A Lesson in Vengeance

by Victoria Lee

  I close my eyes and press my palms to the hardwood, feeling the texture of the grain against my thumbs.

  Is this what it feels like to be a ghost? To haunt the same halls over and over, waiting for someone to see you, to speak to you, to call for you or send you away again?

  * * *

  —

  Quinn returns in the evening. I find them in the common room, drinking a martini garnished with lemon peel, flicking through the pages of one of Godwin’s books too quickly to actually read the words. I have no idea where they conjured up gin.

  “Did Ellis abandon you?” Quinn says without looking up.

  “Predictably.” I brace my hands against the back of the sofa. “What are you up to?”

  “Nothing. I’m bored. Do you want a martini?”

  Good lord, does anyone in this family do anything besides drink all the time?

  But I can’t afford to be impolite. And besides, growing up with my mother, I can’t exactly pass judgment. “If you’re offering.”

  Quinn lets the book fall shut and gives me that grin again—the sincere one, all teeth. It feels like a victory, winning that smile. “Follow me.”

  We retreat to the kitchen, where Quinn produces liquor bottles from a plastic grocery bag on the counter; they must have run by the store on their way back from New York. Quinn mixes a fresh drink and drops the lemon peel in with a flourish. When I take a sip, it’s dryer than I’m used to, the taste of vermouth strong in the back of my throat.

  “It’s good,” I say anyway, and Quinn snorts.

  “If you don’t like it, we can do shots instead.”

  It’s a joke, of course—and a good thing, too, because the martini Quinn made is strong, and the second one they mix is stronger. We both end up sprawled on the common room rug, the room spinning overhead and little waves of heat coursing through my stomach.

  “This was a mistake,” I mumble.

  “No such thing,” Quinn says, although the slurred way they say it suggests the contrary.

  I don’t understand why my mother enjoys this so much. I’m afraid to move, for fear I might detach from the earth and spill unanchored into the sky, my tongue thick and heavy in my mouth.

  Or maybe I’m afraid of losing control like she did—drunk in our gallery with a knife in hand, ripping all those priceless works of art to expensive shreds.

  I drape my wrist over my eyes, but that only makes the spinning worse. “How often did you get to see Ellis?” I find myself asking. “After you went to Yale. I guess you didn’t come home much.”

  A long silence passes in the wake of those words, long enough that I squint over at Quinn and start to wonder if I’ve said something wrong. But at last Quinn exhales and tilts their face toward me, says, “Not much, no. And god knows Karen and Jill weren’t home enough, either.”

  It takes me a second to realize Karen and Jill must be Ellis’s mothers. Quinn’s, too, although perhaps not very good ones.

  “That must have been hard,” I say.

  “Depends who you ask, I suppose. I survived just fine. Ellis, though…”

  I’m still trapped in the thick gauzy space of intoxication, but something about the way Quinn says it injects a shot of adrenaline into my blood. And suddenly I’m a little more awake, a little more alert.

  “What do you mean?”

  Quinn’s eyes are slivers of obsidian glittering beneath their half-lowered lashes. “I mean it fucked Ellis up. She was always a little insecure, but…”

  Insecure? “Are we talking about the same Ellis here?”

  “Same Ellis. I don’t know what kind of persona she puts on at school, but yeah. Because…well.”

  Quinn blows out a heavy burst of air and pushes themselves upright, turning toward me properly, with one knee drawn up. Something about the way they’re sitting reminds me so keenly of Ellis: the body language, perhaps, or even just the clothes. And yesterday wasn’t a fluke; they dress exactly alike. I wonder if Ellis did that on purpose, modeling herself after her older sibling—if she hero-worships Quinn and can’t tell the difference between admiration and appropriation.

  Maybe, in some small ways, Ellis is human after all.

  “Fuck it. Look. Ellis was always a little weird growing up, you know? She was one of those gifted kids. I’m smart, but Ellis…she was on a whole ’nother level. The tutors almost couldn’t keep up with her. She’d get so bored, so damn pathologically bored. She needed constant stimulation or she’d throw these tantrums and give the whole house migraines.”

  It’s not hard to imagine a young Ellis—in my mind, wearing a miniature version of the adult Ellis’s knife-crease slacks and glen check blazers—hungry for knowledge, for more, and bursting with fury when that need was denied.

  “Anyway, when Ellis was ten our parents went abroad for the winter. They were supposed to be gone a couple months, so they left Ellis with our grandmother in Vermont. Only then there was this terrible storm…They got snowed in, and the power went out, and Nana died.”

  “Oh god.” I don’t even want to think about what that was like: Ellis, solitary in that house with her grandmother dead, her parents gone. “What did she do? How—?”

  Quinn arches a brow. “Ellis was alone for four weeks. It took three weeks for the snow to melt, but the power company was stretched so thin with all the outages that they didn’t get around to fixing our grandmother’s house that whole time.”

  It would have been freezing cold, the snow pressing in against the windows and the grandmother’s body slowly rotting upstairs. And as it got warmer, the stench permeating the house inch by deadly inch. I imagine Ellis shutting doors to keep out the smell, barricading herself in smaller and smaller spaces until there was nowhere else to run.

  “It was six miles to get to the nearest neighbor,” Quinn went on. “And with the snow…I mean, Ellis was ten. She decided it made sense to hole up and wait it out.”

  As indifferent as my own mother might be, I can’t imagine her allowing something like this to happen. I have to keep reminding myself that Ellis’s parents had left her with her grandmother, that they had every reason to think she’d be safe.

  Only she wasn’t safe. Clearly she wasn’t safe.

  “But then your parents came back. So she…she was all right.” I stare at Quinn, half begging them to end it. Knowing Ellis is here, that she survived, isn’t enough. I need the story to be finished.

  “They came back all right,” Quinn says grimly. “They came back early, in fact. But Ellis had already run out of food. Our moms weren’t supposed to return for another three weeks. Ellis didn’t have anything to eat….She ended up strangling her pet rabbit and eating him. Raw. You have to understand—she was desperate….She didn’t have a choice.”

  Nausea lurches up my throat, the taste of bile and old gin flooding my mouth, convulsive and sickly; I swallow it down. Ellis…She—

  “I did have a choice, actually,” a voice says from behind us. Quinn and I both lurch around so quickly it sends the room spinning all over again.

  Ellis stands in the doorway, one hand braced against the frame, resplendent in a tailored suit. Her expression is so neutral that I can’t tell if it’s an affectation or if she genuinely doesn’t care what we’ve said—what Quinn has said.

  Her hand drops back to her side, and she arches a brow. “It was eat my rabbit or eat the dog. And I wasn’t going to shoot Muffin.”

  “Of course not,” I whisper, so softly I barely even hear myself say it.

  “I’m sorry,” Quinn is saying, already on their feet, swaying slightly, their face gone green. “I shouldn’t have said anything. Ellis…”

  Ellis’s lips press into a sharp smile. “It’s all right, Quinn. Felicity understands. Everyone has a backstory.”

  Our eyes meet across the room. I feel like I’m seeing Ellis Hal
ey for the first time, turning over memories like fresh stones: When I told Ellis about Alex, she never said it wasn’t my fault. She’d said, You didn’t have malevolent intent. There was a difference, which Ellis—Ellis the writer, Ellis alone in the dead of winter—understood better than anyone.

  “I was coming down to tell Felicity I’m going to bed,” Ellis says. She toys with the corner of the nearest accent table, as if caressing the grain of the wood. Or as if she has more to say, something she’s holding back.

  I discover what that something is an hour later, when I go up to bed myself and find a folded square of paper on my floor, tied shut with a length of black ribbon: coordinates and time, signed with Ellis’s name.

  Another Night Migration.

  The coordinates take me back to the church an hour before nightfall the following day. The setting sun casts a yellowish hue over the clapboards, the shadow of that upside-down cross stretching long and black across the dirt—nearly to the forest’s edge.

  Ellis leans against the wall by the door. Beside her is a gun.

  I stop at the tree line, staring at her from twenty feet away. Although of course that distance would mean nothing to someone with a finger on the trigger. “What is that for? Where did it come from? You—”

  “Don’t worry,” Ellis says, pushing herself to standing. “It’s nothing sinister. Quinn keeps this rifle in their car for self-protection—it’s a southern thing.”

  A southern thing. My throat is still so dry I have to swallow against it several times before I’m even able to speak again. “I’m not asking why Quinn has it. I’m asking why you have it.”

  “For the Night Migration,” Ellis says slowly, as if I’m perhaps a little bit stupid. “Flora Grayfriar’s death. It’s one of the last loose ends we need to tie up: we need to reframe how she died. How Margery killed her, rather.”

  I shake my head. “There are too many versions of that story. Which one are you claiming is real?”

  Ellis picks up the gun and props it against her shoulder. I feel like my head is full of marbles, all of them rolling over each other, bumping against the walls of my skull, too many to count. I can’t think straight with that thing in Ellis’s hands.

  “I still don’t understand why you need a gun.”

  “The hunting explanation,” Ellis says. “Remember? One version of the story says that Flora was found shot in the stomach. It could have been a hunting accident, or one of the townspeople, but my money’s on Margery. Someone heard her confess, after all. Why confess to something that isn’t true?”

  “I don’t—”

  “Just a coyote, Felicity,” Ellis says with a little laugh. “There are dozens of them out in these woods. Obviously we aren’t going to shoot each other.”

  I move closer to her now, although what I really want to do is drop onto the ground and sit there in the dirt. I don’t know how to argue with Ellis about this. It’s like trying to convince someone the grass is green when they insist that anyone could clearly see the grass is blue.

  “Okay.” I press my hands to my face and exhale heavily. “So you want to go hunting. Is that it?”

  “I want to see if an unskilled girl would be able to shoot something in near darkness and actually hit her target. And I want you to see that, too: No altar, no ritual. Just a girl who shot another girl in the woods. No spirits or sorcery necessary.”

  “The body was found on an altar. None of the accounts dispute that fact.”

  Ellis shrugs. “Sure. But that doesn’t mean the magic was real. Just that Margery wanted to make it look like it was real.”

  The explanation feels half-baked to me. I can’t put my finger on why at first, but then: “We’ve gotten to the part of your method writing where you need to kill something?”

  But Ellis just smiles and shakes her head. “Not remotely. You already heard I killed that rabbit, after all. This is for you, Felicity. This is the central part of the Dalloway story, as close to the heart of the so-called witches as you can get. But you don’t have to perform a ritual to pull a trigger.”

  “I know that,” I snap.

  “Knowing isn’t the same thing as knowing. You know up here.” Ellis taps her temple with one finger. “But you don’t know in here.” She presses that same hand over her chest. “You’ve tied those girls to magic so closely in your head that the knots will never unravel on their own. That’s why we’re doing this, Felicity—that’s the whole point of the Night Migrations. You need to walk in their shoes without magic. You need to see them as humans: as fallible and impulsive and mundane as anybody else.”

  Maybe she’s right. She’s been right about enough so far. So much of this has been in my head, the product of fear and some kind of chemical imbalance in my brain. I’m not sure I want to see the Dalloway witches as human, though. I want them to be like me.

  But when Ellis starts off toward the woods, I follow.

  According to her, coyotes are best hunted in the last hours of daylight. The sun is already dipping low toward the horizon by the time we step under tree cover, the gold light glinting off the lake and burnishing auburn in Ellis’s hair. I let her walk in front of me. It’s not that I don’t trust her; I just feel better when I can keep my eyes on the gun.

  “I saw a few traps out here last time. Watch your step,” Ellis says as we step into the shadow of the woods, her rifle cradled in the crook of one elbow.

  My gaze tracks the ground, but all I see is dead leaves.

  Ellis had told me, as we set out from the church, that our first goal was to cover as much ground as possible. Apparently coyotes move quickly and don’t often linger in one place for long—and in the woods, our call won’t travel far. We won’t spend more than ten or fifteen minutes in any one position before moving on.

  We don’t speak much once the trees have closed behind us. Silence reigns, broken only by the chattering of birds as we move beneath their nests. I feel the cold more completely now that we’re in shadow. I clench my hands in their leather gloves and pull my scarf tighter around my neck. Ellis’s cheeks are flushed, the only sign she feels the same.

  We’ve been out for twenty minutes or so when Ellis stops all of a sudden, reaching one hand back to catch my arm. She gestures, and I look.

  Tracks in the dirt: fat paw prints with widely spaced toes, perfect enough to publish in a textbook. We’ve found the coyote’s hunting territory. Ellis shoots me a quick grin, her face half shadowed under the brim of her flat cap, and starts off along the trail.

  The forest falls quieter the deeper we go. The birds no longer signal our arrival; perhaps they sense the presence of a greater predator than us. The shadows thicken, stretching out like slim fingers, then lacing together until their shade rises like tidewater underfoot. I keep my gaze on Ellis’s back; her shoulder blades shift visibly beneath her jacket, and for some reason I can’t stop staring at them, the slow steady movement of her body through the brush.

  Or maybe it’s not that I can’t stop watching Ellis. I find myself wary of looking away, certain that if I turn my eyes out toward the forest I’d find something else gazing back at me.

  “Wait,” Ellis says, throwing out one arm. I almost run into her but stop myself just in time.

  “What is it?” I ask, but she doesn’t need to answer—I see it a split second later.

  Past where Ellis stands, about ten feet away and half concealed by the shadow of a fallen log, lies the mess of a kill.

  A deer, I think, although it somehow seems too massive to be a deer, white bones gleaming where they thrust spearlike from the gore of tattered flesh and organ. Here and there the remnants of tawny fur ripple in the slow breeze.

  It’s grotesque. I take a half step closer, the scent of blood like copper in the air. Ellis doesn’t hold me back, but she does lift her gun up to her shoulder, ready if anything should dart out from between
the trees.

  Near the carcass, the rotting leaves are slick and almost mushy underfoot. The corpse is a deer’s, as it turns out—the antlers fractured and useless, one black eye staring sightlessly toward the dusk sky.

  “Can coyotes do that?” I breathe.

  “Maybe,” Ellis says. “But this is probably a wolf kill.” Her fingers press against the back of my neck. They’re gloved, but it’s still enough to send a soft shiver rolling down my spine. “How long ago do you think it died?”

  I crouch down in the bracken and take off my gloves to trail bare fingers along the deer’s flank. The fur is cool, but my hand comes away sticky.

  I turn and show her. “The blood’s still warm.”

  “Less than ten hours, then,” she says. “Be careful. Wolves might still be in the area.”

  The air feels thinner as we move on. I don’t glance behind me. I know I should be afraid of the wolf, or wolves, that killed that deer, but instead my mind keeps circling the memory of Alex’s ghost in the woods, a slim white figure darting between shadows. As certain as I’d felt earlier tonight that she wasn’t here, it’s harder to believe that as the forest darkens. Even the branches seem to take on new form, like bony fingers reaching for flesh.

  I straighten my shoulders and keep my gaze ahead. I want to seem ready. I can’t afford to show fear where Ellis can see.

  “We should try now,” Ellis says after we’ve walked another five minutes past the kill site. “I’ll set up the call.”

  We kneel down in a cradle of oak roots, close enough that our shoulders brush; I feel it every time Ellis breathes. We’ve placed the call fifteen feet away, a tiny electronic speaker that plays the sound of a rabbit in distress—squealing, screaming for mercy.

  The way Ellis’s rabbit might have squealed when Ellis wrung its neck.

  I glance sidelong at her, quick and surreptitious, but if she is thinking about that winter it doesn’t show on her face.

  We stay there, frozen still, until my legs start to ache and my body goes cold. The dark pitches deeper now—my eyes adjust slowly—and the frozen ground is hard against my knees.