Not that I fit here, either. My first attempt at a senior year, I’d been living in Godwin for a year already—had stitched myself into the fabric of Godwin with knotted threads. I remember I’d wanted so badly to be accepted to the house. I had applied to Boleyn and Eliot as well, but Godwin was the ground on which the Dalloway Five had stood, the land on which they’d lived—and died. I had read in the library about Tamsyn Penhaligon’s death, her body found swinging from the oak tree behind Godwin eleven months after Flora Grayfriar’s murder. Although Tamsyn had been ruled a suicide, one of the records in the occult library said her face had been painted with blood: unfamiliar sigils traced over her cheeks and brow.
That same tree stands right outside my bedroom. The first night I spent in Godwin, I’d pushed open the window and leaned out to press my palm against its bark. I’d imagined I could feel Tamsyn’s heart beating inside it, an echo to my own. The oak didn’t frighten me until later.
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 werereal.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 theliterature,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.Idon’tbelieve 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 becausetheydid.”
“And you’re obsessed with them. The Dalloway Five.”
“I’m not obsessed. This is our history—Godwin’s history. They killed a girl. That really happened, whether we believe in witchcraft or not. And we know they held a séance—that was documented in the trial. Whether they thought it was real or just make-believe, they performed a ritual to raise a ghost. And Flora died a few days later.”
The primary sources I’d read in Dalloway’s library were inconsistent as to the nature of Flora Grayfriar’s death. The account I’d read in the library described an almost ritualistic killing, Flora’s throat slit and her stomach cut open, stuffed full of animal bones and herbs. But other contemporaneous writings said she was found with a musket ball in her gut, dead in the forest, shot like a beast. It should have been a simple thing, to determine how a girl died: Was she shot, or was her throat slit? Do I trust the trial documents, or the letters written by Flora’s mother? Who had more motive to lie?
Either the Dalloway girls were witches, and they’d murdered Flora in some arcane deal with the devil, or Flora’s death had a far more mundane explanation. A hunting accident, maybe. A lovers’ quarrel. Or even a bigoted townsperson who heard about the séance and wanted to see the girls punished for meddling with powers they couldn’t contain.
After all, Flora was the first death, but she wasn’t the last. Following her, every one of the Dalloway witches died in ways that were impossible to explain. All of their bodies were found on the Godwin House grounds, like the house itself was determined to keep them. It was almost as if they were cursed, as if they’d raised a spirit that was determined to see them all dead.
The more likely explanation—that they’d been killed by religious mountain folk who feared women, feared the magic they’d assigned to women—didn’t hold the same appeal.
Regardless, Alex was right. I hadn’t been able to get the Dalloway Five out of my head for weeks. I’d even dreamed about them the previous night, Beatrix Walker’s hair like spun corn silk and Tamsyn Penhaligon’s bony fingers trailing along my cheek. They had found their way inside me, like fungal spores inhaled and taken root. Sometimes I felt like they’d always been there. I’d read about reincarnation, about girls born again and again, and imagined Margery Lemont whispering soft words in the back of my mind. Every time I touched her skull at Boleyn House, I felt her in my blood.
