Stay over at her place

"Call Stephen, tell him you're having a sleep over with me."

"A sleep over?" Marnie's eyebrow arches with scepticism. "What is this, 1996? Are we back in junior high all of a sudden?"

"Fuck off, you know what I mean. Tell him I've invited you to some fancy spa or something for the weekend. He'll be cool with it."

Marnie knows Alexa is right; Stephen will be disappointed he doesn't get to see her, but he'll understand. In a way that makes it even more imperative to avoid corrupting him. He's actually quite a good catch. So she does as her friend suggests, texting Stephen.

Marnie: Going to stay with Lex, go to spa this weekend.
Stephen: ok. Bit sudden tho. You comin round for clothes?
Marnie: Lex has it covered. She wants to go out tonight then spa in morning. See you on Sunday?
Stephen: You bet. Love ya.
Marnie: Love you too.

Alexa returns from her room. She seems to have anticipated Stephen's question and tosses Marnie a top and some yoga pants identical to those that she's wearing. "Here, slip into something more comfortable." While Marnie does so, Alexa starts laying out the letters on the table. "You said your demon-thingy is dormant now, right?"

"I think so."

"Great. Let's look at these together first, then. If you can help show me what I'm looking for, then tomorrow I can go … you know, do research or whatever."

"And meanwhile, what do I do? Hang around here and worry that Vic is going to drop by to 'borrow DVDs'?"

"No, girl. You're going to a spa."

"What? I thought that was just an excuse."

Alexa gives an effortless laugh. "Well it is, but it isn't. That new spa on Lexington dropped off some comp tickets at the gym for staff and members. I'll give you one. It's supposed to have a kind of Zen or Buddhist retreat theme to it, so there shouldn't be that many people around you. How much trouble can you get into?"

"Wow. That's … actually a good plan," Marnie says.

"Duh. I might not be a brainiac, Marn, but I'm not just a fatass gym bunny either. Now let's look at these letters."

The collection of letters is a far richer treasure trove than Marnie would have credited when she first leafed through them. They begin in the early 1800s, with two senior members of the Tangiers Group discussing the find of this amulet. One of them found it on the body of a Napoleonic soldier in Egypt. He kept it as a memento rather than pawning it, and when most of the Group came over to the States in the late 1820s, so too did the amulet. From they start they seem to be aware of its occult nature, but they don't know that it's the prison for a demon. Then in 1826, the then-owner of the amulet, Philip Ellsworth, explains how his sister mistook it for a piece of her own jewellery and put it on by mistake.

"Fuck me," Alexa says as she reads through the letter. Philip's sister, Anne, collapsed and went into some kind of seizure. When she recovered, she claimed to have had visions of a demonic presence—the first recorded encounter with Uhazral.

"That's interesting," Marnie says. "Notice that the amulet doesn't seem to react with any of the men into whose hands it comes, but the moment a woman puts it on, it seems to become active."

"But it says here that Anne could take the amulet off and suffered no other ill effects." Alexa looks from the letter to the stone around Marnie's throat. "Why is it stuck on you? Why is Uhazral so chatty?"

"I'm not sure. But look here—" Marnie holds up one of the letters, dated 1843. Anne and Philip have died, and the amulet passes to a nephew, also a member of the Tangiers Group. "'And when my wife, Elizabeth, being involved with all our good work and sharing with me the passion that makes this endeavour a labour of love as well as duty, did touch the amulet, she heard the voice of the demon. I have since placed it in a locked box and left it with our solicitor, for I do not want such an accursed object under the same roof as us.' So the amulet definitely reacts to women. And it sounds like as the century goes on, the Group gets a little more proactive in investigating Uhazral and its motives."

"Mmm, I think you're right. This one is from 1870. Someone named Charles Bletchley is describing an … 'experiment' he conducted with three servingwomen. Oh my God! He forced them to put on the amulet. One of them had a fit like Anne … one of them died, Marn."

They're silent for a moment. It's strange to think that, as awful as this experience is, it could have been worse.

"And the other one?"

"Bletchley doesn't say directly, but he hints that she couldn't take the amulet off: 'The necklace seems to have taken a liking to its wearer. She reports contact with its inhabitant. The demon claims it will trade knowledge in return for release, but I have neither the means nor will to do such a thing. For surely it was a greater magus than I who could have bound it to this stone, so it will take a greater one to let it free. And though I long for the knowledge it claims it can give me, I am not so fool as to believe the promises of a fiend of darkness.'"

"Maybe Uhazral wasn't strong enough to exercise its powers then?" Marnie shakes her head. "I don't know."

"Well, it's a starting point, right? I can go to the library tomorrow and look up more about this Bletchley character."

"That's good. I haven't heard the name before. I wonder if he's part of a splinter group. The Tangiers didn't last long past the 1870s as anything more than a gentlemen's club, but I don't know much more about them."

They pack away the letters and get ready for bed. As Marnie lays her head down on the pillow next to her friend, Alexa rolls over and pulls her into a tight but chaste embrace. "We'll figure it out," she mumbles in Marnie's ear. "You'll be fine."

Marnie can only wish she were half as confident of that fact.