A Lesson in Vengeance(24)

I knew the answer to my query, but I wanted Margery to say it nonetheless.

The planchette shifted under our hands, my breath catching in my chest—the planchette moved aside, then returned immediately to yes.

So many new questions swelled inside me. Too many. It was impossible to ask all of them. Impossible to ask with a board and a pointer the question I really wanted to know:

What can you teach me about magic?

I was about to ask the Dalloway Five the purpose of Flora’s death, what ritual they were trying to perform that night at the autumn equinox—if they were even responsible for her death at all—when the planchette moved again.

“Get the notebook,” Alex gasped, and I snatched my moleskin back into my lap and uncapped my pen with one shaking hand.

The planchette shifted across the board in jagged jerks under our touch.

“I…A…”

The air was frigid now, a bone-deep ice that crystallized in my blood. I didn’t dare look away from the board, which meant that when the planchette finally went still—when I finally turned my gaze to the notebook—I could barely read my own handwriting.

“What does it say?” Alex urged after I’d been silent for several seconds.

“It says…” I shook my head, swallowed; my throat had gone dry. “It says, ‘I am going to kill you.’?”

I looked up. Alex stared at me from the other side of the board, both her hands clenched in white fists against her knees. Her face glowed greenish in the candlelight, eerie, and—

Something grazed the back of my neck, a cold finger tracing down my spine.

“Alex,” I choked out.

“Are you okay?”

The touch vanished; I felt a breeze ripple through my hair as it passed. I was too afraid to look over my shoulder. “I swear, something just—”

The shadows deepened, coalescing like smoke. A figure rose behind Alex like a ghastly silhouette, long hair undulating like waves about its head, its hands like sharp claws reaching.

Reaching for her throat.

“Alex, behind you!”

She spun around, and in that same motion the specter vanished, bursting into shards and scraps of shadow that faded into the night.

Margery.

“Nothing’s there,” Alex said.

But I could still sense her: Margery Lemont’s spirit had its talons dug deep in my heart, my blood turned to poison in my veins.

I shook my head. “It was…She was there, I swear. She was right there.”

How did the poem go?

And then the spirit, moving from her place,

Touched there a shoulder, whispered in each ear,…

But no one heeded her, or seemed to hear.

“This is bullshit,” Alex declared.

“No! Alex, don’t—”

Too late. She swept the planchette from the board and stabbed the incense out. “It’s not real, Felicity. Calm down.”

No. No, this was all spiraling out of control. We had to end the séance properly. Margery was still here, lurking, the veil between our world and the shade world gone thin and diaphanous at Samhain. It was only too easy for her to shift into our sphere.

I’d prepared for this possibility: a tiny bowl of ground anise and clove to be ignited over a charcoal briquette—enough to protect against the cruelest spirit, or so I’d been assured by the library’s copy of Profane Magick.

Alex scattered the spices across the floor, rendering them useless.

That was the moment, I decided later, that set everything in motion, the moment the devil’s wheel began to turn, my blood spilled on Margery’s skull and Margery’s hands tangling in the threads of our fates. We’d cursed ourselves. I am going to kill you, she’d made me say. And she was right.

It had an absurd sense of inevitability about it. I kept thinking about the séance the Dalloway Five had held, the one that was interrupted. About Flora, dead three days later. How each girl died in mysterious circumstances which couldn’t be explained, until finally Margery herself was buried alive. It was almost like whatever spirit they’d raised had cursed them—and wouldn’t rest until every one of those girls was dead.

But at the time, I let Alex convince me. Once the lights were on, it all seemed rather ridiculous: The candles had guttered because we’d left the window open, which also accounted for the chill. The figure I’d seen behind Alex was her shadow stretching and shifting in the candlelight. Everything had a reasonable explanation, and Alex was right. The spooky atmosphere, the old school legends, Samhain: we’d let it get to us; that was all.

I didn’t tell her how I couldn’t stop dreaming about Margery after that night, or how I slept with anise and clove under my pillow to keep her away.

A few months later Alex was dead, and now…

Now I can’t hide from the truth.





The postcard never emerges. I search everywhere in the following days, even the hole in the back of my closet, but it’s no use. The card is gone, vanished into the place where lost things go.

Or, perhaps, into someone else’s possession.

I started reading We Have Always Lived in the Castle this morning for my thesis. I wonder if Merricat’s brand of magic would work here—if I could tie a black ribbon in knots and bury it in the back garden with a murmured incantation, and tomorrow I’d wake to find the postcard back on my wall, where it belongs.