Cancelling my dorm transfer request was an illogical decision, on the surface. I should have been mortally afraid of Alice. I should’ve wanted to sleep as far away from her and the North Tower as humanly possible.
And yet if I was going to glean insights nobody else had, this tower-adjacent dorm was where I had to be. If I was going to figure out how to get rid of the ruby in my throat – how to remove its murderous presence from my body – I couldn’t just run. All I could do was hope that with Alice locking the door to prevent me from sleepwalking, the North Tower couldn’t claim me next. As long as I was in bed before midnight every night.
Still, the guilt over staying ate away at me. If anything horrible did happen, I knew my parents would never survive. For a few moments after I threw the form away, I gripped the bumblebee charm on my bracelet until the silver was warm to the touch.
Dad, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. But I don’t have a choice.
As I was running through what I knew about the murder so far, I kept catching on the question of how Poppy, and possibly her killer, got into the tower. It was locked. Who else had the key, besides Mordue? And then: was Poppy suffering from the same haunting symptoms that I was? Did she ever find herself at the foot of the North Tower with no recollection of how she’d got there?
And above all, how could I possibly find all this out?
My first inroad came later that day. As we were piling into the chapel for Dean Mordue’s address, I spotted a dark-haired, olive-skinned girl sitting alone. She looked more traumatised than anyone else, and it drew me to her. She clicked her fingers compulsively while staring up at the rafters.
I slid on to the pew beside her.
‘Hey. Are you okay?’ I asked.
‘Uh-huh.’ She didn’t even break her gaze away from the ceiling.
‘It’s horrible,’ I said inanely. ‘I just keep thinking, like . . . it could have been any one of us.’
A strangled noise. ‘But it wasn’t. It was Poppy.’
‘You knew her?’
‘Yeah. I think I was the last person to see her alive.’ A horrible choke-laugh. ‘Well, apart from whoever killed her.’
My heart skipped a beat. ‘You saw her? When?’
‘In the library. We . . . we had an argument. It was stupid, but . . .’ She trailed off, lost in her thoughts.
I persevered. ‘I’m sorry. Did you know her well?’
‘I mean, as well as you can know anyone you only met a few weeks ago. But yeah, she lived on my corridor in Foxglove.’ Foxglove was right next to Willowood, and it was the only dorm hall that offered single suites.
‘What did you argue about?’ I asked, trying to get my tone to land somewhere between consoling and curious.
Her fingers stopped clicking abruptly, and she turned to face me. Her deep brown eyes were wild; pupils dilated so they almost completely consumed the iris. A look of primal fear. ‘I talked to the police. They said they found a suicide note. And her body, it was . . . they were asking me all about it, whether she was depressed. I didn’t know her that well, but she didn’t seem . . . I mean, I know you never really can tell, can you? It just . . . I don’t think it makes sense. Especially with everything that happened the last time people died.’
My sure-footed approach stumbled. I wasn’t expecting that. ‘Did you see the note?’
She shook her head. ‘No. But it was typed. They asked whether she usually handwrote her essays or typed them on the computers in the library.’
I swallowed. ‘And?’
She dropped her head into her hands and shook her head. ‘I don’t know. It makes you realise how little you pay attention to the people around you. I’ve been so absorbed in my own shit that . . . argh.’
This triggered something in the back of my mind: the fact that Sam Bowey tried to have Janie sectioned under the Mental Health Act. A common thread between two of the victimscouldbe a possible connection to the hauntings. Demonic possession might have looked like psychosis to the untrained eye. I tucked this in my back pocket to examine later.
There was one question I badly wanted to go back to – what Hafsah and Poppy had been arguing about – but I didn’t want to seem insensitive or bullish.
Before I could ask anything else, Dean Mordue entered the room from a side door by the dais and the whole chapel fell into hush. I decided not to take notes like I had at the inauguration – it would make it all too clear what I was up to, and potentially make it harder to earn the trust of the girl beside me whose name I still did not know. Instead I had to try to carry it all in my head: the conversation with Poppy’s almost-friend, the Dean’s statement, the general atmosphere, the needling thoughts that arose from all of the above. It took so much mental effort while operating on so little sleep that I clenched my jaw against the strain of it.
When the Dean left the stage and people started to gingerly climb to their feet, the girl next to me whispered so softly I almost didn’t hear her, ‘What if it was me?’
I was sure I’d misheard her. ‘Sorry?’
She turned to face me again with those frantic eyes, that terrified expression. ‘I said something really mean to her. About her art. What if she killed herself because of me?’