It’s chilly in this room; I hold my coffee between both hands, trying to borrow its warmth. “And what will you conclude?”
“I don’t know yet. That’s what I’m trying to figure out.” Ellis traces her finger along the circumference of her cup. “Although I suppose in some ways I don’t need to speculate. The deaths in the story are inspired by the Dalloway Five.”
The Dalloway Five, again. No matter what I do, it seems like I can’t escape them. I left for almost an entire year—I spent nearly a year away from this place, in my own brand of seclusion, but as soon as I come back, there are ghosts at my heels and stories of dead witches on everyone’s tongue.
I don’t recall people being nearly so interested in Dalloway’s history last year. If anything, I felt self-conscious of my thesis subject; discussing it always earned me scrunched noses and twisted mouths.
“What do you mean?”
“I’m writing about them,” Ellis says. “Well, about Margery Lemont specifically. The story is from multiple perspectives, but ultimately questions whether Margery was really a witch, as her accusers claimed, or whether accusations of witchcraft merely reflected a pathologization of female anger.”
I don’t know how to respond to that. My mouth is dry; my tongue sticks to my palate like old gum.
“So of course I had to transfer here, to Dalloway. There’s nowhere else to write this kind of story, is there?”
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.
“Well, good luck,” I offer.
Ellis smiles at me, right as her lips close around the rim of her cup, is still smiling as she takes another sip. “And you? What’s your senior thesis?”
For a moment, last year’s answer perches on my lips. Ellis waits in patient silence while I struggle to swallow it down.
“I don’t know yet.”
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.
At last, I bite the inside of my cheek and admit: “I thought I wanted to study the witches, as well. But I’m not sure that’s such a good idea anymore.”
Ellis’s brow arches at a perfect angle. “Curiouser and curiouser,” she says.
Her amusement hangs on the words like antique lace.
Does she know? Can she tell that, for me, the study was never academic?
Maybe she’s been warned, Wyatt or MacDonald drawing Ellis into her office: Be careful with such stories, Miss Haley. Take care you don’t start to believe they’re true.
“How so?” It comes out a little more aggressively than I expect. “It’s a good story. Clearly you agree, or you wouldn’t be writing about it.”
“A perfect story,” Ellis corrects. “Dalloway School: founded to teach the arcane arts to young witches under the guise of an expensive finishing school. Dalloway’s first headmistress: daughter of a witch. And of course the Dalloway Five, who murdered one of their own in a satanic ritual. Reality only aspires to such perversity.”
“It’s not all untrue. We know the founder came from Salem, after all. And don’t forget the occult collection in the main library.” A collection donated by an alumna of Dalloway, a now-famous historian of seventeenth-century religious practices. A collection I had hoped to get my hands on, as soon as I was a third-year and had a faculty member willing to sign the permission slip. I wanted to breathe the dust off those scrolls, trace my gloved fingers along ancient spines. The administration—and Wyatt—had tried to talk me out of my thesis a hundred times. Maybe they’d known what would become of me if I flirted too well with old magic. “How many finishing schools do you know with rare book rooms crammed full of pentacles and pages made out of human skin?”
Ellis waves a hand as if to say Fair enough.
“But of course, you’re right,” I add. “They weren’t really witches. They were just girls.”
Just girls. Just clever, bright young women. Too clever and bright for their time.
And they were killed for it.