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.
Only that can’t be true, I tell myself, sucking in a series of shallow breaths and willing my pulse to slow. There’s a more rational explanation: my window’s cracked open, the gauzy drapes shivering and the air cold as night. The oak stands silent and watchful, branches like black fingers against the sky.
Ghosts don’t exist. I have to keep my head on my shoulders; I have to stay sane. I have to prove I deserve to be back here. I need to prove returning wasn’t a mistake.
I curse again and cross the room to shut the window, twisting the latch shut. I could have sworn I’d closed the window before I left.
I collect the detritus and put it all back in place. Some of Alex’s old letters have fallen from their homes, tucked between books on my shelves. That’s more than a coincidence, I think. It has to be. It has to be.
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.
Here is the truth.
What happened to Alex was no accident. Not just because she fell, because we’d fought, or because I cut the rope—but because of what happened last October.
I’d recently decided on my thesis project: “I caution you against this,” Wyatt had said when I told her I wanted to study representations of witchcraft in literature. “You will struggle to get a thesis on witchcraft approved by the administration, no matter how good your scholarship. Dalloway is a respectable school—this isn’t the Scholomance.”
“I don’t see the problem,” I’d said. “I’m not claiming the Dalloway witches were real. Just that conceptualizations of witchcraft existed in the eighteenth century, and that those were influenced by perceptions of female agency and mental illness at the time. I want to connect the reality of their lives to the fantasy of how women were presented on the page.”
Wyatt had fixed me with a lancet gaze and said: “So long as you focus on the literature, Miss Morrow—not on flights of fancy.” And she’d signed the papers.
But when I’d told my mother about my plans, she’d been appalled.
“That school is a bad influence on you,” my mother had told me while I was home for Thanksgiving break a few weeks later. “I thought you knew better than to believe all that nonsense about witches.”
Perhaps she was right to be afraid. Of course, at the time I’d scoffed. I don’t believe in witches, I’d insisted, and it was true. Before Dalloway, I had fancied myself a rationalist—too rational, in fact, to entertain the possibility that reality might contain more mysteries than my feeble mortal mind could understand. But there was something about the Dalloway Five that drew me in, embraced me in their cold dead arms. They were real: there was historical evidence for their lives, for their deaths. And I imagined their magic stitched like a thread across time, passed from mother to daughter, a glittering link from the founder to Margery Lemont to me.
That had felt like a comfort once. After Halloween, it felt more like a curse.
By that night, I’d had plenty of opportunities to embroil myself in lore and legend. My room at Godwin House was littered with scanned grimoire pages and notes on the uncanny. Alex watched all this with a sort of academic fascination; she’d never been able to understand why I was so drawn to darkness. She had always belonged in the light of the sun.
“Don’t you think you’re taking this a little too seriously?” Alex asked the night everything went wrong, waving a match through the air to extinguish the flame. “You’ve been kind of over the top about this thesis business. Like, do you think you’re starting to get a little confused about reality here? Magic doesn’t exist, Felicity.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“I mean…yes?”
She held my gaze for a long moment; I looked away first, back to the Ouija board set up between us. “This is important to me,” I confessed to the planchette. I dipped a cloth into salt water and wiped it over the board itself, cleansing it for the summoning. “Not because I believe in it, necessarily, but because they did.”