity; we’re perfectly safe.”

&nb
sp; I shut my mouth over my response. What I want to say is that even Ellis Haley can’t control the weather—but I have the feeling it’s going to be a long drive, and I don’t want to irritate her this early.

  The radio station Ellis has chosen plays the blues, mournful notes that make me think of smoke. I wonder if the music is another thing Ellis is trying to make herself like, the same way she’s forcing herself to enjoy whiskey. Or perhaps this is one of those rare glimpses into who Ellis Haley really is, something organic that grew from her heart.

  I realize where we’re headed after we’ve turned off toward Kingston and follow a slim road skirting outside the city and into the wooded hills. But I almost don’t want to believe it. I stay silent in my seat, gripping the handle above the window, until Ellis rounds a corner and the cemetery gates come into view.

  “No,” I say. “No. I’m not…Why would you bring me here?”

  Ellis shifts the car into park and twists around to grasp my wrist and say, “It’s okay. You can do this.”

  But I can’t. I can barely even breathe; it feels like something is crushing my chest, my bones, my lungs.

  “It’s just a grave,” Ellis says. “You can visit a grave.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Didn’t you go to her funeral?”

  I went to Alex’s funeral. Of course I did. That was right after the accident; I was still floating in the numb, medicated haze of trauma. But I remember enough. I remember how empty Alex’s house felt without her; how Alex’s mother flinched away from me at the wake. Even the reverend looked at me like I was original sin herself walking among them.

  It takes me a long time to nod. “Yes. I…Yes. But that was a long time ago.”

  “Then it’s time to pay your respects.”

  Ellis reaches into her satchel and passes me a book. The Secret Garden. An older edition, the spine cracked and the pages gone the color of saffron.

  “You told me this was one of her favorites,” Ellis says softly.

  I take the book and hug it close to my chest. All at once my face feels tight, a pressure building behind my eyes.