A Lesson in Vengeance

by Victoria Lee

Thirteen thousand feet above sea level, you can drown in air like water. I read that drowning is a good way to go. By all accounts the pain fades and euphoria blooms in its place like hothouse flowers, red orchid roots tethered to the stones in your pocket. Falling would be worse. Falling is barbed-wire terror ripping down your spine, a sharp drop and a sudden stop, scrabbling for a rope that isn’t there.

What if, beneath the tailored skirt and tennis sweater, I’m one lonely night away from stripping off my clothes and hurtling naked through the woods like some delirious maenad?

This time I stack my dresser with jewelry instead. When I look up I catch my own gaze in the mirror: blond hair tied back with a ribbon, politely neutral lipstick smudging my lips. I scrub it off against my wrist. After all, there’s no one around to impress.

Girls who might prefer Oates to Shelley, Alcott to Allende. Girls who know nothing of blood and smoke, the darker kinds of magic.

I didn’t know how to explain to her that being friendless at Dalloway was better than being friendless anywhere else. At least here the walls know me, the floors, the soil. I am rooted at Dalloway. Dalloway is mine.

A girl sits at Alex’s desk, slim and black-haired with fountain pen in hand. She’s wearing an oversized glen check blazer and silver cuff links. I’ve never seen her before in my life.

Sleep swells around me like groundwater. The dark pulls me under. And then I’m back on the mountain, hands numb in my gloves as I cling to that meager ledge. The storm is unrelenting, sleet battering the nape of my neck. I keep thinking about dark water rising in my lungs. About Alex’s body broken on the rocks.

Once upon a time I found it so easy to forget the stories about Godwin House and the five Dalloway witches who lived here three hundred years ago, their blood in our dirt, their bones hanging from our trees. If this place is haunted, it’s haunted by the legacy of murder and magic—not by Alex Haywood.

I don’t know why she’s here early. I don’t know why she won’t tell me her name. I don’t know why she never speaks to me, or who she is. But I want to find a loose thread on the collar of her shirt and tug. I want to unravel her.

I feel as if the next year has just opened up in front of me, a great and yawning void that consumes all light. What will emerge from that darkness? What ghosts will reach from the shadows to close their fingers around my neck? A year ago, Alex and I let something evil into this house. What if it never left?

And if ghosts and magic aren’t real, curses aren’t real, either. But the tap-tap of the oak tree branches against my window reminds me of bony fingertips on glass, and I can’t get Alex’s voice out of my head.

Past: the Six of Cups, which represents freedom, happiness. It’s the card of childhood and innocence. Which, I suppose, is why it falls in my past. Present: the Nine of Wands, reversed. Hesitation. Paranoia. That sounds about right. And my future: the Devil.

I sit down in an empty armchair and pull out my phone, scrolling through my email while Clara and Kajal exchange incredulous looks—like they’ve never seen someone text before. And maybe they haven’t. They’re all dressed as if they’ve just emerged from the 1960s: tweed skirts and Peter Pan collars and scarlet lipstick.

“Creepy, right?” Clara says. She’s smiling. I can’t help but stare at her. Creepy: the word fails to encapsulate what Margery Lemont had been. I can think of better terms: Wealthy. Daring. Killer. Witch.

Flora Grayfriar, who was murdered first, by the girls she’d thought were friends. Tamsyn Penhaligon, hanged from a tree. Beatrix Walker, her body broken on a stone floor. Cordelia Darling, drowned. And…Margery Lemont, buried alive.

Ridiculous. I’m ridiculous. I should never have used them again. Tarot isn’t magic, but it’s close enough; I can practically hear Dr. Ortega’s voice in my head, murmuring about fixed delusions and grief. But magic isn’t real, I’m not crazy, and I’m not grieving. Not anymore.

Oh. Oh. Mismatched puzzle pieces slide, at last, into place. Ellis is Ellis Haley. Ellis is Ellis Haley, novelist: bestselling author of Night Bird, which won the Pulitzer last year. I’d heard about it on NPR; Ellis Haley, only seventeen and “the voice of our generation.” Ellis Haley, a prodigy. I manage to say, “Isn’t she homeschooled?”

Boleyn’s secret is an old ritual, a nod from the present day to a time when bad women were witches and passed their magic down to their daughters, generation to generation. And if the magic has died by now, diluted by technology and cynicism and too many years, students of certain Dalloway houses still honor our bloody inheritance. Boleyn House. Befana House. Godwin.

Ex scientia ultio. From knowledge comes vengeance.

Tamsyn Penhaligon seen outside a window with her snapped neck, Cordelia Darling with her sodden clothes dripping water on the kitchen floor, Beatrix Walker murmuring arcane words in the darkness.

I hate the invisible threads that tie her to the other girls in our coven, the knots between her and Bridget Crenshaw and Fatima Alaoui and the rest of them, tethers I used to think were unbreakable. I hate that I don’t even remember her name. “I haven’t received a note yet,” I say.

It’s a comment that demands a response, but I find myself voiceless. So seriously. As if the skull, the candles, the goat’s blood…as if that was all a joke to them.

“Still at Boleyn, as far as I know. I came back alone.” I struggle to imagine any of those girls letting Ellis Haley go anywhere by herself. You must’ve had to peel them off like tiny well-dressed leeches. I realize I’ve said that out loud, a beat after my mouth falls shut again.

I suppose there isn’t. Even so, a part of me wants to warn her not to get too close. Margery Lemont has a way of sucking you in and refusing to let go. I wonder if Alex’s ghost is watching us right now, her dead gaze drinking in this scene. Judging.

I can barely stand to exist in this place anymore. Dalloway might be in my blood and bones, but as much as I was unable to stay away, Dalloway’s history—and mine—hangs over the campus like a heavy fog. I wonder if Ellis feels it. If Ellis is scared of it, or if she hopes a shadow of that evil will seep up from the ground and infect her, the way it infected Margery Lemont.

“How many finishing schools do you know with rare book rooms crammed full of pentacles and pages made out of human skin?”

I think about the moment the rope snapped and the world went quiet and still, my body weightless without Alex dragging it down, the snow in my eyes and the emptiness on the mountain. The hollow feeling that carved its way into my chest. And the relief.

And then there’s us: the literati, the bookish intelligentsia with an affinity for horn-rimmed glasses and pages that smell like dust.

“Yes.” I got used to responding as people wanted to hear while I was at Silver Lake. Yes is what Wyatt wants to hear. “I don’t want to waste the research I did before, so I was thinking I’d stay in a similar genre. Horror.” Wyatt nods slowly. “Is that a good idea? Horror can be…very gruesome.” “I’m better now,” I reassure her. “I can handle reading Helen Oyeyemi. I promise.”

By the time I leave Wyatt’s building, though, I already wonder if I’ve made a mistake. If reading about witches was foolish, reading about ghosts is surely more so. Ever since I came back here, I’ve felt Alex’s presence like an unfinished sentence—waiting. And no matter how many times I tell myself ghosts don’t exist, that doesn’t dilute my fear.

Sometimes I wonder what would happen if I just stopped cooperating.

At least I didn’t have to buy my friends, Alex had said the night she died, cheeks blotchy with rage; and even then I’d known she was right. But I don’t have any interest in buying the friendship of Ellis Haley or her cabal. I find it hard to care about social hierarchies these days. Alex would have been proud.

I draw a card: the Page of Cups. My room smells like Alex’s perfume.

Alex is dead. And maybe her spirit is still here, maybe she still haunts the crooked halls of Godwin House. But I turn to face the empty room and say it anyway: “I’m not afraid of you.”

devouring the dark and the macabre with white sunlight burning the nape of my neck.

“This isn’t coffee,” I say. “It’s chamomile,” Ellis says. “One squeeze of lemon and a half teaspoon of honey. That is how you take it, right?” I had no idea she’d even noticed how I drink my tea—or that I drink tea to begin with. And yet here she stands, hands clasped behind her back and the tea itself steaming right next to my potted echeveria. I arch my brows, pick up the mug, and take a tiny sip. God, she even got it to the perfect temperature.

Not that she would accept my excuses. How could I explain the way my past feels as if it’s intertwined with theirs? The dark magic that bites at my heels no matter how fast I run? She knows. She can’t possibly know. But Ellis’s gaze has already slid away from mine, fixing instead on my bookshelves. “What are these?”

The Knight of Swords,” I say. “You’re—surprise, surprise—ambitious and driven. You know what you want, and you pursue it at any cost. That can be a good thing, of course, but it has downsides; you can be impulsive and reckless, too, more focused on your goal than on its risks.”

“The Hermit. This one’s me.” Cloaked and bearing a staff, my free hand extended to hold a lamp. The light cuts through the dark landscape around me, a star held in my palm. “I should prepare for a journey of self-discovery and introspection. Not everything will be clear at once; I’ll only ever be able to see a few steps ahead. I have to trust myself and my own intuition.”

“And the last one? Us together?” I turn it over. It’s the card from before, the same one that had so fascinated Ellis when she first looked at the deck. Death rides a pale horse, the light of the setting sun glinting off the blade of her scythe. Peasants and queens alike are slain by her passing. In her wake, a white rose blooms.

It’s too easy to imagine Clara whispering in Ellis’s ear again, old and rotten tales about missing girls and desolate mountain cliffs, how Felicity Morrow claimed it was an accident, but no one else was there to say for sure.

I can’t, of course. I know I can’t. Magic is dangerous for me. Maybe some people can toy with it, but me… God. Just last week the party line was how magic isn’t real. And yet it is; I know it is. The question isn’t whether magic is real. It’s whether I can touch it without being consumed by it.

Alex was pretty. Maybe not in the conventional way—her jaw was too square, her eyes too far apart, her red hair always tangled and roped back into a fraying plait. But she exuded a fierce energy that ate up all the oxygen in a room. I wanted her from day one.

Alex and I became our own clique: inverse images of one another, the rebel and the heiress. Alex had her own charm; it was impossible not to love her.

“I can’t work with Felicity,” Bridget says without even waiting to be called upon. “She makes me uncomfortable.” That’s code for I won’t work with a girl who killed her best friend.

Never mind that Bridget is part of the Margery coven; never mind that Bridget had doubtless been part of the decision to excise me from that club. I’m not queen anymore. This is a coup.

A titter runs through the class, and Bridget’s cheeks darken; she says nothing. It shouldn’t feel like a victory, but it does. If Bridget thinks less of me because of what happened, because I had to leave school, then I want her humiliated.

“Do what?” She spares me a sidelong glance. “I don’t want to work with Ursula Prince. It’s as simple as that.” As simple as that. Somehow, I don’t think it is.

The moment I open my bedroom door, a curse escapes my lips. It looks like an autumn storm has swept through, the trash bin tipped over and its contents spilled across the rug, Alex’s postcard torn from the wall and lying on the floor as if someone had read it and then, indifferent, discarded it. Her ghost.

I retrieve her letters, carefully separating them from the wastebasket contents and putting them in my desk drawer this time. I find all except one, the card Alex sent me from her family’s winter trip to Vermont. And no matter where I search—under the bed, behind my desk, even out on the lawn of Godwin House—I can’t find it anywhere.