This time I don’t hesitate.
I take the stairs up to the second floor two at a time, and I’m halfway down the hall when I realize Alex’s bedroom door is open. Bile surges up my throat, and no…no—
But when I come to a stop in front of Alex’s room, there’s no ghost.
A girl sits at Alex’s desk, slim and black-haired with fountain pen in hand. She’s wearing an oversized glen check blazer and silver cuff links. I’ve never seen her before in my life.
She glances up from her writing, and our eyes meet. Hers are gray, the color of the sky at midwinter.
“Who are you?” The words tumble out of me all at once, sharp and aggressive. “What are you doing here?”
The room isn’t empty. The bed has sheets on it. There are houseplants on the windowsill. Books pile atop the dresser.
This girl isn’t Alex, but she’s in Alex’s room. She’s in Alex’s room, and looking at me like I just walked in off the street dripping with garbage.
She sets down her pen and says, “I live here.” Her voice is low, accent like molasses.
For a moment we stare at each other, static humming in my chest. The girl is as calm and motionless as lake water. It’s unnerving. I keep expecting her to ask Why are you here?—to turn the question back around on me, the intruder—but she never does.
She’s waiting for me to speak. All the niceties are close at hand: introductions, small talk, polite questions about origin and interests. But my jaw is wired shut, and I say nothing.
At last she rises from her seat, chair legs scraping against the hardwood, and shuts the door in my face.
The girl in Alex’s room isn’t a ghost, but she might as well be.
A day passes without us speaking again; the door to Alex’s room remains shut, the only sign of the new occupant’s presence the occasional creak of a floorboard or a dirty coffee cup left out on the kitchen counter. At noon I spot her out on the porch, sitting in a rocking chair with a cigarette in one hand and Oryx and Crake in the other, dressed in a seersucker suit.
I split my time between my bedroom and the common room, venturing once to the faculty dining hall to load up a box of food and abscond with it back to Godwin House; nothing seems worse to me than the prospect of trying to eat while all the English faculty wander up to me to remind me how sorry they are, how difficult it must be, how brave I am to come back here after everything.
If I keep moving—bedroom, common room; common room, bedroom—then maybe the cold won’t catch up to me.
That’s what I tell myself, at least. But in the end I can’t outrun it.
I’m in the reading nook when it happens. I’ve curled up lodged on the window seat at the end of the ground-floor hallway, shoes kicked off and sock feet tucked between the cushions, the books from Dr. Wyatt’s summer reading list stacked on the floor by my hip. My eyelids are heavy, sinking low no matter how hard I fight to keep my gaze fixed on the page. I’ve lit candles even though it’s still late afternoon; the flames flicker and spit, reflecting off the window glass.
A moment, I think. I’ll just close my eyes for a moment.
Sleep swells around me like groundwater. The dark pulls me under.
And then I’m back on the mountain, hands numb in my gloves as I cling to that meager ledge. The storm is unrelenting, sleet battering the nape of my neck. I keep thinking about dark water rising in my lungs. About Alex’s body broken on the rocks.
The snow beneath me isn’t shifting anymore. I perch light on its back, light like an insect, motionless. If I move, the mountain will shiver and swat me away.
If I don’t move, I will die here.
“Then die,” Alex says, and I snap awake.
The hall has gone dark. The tall windows gaze out into the black woods, and the candles have blown out. My breath is the only thing I can hear, heavy and arrhythmic. It bursts out of me in gasps—painful, like I’m at altitude, like I’m still so far above the earth.
I feel her fingers at the back of my neck, nails like shards of ice. I jerk around, but there’s no one there. Shadows stretch out through the empty halls of Godwin House, unseen eyes gazing down from the tall corners. Once upon a time I found it so easy to forget the stories about Godwin House and the five Dalloway witches who lived here three hundred years ago, their blood in our dirt, their bones hanging from our trees. If this place is haunted, it’s haunted by the legacy of murder and magic—not by Alex Haywood.
Alex was the brightest thing in these halls. Alex kept the night at bay.
I need to turn on the lights. But I can’t move from this spot against the window, can’t stop gripping my own knees with both hands.
She isn’t here. She’s gone. She’s gone.
I lurch up and stagger to the nearest floor lamp, yank the chain to switch on the light. The bulb glares white; and I turn to face the hall again, to prove to myself it’s empty. And of course it is. God, what time is it? 3:03 a.m. says my overly bright phone screen. It’s too late for the girl in Alex’s room to still be awake.
I turn on every light between there and my bedroom, pulse stammering as I keep climbing the stairs past the second floor—Don’t look, don’t look—and up to the third.
In my room I shut the door and crouch down on the rug. If this were last year I might have cast a spell, a circle of light my protection against the dark. Tonight my hands shake so badly I break three matches before I manage to strike a flame. I don’t make a circle. Magic doesn’t exist. I don’t cast a spell. I just light three candles and hunch forward over their heat.
Practice mindfulness, Dr. Ortega would say. Focus on the flame. Focus on something real.
If anything supernatural wanders these halls, it doesn’t answer; the candle flames flicker in the dim light and cast shifting shadows against the wall.
“No one’s there,” I whisper, and no sooner have the words left my lips than someone knocks.
I startle violently enough that I knock over a candle. The silk rug catches almost instantly, yellow fire eating a quick path across the antique pattern. I’m still stamping out sparks when someone says, “What are you doing?”
I look up. Alex’s replacement stands in my doorway. And although it’s past three in the morning, she’s dressed as if she’s about to walk into a law school interview. She’s even wearing collar studs.
“Summoning the devil. What does it look like?” I answer, but the heat burning in my cheeks betrays me; I’m humiliated. I want to kick the rest of the candles over and burn the whole house down so no one knows I got caught like this.