Alex struck a match, and the specter vanished. The place where it had stood was pitch black, and yet I could still feel its presence. Maybe it hadn’t disappeared. Maybe instead it hadexpanded,consuming us.
Alex and I stared at each other across the board. Alex’s shoulders shifted in quick, shallow little movements, her tongue flicking out to wet her lower lip. It felt colder now than before, like the temperature had dropped several degrees when the candles went out.
It’s all right,I wanted to tell her, but my tongue was a dead thing in my mouth, heavy and ill tasting. As if I’d swallowed grave dirt.
Margery Lemont had been buried alive.
My blood was sticky against my palm, the scent of it high and coppery in the air, overwhelming the musk of incense. Alex lit the candles again—just the three nearest her. Their light cast unnatural shapes along the board, most of the letters fallen into darkness.
Neither of us were touching the planchette anymore, but its aperture was fixed over the wordyes.
“Did you move the pointer?”
Alex shook her head.
My teeth dug into my lower lip. Together, we both tilted forward once more, our trembling fingers meeting atop the wooden planchette.
“Are the stories true?” I asked. “Were you really witches?”
If the ritual account of Flora’s death was true, it had been clearly Druidic in inspiration: some bastardization of Greco-Roman reports that the ancient Celts performed human sacrifice at the autumnal equinox—that the future could be read in the way the victim’s limbs convulsed as they died. Even the way in which the sacrifice bled had prognostic value.
The town midwife’s diary told a version of the story in which Flora Grayfriar’s body was found with her skin half-burned and her clothes in ashes atop a wicker altar. Silver mullein leaves were strewn about the ground, a wormwood crown laced through her hair, her throat wet with blood.
I knew the answer to my query, but I wanted Margery to say it nonetheless.
The planchette shifted under our hands, my breath catching in my chest—the planchette moved aside, then returned immediately toyes.
So many new questions swelled inside me. Too many. It was impossible to ask all of them. Impossible to ask with a board and a pointer the question Ireallywanted to know:
What can you teach me about magic?
I was about to ask the Dalloway Five the purpose of Flora’s death, what ritual they were trying to perform that night at the autumn equinox—if they were even responsible for her death at all—when the planchette moved again.
“Get the notebook,” Alex gasped, and I snatched my moleskin back into my lap and uncapped my pen with one shaking hand.
The planchette shifted across the board in jagged jerks under our touch.
“I…A…”
The air was frigid now, a bone-deep ice that crystallized in my blood. I didn’t dare look away from the board, which meant that when the planchette finally went still—when I finally turned my gaze to the notebook—I could barely read my own handwriting.
“What does it say?” Alex urged after I’d been silent for several seconds.
“It says…” I shook my head, swallowed; my throat had gone dry. “It says,‘I am going to kill you.’ ”
I looked up. Alex stared at me from the other side of the board, both her hands clenched in white fists against her knees. Her face glowed greenish in the candlelight, eerie, and—
Something grazed the back of my neck, a cold finger tracing down my spine.
“Alex,” I choked out.
“Are you okay?”
The touch vanished; I felt a breeze ripple through my hair as it passed. I was too afraid to look over my shoulder. “I swear, something just—”
The shadows deepened, coalescing like smoke. A figure rose behind Alex like a ghastly silhouette, long hair undulating like waves about its head, its hands like sharp claws reaching.
Reaching for her throat.
