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“Are you alone?” I asked.
“My roommate’s in class. Or probably skipping class to make out with his boyfriend, actually,” Desmond said.
“Good. Not the boyfriend-making-out part—specifically the alone part,” I clarified.
“Yeah, I got that,” he said, sounding amused. My cheeks heated up. “Where did you find it? The journal?”
“That’s not important,” I said, reluctant to share too much. Would he help me if he knew I’d gotten the journal from the Harrow Witch?
“Okay,” Desmond said slowly. “So the whole thing is in the Vaughan cipher?”
“There’s a Vaughan cipher? And yeah, the whole thing is filled with those symbols.”
“It’s where I got the idea for my cipher, originally. There are bits of it all over Harrow,” Desmond explained. “I’ve never been able to crack it, though, not without a longer chunk of text. And you just—Helen, I’ve wanted to find that journal like mywhole life. Other kids wanted hot wheels in kindergarten—I wanted to read my unhinged ancestor’s rantings about ectoplasm.”
“Does that mean you can crack it?” I asked, smiling in spite of my nerves. It was hard not to be excited in the face of Desmond’s enthusiasm.
“Hell yes, I can crack it,” Desmond said. He sounded on the edge of gleeful. “Can you take photos of the pages to send to me?”
“No problem,” I said, relieved. “I’ll send them right away.”
“If it really is a straight substitution cipher, it shouldn’t be hard. You start with the one- and two-letter words—there aren’t very many, so you can narrow things down quickly, and—”
“And you’ll keep it secret?”
He paused. “Helen, is everything okay over there?”
I covered my eyes with my hand and stifled the urge to sigh or scream or invent new, creative curse words. “No one will tell me what’s going on around here. I think the journal might have answers, but... I don’t know. I don’t want anyone to know that I have it. Not yet at least.”
There was a long silence. “I think I’d like some of those answers, too,” he said at last.
“I thought you didn’t believe in the things at Harrow,” I replied.
“I don’t know what I believe,” he said. He sighed. “I’ll keep it a secret for now.”
“Thank you, Desmond.”
“Take care of yourself, Mistress Vaughan.”
—
That night, I dreamed of Harrow once again.
I lay beneath the house, pinned by the weight of the earth, a worm wriggling against the soft skin of my wrist. I looked up, beyond the spires of Harrow. I thought at first the sky was cloudedover, the stars hidden, but then I saw them glimmering in the dark. The stars were there, but they burned black against the night sky, and among them moved some vast and horriblething, a shadow of grasping tendrils that reached for me—
But before they could reach me, I was gone, running through the tangled halls of Harrow, out the doors which were flung open to the night. A golden light glowed in the forest, and like a fluttering moth I chased it. Chased the song.
“Listen close for Harrow’s bell.
Blood will bind, and blood will tell.”
Bryony stood among the trees, not far from the edge of the woods, her lantern resting on the ground at her side. She watched the house with expectant hopefulness.
“Is it you?” she asked.
I tried to speak, but I didn’t have a mouth. Tried to reach for her, but I didn’t have hands.
“Talk to me,” she said, a pleading edge in her voice. “Tell me what I’m supposed to do.”
