After the night Salem attacked me on our windowsill, my sense of reality swirled and eddied.
Had I really killed her, only for her to come back to life?
Or was the whole thing a pain-addled hallucination?
And which would be worse?
Despite the concerns for my sanity, things between Lottie and I finally felt on a semi-even keel. There was still that wariness between us; a shared understanding that we could hurt each other badly if we so chose to. She could keep investigating me until I slipped up badly enough for her to go to the police, while I could quite literally murder her in a red-eyed rage. Regardless, we sunk into a pleasant almost-friendship, asking about each other’s days and, a couple of nights a week, reading in our separate beds beneath the golden lamplight. The intimacy was a salve to the worry over the ritual, but in my darkest moments, I found myself thinking I didn’tdeservethe salve. Not after everything I’d done – orhadn’tdone.
Twice Lottie asked for a lift to the nearest post office – once to drop something off, and once to pick something up – but was vague about why she had to go in the first place. A glimpse at the manila envelope clutched in her hands yielded only a stamped return address: The National Archives, Richmond. I assumed it must’ve been something to do with an assignment.
One of the most troubling things about this period was how much I began to enjoy her company. We had another night of drinking wine on the windowsill – my Merlot, this time – when her hockey team suffered a spectacular defeat in a derby match. She was a soft, easy presence; a sunny glade to my darkened forest. Eventually I started to enjoy being around her more than I enjoyed being alone; something I hadn’t experienced since Noémie left for Toronto.
Speaking of Noémie, the unexpectedly prescient wisdom from Lottie turned over and over in my mind: ‘Time heals all wounds, but not the ones you leave infected.’
Over the ensuing days, I realised that’s what I’d been doing with Noémie; hoping the simple passage of time would stitch together the flesh I’d left exposed. But in truth, I’d left it infected with my lack of apology, my lack of acknowledgement of what I’d done to her. If I truly wanted the wound to heal, I had to endure the sting of cleaning it. Which first meant admitting to myself what I had done.
In truth, I had needled away at her for so long that in the end, she turned down her place at Carvell. Her first-choice university; the place she’d always dreamed of attending. She gave that up because she couldn’t bear to be around me any more. My barbed comments and impatient snaps, my long stretches of stubborn silence.
It only got worse after my confrontation with Chris. We broke up, and I was free to be with her if I so wanted to, and yet something innocent inside me had shattered. A person who claimed to love me had hurt me, physically and viscerally. He had thrown me to the ground like I was nothing, and I had been powerless to fight back. How could I trust her not to do the same?
And so I pushed and pushed and pushed, determined to find the outer limits of her love, the point at which she too would lash out, the desperate need to draw a boundary for myself, an area in which I knew I was safe.
She left before I ever found it.
It was only now, months later, that I could bring myself to apologise.
I’m sorry, Noémie. I’m sorry for everything. X
She didn’t reply, and maybe she never would. But at least now my own wound could start to heal.
I also spent more time with Hafsah, hunched over the antique writing desks in the library as we scribbled our assignments side by side, chatting about the reading list as we ate lunch together in the cafeteria. We luxuriated in the thought of a full month of kindness and ease before we had to go through the transformation again, but in the back of my mind a dark spot loomed on the horizon. Hafsah had managed to find two blood sugar monitoring kits that came with pinprick needles to draw small amounts of blood from a fingertip; a relatively painless way to secure the final ingredient. But there were other logistics to consider, and not all of them had such a simple solution.
Where could we go to perform the ritual so that we couldn’t hurt each other – or ourselves? The wounds in my stomach became less sore as the days wore on, but the purpling scars were a stark reminder of what I’d done to myself the last time. And yet the campus was not a psychiatric facility. There was nowhere we could be locked in padded rooms until Dark Alice and Dark Hafsah handed the reins back.
With two weeks to go until the ritual had to be performed again, I started to feel Dark Alice creeping back in.
Only this time, it happened much more swiftly and severely than before.
It started out tamely enough. I snapped at Hafsah over the slightest misunderstanding. I blared my car horn over the most minor traffic infraction. I rolled my eyes when Lottie talked endlessly about hockey as though their wins and losses were in any way important to the world.
Then, too soon, the violent impulses once again became an onslaught, the desire to hurt a constant in my head and my bones. The ability to study, to communicate, to think of anything but bloodlust vanished.
It was happening too fast. I should’ve had more time.
By day nineteen, I was pacing the carpet between the two bunks, willing Lottie to come home soon. I needed her blood far quicker than I thought I would. I wasn’t prepared.
I crossed to the windowsill, heaving it open and gulping down the frigid air. The sky outside was charcoal grey with storm clouds. A crow sat on the windowsill of the North Tower, looking down at me. Its eyes were hard, cold beads, unblinking, unyielding.
I tore my gaze away, and that’s when I noticed the manila envelope peeking out from under a weighty textbook on the Romantics. Unable to fight back the devious urge, I pulled it out – and recognised the stamped return address instantly.
The National Archives.
This is what Lottie had retrieved from the post office that day. My fingers slid out the stapled sheets of paper, and I frowned.
Blueprints. What looked like architectural drawings of Carvell from back when it was a working convent. Neat pencil lines and pristine printed room labels, with black smudges and blemishes from where the originals had been photocopied.
There was one sheet of paper for each floor, and on the third page – outlining the second floor – Lottie had circled a room and written ‘what is this??’ in chicken-scratch pencil.