The Secret Garden. It’s the same copy Ellis gave me in the graveyard, the same copy I left leaning against Alex’s headstone, with its old pages and embossed gold foil.
I’m sick to the blood, sick in a way that makes me certain I shouldn’t touch that book. I should leave, should burn this place to the ground.
But I can’t help myself. I slide the book out of its space between two Austens with shaking hands. When I open the ancient pages I smell something familiar, something that isn’t glue or rotting paper. It’s jasmine and vetiver. It’s…Alex. It’s Alex’s perfume.
Pressed between chapters three and four is a sprig of hellebore.
I drop the book, and it thumps to the floor, releasing a cloud of dust as I stagger back. The walls are closing in on me, the room airless. It’s a feeling like standing on a precipice, the world dropping out from under you, and nothing but sky between you and certain death.
I spin around, expecting to find Alex there, with skeleton fingers reaching for my throat. Her face bloodless and pale, withered with decay. Her mouth sucking in air like a broken vacuum, and frothy blood leaking from her lips—I’d watched videos of drowning victims online after I remembered the truth; I know what it would look like. The way her chest would heave as she tried to breathe. The gut punch, her back curling, as she couldn’t exhale.
The room is empty, but it’s not empty. I feel her. She’s here. She’s in every corner, every shadow. She’s above me, inside me. She’s black ice in my veins.
She’s the shadowy figure flitting between the trees, watching us sleep in the snow.
I stumble out of the room and down the creaky Godwin stairs, dragging against the wall and gripping the banister, as if that could keep me from falling if Alex’s spirit made me throw myself down. The light is off in Ellis’s room when I manage to get my disobedient legs to carry me along the corridor. Tripping over the fringe of the rug, I press my sweaty hands against her lintel.
For a moment I’m sure I’m about to vomit all over her door, but I swallow bile down and knock instead. She doesn’t answer, so I knock again and again, until I’m just pounding and shaking and sobbing. The time it takes for Ellis to open the door feels like a thousand years. But she does open it, and I tip forward and into her arms.
Her hands find my back hesitantly, as if she’s never held anyone so close before. She’s in a silk dressing gown; it occurs to me on some distant level that I’ve never seen her so undressed.
“What is it?” she asks, slowly smoothing her touch up and down my spine. “What happened?”
I can barely get the words out. They’re like broken glass in my mouth, deadly.
“Alex,” I manage at last, and a fresh shudder rolls through my body.
“What about Alex?”
I’m still trembling, but Ellis pushes me back enough to look at me properly, her gaze traversing my face as if she can interpret something new from my tears and snot.
“The…the book,” I say, after taking a few unsteady breaths. “The one we left at her grave.”
“The Secret Garden,” Ellis provides.
I nod. “It’s…It’s in…It showed up in my room. The same…the same copy.”
Ellis’s gaze sharpens. “The same? You’re sure?”
“Of course I’m sure!” My voice pitches loudly enough that Leonie opens her door down the hall and peers out at us, blearily asking what’s going on.
“We’re okay,” Ellis says, and she tugs me into her room and kicks the door shut behind us.
“It’s the same book,” I tell her again. My voice is a little calmer now at least. I don’t feel quite so much like I’m suffocating. “It’s…Alex. I told you. I told you going to that graveyard was a bad idea! Now she’s angry. She’s…she’s never going to leave me in peace!”
Any other day, perhaps I’d have taken a moment to be pleased with myself; I’ve clearly presented a mystery to which Ellis Haley has no ready answer. She stares at me with a look on her face I’ve never seen before, like she doesn’t believe what she’s hearing.
It occurs to me in that moment—away from the proximity of the book itself—that there’s another explanation for its reappearance.
“You,” I choke out. “You put it there. Didn’t you?” I shove her with both hands, and she falls back on her heels, which for some reason strikes me as not good enough. I push her again, harder. “Didn’t you?”