A Lesson in Vengeance

by Victoria Lee

  A strange request. It’s as if Ellis thinks we all live in books. At least then it would be easy enough to delete what happened in the cemetery, make me forget, and start over.

  I sigh and drop down onto the side of my bed, the box of nonsense bouncing with my weight.

  “I’m not angry,” I tell her. “Not really, anyway. Not for long. I know you were only trying to do the right thing.”

  “I was,” she insists, and releases the desk to lean forward and grasp my knee instead. Her fingers curve all the way around my kneecap, swallowing the entire joint. “I…God help me, Felicity, but I care about you. I want you to be happy again.”

  Again? She’s never seen me happy. She doesn’t even know what that looks like.

  “All right,” I say. And when she turns her hand palm-up on my knee, I take it, lacing our fingers together. “All right.”

  It’s a lie, of course. I have no intention of being happy, for Ellis or otherwise.

  But what else am I going to say? Ellis sees me.

  I need to be seen.

  * * *

  —

  Things ease between me and Ellis the week following that conversation. I’m grateful for it; with the end of the semester approaching in a flurry of final papers and projects, I don’t think I could have sustained my resentment without unraveling in some other way.

  Although it might already be too late for that. I dream about Alex almost every night now, even when I’m not having nightmares. She’s the girl at the café in my dream about Paris; she’s the woman with soft fingers touching my lips; she’s falling and falling and falling into an endless dark.

  I’m not the only one worried about final exams looming at us from the other side of break. Godwin House is consumed in a constant fog of low-grade panic. Kajal has realized she’s on the cusp of an A and a B in AP European History, and her score on the final essay will determine whether she makes dean’s list this semester. Meanwhile, Clara, whose record is in somewhat more dire straits than Kajal’s, refuses to emerge from her room. Leonie spends half her time in the library—and I have started to regret my decision to eschew laptops. It’s much more difficult to write a fifty-page essay on a typewriter than one would think. I don’t want to find myself rushing to get it finished in the few weeks after Thanksgiving.

  Wyatt calls me into her office midweek to check up on thesis progress. She wants to see pages—pages that, of course, I don’t have, because I’m not writing about the topic we agreed upon. I escape by telling her the truth, or part of it at least: I’m writing on a typewriter, so I only have one copy. I’ll show her after break.

  That buys me a few weeks to invent an excuse for why I’m writing about witches again.

  Ellis is the only one of us who seems relatively at peace. “My main concern right now is finishing the book,” she tells me, both of us sitting on the common room floor with the materials for our Art History project arranged on the rug in front of us. “Everything else is secondary.”

  “That’s easy for you to say. Even if you fail out of Dalloway, you still have a writing career.”

  She shakes her head. “I only have a writing career if I publish another book. And to publish this book, I need to finish it first.”

  I sip my coffee. The taste is strong and bitter, the way Ellis likes it.

  Ellis highlights a line on another page then finally sits upright, fixing me in her gaze. “Are you all right?” she asks in that characteristically blunt way of hers.

  “What? Yes, of course. Why? Don’t I look all right?”

  “You look exhausted,” she says. “Have you been sleeping?”

  “No,” I admit. The truth is, I’ve been doing my best to stay awake; my nightmares have only gotten worse since our ritual at the church. “I can’t sleep.”

  Ellis’s mouth tightens, but at least she doesn’t say anything more on the subject. Perhaps she knows how little I want her pity. Instead she shoves one of our new library books into my lap and says, “You’re in charge of chapters fourteen through eighteen.”

  The reading is a slog, but we get through it. Then Ellis wants to dissect the Dalloway murders again; she’s stuck on the scene with Beatrix Walker’s death. She was found with all the bones in her body broken, as if she’d fallen from a great height, but she was discovered indoors, far from anywhere above ground level.

  “Someone obviously moved the body, like with Cordelia,” Ellis says, sounding almost exasperated. “The simplest explanation is always the best. Why assume witchcraft?”

  “But how did she fall? There’s nowhere on campus high enough—not in the eighteenth century, anyway.” Except for the cliffs where Alex died.

  I grit my hands into fists.

  “Maybe she didn’t fall at all. Someone could have broken her bones individually.” Ellis lies down on the common room rug, her limbs splayed out. She lifts one wrist in demonstration. “A hammer here.” She touches her ribs. “A kick to the chest.”

  I shift over her, straddling her middle, and brace one hand against her sternum. My hair has fallen forward, long pale strands tickling the skin at Ellis’s throat. “But she’d be struggling,” I point out. I add pressure to my hand, holding Ellis in place. “And screaming.”

  Ellis gazes up at me, eyes steady and unafraid. “Not if she was dead first.”

  We finally call it a night around one, Ellis stretching her long arms toward the ceiling as I collect all our notes and other detritus.

  “Again tomorrow?”

  “Six sharp.” Her grin is quick; I want to memorize it.

  My room feels dark and barren when I go upstairs. I’ve been spending more and more time in the library with Ellis, enough so that coming back here even to sleep feels foreign.

  I should have brought more books when I came back to school, perhaps. More photos, maybe a few potted plants—something to bring life in wintertime. Something aside from the incense and crystals and candles I dug out of my closet hiding space, meager wards against the dark.

  I trail my fingers along the spines on my bookshelf, tracing past Little Women and The Bluest Eye and Wide Sargasso Sea. I’ve read all these a dozen times, have loved them more at each iteration. But then my hand brushes an unfamiliar leather binding, and I stop, the air suddenly frozen.

  The Secret Garden. It’s the same copy Ellis gave me in the graveyard, the same copy I left leaning against Alex’s headstone, with its old pages and embossed gold foil.

  I’m sick to the blood, sick in a way that makes me certain I shouldn’t touch that book. I should leave, should burn this place to the ground.

  But I can’t help myself. I slide the book out of its space between two Austens with shaking hands. When I open the ancient pages I smell something familiar, something that isn’t glue or rotting paper. It’s jasmine and vetiver. It’s…Alex. It’s Alex’s perfume.

  Pressed between chapters three and four is a sprig of hellebore.

  I drop the book, and it thumps to the floor, releasing a cloud of dust as I stagger back. The walls are closing in on me, the room airless. It’s a feeling like standing on a precipice, the world dropping out from under you, and nothing but sky between you and certain death.

  I spin around, expecting to find Alex there, with skeleton fingers reaching for my throat. Her face bloodless and pale, withered with decay. Her mouth sucking in air like a broken vacuum, and frothy blood leaking from her lips—I’d watched videos of drowning victims online after I remembered the truth; I know what it would look like. The way her chest would heave as she tried to breathe. The gut punch, her back curling, as she couldn’t exhale.

  The room is empty, but it’s not empty. I feel her. She’s here. She’s in every corner, every shadow. She’s above me, inside me. She’s black ice in my veins.

  She’s the shadowy figure flitting between the trees, watching us sleep in the s
now.

  I stumble out of the room and down the creaky Godwin stairs, dragging against the wall and gripping the banister, as if that could keep me from falling if Alex’s spirit made me throw myself down. The light is off in Ellis’s room when I manage to get my disobedient legs to carry me along the corridor. Tripping over the fringe of the rug, I press my sweaty hands against her lintel.

  For a moment I’m sure I’m about to vomit all over her door, but I swallow bile down and knock instead. She doesn’t answer, so I knock again and again, until I’m just pounding and shaking and sobbing. The time it takes for Ellis to open the door feels like a thousand years. But she does open it, and I tip forward and into her arms.

  Her hands find my back hesitantly, as if she’s never held anyone so close before. She’s in a silk dressing gown; it occurs to me on some distant level that I’ve never seen her so undressed.

  “What is it?” she asks, slowly smoothing her touch up and down my spine. “What happened?”

  I can barely get the words out. They’re like broken glass in my mouth, deadly.

  “Alex,” I manage at last, and a fresh shudder rolls through my body.

  “What about Alex?”

  I’m still trembling, but Ellis pushes me back enough to look at me properly, her gaze traversing my face as if she can interpret something new from my tears and snot.

  “The…the book,” I say, after taking a few unsteady breaths. “The one we left at her grave.”

  “The Secret Garden,” Ellis provides.

  I nod. “It’s…It’s in…It showed up in my room. The same…the same copy.”

  Ellis’s gaze sharpens. “The same? You’re sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure!” My voice pitches loudly enough that Leonie opens her door down the hall and peers out at us, blearily asking what’s going on.

  “We’re okay,” Ellis says, and she tugs me into her room and kicks the door shut behind us.

  “It’s the same book,” I tell her again. My voice is a little calmer now at least. I don’t feel quite so much like I’m suffocating. “It’s…Alex. I told you. I told you going to that graveyard was a bad idea! Now she’s angry. She’s…she’s never going to leave me in peace!”

  Any other day, perhaps I’d have taken a moment to be pleased with myself; I’ve clearly presented a mystery to which Ellis Haley has no ready answer. She stares at me with a look on her face I’ve never seen before, like she doesn’t believe what she’s hearing.

  It occurs to me in that moment—away from the proximity of the book itself—that there’s another explanation for its reappearance.

  “You,” I choke out. “You put it there. Didn’t you?” I shove her with both hands, and she falls back on her heels, which for some reason strikes me as not good enough. I push her again, harder. “Didn’t you?”

  “No,” she snaps, and when I move to hit her, she grabs both my wrists, squeezing tight. “Felicity, are you even hearing yourself?”

  “I should think you’d prefer an explanation that doesn’t involve ghosts,” I snarl. “You were at the graveyard. You saw the book. You brought the book. It would have been so easy for you to go back and get it again.”

  Ellis’s grip strengthens, and she shakes me slightly. “Why? Why would I do something like that? I’ve been trying so goddamn hard to get you to realize you’re delusional—”

  “Delusional?”

  “Well, you are! What else do you call all this nonsense about ghosts and witches and magic books and…I wouldn’t mess with you like that.”

  I don’t know how to believe her. The Ellis I know—the Ellis I thought I knew—wouldn’t do that, it’s true. But…

  “Then explain the book,” I demand. “If the ghost isn’t real, explain that to me!”

  She shakes her head very slowly. “I can’t. I…I’m going to have to think about it. I’m sure there’s a normal reason behind all this.”

  “Right. The only normal reason I can come up with is that you put the book in my room.”

  “Yes, you’ve mentioned that option.” Ellis makes a harsh noise, exhaling through clenched teeth. “But I don’t know when I’m meant to have chased down this book of yours. We’ve been practically inseparable since that graveyard trip—you’re always with me. And if you aren’t with me, one of the other girls is.”

  Only that isn’t true. Yes, we’re together a lot; Ellis and I are constantly studying, or working on our project. Other times we’re with the rest of the girls: on a Night Migration; in the common room, reading poetry; on an outing to a nearby farm to pick up fresh meat and dairy, fascinated as the farmer shows us the beehives on her property, a thousand buzzing insects settling over our arms and the nets over our heads.

  But we still have to sleep. Ellis could have crept out at night and returned to the graveyard for the book, carried it back home, and bided her time until she could slip it onto my bookshelf.

  Ellis wouldn’t do something like that, I tell myself. She might be a lot of things, but she isn’t malicious. The whole point of this project outside of researching for her book is to prove to me that ghosts don’t exist—so why would she do something to convince me that they do?

  Alex, a voice in the back of my mind insists. It was Alex. That was your first instinct, and it’s true.

  “I’ll show you,” I say. “Come up to my room, and I’ll show you the book.”

  Ellis takes a shallow breath and says, “Tomorrow. Yes, I want to see it, but…Felicity, it’s really late. I was half-asleep when you knocked.”

  Of course. I can only imagine what a madwoman I looked throwing myself against her shut door at one in the morning, crying about books and ghosts. Accusing her of torturing me. I scrub both hands over my face, rubbing away what’s left of my tears. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right,” Ellis says.

  “No. No, it’s…Sorry. I’ll let you sleep.”

  She gives me a thin smile and trails her fingers along my cheek, her hand dipping back toward my ear before falling to her side. “Tomorrow,” she says again.

  I have no choice then but to take myself back up the stairs to the room and that horrible book still lying discarded on the floor, the pages all bent now and the smell of Alex’s perfume still pungent in the air. I refuse to touch that cursed thing. I leave it where it lies and grab a handful of dried dandelion from my stash of herbs, sprinkle it in a circle around the book, as if that could keep her ghost at bay.

  I can’t sleep in here.

  I grab my pillow and duvet off the bed and head back downstairs, this time into the common room, where I make up a temporary bed on the sofa and curl up there, facing the hearth. Even here, I’m afraid to have my back to the room.

  Eventually I rock to an uneasy sleep. In my dreams I’m chased by monsters with long, reaching hands, flickering lights, and blood on ice.

  I lurch awake hours later with my heart in my mouth and cold sweat damp on my lower back. But it’s already daylight, the sun streaming in through the east-facing windows. Leonie and Kajal are in the kitchen. I can hear their voices chattering as they clang about with pots and pans; that must be what woke me.

  I drag a hand through my sweat-salty hair and press my brow forward against bent knees.

  Maybe I dreamed what happened last night. Maybe it was all some horrible nightmare. Maybe—

  “There you are,” Ellis says, standing over me. “I was looking for you. You wanted to show me that book, right?”

  She’s already dressed, in a jacket with elbow patches, like some absentminded professor. Still in the couch, in my wrinkled yesterday’s clothes, I feel like a child caught out-of-bounds.

  “Right.” All the terror of last night seeps up like groundwater—diluted now but still nauseating, still potent. I shove the duvet aside and bundle it and the pillow under my arm, carrying them up
with me to the third floor.

  Ellis trails behind like a tall shadow. I find myself glancing back, as if to make sure my Eurydice still follows.

  “I still can’t explain it,” I tell her as we turn onto the landing. “I don’t know how it got back here. And we both…we’ve been here. We did leave it there, right? I’m not imagining things?”

  “We’ll figure it out,” Ellis says, firm and confident, as usual. More confident, I note, than she’d sounded last night.

  I push open my bedroom door and step inside, and the duvet falls from my arms.

  The book is gone.

  The circle of dandelion petals is still there, a ward against evil spirits, but the book itself has vanished. The only thing left is the hellebore, fallen in the middle of my ward like an ill omen.

  “It was right here. It was right—”

  I’m breathless, light-headed. It’s a feeling like being eviscerated.

  Ellis moves into the room behind me, cutting past the bundled-up blanket to gaze down at the herbs littering my floor. She doesn’t say anything, but she doesn’t have to. The thin line of her mouth says enough.

  I round on her, heat rising in my cheeks. “I swear it was here. Last night, it was on my shelf. And here—I dropped it right here. You believe me, don’t you?”

  Ellis’s eyes flick sidelong to catch mine.

  “It was here!”

  “I believe you,” Ellis says, too slowly.

  I shake my head, catch a lock of my hair, and start twisting it around my knuckles, tugging until it hurts. “Someone must have taken it,” I say. “Someone came up here, someone…”

  “Who?” Ellis asks. She’s infuriatingly calm. “Who would have come into your room and stolen this book? What would anyone want with it?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t—”

  I shove past her, banging the door open and darting down the hall toward the stairs. Ellis is on my heels almost immediately, calling my name; I ignore her and clatter down the steps, spinning around the bottom landing fast enough the banister rattles under my grip.