A Lesson in Vengeance(36)

The woman just spins her computer monitor to show me the screen, where it says my name and, in bright-red font, disallowed.

I know for a fact that Ellis has been going into the occult section; that’s where she got the book on tasseography, after all. Still, something in me balks at the prospect of asking her to go for me. I don’t want to open up the possibility for questions I can’t answer.

So I return to Godwin House and pack myself a sandwich and a water bottle, then go back to the library and claim a carrel on the fifth floor—the emptiest floor, housing the school’s encyclopedia collection. I occupy myself by reading the rest of my latest Shirley Jackson book, then type out a few new paragraphs of material for my European History essay.

Eventually even those few students who had ventured up to the fifth floor drift away, the last of them packing up when the lights flicker, a sign that the library’s about to close for the night.

I’ve been one of those reluctant students before, lingering as long as possible to finish just one more chapter, one more page. The librarians will come through any minute, checking to make sure all the students have egressed and gone back to their houses; I know that much from experience. But I also know they won’t check everywhere.

I take my sandwich and go sit in the stacks, eating my late dinner and listening to the echo of heels on hardwood as one of the librarians makes her rounds through the carrels.

Then the sound of a door shutting and the lights turn off, plunging me into darkness.

I pull out my flashlight and flick the switch. The amber beam of light casts a narrow channel through the gloom. The stacks feel taller like this, looming watchful in the darkness as I pass. Perhaps this wasn’t such a good idea; my skin prickles at the nape of my neck as I take the elevator to the basement, which encloses the occult collection. I’m afraid to look behind me, knowing that if I do I’ll find her there, dripping lake water on the tile floor, eyes like black pits above sharp teeth.

I dart out of the elevator as soon as it hits ground; the doors can’t slide open fast enough. Only it’s worse once I’m ducking under the velvet rope and shouldering through the door into the occult section. If Alex haunts me, haunts the school—if Godwin House is the epicenter of her power—then this would be the epicenter of theirs. The Dalloway Five.

I find myself gazing through the iron grate at a leather-bound copy of Malleus Maleficarum, my breath coming in shallow gulps, afraid to look too deeply into the shadows.

This is my problem. Despite my fear, despite all the ways this obsession ruined everything for me, I want to be back here. I’m drawn to these books like a moth to a struck match. I can’t stay away.

I used to spend hours in this room, poring over the papyrus boards of Grimoirium Verum and caressing its cobra-skin spine. I scrawled pages of notes from The Book of Paramazda.

I should be flipping through pulp horror novels and having nightmares over The Yellow Wallpaper. I should be spending my afternoons in the general stacks with cozy, comfortingly fictional books, then returning home to hot tea and a warm bed. I shouldn’t be picking the lock on the Godwin case, washing my hands at the sink, settling in under the amber glow of a desk lamp to read.

But the Dalloway occult collection is the only place in the country where I might find the information I need: how to unravel the curse Alex and I brought down upon ourselves, how to close the ritual a year too late.

The spine makes a faint cracking sound when I open the second volume of the Dalloway records, its heavy leather binding settling reluctantly against the surface of the desk. The smell of it hasn’t changed. It’s like the inside of a grave. The title, in brown ink, is inscribed in eighteenth-century calligraphy atop the first page:

Report of the Trial of

Margery Lemont, Beatrix Walker, Cordelia Darling, & Tamsyn Penhaligon,

On an Indictment for the Murder of Flora Grayfriar



The trial took place in 1712, well before the advent of photography, but like most of us at Dalloway, the accused girls came from money. A portrait of Margery Lemont has been preserved here in the bowels of the Dalloway library; it hangs on the east wall next to the painting of her mother, the founder. When I look up from my book, Margery is watching me with a cool and impenetrable gaze. The artist painted her in luscious pale silks, her black hair tumbling loose over her shoulders, in defiance of the style of the time. Her nose is long and narrow, her lips faintly smiling, but it is her eyes that have always captured me most. Pale green along the lower curve of her irises, they deepen to black past the meridian of her pupils. A pinprick of light gleams against that shadow but fails to illuminate.

Some say she haunts the school along with the rest of the Dalloway Five—Godwin House, in particular. That legend isn’t true, of course; or it wasn’t until Alex and I made it so.

Flora Grayfriar was found exsanguinated in the woods, says this particular record, her sternum split and her white dress soaked red. She was the last body in a series of smaller corpses to be found: a slaughtered rabbit, a bloodless sheep. The trial makes no mention of a musket wound, although the account of the herbs and flowers strewn about her body is repeated here.

I reread the girls’ testimonies. It’s hard to imagine that they were alive once, pink-cheeked and vibrant, when the tales of their deaths loom so large.

In fact, tonight I reread the entire record of the murder trial, although I’ve scoured it enough times I nearly have it memorized. There are other accounts, of course, but I keep coming back to this one. Maybe a part of me heuristically assumes that if it was reported in a courtroom, it is likely a truer account of what happened—although I’m sure that isn’t actually the case. Every time I read I think I’ll find some new detail: another hint about what spells they cast, what arcane arts they practiced that required Flora’s death—if any. It’s useless. The girls claim they never touched Flora. They do admit to having held a séance, the details of which I had bastardized last year for my ritual with Alex. But the girls insisted it had all been in the name of good fun, a joke between friends, nothing more insidious. And nothing to do with Flora’s death.