“You look exhausted,” she says. “Have you been sleeping?”
“No,” I admit. The truth is, I’ve been doing my best to stay awake; my nightmares have only gotten worse since our ritual at the church. “I can’t sleep.”
Ellis’s mouth tightens, but at least she doesn’t say anything more on the subject. Perhaps she knows how little I want her pity. Instead she shoves one of our new library books into my lap and says, “You’re in charge of chapters fourteen through eighteen.”
The reading is a slog, but we get through it. Then Ellis wants to dissect the Dalloway murders again; she’s stuck on the scene with Beatrix Walker’s death. She was found with all the bones in her body broken, as if she’d fallen from a great height, but she wasdiscoveredindoors, far from anywhere above ground level.
“Someone obviously moved the body, like with Cordelia,” Ellis says, sounding almost exasperated. “The simplest explanation is always the best. Why assume witchcraft?”
“But how did she fall? There’s nowhere on campus high enough—not in the eighteenth century, anyway.” Except for the cliffs where Alex died.
I grit my hands into fists.
“Maybe she didn’t fall at all. Someone could have broken her bones individually.” Ellis lies down on the common room rug, her limbs splayed out. She lifts one wrist in demonstration. “A hammer here.” She touches her ribs. “A kick to the chest.”
I shift over her, straddling her middle, and brace one hand against her sternum. My hair has fallen forward, long pale strands tickling the skin at Ellis’s throat. “But she’d be struggling,” I point out. I add pressure to my hand, holding Ellis in place. “And screaming.”
Ellis gazes up at me, eyes steady and unafraid. “Not if she was dead first.”
We finally call it a night around one, Ellis stretching her long arms toward the ceiling as I collect all our notes and other detritus.
“Again tomorrow?”
“Six sharp.” Her grin is quick; I want to memorize it.
My room feels dark and barren when I go upstairs. I’ve been spending more and more time in the library with Ellis, enough so that coming back here even to sleep feels foreign.
I should have brought more books when I came back to school, perhaps. More photos, maybe a few potted plants—something to bring life in wintertime. Something aside from the incense and crystals and candles I dug out of my closet hiding space, meager wards against the dark.
I trail my fingers along the spines on my bookshelf, tracing pastLittle WomenandThe Bluest EyeandWide Sargasso Sea.I’ve read all these a dozen times, have loved them more at each iteration. But then my hand brushes an unfamiliar leather binding, and I stop, the air suddenly frozen.
The Secret Garden.It’s the same copy Ellis gave me in the graveyard, the same copy I left leaning against Alex’s headstone, with its old pages and embossed gold foil.
I’m sick to the blood, sick in a way that makes me certain I shouldn’t touch that book. I should leave, should burn this place to the ground.
But I can’t help myself. I slide the book out of its space between two Austens with shaking hands. When I open the ancient pages I smell something familiar, something that isn’t glue or rotting paper. It’s jasmine and vetiver. It’s…Alex. It’s Alex’s perfume.
Pressed between chapters three and four is a sprig of hellebore.
I drop the book, and it thumps to the floor, releasing a cloud of dust as I stagger back. The walls are closing in on me, the room airless. It’s a feeling like standing on a precipice, the world dropping out from under you, and nothing but sky between you and certain death.
I spin around, expecting to find Alex there, with skeleton fingers reaching for my throat. Her face bloodless and pale, withered with decay. Her mouth sucking in air like a broken vacuum, and frothy blood leaking from her lips—I’d watched videos of drowning victims online after I remembered the truth; I know what it would look like. The way her chest would heave as she tried to breathe. The gut punch, her back curling, as she couldn’t exhale.
The room is empty, but it’s not empty. I feel her. She’s here. She’s in every corner, every shadow. She’s above me, inside me. She’s black ice in my veins.
She’s the shadowy figure flitting between the trees, watching us sleep in the snow.
I stumble out of the room and down the creaky Godwin stairs, dragging against the wall and gripping the banister, as if that could keep me from falling if Alex’s spirit made me throw myself down. The light is off in Ellis’s room when I manage to get my disobedient legs to carry me along the corridor. Tripping over the fringe of the rug, I press my sweaty hands against her lintel.
For a moment I’m sure I’m about to vomit all over her door, but I swallow bile down and knock instead. She doesn’t answer, so I knock again and again, until I’m just pounding and shaking and sobbing. The time it takes for Ellis to open the door feels like a thousand years. But she does open it, and I tip forward and into her arms.
Her hands find my back hesitantly, as if she’s never held anyone so close before. She’s in a silk dressing gown; it occurs to me on some distant level that I’ve never seen her so undressed.
“What is it?” she asks, slowly smoothing her touch up and down my spine. “What happened?”
I can barely get the words out. They’re like broken glass in my mouth, deadly.
“Alex,” I manage at last, and a fresh shudder rolls through my body.
