The Screaming Season (28 page)

Oh, my God.

I heard the wheels squeak. Noises from the living room startled me; Lara was yelling to someone. Maybe she would come to check on me.

Maybe she would shut me in.

Could all this be one huge meta-prank, pulled off by Mandy with the help of half the school? The bad dreams, the visions, something she’d arranged? Anyone who had seen her haunted house knew she was capable of truly amazing special effects. The Winterses had enough money to create a theme park on the Marlwood campus, or buy their own chemical labs and create their own designer hallucinogenic drugs.

The chair squeaked again. I heard myself whimpering. Frozen, I stared at it, caught in the beam of my flashlight. As my eyes adjusted to the light, I saw that something shiny and square lay on the wooden seat. My flashlight glinted off it.

The wheelchair inched toward me. I cried out, then covered my mouth. It had never hurt me before. Maybe someone . . . someone was standing behind it, making it move. Someone I couldn’t see.

A ghost.

“Is someone there?” I whispered.

The wheelchair moved again.

I wanted to run. I thought of going to find Mandy. My heart was racing so fast that I wouldn’t have been able to count the beats.

Before I could stop myself, I dashed forward, racing around the furniture, the boxes, a Diet Coke can. I hit the can as I passed it, sending it rolling with a rattle-rattle-rattle, and I cried out again.

I kept my light on the chair; I shined it against the back, to see if there was a figure there—maybe the shadow man who had been in Mandy’s room, if anybody
had
been in Mandy’s room.

“Don’t move,” I said aloud. “Don’t, okay?” I stared down at the things on the seat: a cigarette lighter and three little squares.

“Are these for me? Did you bring them for me?” I said loudly, to prove I wasn’t scared; I was in control.

There was no response. It was as if the chair was staring at me. I could almost see a figure in it, sitting still. I could imagine empty eye sockets staring at me. A mouth, opening in a smile . . .

. . . or a scream.

I jumped forward, grabbed the lighter and the squares, and fled back up the stairs.

TWENTY-THREE

I PRACTICALLY THREW myself against the washing machine when I reached the top of the basement stairs. I slammed the door, panting, I stared at the objects in my hand. A cigarette lighter. There was some kind of crest or logo on it, but I didn’t recognize it. A red shield with three white squares and letters, two across, one down:
VE RI TAS.
Truth.

Miles had found cigarettes when he’d retrieved the messenger bag. The squares looked like gum.

“Hey,” Lara said, peering around the corner. “Time to go.”

I stuffed the lighter and the squares into the pocket of my army jacket. I folded my arms and followed Lara back across the living room. I could hear Ms. Meyerson’s TV. She played it loudly so she could pretend she didn’t know what her charges were doing.

“Where’s the Ouija board?” Lara asked me.

“Couldn’t find it.”

She smiled sourly. “I told you, all her stuff is in the attic.”

Had Lara taken any of Mandy’s things from the attic? I followed her into the kitchen, finding Sangeeta and Alis there, loading their arms with cartons of tequila, scotch, and wine bottles. Sangeeta was dressed in purple, from a suede jacket to a short silk skirt and purple ballerina flats. Alis had on skinny jeans, a green cashmere sweater, and a belted cardigan in a darker green. Alis was munching a fancy appetizer—their freezer was always loaded with fancy boxes, and they overnighted appetizers and fancy chocolate truffles, expensive cheeses, and cans of caviar without a moment’s consideration about how much it cost.

We moved from their yard with the privet hedges to the path leading into the woods. I looked to my right, where the lake pushed back the forested shore. Lara had been friendly to me the first time I’d gone down to the lake, to watch the terrible prank Mandy talked Kiyoko into doing. It had been Lara’s job to entice me into becoming one of Mandy’s robots. Now she’d probably just as soon push me in the lake.

Lara walked in front, and Sangeeta and Alis flanked me. It would be easy for them to overpower me if they got possessed and decided it was time to kill me. I pretended that the carton was too heavy and stopped to reposition it in my arms. The three kept walking. I stayed behind all three of them, watching the backs of their heads.

The path grew steeper, and the trees began to crowd us. The sun dipped low, and gray shadows crossed our path. Tendrils of fog spread along the ground. The temperature dropped.

We kept going. The three friends were chatting about a spa in Santa Barbara they’d all been to. Even though they went to amazing, expensive places on vacations, it seemed that they all went to the same ones. They even complained about it—“Maui
again
! Oh,
God
, we’re going to Paris!”—and cheered each other up by buying more things. Clothes, jewelry, purses, high-tech gear.

Fishing line?

I followed the climbing vines of fog with my gaze, because I knew that we were getting close to the operating theater. I was beginning to lose my nerve. I didn’t think I could go in there again.

Lara looked back at me and smiled. I shifted the box again and forced one foot in front of the other. The wind blew right through me; I looked up at the darkening sky and smelled the promise of rain.

Then I made myself face the operating theater head-on. The circular roof had fallen in, as if a giant had made a fist and pounded against it. Windows had blasted out, and their iron fittings had completely rusted away. Huge gaps in the walls revealed bushes growing inside the structure, their spindly branches like veins.

Where a door had been, there was only a gaping mouth, and to the right, the burned-out top of the tunnel looked like a mound in a graveyard. That was where it had happened, where the girls had died. The tunnel was the death trap where Celia had started the fire, and the rage of her six victims had burned for over a hundred years.

I felt it in the ground beneath my feet; I heard it in the trees. Fury. Wounds so deep that they bled black hatred. Too much damage for this land, for this place. The unfinished business of the dead infected us like an illness. It owned us. We were all possessions of Marlwood.

“Come
on
,” Lara said.

She was standing in the doorway. Sangeeta and Alis had already gone in. I smelled smoke. I always did. At first it had frightened me. I had looked for fires. I hadn’t realized the flames were burning inside me.

I’ll die in there.
I always thought it.

I had to do this. I had tried to go home, tried to ignore everything, but neither had worked. I knew there was nothing else I could do. It was time to face it.

I walked toward Lara, and she disappeared inside. Steeling myself, I followed, ignoring the stench. Battery-operated lanterns had been placed along the floor of the narrow passageway. The operating theater itself was on the same floor. Beyond the ruined wall to my left, Troy had performed the fake lobotomy on Marica on Valentine’s Day. And on December 16, barely two months before, these girls had tried to kill me by setting me on fire.

They had made me stare at the white head until I was mesmerized . . .

I did do it. I did break the head,
I realized with a start. I could almost remember it, but not quite. But I
knew
.

Julie had been right to get rid of me.

Swallowing hard, I almost dropped the heavy box. The bottles clanked. My back ached. My forehead was throbbing.

“Yo,” Lara shouted from below. “Let’s
go
.”

She had reached the lower level, down a flight of stairs, where the tunnel led into the building—where a hundred years ago, they would wheel the girls in and prep them for surgery.

A surgery that David Abernathy would perform on them.

I carried the box down the stairs to find Mandy’s usual party arrangements intact from the last blowout—the little tables and chairs, lit by a votive candle. The votives were green, and scatters of glittery shamrocks had been sprinkled around them. So much for mocking my suggestion that we decorated. When on earth had anyone had time to order St. Patrick’s Day party supplies?

The first party I’d gone to here, Mandy had assembled a wind ensemble. Judging by the weird Eurotrash trance music booming over a music system, tonight we were wired for sound.

“Oh, God, finally,” Mandy said, rushing to me. She reached out her arms; I started to hand the box to her, but she made two fists and put them under her chin. I rolled my eyes and set my burden on the nearest table, knocking over the votive candle. I leapt forward to grab it.

“Careful,” she chided me. “Jeez, Lindsay, I began to think you weren’t coming.”

“Wouldn’t miss it,” I replied.

“What did you bring?” She opened the box, peered inside, and gasped in horror. “
Paper
plates?”

“And plastic glasses. Sorry, the elephants have the night off. We had to trek all this in on pack mules.”

“I guess that’s not the point tonight.” She showed me a bottle of tequila, unscrewed the cap, and chugalugged several healthy swallows. Pressing the back of her hand to her mouth, she held it out to me.

“We have to be careful,” I warned her. “We have to keep our wits.” I felt a pang; that was what Shayna had told me. Keep your wits, in case a dybbuk came after you—a spirit haunted by what had been done to it or what it had done to someone else.

“We have to stop from screaming,” Mandy countered, giving the bottle a wag.

I took it from her and had a swallow. Frankly, most hard liquor tasted the same to me—horrible—and I didn’t understand the allure. I mostly got weepy and tired when I drank the stuff.

“Okay, now, we need a strategy.” Her eyes darted from side to side; she was jittery already, and the evening hadn’t even started.

“Are you on anything?” I asked her suspiciously.

She scowled at me. “
Not
that that’s any of your business.”

“Are you insane? Of course it’s my business.” I hesitated, and then I made a decision. “Listen, I went in your basement and I found this. On the old wheelchair.”

She jerked. “What old wheelchair?”

She knows about it. She knows it moves by itself.

I pulled the lighter and the candy from my pocket. She picked up the lighter and flicked it. A small yellow and blue flame appeared. Then she examined one of the squares.

“I think this is gum,” she told me. She handed it back. “Save it.”

I put it back in my pocket.

“Anyway, okay, we’re all done here.” She rubbed her hands along her arms. “What are you going to wear?”

“What I have on, I guess.” Which was my baggy flares, Doc Martens, my black long underwear top, and my jacket.

She blanched. “You can’t. You’re my co-hostess. You look like you’ve been sleeping in a Dumpster.”

“So what? Mandy, we’re not having a party to have a party, remember?”

“But we can’t just give up. I mean, then they’ve won.” She was serious. Her blue, Miles-colored eyes were enormous. Her shiny lips were parted in distress. Mandy could not fathom going through this evening without looking good.

It was such a different way of thinking that I couldn’t even go there. It wasn’t so much that she was shallow as that she had a strange sort of integrity.

“Okay, that’s it,” Lara announced, walking up to us. “Everything’s ready. We’ll go get dressed.”

They were all leaving. I couldn’t stay here by myself.

“Come over to Jessel with us,” Mandy said. “We’ll fix you up.” She grabbed a handful of my curls and scrunched them. “I’m sure we’ve got some products you can use.” I remembered products. And measuring my eyebrows and caring about all that. I’d lost ground while my mom was sick, too distracted to worry about my fashion IQ and what my kind of scent I should be wearing. Despite that, I’d gotten sucked into the Jane machine and I had briefly turned into a hot chick. Once that had blown up, I’d chucked all my magazines and makeup and turned into a “crazy-haired lesbian,” as my cousin Jason had called me, only without the lesbian part. Too bad for me: my first mad crush was Riley, and look how that had turned out.

The four girls headed for the exit. I forced myself back down the corridor, breathing more freely when we got outside.

We trooped back to Jessel, and Mandy took me into her room. It was pristine. She had folded all her ruined clothes and put them in bins in the attic. She had ordered scads of new clothes, and at least half of the coats, sweaters, pants, shoes, and tops she showed me still had their price tags.

First there was an interminable fashion show, during which she decided to wear a sleeveless black and metallic handkerchief top over bronze leggings and black and bronze high heels that she told me had been handmade, using measurements of her feet that she had faxed the company. She applied bronze makeup with the skill of a professional, using sleek, natural-bristle brushes and a magnifying mirror. She added bronze earrings and a cool cuff with abstract designs of beaten metal.

I knew she was going to dress me up, and I just let it happen. In the house with the ghosts and the wheelchair that moved, the haunted turret room and secret tunnels, I was Mandy’s dress-up doll. She swathed me in a short scarlet dress, sheer black leggings that came down to the middle of my calves, and black stilettos. She threaded black and gold bangles up my arms and twisted gold chains through my hair until it was pulled up and away from my face Jane Austen style.

Then on came the makeup, layer by layer. I remembered the smell of makeup, the excitement of girls putting it on together. Concealers, highlighters, blush. She decided to make me smoky, which I found bizarrely ironic, but I let her do it. Her hands were shaking and she cracked open a bottle of champagne to calm down. I was thinking tequila and bubbly were not the best combination, but I didn’t say anything this time.