The Screaming Season

  I thought of Riley, and my dad and CJ and my stepbrothers, and I thought of my mom.

  “Memmy,” I whispered. My last goodbye, my last farewell.

  And something . . . shifted . . . in the air. I felt release of pressure inside the room. I looked at Belle as she gasped and dropped the ice pick. At Pearl, as she stared at something in front of her that I couldn’t see.

  A heavy bouquet of lemon and earth filled my nostrils. Geraniums. Light reflected off the skull faces of the two ghosts. I tried to tip my head back so that I could look too, but I couldn’t bend it back far enough. Pearl still held me down, but her jaw had dropped open. It began to clack nervously, and she recoiled.

  I still couldn’t get free. I struggled, but Pearl’s weight on my wrists kept me down.

  The geranium scent washed over me. Images—words—flashed through my mind.

  possessions:

  full moon

  mirror—Mandy’s room

  candle—on the tables

  item belonging to dead person—me

  part of dead person (hair, bone, etc.)—me

  Memmy.

  Memmy.

  Memmy.

  Memmy.

  Memmy.

  David Abernathy had summoned her five times. And I had collected the objects listed in Mandy’s journal.

  “Memmy,” I whispered as electricity shot through me. I felt as if I were being jolted with a thousand watts. I felt it through the floor as the light grew brighter on Belle and Pearl’s skull faces.

  “We were never loved enough,” Pearl wailed.

  “We were betrayed by love,” Belle shouted bitterly. “Betrayed and murdered!”

  As I watched, the light grew more intense. No longer yellow, but bright white. Their skeletal faces shone, glowing; the gleam became so blinding that I had to look away.

  “What are we doing?” Pearl cried.

  And she released me and pushed Belle, hard. Belle landed on her side, the ice pick in her fist, staring at the glow. There was a soundless explosion of colors, flaring all over the room, beams of rainbows kaleidoscoping over the circles of ruined chairs in the balconies, the debris on the floor beneath me, the faces of the ghosts.

  I whirled around.

  And did something—someone—hover in the air for just one second? Did I feel a huge wash of sorrow rush through me, followed by a burst of happiness?

  “Oh, God, what are we doing?” Rose bellowed, in her normal voice.

  She and Marica ran to me and threw their arms around me. The skull masks had disappeared, and they were my two friends.

  “What’s happening?” Marica shouted.

  Across the room, Miles was battling David Abernathy for possession of the drill. Already battered, Miles was losing. Abernathy caught him under the chin with the butt of the drill, then leapt on him and pushed him down as Miles lost his balance.

  He aimed the drill at Miles’s forehead.

  We dashed toward him.

  “No!” Abernathy shrieked. He lifted his head and stared at Miles and then at us. “No! You all must die. All of you. You are filthy girls. You are wanton harlots. I hate all of you and I will see you dead before I rest.”

  We made a semi-circle as we ran. The drill kept whirring, shrieking. Miles was panting, too weak to help himself. Abernathy narrowed his eyes, as if daring us to come closer.

  “I did it for love!” Abernathy yelled.

  “You did it for money, and to keep your job,” I replied, holding up my hand. The other two girls stopped. I took a step toward him. “But you liked doing it. You liked the power. Is that why you came back here after you died? Because you are dead.”

  “I am not dead!” he shrieked. “I am here!”

  “You didn’t die here, but you are here,” I said, forcing myself not to panic as the drill whirred closer toward Miles. “You’re more alive here.”

  He sneered at me. “I walk, in the night fog. And I see all of you, parading your filth. Your wantonness enrages me . . . ”

  “You were the Marlwood Stalker,” I said, swallowing hard, wondering if I was right, and if I should push him like this. “You did those things.” I wasn’t sure how. Did he move from person to person? “You killed Kiyoko. Pushed her . . . ”

  Then, as I stared at him, the skull ripped away from Dr. Morehouse’s face. A white skeleton appeared beneath the skull, and shimmered with light. Old-fashioned clothing appeared—a black Victorian suit, and over that, a white butcher’s apron, covered with blood. And then the gleaming skeleton became a dark figure made of shadow. Black on black on black, flat and heavy.

  “Pushed her,” the shadow said. “Yesssssssssss. Because she was unclean.”

  I realized it was the figure I had seen in Mandy’s room.

  “You were going to kill Mandy in her room that night,” I said.

  “She was Belle.”

  Which was why Mandy hadn’t remembered it.

  “I couldn’t finish the job that night. But I just did,” said the blackness. “Filthy.”

  “No. She was a girl,” I said. “They all were girls. That’s all they—we are. And deep down, you know it. You know it.”

  The darkness clacked its jaws. “You’re a liar.”

  “You’re lying. To yourself. You knew those girls—and us—we’re no better or worse than any other girls. Because no one is perfect. But something happened to you, didn’t it? And it hurt you so deeply that you had to hurt back!”

  The black eyes opened and stared right at me. I saw the whites. Ice shot down my spine.

  “No.” David Abernathy’s voice was ragged. “No, she was supposed to love me!”

  In that moment, I felt my own anger, my outrage. It was like lightning coursing through me, making me alive. I understood its power. I had been so angry I’d wanted someone dead. Not because Riley had cheated, or Mandy had been rich and mean, but because no one had stopped my mom from dying.

  But there was a difference between us—I had never killed anybody.

  He had. Oh, he had.

  I pointed at the hideous thing. “So you took your revenge. You became a monster because you hated her.” I didn’t know who she was. His own mother? A different beloved woman?

  “No, no , because you . . . all of you . . . you need to be . . . to be not like her. Not!” The ghost threw back his head and screamed.

  “But we are like her. We all are!” I yelled at him—at it. “We’re human beings!”

  “No!” it screamed again.

  “And there’s nothing you can do about it, ever!”

  It screamed a third time, screamed so loudly the roof of the operating theater shook.

  “Love me!” it screamed. “Love me, please!”

  I wept, unable to respond in any other way .

  “Love me!” it cried again, pathetic.

  I wept, unable to respond in any other way.

  The shadow crumbled, fading into fog. Screaming, “Love me!”

  And then . . . it vanished.

  I blinked, stunned, aware only then that Rose and Marica were screaming, too. They held each other, sobbing.

  “Oh, God,” Dr. Morehouse cried, jerking. “Oh, dear God, what have I done?”

  “It wasn’t you,” I said over the whine of the drill. “Dr. Morehouse . . . it’s all right.”

  Miles started to get up. Dr. Morehouse glanced down at him.

  Then he reached back his foot and kicked Miles in the chest. Miles contracted, and the doctor ran toward the doorway.

  Marica, Rose, and I began to run to Miles, through the rain, gathering around him and shielding him with our bodies. He grabbed my hand and squeezed it. Dr. Morehouse stood in the doorway, panting. He was holding the drill. It was still on.

  “Dr. Morehouse,” I said, “stop. Something bad has happened to you, but it’s over. Let it be over.”

  I walked slowly toward him.

  The drill whined as he lifted it toward his head. He was shaking, weeping.

  “No
,” I said, as calmly as I could. “It wasn’t you.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes. I did it.”

  “No. You were possessed.”

  “Oh, my God,” Rose said behind me. “What’s happening?”

  “I wasn’t. Back there . . . Massachusetts . . . where I . . . ” He sobbed. “I did . . . terrible things. I did them.”

  I knew at that moment that he had dark secrets of his own. From his own life. His self-hatred had been why David Abernathy had been able to control him so completely.

  He lifted the drill. “I should be dead.”

  “Stop!” I screamed.

  Then he aimed the drill straight at his forehead and pushed.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  “LINDSAY, DON’T LOOK!” Miles shouted as Dr. Morehouse shoved the drill into his skull.

  Reflexively I turned; Miles grabbed my chin and dragged me across the theater. I was staggering; we wove left and right, like drunks, sliding over the floor. He hit an aluminum pail with his left shoe and it tipped over, releasing an eye-watering stench.

  Behind us, something crackled and made a zizzing, sparking hiss. Miles pushed me along into the narrow tunnel. I ran with him, screaming, and then I realized that I wasn’t screaming. Celia was, inside my head.

  “It was him, it was him, Lindsay, he did it to us, he did it,” she wailed. “He did it.”

  I couldn’t stop screaming as Miles grabbed me and whirled me around, shielding me with his body. My shrieks; Dr. Morehouse’s horrible, garbled yell; Marica and Rose, screaming.

  Miles picked me up again and barreled for the door. I saw Dr. Morehouse’s body facedown. The drill rattled and spun beside him.

  We ran through the corridor, Marica and Rose too, then out the hole that had been the front door, into the rain as it poured from the sky like so much weeping, tears of agony for Marlwood.

  Then we were outside, in the driving downpour. We outdistanced Marica and Rose as Miles flew through the trees. Lightning crashed and the trees shook. The ground shuddered beneath Miles’s feet.

  Horribly bruised, Riley burst from the trees with a flashlight in his hand, shouting when he saw me. He dove at Miles, pushing him backward, and I fell, hard. Then Riley raised the flashlight above his head, preparing to slam it across Miles’s face.

  “No!” I shrieked, hurling myself at him. “He didn’t do anything!”

  Riley pulled me out of Miles’s reach, easing me beneath a thatch of overhanging pine branches. He peered hard at me. “Are you okay?”

  “Dr. M-Morehouse,” I said. I was stammering and quaking. My stomach clenched, hard, and I covered my mouth.

  “He killed himself,” Miles said. “I’m going for help.”

  Lightning jagged across the sky as he sprinted away into the darkness. In seconds he was swallowed up.

  Another lightning bolt jittered. Thunder boomed. The entire heap of the operating theater groaned and shifted. Metal squealed, followed by a crash so loud it shook the ground where we stood. We both jumped. Then a series of clatters and clangs buffeted my ears. The horrible torture chamber was collapsing.

  Celia shifted inside me with each sound, her icy presence grabbing hold of my bones, my lungs, my heart. My head throbbed.

  “Come on,” Riley said, taking my hand. “Mandy’s been killed. I’m getting you out of here.”

  We ran among the trees, branches whipping in the wind. I was so numb from the cold that I couldn’t feel them hitting my face. I was freezing, inside and out. Celia wanted something, needed something.

  When we burst through the last stand of trees, I saw Searle Lake, in all its blackness, stretched out like a body in a coffin. I imagined the lake’s black arms reaching up to grab me, and I took a step backward. A huge crowd had gathered where I had found Mandy. If they turned, they would see us.

  “No, Lindsay, please,” Celia murmured inside me. “I need so badly to rest.”

  Not by my own will, I lurched forward. One step, then two, toward the lake. At first Riley didn’t realize I was going in a different direction. Then he said, “No, this way,” and urged me toward Jessel.

  “We go alone,” Celia said. She wasn’t asking; she was telling me. I remembered what had happened to Troy the night that Mandy and the other possessed girls—including Julie—had tried to kill me. He’d gotten “lost,” and he had “fallen.” Search parties scoured the forest for days, and when he was found, he had been taken to a hospital, half dead from hypothermia. Was she threatening me with that?

  “No,” I said under my breath. Riley didn’t hear me.

  “Alone,” Celia repeated, and in that exact moment it stopped raining, as if someone had clicked it off with a switch. “Please. You won’t be hurt. I swear it. And neither will he.”

  “No,” I said more loudly. Riley looked at me, surprised.

  “No, what?” he asked.

  And then I felt her shifting inside me again, like ice cubes roaming through my body. Her killer was dead, but it wasn’t over.

  Not for me.

  “We have to get out of here,” Riley said, looking back in the direction we had come.

  “He’s dead,” I said; then I began to shake all over. Tears rolled down my rain-drenched face. I couldn’t stop seeing Dr. Morehouse with the drill, how he’d screamed. Dr. Abernathy had died in his sleep at a ripe old age. But how many times had the screams of his victims echoed in his memory? How often had he longed for the glory days when he could exorcise his hatred of some woman who had scarred him forever?

  And I knew then that if I ignored Celia’s command to go down to the lake, I, too, would hear screams for the rest of my life.

  “Riley, I—I need a minute.” I knew I sounded lame. But there was no way I could explain.

  “We have to . . . ” He looked at me. Really looked.

  “What’s going on? You look so strange.”

  I was sure there was makeup all over my face. I didn’t know if Celia’s white face blended with mine, but I couldn’t stop to explain. This might be the last moment I had to be alone.

  “Wait for me here.” I took his hand. “Please.”

  Riley was soaking wet and shivering, and he probably thought I was more than a little crazy. But he nodded and crossed his arms over his chest. Then he unfolded his arms and handed me his flashlight. I flooded with gratitude. I wanted to tell him how afraid I was. But this had nothing to do with him.

  Then alone with Celia—a contradiction in terms if there ever was one—I trudged down to behind some boulders to the lake. My boots sank into frigid mud, and the obsidian surface gleamed as if winter ice still crusted its surface.

  Cautiously, I bent from the waist and gazed into the black water. She was there, the white oval, the eyes that were, once again, hollow sockets. Less human, more terrifying. Her mouth was open, a black O.

  “You’re safe now,” I whispered. “It’s safe to let go.”

  And across the sheen of the jet-black water, I heard a long, low wailing. Heartbreaking misery, longing; so much pain.

  And it was coming out of me.

  “Memmy,” I said, gasping. I sank down onto my knees, hands pressing against the mud, and stared at Celia. Bubbles dotted the rippling circle of her face . . . were they her tears or mine? “Oh, God, Celia, I lost my mom. My mom died,” I told her. “For a while, hardly anyone would talk to me, like I had a disease. And then, sometimes they would forget, and bitch about their mothers, and then they would stop, and act so bizarre and tell me how sorry they were.”

  “I know. I am so sorry. I’m so sorry for you, Lindsay,” she said.

  I was crying hard. My stomach was a knot. My throat clenched and I let the tears fall into the lake. “I miss her so much.”

  “I know. I know. I—I thought I was going to have a long life. But my daddy . . . I got sent here, and I wished they had just killed me.”

  She was weeping, hard. I held out my hand, as if to touch her face.

  “It was horrible. And I was so angry . . . I
went mad, I know I did. I did terrible things . . . and then . . . I died so young. Like your mama, Lindsay. She died so young.”

  “Yes, she did. And you did.” I licked my lips. “Please, tell me, have you seen her? Can you talk to her for me? I think she was with me in the operating theater. I think she saved me.”

  “No. I’m sorry. I think she’s moved on.”

  I felt as if she had punched me in the stomach. How could Memmy move on and leave me?

  “You don’t want that for her, honey, if you love her,” Celia whispered. “Lingering like this . . . it’s worse than death. We have to move on, all of us. Or the pain is too much to bear. It drives us mad.”

  “But what he did to you . . . ”

  “It’s done. He knows what he did. Until tonight, he never faced it. The why of it.”

  “But why did Dr. Morehouse have to die?”

  “Don’t waste your tears on that one. The truth will come out. The truth of what he was. What he did, back in Massachusetts. It’s a blessing for the living that he’s gone.”

  She sobbed, and I heard the wail ricochet off the water. Night birds fluttered and cried on the water’s edge. I held out my hand.

  The coldness rose up into my chest and then out through my arm. As I watched, and we both cried, white light poured from my fingertips and covered the lake. It lit up like a beacon. Celia was leaving me.

  “You’ve carried me with you, dear Lindsay,” she whispered. “You can lay me to rest.”

  It was safe to let go.

  “I’ll find your grave,” I promised her. “I’ll tell your story.”

  “Bless you, sweet love. Bless you.”

  The light intensified, like back in the operating theater, until I had to shield my eyes. The other ghosts of Marlwood were coming back to where their ashes had been dumped to hide the terrible crimes that had been committed against them. White faces shone, then melted into the light. Echoes and crying and papery weeping shook me, and I gave in to it too. I was sorry for myself, and for them, that such horrible evil could twist them and make them crazy and mean.

  I leaned farther over and dipped my hands into the water, teetering. A hand wrapped around mine, colder than the grave, and then it gave me a squeeze.