‘The Society for Soulless Girls?’ I swallowed hard. ‘That kind of raises more questions than it answers.’
‘Aren’t you supposed to be bright?’ Feathering said irritably with a dismissive wave of the manicured hand. ‘We all performed the ritual. Just like you did. This is where the surviving members of the original Society come each night to perform the ritual.’ She pointed to the row of doors at the opposite end of the room. I noticed for the first time that they had gold-plated letter boxes beside their ornate handles. ‘They lock from the outside. I post the vial through the slot and wait for the transformations to run their course.’
There were a thousand other questions on my tongue, but before I could give form to them, the door from the North Tower entrance opened. Dean Mordue entered, a look of furious indignance on her face. She wore claret lipstick and a long black peacoat that blew out behind her.
‘Kate? How is she here?’ She glared at me with an expression I couldn’t quite parse; it wasn’t disdain, but perhaps something fear-shaped.
Feathering peered across at me with sudden interest. ‘Yes, howdidyou get past the guard? The locked door?’
‘I have a fearless friend.’ I shrugged, despite the fact my heart was pounding through the too-tight skin on my chest. ‘We wanted to know why the dean came here every night. We saw her at the lighthouse. What’s going on?’
For a split second, the dean seemed torn between anger and understanding. Her shoulders dropped as she chose the latter. ‘I suppose you have a right to know. You’re one of us, after all.’
Even though the situation was terrifying, something insecure in me glowed at the sentiment. I’d never belonged anywhere before. The kinship felt both dangerous and doomed; a wounded ship on a violent black sea.
I suddenly felt weak and dizzy, and pulled out a chair from the long table and slumped into the worn velvet seat, clutching the knife so hard my knuckles went ghost-white.
‘Start at the beginning,’ I said faintly, both my mind and the dark room reeling.
Mordue sat down in a chair opposite me, gesturing for Feathering to do the same.
The dean spoke first. ‘When I came to Carvell in the early eighties, I was just like you. Young, and smart, andangry.’ A laden pause, hung with the shadows of moth cocoons. ‘During my time at Oxford, while I was studying for my doctorate, I’d been assaulted by a tenured professor. He cornered me in his office, pinned me against a wall, and kissed me against my will. It didn’t go any further, thank God. A cleaner came in at that very moment. But I was never able to shake that powerless feeling. The sheer imbalance of our physicality; the awful inevitability of it.’ A bitter laugh. ‘The real reason they encourage little girls not to fight. So that we won’t know how.’
She stared into her hands, and I could tell that right now, she was young and scared once again. ‘Over the years that followed, my thoughts grew more and more violent. All I thought about was hurting my attacker.Killinghim. It took over my life. I couldn’t focus on my work – or anything else. I really thought I was going to do it. I was going to drive to Oxford and cut his throat. It’s difficult to fully explain, but this completely destroyed my sense of self. I’d always been religious, you know? I’d always had a deep personal connection to God. Church every Sunday, prayers every morning and night. Yet according to everything I believed in, that wrath was a sin.Iwas a sin. I couldn’t love my neighbour, I couldn’t turn the other cheek. I was burning up inside. It became more and more difficult to fully devote myself to my faith with that anger hanging over me, and without that deep personal connection . . . I didn’t know who I was any more.’
My throat had gone scratchy and thick. ‘So you performed the ritual.’
Mordue nodded. ‘I found the book in a knick-knack shop in town. Renner had only printed a handful, and it was the last one left. Back then it still had all of its pages, but to begin with, I didn’twantto reverse the ritual. I’m sure you remember that at first, the feeling of liberation and relief is astounding. I was able to focus on my teaching and my research without having my thoughts obscured by violent impulses. For a glorious couple of weeks, it was like all my problems had simply evaporated. There was no anger, only patience and reason. Then came the first transformation. God, the pain . . . like nothing else, isn’t it?’
She squeezed her eyes shut against the memory, her fine wrinkles deepening. ‘It was once I realised that the time between transformations was narrowing that I finally wanted to reverse it. But by then those pages had gone.’
‘What happened to them?’
‘I kept the book on the desk in my office, and I can only assume someone tore them out while I wasn’t around. By whom, and for what reason . . . that I still haven’t been able to figure out.’
My mind vaulted and somersaulted over the facts, trying to find a place to land. Each one was as terrifying as the last. ‘But you said the author printed a handful of copies,’ I pointed out. ‘So there must be others out there.’
Mordue shook her head. ‘I’ve searched the area for years, including every inch of Renner’s lighthouse. I’ve never been able to find one. But I go and visit him once a week, just in case he’s lucid enough to remember.’
He called Lottie Vanessa, I dimly recalled. I’d dismissed it as senile confusion, but Mordue’s name was Vanessa. He knew who she was, even if he couldn’t help her.
Helplessness stung at my eyes. My brain swam with the magnitude of it all. I was looking at my future, and my future was confined to a locked room every night, clawing at the walls like an animal.
I forced words into my mouth. ‘So then . . . the North Tower murders.’
‘Of this I am truly ashamed.’ The dean rested her hands on the table in front of her and clasped them together, knuckles stretched taut. The skin around them looked dry and cracked. ‘Before I realised how dangerous the ritual was, I encouraged others to do it with me. Two colleagues – Patrice Baptist and Ana-Maria Santos – and a student.’
‘Who was the student?’ I asked.
Kate Feathering cleared her throat, and my heart sank. It was her.
‘Earlier in the semester, I had confided in Vanessa about my anger issues,’ Feathering said quietly. ‘There was no real reason for it, no origin story. I was just born pissed off.’ A sour laugh. ‘I had sought counselling through the NHS, to no avail. My old male GP practically laughed in my face. This was the eighties in Northumberland – angry or sad or whatever, you were just supposed to get on with it. And I couldn’t afford private therapy. So Vanessa recommended the ritual to me in good faith.’
‘What about the others?’ I gestured to the plaque, where the names of the murder victims stood starkly in gold leaf.
‘Friends of mine,’ Feathering mumbled, the words clipped with pain and guilt. ‘Fellow students. I told them about the ritual, before I knew it would ruin their lives.’
Janie Kirsopp. Fiona Middlemiss. Dawn Taylor.