29 OBLITERATE, INSENSATE, OFFENSIVE
29
O BLITERATE , I NSENSATE , O FFENSIVE
I lost Caroline immediately. Part of me was afraid that she hadn’t really been there at all—that I was seeing shit again, my mind no longer mine.
Still, I hurried down the path where she’d disappeared. There were no lights out this way—they didn’t want to encourage us to leave at night. I went anyway, to the place where Rotham’s property line devolved into woods. Lysander Gate was covered in dead ivy. I ducked as I passed under it, though it wasn’t nearly short enough to warrant the action—something about it made me want to shrink.
The path went from stone to dirt and the moon reflected off the pond. Even this close to the water, I could hear music carrying across campus from one of the dorms—I wondered if somewhere a party was happening. If Finch could hear it too. If she was waiting for my text to announce I’d gotten home. I touched my phone in my pocket and considered lying. But crashing footsteps drew my eyes back up. I pushed between the trees and let my ears be my guide.
Against all efforts to be quiet, my shoes crunched over winter debris. She flitted through the trees without looking back, a distant flash of white, like a camera snapping shots in the dark. I wondered if she could hear me and just didn’t care. If her goal far outweighed the consequences of my following. Branches whipped my cheeks. I could hear something panting behind me, like an animal coming too close—I glanced for it over my shoulder and turned back to find Caroline gone again.
“Fuck.” I pushed on in the direction I thought I’d last seen her. Something trampled behind me, recklessly loud. There were deer out in these woods. Bears had been spotted before, but rarely—though I’d thought the same about that boar I’d hit with my car. I grabbed a branch and felt thorns rip into my palm. Let out another hissed curse. Stumbled forward, nearly lost my footing.
Brush gave way to dirt as the sound of trickling water came close—the ground dipped down into the belly of a creek.
Caroline stood in the water, clutching something against her chest. I opened my mouth to call to her. But she stepped forward onto the dirt beside the stream and fell to her knees, the bundle tumbling from her arms to the ground.
She clicked on a flashlight and aimed it at her work, one hand sifting through the materials. Now the beam of light showed me what she’d been carrying—the clothes Finch had let me borrow after that night I slept over and the weighty tome of ANTHROPOMANCY , the letters on its cover gleaming gold beneath the glow. She set the flashlight down beside her leg and got to work, ripping up grass and dead leaves to stuff the arms and legs of the sweatpants and hoodie, filling out a Finch-shaped doll. The light rolled across the ground with her movement and illuminated my paint rag, hardened a dull reddish brown with the blood from Finch’s cut.
She’d stolen from my room. She had taken the rag from my studio. Now it made sense—Caroline in that Michigan room, her fingers working Finch’s hair out of the brush.
I took an uncertain step forward, and the hill’s slope sent me slipping closer to the water. I swung for a grasp on one of the trunks surrounding me, but my nails just scraped over bark as I cried out. Rocks clattered into the stream and I skidded to the bottom of the hill.
She spun with the book in her arms and turned her flashlight on me. All I could see was its white eye, the searing beam turning everything else to haze.
“Hey,” she said casually.
“ Hey? What the fuck, Caroline?” I panted as I got to my feet, one hand up to block her light. “What are you doing with that?” I gestured to ANTHROPOMANCY and the mess in front of her, then took a wobbling step across the stream of water. She turned back to the effigy without a word and continued to stuff it with new fervor. The body became so plush with her work that I expected it to sit up and speak to us.
That vision sparked urgency in me. I bent and snatched up the bloody rag. Caroline finally acknowledged me again. In the dark, she made such a ghoul, her face ghostly and colorless, her eyes two black caverns.
“Jo,” she said, languid, serpentine, “come on.”
“Did you take this from me?”
“Don’t be annoying, of course I did. Give it back.” She held her hand out. I shook my head hard. “Did you follow me out here?”
I thought about what she might say if she knew I’d seen her after leaving Finch’s apartment. “Get up. This is done,” I said, ignoring her question.
Caroline sighed. “You’re impossible.”
“I’m impossible? Caroline. Get the fuck up.”
“Go home.”
“I’m not going anywhere until you stand up and leave this alone. This is what you meant by fixing it ? Are you out of your mind? You saw what happened to Kolesnik. How could you ... what could you possibly—” I faltered, sickness rising in me.
Brush crackled again. I spun in search of what could have made the sound, but Caroline ignored it, her deft hands ripping an opening in the chest cavity of the hoodie. I took hold of her shoulder and pulled her off it—she shoved me hard enough to knock me back into the dirt.
“I said go home ,” she snapped with vicious heat, index finger jabbing hard in my direction. “You have no idea what you’re fucking with, Jo. You came to me and you told me you were afraid, that something needed to change. So I’m changing it. I’m protecting us. Don’t be upset just because you got what you asked for.”
“I didn’t ask for this ,” I cried. Caroline loomed effervescent above me—something reincarnated, summoned with a spell, an entity haunting the wood.
Her voice dropped to a rough hush. “There’s never been another option. We fucked the first ritual, and that’s on us. We never should have left it somewhere so volatile.”
“But—” I stopped, uncertain. “You can’t do that to her. Not Finch.”
“Then who, Jo? Who else stands in our way other than her ? You want to pick someone else we should murder?”
“Stop,” I whispered. “Please, just stop, I need to think.”
“We’re out of time. We’ll bury the scarecrow so deep no one will ever find it. It will live on forever, and leave us alone, and we can go on to create beautiful things. Don’t you want to make something beautiful?”
Of course I did. She knew that. But if I couldn’t make something beautiful on my own, what right did I have to claim exaltation? What had I ever worked for and earned? I would do anything to keep her, to keep all of them. I would not do this.
Caroline was still speaking without waiting for me to answer in the same rush of emotion I could hear her spew past the walls of our Manor bedrooms. Her eyes had the wild look of a hunted animal. I looked at her and thought about that feral pig bleeding out on the road, screaming in the voice of a man we’d murdered.
It was a struggle to stagger upright. Her head snapped to meet me. We watched each other like we were preparing to circle, to stalk and lunge—I was afraid that I’d never seen this side of her, that she had shown me a new face. A deeper, sharper part of me assumed this was her in entirety.
“You asked me to fix it,” she said. The words dragged out of her like she had winched them from her chest. “You. Asked. Me .”
Another flurry of movement in the woods. Too close. The trees bent and whistled in the wind, ANTHROPOMANCY ’s pages fluttering through a succession of gruesome images like an invisible hand was turning them. I stepped away from Caroline and the effigy, still sprawled on the ground before her feet.
“Let’s just go home,” I pleaded.
Something groaned in the brush. I fought to keep my eyes off the dark, but it was pervasive, everywhere and everything. The rag felt like an omen in my hands—as if just by holding it, I’d made an offering to something terrible. I dug my nails into the bloodstain.
Caroline fixed me with a look devoid of feeling. One foot prodded the Finch doll on the ground, and the belly spilled rotten grass. The sound of heavy breathing surrounded us.
“Do you hear that?” I whispered, rag held to my chest.
“I told you what I saw. I know you saw it too,” Caroline said flatly. “If you refuse to let me keep us safe and we walk away now, this mess is on you.”
I wasn’t good. I considered. I imagined what it would be like to watch Caroline continue the ritual, to let someone else bear that fear, to release myself from Kolesnik’s shadow. It would have been so simple. So necessary. I didn’t know how much longer I could last without another option. But what was safety anyway, if choosing it meant hurting them?
I loved Finch, even when I hated her. I closed my eyes so Caroline’s couldn’t convince me otherwise.
“We can’t do that to her,” I said finally.
Caroline kicked ANTHROPOMANCY away in disgust. I snatched it up and held it to my chest as she stalked past me into the woods, and I hurried to follow.
Everything was dark and damp between the trees, like walking down a throat with its tongue roiling underfoot. She moved so quickly—I jogged to keep up, branches tearing welts across my arms. By the time I broke out into the garden again, Caroline was a speck of white in the distance.
She let the Manor’s door slam before I could catch up. I fumbled with the knob in a rush. When I shut it and locked it behind me again, I heard her footsteps thumping overhead against the last stairs before her bedroom door slammed too. The rest of the house remained still, everyone else likely in bed, used to Caroline’s ways.
I didn’t look behind me to see what might have followed us. I was sure that whatever it was had already made itself at home inside the Manor, inside of me.
Caroline’s voice was low and angry on the other side of the wall as I shut my door, shed my dirty clothes, and perched on the edge of my bed. I set ANTHROPOMANCY down beside me on the quilt, fingers grazing over the cover like it might be able to give me an answer through the thin leather. It had the warm, fleshy sensation of a limb. Like something cut from skin and called to life.
I knew the answer I craved and its simultaneous impossibility. I wanted a break from myself. I wanted to wake and find the fear erased.
There was a place to begin, at least—in the morning I could tell Saz that I knew what we had done and where the ritual had come from. I’d share my concerns for Caroline and the influence this horrible book held over us. If the ritual stemmed from it, then there had to be something else in its pages: a way to go back to how things were before.
I shed my clothes and slid into bed, yanked the blankets nearly over my head, shivering there between the sheets with Finch’s pill melting beneath my tongue. The coating slickened everything. I shut my eyes as the floor outside my bedroom door creaked beneath Caroline’s weight. Movement hesitated, as if she was standing outside with a hand raised to knock. But the sound never came. Lights flickered until the glow beneath my door was nothing but the faint red of the exit sign.
For the first time in months, tongue still candied by Finch’s pill, I hurtled into black.