Just as I was about to put the notebook in my bag, I noticed something. The clasp was fastened, although I never closed it myself. The mechanism was so old I was afraid it might break if I tried.
My fingers shook as I opened it gingerly, pulled back the leather flap and… found myself staring into darkness.
I held my breath. My bag was filled with feathers. Black, gleaming feathers, scattered thinly with a few tiny white dots. My hand shook harder still as I reached for one. It felt real. Real and… warm. Without stopping to think I pulled out a whole fistful of them and let them flutter onto the table in front of me. The feeling persisted. They were warm. And… wet?
My eyes shifted from the blackness of the feathers to my hand. My hand, which was smeared red.
Reflexively, I backed away, almost tripping over the chair. My pulse was racing and my feet wanted to do likewise, but I knew it was no use. The blood, the fuckingbird blood, was already binding itself to my skin.
* * *
My hand was throbbing as I left the library not long afterwards. I wrapped my fingers more tightly around the strap of my bag, not wanting to look at them, although I’d scrubbed them in the toilets until all trace of blood was gone. Yet I felt as though it had leached into my skin. Just as I felt like the feathers in my bag were stones. The weight of them bit into my shoulder, urging me to stop at every bin and dump them. I didn’t. I mustn’t. Not until I’d decided what to do with them.
My breath swirled like mist before my face as I walked through the college. The tip of my nose shimmered bluish at the edge of my vision, my fingers tingled, and I could no longer even feel my toes. Somehow, out of nowhere,allof my sensations had been muffled. My thoughts, like my body, felt wrapped in cotton wool. Maybe because every fibre of me was refusing to confront the sharp-edged events of the past thirty minutes.
Reaching a lamppost, I stopped. I tilted back my head and took a deep breath, as the words ran again through my mind. Garish and flickering, a neon sign in my own personal darkness.Memento mori. I knew the phrase was supposed to be a reminder–appreciate your life–but scrawled on the library wall like that, it felt more like a warning. A threat. Especially since the person who wrote it immediately went and stuffed a whole load of bloodied feathers into my bag.
I wanted to tell myself there was no connection, but how could I? Iknewit was the same person. Iknewit was no accident, that whoever it was had intended them for my bag. For me. Just as Iknew, without even checking, that the feathers had belonged to a starling. A starling that was now most likely dead.
Memento mori.
I squeezed my eyes shut until the letters crumbled away and focused on the key points. The most important questions were: who? And why? For the first question, there were three names that sprang to mind. Three people who knew I had taken an interest in them, who had made it clear to me in various ways that I shouldn’t have: Ashton, Victor, Blake. The why was obvious. They wanted to let me know I was on their radar. Presumably the whole thing was meant to frighten me–the only problem was, it lit a fire in me instead. If I’d had any last shred of doubt that the society existed, it was gone now.
It was so funny: in an attempt to stop me learning more about them, they’d given me my first piece of conclusive proof. There could be no other explanation for why they’d given me starling feathers, specifically, when I hadn’t mentioned the League to any of them.
I wasn’t sure what to make of it. That they underestimated me, and didn’t think I would put two and two together? Or that they overestimated themselves, to the point where they didn’t care if I did? Well, probably it didn’t matter either way. Even if they had guessed at my suspicions—what could they do about it? Secret society or not, at the end of the day it was just a bunch of rich kids. If the worst they could do was put feathers in my bag, I could handle that.
Still, my heart wouldn’t stop racing as I made my way through the grounds. I felt alone and unprotected, and I didn’t like it. I wanted to talk to someone about it–Ihadto. Quickly making up my mind, I grabbed my phone out of my coat pocket. After our conversation earlier, Davie had sent me a photo of a sad-looking face made out of chips, but even that didn’t make me smile.
Mabel
We need to talk.
I didn’t want to worry Davie unnecessarily, but after what had just happened, part of me sensed his concerns might not be unfounded. The situation was starting to get out of hand, and while retreat wasn’t an option, I knew I’d rather take the next steps with someone by my side.
As I turned the corner, I came to an abrupt halt. Blue light flooded my eyes, dazzling me. I found myself staring in bewilderment at a police car parked in the middle of the gravel path outside a building in Clare College, its light flashing across the wall. A handful of people were huddled behind a cordon, watching the officers positioned outside the door.
I approached a woman standing a little way off, under a beech tree. Despite her puffer jacket, she was shivering so badly that her teeth chattered.
‘What happened?’
She looked at me glassy-eyed, then back at the building. Her gaze drifted upward to the roof, twenty-five feet or so above the ground. ‘Somebody jumped,’ she whispered, as if the words would only become real if she said them too loudly. ‘They just took her away.’
‘What? Who?’ I stared back in horror at the area beyond the police tape. In the lamplit gloom, there was nothing to be seen. Only cold, grey, unforgiving stone. My stomach knotted.
The girl next to me snivelled, hugging herself more tightly. ‘A student… June Owens. I was in a few lectures with her, she’s always so sweet and funny. I… I can’t believe she did this.’
The name rang a bell in my mind, but I couldn’t follow the sound into the recesses of my memory. The whole situation was just too overwhelming. ‘Are they sure she definitely jumped? Maybe she fell, and it was an accident.’
She shook her head, pointing at two whey-faced girls who were standing by the police car, speaking to an officer. ‘One of them lives next door to me. She called me after it happened. She and her friend, they saw it. They found June up there and tried to talk her down but she just—’ She broke off, pressing a handto her mouth in a dry sob.
‘Is she…’ My voice trailed away. I couldn’t bring myself to say the word, or even think it.
‘There was so much blood,’ she murmured. ‘And… the ambulance took her but they didn’t turn the siren on, or the lights. That means…’
That meant she was already dead.
We were silent, suspended in a moment flooded with artificial light yet still so dark. With every second I stared at the ground, I felt colder. Dark stone made darker with blood. Like my hand, just a few minutes ago.
