Gathering most of the ritual ingredients was simple enough.
On a weekend visit home, I slipped the marble pestle and mortar from the kitchen into my overnight bag, and pilfered some of my dad’s gardening secateurs. I made fresh cordial with my mum, using lemon, honey, sugar and pretty elderflower heads. We drank most of it that afternoon, I stoppered four vials’ worth from the dregs in the pan.
There were pimpernels, heather and rosemary scattered throughout Carvell’s wooded grounds, so it was a simple case of snipping samples and collecting them in small glass vials I found at a local hardware shop. I returned to the gnarled black poplar tree and plucked one of the moth chrysalises from its perch, grinding it into a fine powder while Lottie was at a hockey match.
The book also called for sage, fern and philodendron leaves, which were slightly harder to find, but I eventually found a sun-dappled glade in the woods where all three seemed to have been planted a long time ago.
I enjoyed this period of foraging immensely. I felt connected to something ancient and spiritual, something much larger than myself, walking the same paths as the nuns before me. Maybe, I thought, that was the real power of a ritual; the intangible connections it forged between souls. It was at once grounding and liberating.
Killing the live moth was the least pleasant part of the experience. I had to do it in a way that would keep the arthropod intact, in order to be able to extract the haemolymph, which meant I couldn’t just swipe at it with a rolled-up newspaper as my dad did at home. I settled on capturing a beautiful turquoise and red-spotted zygaena I found fluttering in the wooded glade, sealing it inside an old jam jar and waiting for it to asphyxiate. I stuffed the jar to the back of my wardrobe, beside my tarot decks and healing crystals.
The guilt I felt in the time it took for the moth to die reassured me that I was not, in fact, a psychopath. I felt no pleasure or satisfaction in murdering an innocent being.
Finally, all that was left to collect was the blood of a person who I had wronged. For days I carried an engine oil dipstick around in my pocket, waiting for an opportune moment. Accident-prone Lottie was sure to cut herself shaving, or come back to the dorm with another hockey injury – a bloody nose or a broken tooth, perhaps. But the right opportunity never arose, and I soon realised that if I was to progress with the ritual before my new roommate arrived, I’d have to take matters into my own hands.
I really didn’t want to hurt Lottie any more than I already had, so I instead settled on the guy I almost stabbed in the Refectory on my first night. Harris, I’d heard him being called in the dining hall.
After another visit to Youngman’s, the now-familiar hardware store, I created an innovative contraption using two silver rings and a drawing pin. I stacked the two rings on my middle finger, then slid the flat part of the pin between the two, so the sharp point was pointing outwards into my palm.
Finding out which dorm Harris lived in didn’t take very long. I followed him leaving his Victorian literature seminar and tailed him back to Hume building, a few rows back from Willowood. I considered trying to slip through the keypad entry system behind his group of friends, but it would’ve required me to get too close, to lose the element of surprise. Besides, I wanted to get him alone. This next part would not benefit from an audience.
The old Victorian street lamps gave the poplar-lined walkway an orphic glow, illuminating the drifting haze of mist that hung low beneath the branches. There were few people around; a group of giggling girls staggering in the direction of the Refectory, and a couple of guys snogging beneath a tree. I was sure I saw Professor Dacre and Professor Le Conte walking together, heads just a few centimetres apart, but they disappeared from view before I could ascertain whether their rendezvous was also a romantic one.
Wrapping my coat tighter around myself, I sat on a memorial bench opposite the entrance to Hume building and waited for Harris to resurface. I knew it could be a while, so I’d brought the book from the library. For some reason – inexplicable foresight or pure gut instinct – I hadn’t checked it out of the system officially. I didn’t want anyone to know I’d been looking at the ritual.
Still, I wanted to read more about why the tincture fell out of favour in the late 1800s – whether there were any mysterious dangers I could’ve been letting myself in for. However, the section on the first purification ritual ended abruptly, making way for a much longer section on ill-advised chastity rituals that ended up poisoning an entire convent in Cumbria.
Baffled, I carefully flipped through the pages again, until I noticed that there was a narrow gap between the how-to for the tincture and the chastity section, as though there were missing pages. A closer look showed a few frayed edges of paper still tangled in the stitched binding.
Someone had ripped out a section. Why?What did the missing pages say? Did they explain what the ritual actually did? Outline the side effects?
An icy frost crept up my spine. Who would tear pages from the book like this? And more importantly, what were they trying to hide?
I wracked my brain to try to remember whether they’d been intact when I first stumbled upon the book. Had the pages been torn out by the person who’d left it face down on the ground, smudged with their blood? Was that why they were in such a hurry?
This discovery didn’t put me off performing the ritual, even though in hindsight it certainly should have. It only made me more intrigued than ever.
I was so absorbed in the book’s mystery that I almost didn’t see Harris leaving the Hume building. He wasn’t alone, but there was only one other guy with him. They both had dark green kitbags hoisted over their shoulders, and Harris’s friend carried a dirt-caked rugby ball which he twirled around in his palm as they walked.
It would have to do. It might be weeks before I could get Harris alone.
It was now or never.