The lingering after-effects of my concussion made it difficult to investigate either Mordue or Sanderson for the following week. I couldn’t stand up for too long without feeling dizzy and nauseous, and I was dog-tired by mid-afternoon most days.
My weakened state allowed Sister Maria and her two rubies more control over me than ever.
The memory-dreams were growing more vivid and intense. There was a feeling of fully inhabiting them, walking about and impacting the scene around me, as opposed to drifting aimlessly through. They often bled into the daytime; I’d be sitting in class fully cognisant one minute, and hallucinating about dead moths and blood-stained manuscripts the next. It was as though she was trying desperately to show me something, but my brain was too woolly to process any of it.
In one of the memories – more of a nightmare – my hand was held over a burning candle until the skin blistered in agony. I screamed myself awake, only to find that my palm hurt in real life too. There was no blister, but it throbbed for days, a kind of phantom pain that I couldn’t explain.
Though the rubies’ roots didn’t try to choke me to death again, they were not afraid to make their feelings known. One morning I was waiting for Alice outside one of her seminars when the roots twinged and tugged until I was gagging. I had no idea why. Were they annoyed that I was wasting time instead of investigating Sister Maria’s death? In any case, Alice and Hafsah found me crouched on the floor, hand clasped desperately around my neck. Professor Dacre, who had the demeanour of a toffee-toting grandfather, escorted us to the medical office only for the retching to stop as soon as the nurse saw me. It was a relief to excuse myself – I didn’t want to have to explain the rubies to anyone.
Often I would wake up thrashing in my bed, or clawing frantically at the dorm door in a bid to escape. Alice’s hands would be gently coaxing me away, talking in a low, soft whisper so as not to wake me too suddenly.
Alice provided excellent nursing in general, bringing me bacon rolls and hot coffee from the dining hall, making sure I was drinking enough water and letting myself rest. This couldn’t have been easy for her – knowing that all the while I was laid up in bed, her internal ritual clock was ticking ever forward – but she seemed to genuinely want to do it.
One thing I found particularly touching was when she returned from a trip to town with a small, midnight-blue paper bag and handed it to me somewhat gruffly.
‘This is for me?’ I asked, propping myself up on my elbows. I was lying in bed reading some course material, trying to make the room stop spinning and eddying whenever I moved the slightest fraction of an inch.
‘I mean, it’s nothing, really. An early Christmas present.’ She immediately busied herself folding a stack of laundry that had been mounting up on her side of the room.
Inside the bag was something very small, wrapped in silver tissue paper and secured with a precise square of Sellotape. I peeled it open as carefully as I could.
It was a black velvet choker, with a neat silver clasp at the back.
Alice glanced over her shoulder. ‘I know it’s more my style than yours, and it doesn’t really go with joggers and hoodies, but I thought you could use it to cover the rubies. Better than being constantly hot and bothered in that huge pashmina.’ She shrugged. ‘It’s okay if you hate it.’
A smile tugged at the corners of my mouth, spreading a warmth through my cheeks that I didn’t fully understand. ‘No. I love it. Thank you.’ And I really did. True, it wasn’t my style, but it was Alice’s; a style she took great pride in. I took it as a token of trust and friendship that she’d willingly shared that style with me.
I wrapped it around my neck and tried to fasten it, but the clasp was tiny and fiddly, and my hands were still trembling from the head injury. Alice crossed over without saying a word.
She tenderly swept my hair over one shoulder, then took the clasp from me. Her fingertips brushed the back of my neck as she worked, and I could feel her warm, slightly quickened breath on the top of my spine. I shivered despite myself, an odd flutter that extended from the depths of my chest to the tips of my fingers.
‘There,’ she said, stepping back and handing me my make-up mirror.
My reflection was, for the most part, hideous. My skin had a pallor I hadn’t seen in years – I usually spent so much time outside that I had a permanent tan – and there were purplish bags under my eyes. My hair was frizzy and unwashed, with a halo of fuzz over my crown, and my lips were dry and chapped.
And yet the choker, which covered the rubies perfectly, made me feel beautiful. Not the whole dark woods – not like Alice – but maybe a particularly glorious blackberry, the ultra-dark kind that bursts with sweetness when you bite into it.
‘Thank you,’ I murmured, voice thick with an emotion I couldn’t quite name.
As the days wore on, though, I could no longer deny that something had once again shifted in Alice. The torn veil – whatever that meant – was going to be a problem.
She, Hafsah and I were sitting at one of the big group tables in the library one morning in early December, working on assignments. The library was busier than it had been, since most courses had essays due at the end of the semester, and it rustled with the sound of shuffled papers and turning pages, cleared throats and stage whispers. The space had been decorated for Christmas, with an enormous fir tree in the centre of the ground floor. It dripped with warm-white fairy lights, red and gold baubles and glass snowflake ornaments, and the golden angel on the top was holding a book. The sullen librarian, Kate Feathering, looked at it with withering hatred approximately every thirty seconds.
I was forcing my milky gaze to focus on the passage ofThe Picture of Dorian GrayI was trying and failing to annotate. Hafsah had big purple cat-ear headphones plugged into her Walkman as she scribbled away, while Alice was reading something in a Confucius reference book and frowning intently. The dance music Hafsah was listening to was so loud we could hear almost every word.
‘Hafsah,’ Alice muttered, looking over at the Walkman with unfettered irritation. I knew from the timbre of the word that the darkness was talking, but what could I do in such a public place? ‘Hafsah.’ The word seethed with vicious energy.
While most people would’ve nudged a noisy neighbour with an elbow in order to get their attention, Alice reached into her black leather pencil case, picked out a mathematics compass with a sharp golden point, and stabbed it straight into Hafsah’s forearm.
Hafsah jumped back and hissed in pain, shale-dark eyes flaring with fury. She ripped the headphones from her head as the compass clattered to the floor. ‘What the fuck, Alice!’ She pulled back her sleeve, but there was only the slightest bloody puncture; her jumper had cushioned most of the needle.
Alice was staring at her own hand as though it had betrayed her in some fundamental way.
The next day, she arrived from an impulsive jaunt into town with a small object wrapped in brown parcel paper.
‘What’s that?’ I asked, sitting up in bed with a wince. Frustration over my injury was really starting to build. All I wanted was to be running around a muddy field thwacking balls with a stick, and I was, for the first time in my life, what some would describe as ‘irritable’.
Alice’s eyes sparkled, but not with mirth; there was a sinister candescence to them, lined in more black kohl than usual. ‘A knife,’ she replied calmly.