My mouth has gone dry as I stare down at the book. And itisjust a book. It holds no special power. It can’t hurt me if I don’t let it.
The leather bends easily as I open the cover, worn soft by a hundred years of hands. The thick parchment paper is scratchy against my gloved fingers when I turn the pages.
This book has more than one author. The handwriting is all different—sometimes steady and slanted, sometimes erratic. Sometimes the ink is thick and black; other times it’s a pale red brown so faint I can barely read it at all.
I flip over my notebook and uncap my pen again. My own calligraphy is shaky—blotches welling at the tail of each letter, jagged cross-strokes—as I copy down a spell for banishing evil spirits. But Ellis might want it.
And me…I won’t use this incantation. But I’ll have it, just in case.
I turn the page again, and abruptly it’s hard to breathe. The air has gone heavier, wetter, like I’m choking on tar.
A full illustration consumes the verso, a young woman kneeling, nude, at the feet of a tall figure with a bone-white face. The mask is gaunt and elongated, with curving horns and black pits where the eyes should be, its nostrils sharp and jagged: a goat’s skull. The figure reaches out one spindly arm, dripping blood, to paint a sigil on the woman’s brow.
Initiation.
Members of the Margery coven don’t talk about it often, not outside the rituals. Even Ellis probably doesn’t know initiation exists. The secrets of Dalloway are given only to a select few: those of us thought worthy, those of us strong enough to survive our fear. But behind closed doors, in secret gatherings of two or three girls from each house, some of us lean into the dark.
Will I ever forget the way Alex looked that night? They’d positioned us facing one another, the two new initiates of Godwin House. Alex was in flannels and a tank top that exposed her slim collarbones and muscular shoulders. She’d looked so out of place surrounded by the elder girls in their black robes and skull masks.
They lit candles and burned herbs. They chanted in Latin and Greek and Aramaic—a bizarre and meaningless mix of languages, it strikes me now, but at the time it felt like the shadows grew taller and wilder, shifting with our occult power. The night was endless and magnificent; it could have lasted three hours or three days. When they smeared the goat’s blood on my brow, it was still fresh, cutting down my face and catching in my eyelashes. With my hands bound, I couldn’t wipe it away; I could only sit there as scarlet tears streamed down my cheeks.
That was the night I felt like I had finally become one of them—a girl of Dalloway, a girl of Godwin—heiress to the witches who planted the stones on which we stood.
That was the night I first wished magic were real.
I shut the spellcraft book and put it back where I found it. I feel as if the darkness breathes out a sigh behind me as I leave the library: as if the spirits there had been watching, waiting for me to go.
It’s a silent and solitary trip back to Godwin House, especially once I’ve left the quad and must tread through the woods up the hill. The windows of Godwin are black and shuttered; I’m left with the strange impression that its soul has been sucked out through the cracks beneath uneven doors.
I don’t go in. Instead I slip around back, shoulder open the rickety door to the gardening shed. The small stone structure is steeped in shadow, a gloom somehow more complete than pitch.
I find the masks where we always kept them—even if I spent a year away, even if the sisters who initiated me have graduated, some things never change. I crouch on the pounded-earth floor of the gardening shed and stroke a finger around a mask’s hollow mouth; shears and trowels, which had concealed the memento mori of our craft, litter the floor around me.
I might have been expelled from the Margery coven, but Ellis hasn’t.
Ellis is in the kitchen when I return to the house, her typewriter set up on the table overlooking the forest behind Godwin, face and page both lit only by a single flickering candle. She twists round to look at me when I come in, and the light shifts in shadows across her face like panes of stained glass.
“I have an idea,” I tell her.
If Ellis wants to understand the Dalloway witches, if she wants to prove that magic isn’t real, she has to become one of us first.
“This is perfect,” Ellis says once I’ve explained the Margery coven. I told her of the sanitized version of a coven that exists between the other houses, of course—but also about the Dalloway Five dancing nude and worshipping old goddesses around towering bonfires, taking arcane herbs. Stories of their magic have survived at the school even throughout the most austere administrations.
And so help me, I don’t care what Dr.Ortega says anymore. The legend is real.
At the very least, Ellis should know about the Margery coven. She should see if she can be initiated.
“It’s magic,” I tell her. “Or the Dalloway Five believed it was. Doesn’t that runcontrayour entire thesis?”
But Ellis is still pacing the narrow kitchen, the soles of her Italian leather shoes clicking against the stone floor. “Not at all. It’s no different than the spiritualist séances of the Victorian era—people went wild over the idea of mediums who could commune beyond the grave. It was occult as entertainment, nothing truly paranormal. Who says the Dalloway girls couldn’t have enjoyed the same kind of fun?”
“This was 1711, not 1870,” I say. “That kind of fun would get you killed.”
She stops pacing and turns to smile at me, a scant foot away from where I stand. She lifts a hand and trails it along my temple, tucks a stray lock of hair behind my ear. I barely remember to breathe.
“No, this is perfect,” Ellis says a second time. “I promise. But who cares about those posh modern girls and their party coven. Let’s make our own.”
My air comes back all at once; I choke on it. Ellis pats my back as I cough until my throat is raw.
