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Epiphany
The rest of their day did not prove much more fruitful, and by ten o’clock that night Eliza collapsed exhausted onto her bed. She had been so full of arrogant optimism that if they could just put their heads together and give it their all for a day, they could truly crack the case. But they had learned nothing new, nothing of value, and still had no leads. Just another object to search for, a big fancy staff no one other than the dramatic little mouse had ever seen. Pal leapt lightly onto the bed at her side and pawed her arm reassuringly.
“Someone might yet see something,” he said. “We might still catch them. And now we know they’re probably a student, if they’re smaller than an adult.”
Eliza stroked Pal’s head appreciatively, but she closed her eyes knowing that the following morning would be no different.
*
Melissa was not in her usual seat the following morning when Eliza entered the Herbalism classroom. She was nowhere to be seen all day, in fact. Mashu, thankfully, could still perform magic. Faye was still visibly shaken from the event and struggled to control her flickering; from time to time, she sputtered out of view and returned with a sob.
Eliza saw Melissa slipping in and out of the Grand Room over the following week. She only came in to take food and left the dining hall just as quickly, carrying her meal away in a napkin. She had completely cut herself off from the rest of the students and had stopped attending all her classes. She was often seen wandering the corridors or devouring books in the library. Her hair became messier by the day and her appearance progressively more disheveled.
For their part, the trio did not stop trying to get to the bottom of the mystery. Weeks passed and no spell, no divination, no communications to the great beyond yielded any decipherable answers. Eliza even tried a guided séance but all she could glean from this was the rush of wings circling her, confusing her, bamboozling her. The answers to her questions were confusing, like the runes didn’t believe Mashu’s incident was connected to the others. It wasn’t until one night in early April when Eliza lay in bed mulling over the possibilities that she had a stroke of inspiration.
She sat up so quickly that Pal, who had been laying on her chest, was launched to the foot of the bed. Eliza wrenched off the covers and threw herself in the direction of her divination tools. Quickly, with shaking hands, she lit the candles and arranged the crystals and runes before her. She asked the runes for confirmation of her theory. Pal joined her, ears bent backwards. She was right. The answers had been confusing until now because she hadn’t been asking the right questions.
Eliza launched herself out of her room, tearing up the stairwell to the third floor of the dorm building. She half-jogged until she reached Faye’s room. Pal did not follow, he was too annoyed.
Eliza knew her friend, who had been a pile of nerves since Mashu had been drugged, would be grateful to know what she had just discovered. The person who drugged and took Mashu’s claw was not entirely unrelated to the curse that affected the other students—but neither was it the same perpetrator.
Melissa Sweet, dear optimistic Melissa Sweet, desperate for more people to pay attention to her plight, had tried to motivate Mashu and Eliza to join in the daily obsession of solving the mystery by making it more personal.
Melissa drugged Mashu. She had crafted herself a staff that combined every amplification object she could get her hands on. She had not lost every ounce of magic, and the staff amplified what little was left, allowing Melissa to create a potion and move Mashu to his room in the dead of night. Eliza slid to a stop in front of Faye’s door and knocked. There was no answer. Hesitating only a fraction of a second, Eliza tried the door and found it unlocked.
Inside was a room of identical proportions to her own, but Faye had a clear glass dormer window instead of stained glass. Eliza presumed the window must overlook the river, but since it was dark out, all Eliza could see when she turned on the old electric light was her own reflection. There was a marked difference in the contents of the room. Eliza’s room was full of books, notes, and drawings from her first year of classes. Faye, who was now in her third year, had fully occupied every inch of space and added many shelves where Eliza had only blank walls. Jars of specimens, limbs, hair, and body parts floated in salted solutions upon Faye’s bookshelf. A pair of floating eyes followed Eliza’s movements, giving her goosebumps. The desk was covered in thick leather-bound tomes that were so ancient they were loose from their spines. Eliza had never seen these in the school’s library and presumed Faye must have acquired them somewhere else.
There were also letters on the desk. Unable to quiet her curiosity, Eliza flicked through a few of them. It looked like the students who had dropped out had replied to the letters Faye and Melissa had written. They described their symptoms and their ongoing feelings of emptiness since losing their magic. It was odd, Eliza did not remember either Faye or Melissa mentioning they had received any replies. Drawing close to a large book, which lay open on a page describing how to mix a complicated potion, Eliza’s eye was caught by a small movement to her left.
There, in the corner of the room, was a small altar. Eliza had seen altars in many a would-be witch’s living room; she had one in her house in Windham. She knew now that those Mundunces with altars probably instinctually felt the magic in the objects they displayed there. Though not powerful enough to allow them to manifest fully, perhaps potential witches and warlocks would eventually receive an invitation to study at Kentree if they practiced enough. To see an altar in a practicing witch’s room was a new sight for Eliza. She had never occasioned to enter any of her classmates’ rooms before and never supposed that the altar tradition would be present in magical families, too.
But this altar was peculiar. It had crystals, pendants, wands, and the usual witching knickknacks. But it also had tufts of different coloured hair tied together in a bow, a few personalized coffee mugs, and bits of old jewelry. As Eliza drew closer, a wave of warning washed over her body. The fine hair on her arms and on the back of her neck rose. Her breath appeared in a fog before her, the air bit coldly at her skin. The chill that surrounded the altar was most ominous, but Eliza rationalized it away as part of her imagination.
There was a small hand-held vanity mirror propped up in the middle of the shelf above a handwritten leather journal. It was this that had caught her eye from across the room; shapes were moving within the mirror. She was repulsed by the sight of it, just as a small voice whispered to her that it held many powerful secrets. Instinct prohibited her from reaching out to grasp it; she cast a floating charm on the mirror to raise it and bring it close enough to examine the shapes within the reflective glass. The mirror floated closer, and she suppressed a cry of horror at what she saw.
Figures, more figures than Eliza could count, were screaming in the mirror. She saw them sobbing, tortured, mad, ragged. Clawing to be released from within. Eliza didn’t know how to make sense of this horrifying little mirror—nor, indeed, why it should be displayed in a place of honour on her friend’s altar. She was just coming to the conclusion to put it back down and ask Faye about it later when one of the figures pushed itself forward through the crowd and the white, petrified face of a pretty blonde came into clear view. Eliza could not help but yelp in horror—the cheeks were hollowed out but it was unmistakably the face of Melissa Sweet screaming silently from within the mirror, tears streaming from her wild eyes.
The figure was pulling at her hair in agony. Eliza, still using the charm on the mirror, pushed it back toward the altar where it fell onto the shelf with a heavy clunk. Breathing heavily, skin clammy with sweat despite the unnatural cold surrounding the altar, Eliza froze in panic. What could she do? What could be done? Should she take the mirror and run? It was the smoking gun, clearly framing Faye as having performed a most evil kind of magic. What were these people doing in the mirror? That Melissa should appear there, surely, must connect Faye to the disappearance of Melissa’s power?
Eliza’s eyes flickered down to the notebook that lay in front of the mirror. The writing was miniscule, and many notes were scratched out and replaced with others even more cramped between the lines. One word halfway down the left page jumped out at her; it was underlined three times in triumph. It read:
SOULS