‘Alice, come on,’ she said darkly. ‘You don’t exactly seem like you want to be living with me either. I could tell from the second I walked in here that I wasn’t what you wanted in a roommate.’
I met her bullishness with my own. ‘The feeling seemed entirely mutual.’
‘That’s not fair. I tried to make an effort. I invited you out for my birthday drinks. And then you ruined the whole night, and you still haven’t apologised.’
Sliding moonstone rings on to my fingers, I frowned. ‘Why would I apologise? I didn’t punchyou.’
Lottie swung her legs off the bed, wincing slightly. ‘Forget it. I just think it’s best if we live with people who we have more in common with.’ Her phone started ringing, and she glanced at the name on the small letterbox screen. ‘My dad’s calling. Would you mind giving us some privacy?’
‘Fine,’ I snapped, grabbing my black plaid scarf. ‘Go and cry to your dad.’
The soft ebb of pleasure. The sharp stab of shame.
But instead of looking wounded at my cruel jab, Lottielaughed.
‘Oh, fuck off, Alice,’ she said cheerfully, before stabbing the green call button. ‘Hey, Dad!’
Pride smarting, a flash of white anger burst through my skull. I wanted to smash something, wanted to throw her stack of books through the window, wanted her to yelp in shock as the splinters of glass rained down around us. The intensity of the urge stole the breath from my lungs.
I hope her dad dies.
The thought shot through my head before I could discern where it came from. I was deeply, deeply afraid of that snarling voice. I was deeply afraid of myself.
Before I could say or do orthinkanything else I might regret, I grabbed my briefcase and left for my first seminar an hour early. The hazy rain soaked me in an instant, beads clinging to my eyelashes and the blunt ends of my hair, but I didn’t care enough to open an umbrella.
Self-loathing followed me out of the building like a shadow. I was doing to Lottie what I’d done to Noémie. I was like this with my family too; sharp and scratchy and mean. Perhaps I was spikiest to the people I was closest to because I was trying to find the outer limits of their love; to see how much the boundary would give.
It made me glad that Lottie and I weren’t close. I’d only end up hurting her too.
Campus was quiet as I walked to the dining hall in search of coffee. Black poplar trees lined the walkway on either side, and from one particularly gnarled branch a row of moth cocoons dangled like sleeping bats.
The sight awoke a dormant thought in the back of my mind: the purification ritual.
Perhaps the nineteenth-century nuns were on to something. Perhaps their creepy moth-blood tincture could round off the edges of my sharded anger, could shrink my violent impulses down into something I could control. Most likely this was absurd wishful thinking, but the part of me that had always been drawn to the arcane loved the romance of the idea.
And what did I have to lose? If it didn’t work, all I’d be left with would be a dead moth and a vague sense of silliness for believing in it to begin with.
To kill some time before class, I decided to go to the library and read more about it. When I arrived at the philosophy section, though, the book was not where I expected it to be. Instead of being neatly lined up on the bottom shelf, it was lying face down and open on the floor, spine bent awkwardly back on itself. Frowning, I propped my briefcase on the armchair and bent down to pick the book up.
It was open on the very last page I’d looked at: ‘How the Ritual Was Performed’.
I wondered which of my fellow philosophy students had stumbled upon it. And why did they leave in such a hurry that they left the volume lying around like a piece of old junk?
The page was exactly as I last saw it, with one tiny, significant exception: the droplet of blood in the bottom right corner. A small smudge, as though someone had pricked their finger on a spindle and then tried to turn the page.
The sight made me smile. Someone had tried to perform the ritual. I knew it in my bones. There was someone at Carvell as intrigued by the occult as I was. For some reason, this knowledge bolstered me.
In a moment, the decision was made. I was going to attempt the ritual too.