Candice searched her roommate’s pristine side of the room but found nothing. She knew that Georgia had taken her notes, but she couldn’t prove it. She sat down on the bed and bit her lip as she thought through her dilemma.
Then she got up, straightened the sheet and stared down at the body of a young woman lying on her back on the floor encircled by a line drawn in salt. Candice peeled a thin yellow piece of paper scribbled with red ink from a square pile of similar yellow papers, wet it with water in a clear bowl, knelt and pasted it face up on Georgia’s forehead.
The still body began to tremble. “Where are my notes?” Candice asked.
A whisper, barely louder than a breath, said, “I don’t know. I didn’t take them.”
“Of course you have, I am never wrong.”
“You are wrong this time…”
Candice snatched the paper off, crumpled it and threw it into a bin placed in a corner of the room. She began to pace the whole length of the floor, oblivious to Georgia’s body lying in the middle of it.
“That’s a lie! A lie!” she screamed suddenly at the inert body. “You’ve taken it! I know it’s you!” Then she, picked up her handbag from her bed and left the room.
Her thesis was due soon, and she needed some of the data she had collected in the notes. All those experiments that she had conducted on stray animals would all be for nothing without the data. She needed her notes. Where would Georgia have hidden them she wondered, as her wild eyes scanned the staircase, the student lounge and the pigeon holes lined along the whole length of the foyer.
It was late in the day and she let out a rattled breath as students began to trickle back to the dorm from their classes in campus. Her anxious eyes frown on noticing dusk creeping over the horizon. Please, please, please, let the shop still be opened she prayed with trepidation, and broke into a run. She let out a sigh of relief when a red and black painted signage loomed into view and she saw the sign ‘Open’ still hung on the display glass. She pushed against the equally red and black door and stepped into a narrow shop lined with a wall of incense, thin wax candles in shallow boxes and piles of yellow papers in all forms and sizes.
“Good evening, Miss. I am about to close,” said a polite old man from behind a long bulky counter.
“I am sorry, but I am only going to buy a packet of incense.”
“Do you know what incense you need?”
“Just the plain black ones.”
The old man shook his head. “Why not take these others? They are more auspicious and will bring you good things.”
Candice shrugged guiltily. “I just like black that is all.”
The old man nodded. “Then no harm will come, I think.”
A younger and more modern version of the old man stepped out from the back. “Just sell her the black incense, Father. The people here are not superstitious; they just want to be trendy. Black is a trendy color.”
Reluctantly the old man wrapped the packet of black incense and received payment for it. As soon as Candice walked out the door, the son locked it after her. For the first time that day, she smiled. Even the cold breeze blowing from behind her warmed her, for it felt as though it was lifting her out of her troubles.
When she reached the dorm, she was relieved to see that the foyer was silent and the student’s lounge empty. At least no one would be complaining about the pungent smell of the black incense. She trotted up the stairs to her room, and locked the door behind her. She opened the two windows wide then pulled the curtains over them.
From inside her wardrobe, she took out a brass vessel filled with sand. This she placed next to Georgia’s crown and knelt in front of it. She took out three incense sticks from the box, splayed them out and lit the tips with a cigarette lighter one by one. Then she stood up, bowed and prostrated herself before the brass vessel three times, each time asking for help from the netherworld. Once done she planted the sticks in the center of its sandy interior. The smoke rose straight up in a thin line. Then a soft breeze ruffled the curtains and whirled the thin smoke into spirals that turned counter-clockwise.
She said, “I seek help because this liar would not tell me the truth.” Another breeze blew cold. “She would not tell me where she hid my notes.” The lock clicked. “I need my notes. I need my notes else I cannot complete my thesis.” The door opened.
Candice stretched her arm and peeled off the top layer of yellow paper. She licked the back and pasted it onto Georgia’s brow. “Tell me the truth, Georgia. Where is it?”
A breath answered. “It is in the room?”
“Good God. What is this?” a man’s voice hissed from the now wide opened doorway. Candice stared up and saw that it was Professor Cheng, and that he was clutching the leather bound notebook she was looking for. “What have you done!”
Candice smiled. “Did you hear, Professor? It works. My experiment works.”
Professor Cheng stared wide-eyed then a hand fell on his shoulder. Professor Moore, the Faculty Dean pushed him into the room and entered after him. Then he closed the door and knelt next to the corpse. The body began to tremble. “Help me,” she said.
“Can you do this to someone long dead?”
“The book says that it only works if you trap the soul before it escapes.”
“How did you trap this soul?”
Candice beamed proudly. “I poisoned her. Then while she was dying, I lay her on the floor and drew a seal of salt around her.”
“What does the seal do?”
“It prevents the gods of death from smelling her. If they can’t smell her then they can’t take her soul away.”
Professor Moore sat back on his haunches. “How long can you keep her?”
“For as long as I don’t break the seal.” She giggled. “I can make her stay in there until she rots to the bone.”
“Well it is a pity you did it here because we can’t move her without breaking the seal.” He touched his nose. “She is beginning to smell. I will have to ask campus security to move her away.” He pulled out a pen from his shirt pocket and cut a line across the salt with it. The curtains blew outwards as though a fan had been suddenly pointed at them. Then he turned to Candice. “Come with us to the archive. There is something I want to show you.” He stood up and walked out the door.
Once Candice was in the brightly lit corridor, she saw that Professor Cheng was so tense his grip was leaving sweat marks on her journal. “Can I have that back, Professor,” she said and reached out for the book. As she flipped through the pages, she asked, “Did Georgia give them to you?”
They reached the stairs. “No,” he replied, “it was on my desk. Maybe you left it there during our last meeting.”
She turned to face him, “Why didn’t you tell me? I was searching for it all over the place.”
Moore said, “Because I wanted to read it first. I wanted to understand your experiments and the steps you took. Very impressive.”
Candice blushed with pride. Outside the building waiting for them were the dean’s personal car and driver. They piled in, and once inside Moore poured wine from a decanter into three long glasses. They watched her drink. By the time the car stopped, Candice was feeling dizzy but not so much that she couldn’t see that they were no longer in campus. The building in front of her was a large stone mansion and the steps were so wide and so high just looking at them made her head spin. Moore and Cheng supported her on either side as they walked up the steps. On entering the front door, they placed her on a steel table which was then rolled into the deeper recesses of the building. Once they stopped, Candice felt herself falling and realized that they were in an elevator. It slowed to a stop and again Candice felt herself being rolled along until they entered a room dimmed with the light of tapering candles. Already there was incense burning, for she recognized the spiced pungency. With horror she listened to Cheng who chanted the mantra she had written in her notes as he drew a line of salt around her body.
“No,” she said in a raspy voice. She was still alive.
Moore opened an eyelid and studied her pupil. Then he turned and said, “Call campus security. Tell them about the raving thesis she wrote and ask them to look for her.”
A door clicked open and close. Moore once again looked down. “Excellent work, Candice. You have done a great contribution to the dark arts. I hope you will bear with us, and contribute some more.”
Her body began to close in on her like a wall and she felt herself drowning in its mass. She inhaled; nothing. She exhaled; nothing. She clawed and clawed and clawed then suddenly she was out of the dense darkness.
“Tell us your name,” a voice said from a great distance.
“Candice,” she replied. “Help me.” She was plunged into the darkness again, and she screamed and screamed for the voice but he couldn’t hear her.
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