The Screaming Season (32 page)

Then a skull floated over it, jaw open and grinning, eye sockets black.

“I’m here to finish what I started,”
he informed me, shouting over the noise.

“No,” I ground out.

He blinked.
“No
?
You can’t say no!”

I understood now. Dr. Morehouse had hypnotized me into obeying his instructions. Whether he had done it as David Abernathy or as himself, he had assumed I wouldn’t fight him. Had Mandy fought?

“No,” I said again.

On my left, Rose and Marica took a step toward me. On my right, Dr. Morehouse-Abernathy approached as well.

“Dr. Morehouse, you’ve been taken over,” I told him. “You’re not yourself.”

“I am David Abernathy,”
he said.
“And it is I, dear girl, who mesmerized you. While I slept inside him. And I soothed the raging bitch who lives inside you. The murderess, Celia Reaves. I have performed the mesmerizing. I have spoken the word that silences her.”

I bolted, whirling and running straight ahead, hoping that I would be quick enough to dodge the three of them. David Abernathy ran at me, the drill spinning in his hand. I fled into the darkness beyond the reach of the lanterns, out of the rain. My right foot came down hard on something on the floor. My ankle twisted. I grunted.

“Help me!” I screamed. “I need help!”

“Lindsay!” Miles shouted.

I looked in the direction of his voice. He braced himself inside the doorjamb, staring at the ghostly white figure now superimposing itself over Dr. Morehouse’s body. Wisps of gray hair clung to Abernathy’s skull, and ragged, moldly tatters of an old-fashioned suit clung to a bony chest and hung on hip bones.

“Holy shit,” Miles said.

Marica and Rose headed toward me. Skulls rose over their faces too—the dead masks of Pearl Magnusen and Belle herself, here for the kill. Winding sheets floated around their skeletal bodies. Rose-Belle grabbed Marica’s arm and pointed to the ceiling.

“Water puts us out,” she said in her southern drawl.

They broke apart, each racing just outside the semicircle of rain, heading for me. I backed away, trying to remember where the gaping spot in the wall had been. I could see nothing behind me, only shadows. To either side, the dead flew at me, just a few feet away.

Miles propelled himself into the operating theater and ran toward Abernathy. He held out a cross.

“I abjure thee, demon!” Miles bellowed, arms shaking. He was half-covered in blood, and he staggered to the left.

Abernathy threw back his head and laughed.

Marica-Pearl grabbed my arm, and Rose-Belle showed me the ice pick. Pearl twisted my arm and pushed me to the floor, falling on top of me, grabbing my wrists and holding me down. She had dropped the hammer. I turned my head, staring at it. I struggled, but the ghost who held me was strong.

Belle approached, holding the ice pick in front of herself like a sacred object. Laughter bounced around the room.

She knelt beside me.

I couldn’t stop looking at her.
Hammer,
I thought,
get it
. But I couldn’t tear my gaze from the pick.

“Oh, God, Rose, listen. You’re
possessed
,” I said. “You don’t want to do this.”

“You deserve it, sweet bee,”
Belle said. “
And we’re not going to deny you any longer.”

She turned the pick point down and pressed it against my forehead. My heartbeat roared in my ears. I heard myself screaming. I fought, kicking my legs; for a confused instant, I thought I was back in the infirmary, in the grip of another nightmare. But this was real. This was happening.

“Lindsay!” Miles shouted.

“Miles!” I shrieked.

Belle raised up on her knees and placed her left hand over her right. She looked over at Pearl. I remembered Pearl. Pearl had possessed Julie, and she alone had felt remorse and horror over what they were planning to do to me. With her help, I had escaped to the lake.

“Pearl,” I tried, “stop. I’m begging you.”

My tears were sliding across my temples. I let out a violent wail as the ice pick pierced the skin on my bruised and battered forehead.

“Not this time, Celia,”
Pearl said, sneering at me.

“I’m not Celia, I’m not. I think she’s gone,” I babbled. “Oh,
please
—”

“Oh, she’s here,” Belle said.

The ice pick went in a little deeper. It was like the slice of a knife, stinging all my nerve endings, making me scream. It was going to happen to me; it was happening; and no one was going to stop it.

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.

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.