Twenty-Nine

I quickly realize the book I chose is useless. It's a primary text on spiritualism, but it's all theory, and we don't have time for theory. I put it back in the pile and pick up the journal. Maybe we need something more personal to find answers.

The handwriting is archaic, written in a strange, spiky cursive that is nonetheless more readable than Isabella's journals were. The flyleaf tells me it belonged to John Bauer, the bearded, determined-looking cofounder of Magni Viri, who I remember was a professor of metaphysics and theology, as well as an ordained minister.

But this journal was written before he ever came to Corbin, during his student days in Boston. He was part of a student-led occultist club, attempting séances and automatic writing. He mentions someone named Walt over and over again, a dear friend judging by the way he describes him. Was that Walter Weymouth George? Is this when their plans for Magni Viri began?

The journal charts Bauer's increasing obsession with the idea of communing with the dead. For him, it wasn't just a fashionable hobby. He believed that ghosts could be like Virgil in Dante's Inferno, guiding a person through the truths of the universe.

So that's how this all started—an undergraduate's spiritual longing. If only he knew how it would all turn out.

As I flip through the pages, Bauer's ideas become more ambitious, his prose more feverish. He felt he was on the verge of finding a way to merge the mind of a spirit and a man, as he put it.

At some point Jordan and Penny come into the room, but I hardly notice them. I'm immersed in Bauer's writing. His mind is nimble and imaginative. He sees possibilities everywhere. Even though I know the horrible outcome of his ideas, I'm still drawn in by his passion for them.

Penny puts a cup of coffee into my hand. I drink it automatically, wincing at the bitter taste. The girl really should not be allowed anywhere near a coffeepot. I see now why Jordan thought the coffee I made was adequate payment for his help with my math homework.

I dive back into the journal. Three-quarters of the way through it, Bauer decides that he needs a way to open the veil between worlds, to either let the ghosts in or to let himself out. If he can do that, then he feels he can offer them fair trade.

"Has anyone found anything yet?" Neil asks around a yawn, interrupting my reading. He stretches like a cat before collapsing onto my bed next to Azar.

There's a half-hearted collective murmur that amounts to "not much."

"Well," I say, "listen to this." I fill them in on what I've learned from Bauer's journal, right up to the point where he decides he needs a way to open the veil.

"Don't we open the veil every time we have an initiation?" Penny asks.

I think of the charged atmosphere of my initiation, the feeling of immense connectedness. Looking back, it's clear when the ghosts all arrived. I felt it, a shift in the air. But what caused it? The ring of candles? The song we sang?

"Didn't the candles blow out all at once, at the same moment the song ended?" I muse aloud, my eyes squeezed tight, trying to recall every detail of that strange night.

"Oh my God," Wren says, sitting up fast. I'm so startled I nearly spill my coffee. "The music. WWG." They look between the rest of us, as if we're supposed to understand.

"What?" Neil asks around another yawn.

"Walter Weymouth George," Azar says. "The founder of Magni Viri?"

"AKA Bauer's dear friend Walt," I add.

"Yes!" Wren yells. "My guy. The composer."

"What about him?" Penny asks, rubbing her eyes. Fatigue is clearly slowing down everyone's thinking.

"He— It's the music. His music. That we sing at the initiation."

"Oh," I say, finally understanding. "The music opens the veil." This is what Bauer needed. He couldn't figure out how to get the ghosts to come. So he teamed up with a musician. I bet Weymouth George is the reason Bauer ended up at Corbin College. Or vice versa. They wanted to continue their occult club in another form.

"Yes!" Wren says, practically bouncing on the bed. "It's not just tradition or ceremony. It's part of the spell."

"An invocation," I say, borrowing Bauer's word for it.

"WWG wrote it for Magni Viri. It's one of his only compositions he never allowed to be performed or recorded," Wren says. "It's only ours."

"The lyrics are all about coming in out of the darkness and dwelling in the light," Jordan says, nodding. "So, yeah, that makes sense. It's the music."

"You know Latin?" Azar asks, scrunching up her nose.

"Yeah, don't you all?" Jordan asks, surprised, looking around at each of us. We all shake our heads.

Azar rolls her eyes. "So we sing this song and wake the ghosts or whatever," she says, "and then what?"

My initiation is fresh in my mind. "We offer them our blood."

"We pledge ourselves to be their vessels," Penny adds.

"Is it really that simple?" I ask. "A song and some blood and a promise?"

"Well," Jordan says, "the blood part is." He holds up the theory book that I'd discarded before. "According to this, blood is a common offering to the dead. It's our life force. That's powerful."

I think of how thin many of us have gotten, how pale. The condition I was in when Isabella finished writing Cicada. It wasn't only fatigue. It was more than that. And I've only been at Isabella's mercy for a few weeks. The older students have been living with theirs for years. No wonder they look far worse, gaunt and exhausted and ill.

"They feed on our blood. They feed on us," I realize with a shudder.

Jordan's mouth twists. "Even the ones who are like partners... they're not truly. They're slowly draining us dry."

Azar shakes her head. "Another thing that fucker O'Connor never mentioned. So what do we do about it?"

"We break with them," Penny says quietly. "We take back our vows."

"Can we do that?" Azar asks.

Penny shrugs. "All agreements can be broken. There might be a cost or a punishment, but they can be broken. People get divorced all the time, don't they? People break contracts at work. They run away from the military."

"Yeah, but that's humans. Ghosts are different, aren't they?" Azar asks.

"Besides, if you go AWOL you go to jail," Jordan adds.

I put my head on my knees and groan. I'm so tired. Even after the coffee, I'm tired. My body still hasn't recovered from the beating Isabella gave me. She knows it too. Since I returned to campus, I can feel her lapping around my edges, waiting for me to let go. And when I do? What will happen then?

Penny puts a hand on my back. "We'll figure this out, Tara. I promise."

I nod tiredly. "But we need to do this tonight. We need to get those books back in O'Connor's office before he notices them missing."

"Okay, everyone read. Find something useful," Penny says. "Anything about breaking the connection with the ghosts. Like, I don't know, maybe banishment? Or an exorcism?"

"How about a séance?" Neil suggests, holding out his book so we can see it.

I'm so shocked Neil is actually offering a suggestion instead of a caustic comment that I just blink at him.

"A séance?" Jordan asks skeptically. "Like with a Ouija board?"

"No," Neil says, "not exactly. We wouldn't need a physical means of communication because we're pretty much already walking Ouija boards, aren't we?"

"Uh, aren't we trying to take the ghosts' power over us away, not give them more?" Azar interjects. "You really think opening ourselves up to them more is a good idea?"

"It does sound dangerous," I say. "Isabella can grab hold of me even when I'm not asleep, if my mind wanders a little. I can't imagine what she could do if we tried to summon her up."

"I mean, yeah, it's dangerous. Obviously. But if we summoned one of them and let them speak freely, maybe we would learn something," Neil says. "And of course there's a chance we give them a stronger hold, but they've already got all the power anyway. We're always at their mercy. My little freeloader doesn't give a shit about my life or what I want. Isn't it worth the risk if we can get the upper hand?"

"He's right," Penny says. "If we don't take whatever chance we have now, we might as well just lie down and give up, let them take over completely."

Everyone is quiet for a long moment, weighing the risks against the potential rewards.

Jordan is the first to speak. "Who did you have in mind, Neil?" he asks, his voice cautious. "I can't imagine most of the Magni Viri ghosts would be particularly helpful."

"WWG," Wren says before Neil can answer. "He's our guy. I'm sure of it."

"The asshole who started all of this?" Azar snaps, sweeping her hand in the direction of the cemetery.

Wren nods vehemently. "Look, I understand why he wanted this. It was for his music. It was because he knew he was going to die too young, and he couldn't stand it. He had so much more to offer the world, and he knew he wouldn't get the chance."

"I get that," Penny says quietly.

"See?" Wren says. "Maybe he was an egomaniac, maybe he was shortsighted, but he really only cared about the music. About his art. He never envisioned Magni Viri becoming this tool of control, I know it. And I don't think he would appreciate where it's all gone. I'm sure he'll help us." Wren waits impatiently for us to think through it, eyebrows raised.

"Even if he doesn't want to help, he'd probably be our best bet to tell us something useful," I finally say, hedging. "I mean, all of this started with him. Maybe he's the secret to ending it."

"It's worth a try," Jordan says, leaning forward, his brow scrunched up in concentration. "But what we're talking about is thinning the barrier between us and them, aren't we? I want to make sure we all understand the risk we're taking. We don't know what the consequences might be. Are you all up for that?"

"Yes!" Wren says.

"I'm game," Penny adds.

Neil and I nod.

"And look, Azar," Neil says, showing her the book. "There are instructions for protecting yourself from the spirits. It says we need to form a circle and maintain our connection to each other physically. It's like putting a protective wall between us and them. If we do this, we should be safe."

We all stare at Azar, waiting. She rubs her temples like she's getting a migraine. "Every cell in my body is screaming at me not to do this, but... fine. If this is our only option, we'll do it," she says. "But when this goes to shit, I want you all to remember that I said it was a bad idea."

Inside me, Isabella begins to churn and fume, agitated by our plans. But I can read what's underneath her anger. She's afraid of what we're about to do. And that means it has a chance of working.

"What does the book say we need?" I ask Neil, the tiniest ember of hope beginning to flicker to life inside me now that we have a plan. Maybe, just maybe, we can find a way to get free.

We wait until the cemetery party has finished and the house has gone quiet before we sneak out of Denfeld into the predawn darkness. I shiver as we walk, both from the cold and my own anxiety. We're going to call forth a ghost—and not just any ghost, but the man who helped start all of this. We're going to get the answers we need. I'm sure of it. This is the right thing to do. It's the only thing to do. Even if it's dangerous.

The cemetery is quiet with the hush that precedes morning, before the birds have awoken, before squirrels have started to skitter in the trees and bushes. It's just past 4:00 a.m., and the cemetery feels as dead as the cicada exoskeletons that litter the ground, crunching beneath our shoes as we walk.

"Here," Wren says when we reach the mausoleum. Their voice sounds so small and quiet in the dark.

The mausoleum looms up, hardly more than a shadow. Inside, WWG's body molders, but, of course, he is already here with us—living inside Wren, undead and undying.

I shine my flashlight on the stone that marks the details of his life, half-effaced though they are. Beneath his name, there's a smaller message I hadn't noticed before: Brilliant and beloved, his soul endures in us, it reads. It's a gentler inscription than Isabella's grave had, written not only with respect for the man's mind but also his heart. I wonder if Bauer chose it. Of course, while an outsider might read these words and see only affection, Magni Viri students can see another truth: that WWG literally endures in us, carried forward by each new generation.

The six of us kneel in a circle in the center of the cemetery, at the door to WWG's resting place. For a moment I feel as if I've gone back to the night of my initiation, the enormous circle of Magni Viri students lighting up the night. But this time, instead of candle flame and blood, we offer only darkness and the mist of our breaths when we speak. Weymouth George is already here; we only need to help Wren channel him fully. But the lack of lights is unnerving. It feels like we don't have anything to defend ourselves against the dark, against the ghosts. We're putting ourselves more at their mercy than we ever have before.

"Bottom's up," Wren says, popping one of Dennis's herbal gummies into their mouth. The others explained to me that the gummies are used by most of the MV students when they need to make it easier for the ghosts to do their work. It certainly can't hurt to include them here.

We hold hands, making a fortress of our bodies as the book instructed. "Ready?" I ask, my voice shaky.

"Ready," everyone says. Except Azar, who only sighs.

"Wren, are you sure you're okay with this?" Penny asks for the third time.

Wren is the one who will have to bear the greatest burden here.

"I'm sure," Wren says, lifting their chin bravely.

"Okay, each of us should scoop up a handful of dirt in our right hands, and then rejoin the circle," I say. Everyone does as I ask. As we grip each other's hands again, cold moist earth mingles with our skin. This is the earth that Magni Viri students have shed their blood on for a century. If blood is life force, like Jordan said, we have offered these ghosts a whole lot of life force.

"Wren, you're going to have to take the lead here," Penny says. "You know better than the rest of us how to talk to him. We'll just support you."

"Okay," Wren says. They are quiet for a long moment. We wait in the silence of the cemetery, bound together by hands and blood and something more. We wait so long that my knees start to ache. The sound of my own breathing starts to get under my skin, too loud in the darkness. It sounds magnified, doubled, as if Isabella is breathing inside me too, poised for her chance to break free.

The book said to name the ghost you hope to speak to, but instead, Wren begins to hum. To my surprise it's not the initiation song; it's soft and sad and lilting, like an old ballad a mother might sing to a child. After a few minutes, all the hairs on my arms stand on end, and my skin feels electric, lit up. All of my instincts are telling me that Walter Weymouth George is here.

"Walter?" I ask, a lump in my throat. I call him that because he doesn't feel like Weymouth George or WWG in this moment. He feels real, present, himself. Walter.

Wren stops humming. "Yes?" they ask softly. It's Wren's voice, but not. It's too dark for me to see anyone's expression, but I can feel the others' tension, their held breaths. Inside me, Isabella pulses and beats, her fury an onslaught of waves wearing down rock.

I push back against her, anchoring myself to Penny and the others.

"Walter, we need your help," I say, my voice strained, desperate. I don't know how long I can hold Isabella off.

Wren starts humming again. Penny squeezes my hand hard, as if to remind me we're only supposed to ask clear, direct questions of the spirit.

"How do we break the bonds of Magni Viri?" I ask.

Wren stops humming. "Magni Viri?" Walter asks, sounding a little confused.

"How did you join your spirit to students, so that you could live on?" I try again.

"Oh, that was John," Walter says.

"John Bauer?" I ask, my breath quickening. "He knew how? Did he tell you how to put an end to it?"

Walter starts to hum again, apparently reluctant to speak. Or perhaps he finds it difficult. "He wrote it all down, of course. He was always writing it down," he says fretfully. "He left half a dozen journals behind, here ‘at the heart of Magni Viri.'" He chuckles and shakes his head.

"Where?" I press, but Walter is still speaking.

"Oh, how he regretted it all. He tried to stop it. He never meant for it to..." Walter's attention wanders, and he starts humming again.

We don't have time for this. I can feel Isabella raging within me, a force of nature. We can't hold our ghosts off forever. "How do we end Magni Viri?" I ask again.

The air around us grows even colder, and it feels like frost creeps across my skin. I shiver and shiver. On either side of me, Penny and Neil do too. I can hear Penny's teeth chattering. I squeeze her hand harder, feeling the gritty dirt between our palms. The ghosts are closing in. Across the circle, Azar is doubled over and moaning as if in pain. I'm not sure she can last much longer. We're going to have to end the séance without getting what we came for.

But then the darkness is replaced with hazy light. I'm in the cemetery, but in a different part. I'm standing instead of kneeling, my hands bound with rope. I can hardly see anything, but someone stands near me, his face very close to mine. He whispers to me, his voice afraid and trembling. I can hardly make out the words over the sound of chanting all around us. But I understand their meaning.

He touches my cheek and kisses me, and I feel the scratch of his beard on my skin, taste the salt of his tears. I know I ought to be terrified, but all I feel is love, radiating out from my chest, reaching for him.

When the knife enters my heart, his lips are still on mine.

The world goes dark. I gasp back into my body, still linked to Penny and Neil.

"What the fuck was that?" Azar asks, her voice quavering.

Apparently, the others all experienced the same thing I did—being murdered.

"Who did that happen to?" Jordan asks, his breaths coming hard and fast.

"I think it was WWG. He didn't die of sickness," Penny says. "John Bauer killed him."

I realize she's right. Walter took us inside his memories, perhaps the one memory he relives over and over again—the memory he lives inside. John Bauer killed Walter Weymouth George. But how could he have founded Magni Viri if he was murdered?

Before I can open my mouth to ask another question, I feel something on my skin. Something slimy and wriggling. I look down and see a worm trying to escape between my and Penny's hands. It works itself free and falls to the earth. That's when I notice the mold creeping up my wrist. Green, thick, fuzzy, it spreads up my coat sleeve, and judging by the way my skin crawls, beneath my sweater too, working its way up my arm. The same thing is happening to Penny. She looks at me, her eyes wide and frightened.

Worms begin to heave and crawl all around us, and insects too. Their sharp legs skitter over my knees and start to climb, their antennae wheeling.

Across the circle Azar screams. She leaps up, breaking our connection, desperately trying to shake off the creatures. And that is what the ghosts were waiting for.

My breath freezes in my chest. My brain seems to shiver in my skull, fracturing my vision. I feel the moment Isabella seizes me, and it isn't like before. I don't watch her from a quiet place in the corner. She claims me. Her rage is cold and endless, a wind whipping through snow-blasted plains. It scours me.

She knows I'm looking for a way out of my vow, and so now she will break me. The way she broke Meredith.

I fall forward to the earth, where worms and insects still throng. I gasp and claw at the soil, trying to raise myself. But it's too late. Cicadas scream inside my brain.

Someone pulls at my arm, trying to yank me up, but I can't get my feet under me. Another person joins them, and together they carry me.

That contact of my body with theirs, it's all that keeps me tethered. It's the only thing that makes it possible for me to breathe. I feel like I'm in two places at once—here, being dragged out of the cemetery by my friends; and in a cold, dark place with Isabella where my body turns to rot, where I am endlessly devoured.

They drop me on the ground outside the cemetery gate, and we all fall together in a pile. I hear the others gasping, whispering, moaning.

"Tara?" Penny asks, kneeling in front of me with a wince. She takes my face in her hands. "Tara, come back to us."

At first, I can't see anything except the darkness, can't feel anything except Isabella's rage. But I follow the sound of Penny's voice, search for her in the endless night. Slowly, slowly, she comes into focus, and I feel the way her hands grip my cheeks. Finally, I look into her eyes, and they fill with relief. Then I notice the others behind her, all of them staring at me with worried eyes.

"I'm... okay," I rasp.

Penny laughs, the sound more like a sob, and kisses me hard. Her kiss is the only warm thing in the world. It spreads through me, bringing me back.

But Isabella is still here. I feel her closer than ever before; I hear her thoughts murmuring in the back of my mind.

"What happened?" I ask. I look down at my hands. There's no rot there, no mold. Only dirt. Were the worms real, the insects?

"We saw that stuff too," Penny says. "We really pissed them off, huh?"

I nod numbly.

"Ugh," Neil groans, drawing out the sound. He pulls at his hair. "Anyone else feel like you've got a parasite in your brain?"

"Yes," we all say. Wren is crying. Jordan has his arm around them.

"Wren, are you all right? Did he hurt you?" I ask.

They shake their head.

"We strengthened their hold," I say. "We gave them more power over us." Which is exactly what we were afraid of, exactly the risk we decided to take anyway.

"Come on, let's get back inside before we freeze to death," Azar says. Her voice is strangely toneless, as if she's shell-shocked. She turns away robotically and starts toward Denfeld.

I push to my feet and help Penny up. She's limping a little, so I put my arm around her waist. She's shivering hard too, and her skin feels feverish. I wonder what her ghost is doing to her.

I feel Isabella settling more firmly than ever into my skin. I might be in control for the moment, but she's growing, her mind filling mine. I can almost hear her thoughts. They are like echoes, muddied and distorted. And there are emotions inside me too, ones I'm sure don't belong to me. It's not only the anger. It's... all of her. The full human being that she was.

Somehow, feeling Isabella's sadness is more disturbing than feeling her rage. There's a loneliness inside her like an ocean, and I'm afraid I might just drown in it.

I can feel the ways that we're alike now. I can sense how much she needed to prove herself, how much she needed to claim her own life, same as me. I can feel the resentment festering in her heart for all the people who have the things she's been denied. But it's the loneliness—that vast and endless solitude—that almost takes my breath.

It's less dark now that we're out from under the trees, and I can see the others more clearly. Each of their faces look strained, as if they're holding back their ghosts from sheer force of will. Maybe they are.

"Well, we're fucked!" Neil yells, his voice thick with tears. His body curves over his knees, and he rocks back and forth.

"Shhh, shut up!" Penny hisses at him. "You don't want to wake the whole house up."

"Who even cares? Things can't get worse than this," Neil says. "God, I was so stupid. It was manageable before. Now it's..." He gasps. "It's unbearable."

"Calm down," Azar says, still in that toneless voice. "It's going to be okay."

Jordan rubs his hand over his heart as if it hurts. "I guess that's what we get for blindly following instructions in a book that was probably written by a charlatan."

"I'm so sorry, y'all. I'm so, so sorry," I say. I know we all agreed to this, but it still feels like it's my fault. Like I'm the one who set this all in motion.

"Do you all feel it too? The boundaries are breaking down—between us and them. The walls are growing thinner," Penny says as if in a daze. "I can hear Dr. Coppola's thoughts, feel her feelings."

"We rushed in," Azar says, picking absentmindedly at her cuticles.

"We had to," I reassure her. "We had to try."

"We didn't know what we were doing. We should have waited," she says, raising a now-bleeding hangnail to her mouth.

"Yeah, we all know you thought it was a bad idea!" Neil snarls.

Azar only stares at him, but Wren shakes their head. "No, let's not blame each other. We didn't have any other choice. Besides, it's not like it was a total failure. We learned a lot."

"Did we?" Neil asks, his voice loaded with scorn.

"Of course we did," I say. "We saw how WWG died. He was ritualistically killed. The chanting, the candles, the knife in his heart..."

"I didn't understand it though," Jordan says. "He wasn't scared. He wanted it."

"And he was gay," Penny says. "Did you know he was gay, Wren?"

They nod. "He always felt that way to me. But I didn't know he was in love. I think John Bauer loved WWG too. The way he killed him was... so gentle."

I close my eyes, trying to remember everything. The memory feels lodged inside me, as if it belongs to me.

Penny lifts her hand to her cheek as if remembering the way Bauer's beard scratched against Walter's face when they kissed.

"So John Bauer killed Walter Weymouth George to create Magni Viri," Jordan says slowly. "But he loved him?"

"He definitely did," I say, remembering the way that Bauer's lips felt on mine in the memory. Even with my limited romantic knowledge, I know that most kisses don't feel like that. "He loved him desperately."

"Then why did he kill him?" Penny asks.

Wren squeezes their eyes shut, as if searching inside for the answers. "WWG was sick and running out of time. Tuberculosis, I think."

"So he was willing to sacrifice his life to create Magni Viri?" I ask.

Wren nods. "Yeah, I think so. He was dying, and he wanted more time."

"And I bet Bauer didn't want to let him go," Penny says. "If they were in love. And so young."

"You don't kill someone you love," Jordan says.

"I would," Neil says, his eyes feverish. "If they were dying anyway, and I could find a way to hold on to them. I would have done it to Meredith."

I stare at him, and I know he means it. He would have driven a knife into her heart if it allowed him to be with her forever. Is that beautiful or evil? I don't know, but mostly it's heartbreaking, devastating.

"All right, so Bauer kills WWG and takes his spirit into himself? He makes himself the first vessel," I say. "And from there, he created Magni Viri."

"But he regretted it," Wren says, their eyes bright. "WWG said Bauer regretted creating Magni Viri."

With a lurch, I remember the rest of what Walter said about Bauer. That he was always scribbling; that he had written everything down.

"The journals that WWG mentioned... he said they were in the heart of Magni Viri," I say. "What does that mean? Denfeld Hall?"

Jordan looks back toward the graveyard. "No, the cemetery. That's what people have always called it. The heart of Magni Viri."

"Oh, that's right. It was in my vows. And I think I heard Quigg call it that," I say, excitement surging through me. "But where in the cemetery?"

Wren laughs. "Where else? The journals are buried with WWG. They must be in his crypt."

"Because who would disturb a grave?" I say.

"You mean besides you?" Jordan asks. When I wince, he laughs and adds, "Sorry, too soon?"

"Well, let's hope the second time's the charm," I say.

My heart races with expectation, despite my exhaustion. The séance wasn't a failure, even if it cost us more than we meant to give. We know where to look now.

We're going to find the secrets to ending Magni Viri, and then we will rid ourselves of the ghosts that are devouring us whole.