Possessions (31 page)

December 17

I jerked awake with a cry.

On Jessel’s porch.

My body ached with cold. I was sopping wet, and covered in mud and cuts. The sky was growing light.

“What?” I said aloud. What had happened? I’d dreamed . . . had I dreamed
everything
?

I broke down then. I cried because I couldn’t do anything else—cried a river, cried a lake, wept and sobbed and tried to scream and cried some more.

I cried until I was dry as bones on the inside.

I got up, as the sun cast my shadow on the porch—me, solid; me with my wild, untamed hair and my destroyed wet clothes and my bruises and my puddles of tears. Wiping my face, I staggered to Grose and stumbled into the room I shared with Julie. All her things were gone, just as she’d said they’d be. She must have taken the head, too.

There was a note:

Julie didn’t remember what had happened.

Shaking, I went into the kitchen and tried to call Troy. I couldn’t remember his number. I touched the buttons, straining to remember the pattern. I swallowed back tears. Tried again.

Did it.

His phone went straight to voicemail. I tried over and over and over. Nothing.

And then the phone rang. I grabbed it.

“Hey, it’s Spider,” he said. “Have you seen Troy?”

I almost lost it then. I said, “What are you saying?”

“He didn’t come back from the bonfire. They’re searching the grounds.”

“Oh God.” I began to shake. Had he gone looking for me?

“I gotta go,” he said. “I’ll let you know when they find him.”

I tried to make myself go into the bathroom. But I couldn’t, I just couldn’t. So I went into the kitchen and turned on the water, let it run as I stripped off my clothes and washed. I was covered with bruises. I looked at my face in the microwave glass. I had a couple scratches, but nothing major.

It happened. It really happened.

I finished and carried my clothes to my room. Changed into the sweats I had laid out for my ride home. I was still frozen solid. And scared, so scared.

“Oh, hello, dear,” Ms. Krige said from the doorway. “All set?”

I couldn’t respond.

“Have a nice break,” she added, and left.

I’ ll never see you again
, I thought. And then I wondered, would I ever see any of them again?

epilogue

December 20

possessions: me

I didn’t tell anyone
. What could I say?

When my dad and stepmom arrived, I let them think I had taken a tumble at the bonfire to explain the bruise on my chin. And that I was so emotional because I’d missed them so much.

And in a way, I had.

All the way home, I tried to make sense of it. I tried to figure it out . . . the operating theater, the fires, and the thing I had become, the voice that had spoken inside me . . . the one they’d all called . . . a murderess?

Should I be in a psych ward somewhere?

“You’re so quiet,” my dad said, looking at me in the rearview mirror. “Did you party hard?”

My stepmom smiled at me over her shoulder. I couldn’t smile back.

“Yeah, I’m tired,” I told them.

We got home. There was nothing in that night’s news about a missing boy. Missing or found. But Troy didn’t call, and my calls to his cell went to voicemail. I tried the Lakewood office number the next morning, but the secretary there wouldn’t say anything, or give out his personal information. No one would tell me if he was all right.

I called Julie, who sounded pleased to hear from me, if a little guarded. She had just gotten back from riding with Mandy.

“I’m keeping her company,” she said. “Being supportive. Troy’s still missing.”

I felt frozen. “Missing,” I said.

“They’re searching the woods.” Her voice trailed off. “Miles offered to join the rescue party, but his parents said no. He’s so
intense
.”

I went cold. Did Miles know about me and Troy? Would he come after Troy? Had he already? What could I do?

“If you hear anything, please call me.”

She paused. “Okay,” she said finally. “I will.”

I net-searched
Marlwood Reformatory. There were no hits. Nothing about a fire. I read about lobotomies. They were horrible operations; doctors sometimes stuck an actual ice pick into your head to separate parts your brain. It was supposed to cure depression and uncontrollable rage. More often than not, the patients—the victims—became mindless vegetables. Some killed themselves.

The ghosts of Marlwood had not been mindless. And they hadn’t killed themselves.

The ghosts of Marlwood.

Maybe I had gone crazy . . .

No.

I searched the net obsessively. Mandy Winters’ face was everywhere. It was the bustling winter holidays, and the Winters were about to go on a ski trip with Prince Harry and the President of France. She didn’t look worried about a missing boyfriend. She looked happy. In one picture, she posed next to Miles in front of a fountain. His arm was wrapped tightly around her waist, and his eyes seemed to bore into mine.
You hurt her
, he seemed to say.
You’re next.

December 23

Three days after I returned to San Diego, my parents gave me a new cell phone to replace the one I’d “lost” at school.

My first call was from my ex-best friend, Heather Sanchez. She said I sounded like my old self, and she invited me to go to the movies the next day. It had been our Christmas Eve tradition the last three years in a row. Heather told me Riley was single again, and quite likely would show at the movies, too. I had a feeling she was arranging a reunion. Maybe I could start over here, too. Lindsay 2.0 was home, and she was the version I’d live with for the rest of my life.

I was alive. I had thwarted them. But what about Troy? I tried not to think of Searle Lake, where Kiyoko had died.

I wondered if Kiyoko had really fallen, or if someone had pushed her in. I felt overcome with sadness and regret, mingled with the icy fear I felt whenever I remembered what it was like seeing her body out there on the shore. . . .

About an hour later, the phone rang again.

The caller ID was blocked, but I figured it was Heather, with more details about the movie. I took the call.

“He’s here,” someone whispered.

I sat upright. “Troy?” I shouted into the phone. “Troy, is that you?”

The line went dead. I hit callback. It didn’t work. I called Julie.

Mandy, not Julie, answered.

“Hi, Lindsay,” she said sweetly. “Julie’s busy right now. Can I take a message?”

“Mandy,” I said, “just tell me.”

“Tell you . . . what?”

“Please.”
Did your brother go after Troy? Are you really, truly possessed?

“I’ll tell Julie you called,” she said, and hung up.

I disconnected and tried to stop shaking. I got into bed and pulled the covers up over my head.

Then my lids grew heavy, and I began to drift.

They are coming
,
they never give up, they cannot die, they will get you . . .

Lindsay, Lindsay. Help me.

It was cold where I was, and black as the grave, as death. An unending corridor that stank of kerosene.

We used kerosene when we went camping and we used oily rags. He had a pile of oily rags in the shed, and when he went to get our fresh gowns for the operating theater, I saw the rags and I started to plot and I stole them.

The door.

The door.

Fire blazed around the white head, shooting to the roof, spreading along the floor. The numbered sections glowed; in the center of the forehead, a bull’s-eye was labeled with a thick, dark 7.

Ice pick. Right through the bull’s-eye. Lobotomy. Kill the lust, the lack of submissiveness. Good young ladies.

In the operating theater, with the good young gentlemen leaning from the spectators’ balconies with their blanching faces.

Help me
.

I didn’t do it. He did it. My father, he did it. I am here and he is in Massachusetts, in the legislature, and he has told everyone I’m dead and I am here. They are killing us, one by one; they are stealing our souls through that hole in our foreheads; they are making us die for the rest of our lives.

“Celia?”

He’s calling my name. The doctor’s coming for me.

Hide me. For the love of God, hide me.

The weight was on my chest, pressing me down. I couldn’t breathe. There was someone in the room, bending over me; I could feel it. My skin prickled but I couldn’t move, or scream, or breathe.