When at last every scrap and stain had been consumed, Jane made her way down to the kitchen. There was water drawn into a bucket there, gray and used from washing, and Jane scrubbed her hands clean in its icy depths. Ignoring the murk of it, she splashed it on her face, shocking herself half senseless. The evidence was burned. The spirits were gone. The sun was rising, and she had work to do.
She shivered as she gathered what she needed for the dawn ritual. Salt and a hen’s egg from the kitchen, chalk and benzoin and a fat taper candle from the study. She risked the bedroom to dress again, then returned to the library.
The stench of burned fabric still lingered, turning her stomach, but the room’s remoteness might shield her from prying eyes if the servants arrived before she completed the working. She put down her basket of implements inside the circle she had drawn at dusk. She set the pin and pulled the string taut, and traced it out fresh.
She circumscribed herself with the utmost care, and settled down in the exact center, reaching for the eel inside her. But as she did, she saw again the rotted skull, felt again the writhing of worms. Abigail’s flesh, hot and slick. The eel darted away. She tried again, and this time, it was a pop from the fire that distracted her. The next, it was the memory of Augustine’s desperate voice behind the stone.
“Just get it over with,” she whispered to herself, and abandoned the circle, reaching for the candle instead. It was decorated with lines and shapes that she had inscribed in its surface according to the text. She rubbed benzoin into the hollows, then set the wax before her and lit it. The perfume almost overwhelmed the stink of burned fabric and blood, but instead of feeling stronger, she felt ashamed.
“Let this candle be the light that guides me to knowledge,” she said. Her voice trembled.
She felt nothing.
She wanted the certainty, the ecstasy that had come with the working before. Instead, she felt … normal. Foolish.
A soft thrumming came from the hallway. No—the wall itself. The empty water pipes?
Augustine. He was listening. He needed this as much as she did.
She fixed him in her mind’s eye and reached once more for the eel. She smelled blood. She felt the worms. But her fingers closed over the writhing flesh, and the first bricks fell in place in the circle around her. Power flared in her breast, and she could have cried from the relief.
Jane started the incantation over, reading line after line, her voice tremulous but constant. She anointed herself, invoking her senses.
She whispered her intentions to the ether: the attainment of knowledge, entry to the greater world beyond the limitations of man, and the salvation of Augustine. She bowed low to the candle, so close she could feel the heat on her chin, as she had felt the heat that burned away the sheets. And then she sat back on her heels and reached for the egg.
“The thin shell protects the potential within from harm; it cannot survive unaided, in the way that the grown mind protects the unprepared soul from the expansion of the universe without. But the shell must finally give way; the mind must blossom and allow that which lives within to breathe in its birthright.”
She cracked the egg into a dish with faded flowers painted around the chipped rim. The yolk was vibrant orange, leaking into the clear albumen in a plume on one edge.
On the other was a spot of brilliant crimson.
Jane pressed the fingertips of both her hands into the bowl. The yolk came apart into an undifferentiated mass of gold and she stirred it, each hand going in a different direction.
“The mind is not yet ready to give way,” Jane whispered, lifting her hands from the bowl and painting lines of sticky egg across her forehead, her cheeks, the hollow of her throat. “But through the resonance of the pantomime, I prepare the mind and the soul. I prepare myself for the first glimpses of the unknown.”
She forced herself to lift the bowl and bring it to her lips. The crimson spot was still there. Her exhausted mind conjured up images of baby birds, fledgling feathers, thin bones that would crack at the slightest pressure.
Just a spot. Just a spot of blood. She had eaten such before, she must have. But the more she looked at the crimson spot, the more she was able to make out the branching of veins, and a murky center that might be the beginnings of a chick. Synchronicity, she told herself. The coincidence had to mean the spell was working. Didn’t it?
She fixed her eyes on the door, on Lindridge Hall beyond, on its ghosts and the man lost in its bowels.
And she drank.
The egg slid down her throat, fast and heavy, rich and wrong. Her stomach heaved, but she kept it down. The bowl nearly slipped from her fingers. In a blinding rush, she felt power course up her spine, filling her to her fingertips, to her toes. Something hurt in her belly, but it was a beautiful kind of pain, sharpening all her senses. Awake. She felt awake. She felt disgusting. She felt glorious. She felt—