The Screaming Season (33 page)

“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.

I squeezed back. “I actually think I’m going to miss you, just a little,” I said.

“Live,”
she replied.
“Oh, Lindsay, live.”

The light in the water went out. I wiped my hands on my dress as I got back up to a stand position, turned, and saw Riley approaching from a distance.

“This is where your friend died, isn’t it?” he said. “Kiyoko.”

I didn’t know he knew about that. It was as if everything that had happened up here had taken place in another dimension.

“Yes,” I said steadily. “She died in this lake. And I found her.”

“Damn.” He reached out and pulled me against his chest. I let out a deep breath. “Damn, Lindsay, no wonder you’re wacko.”

Despite everything, I laughed through my tears and batted him. Then the wonder of what had happened with Celia, and the knowledge that I was no longer possessed, slammed into the nightmare of watching Dr. Morehouse kill himself.

And Mandy Winters was dead.

He let me cry while we shivered and trembled, and the sun finally began to rise.

TWENTY-NINE

JUST AS CELIA REAVES and I finished our goodbyes, the police pulled up at the edge of Searle Lake. In their headlights, birds skimmed the water, then landed. My nightmare was over.

With my frantic parents’ permission, I spoke to the police. From the way they framed their questions, I was certain that they believed Dr. Morehouse had killed Mandy. They would never believe that a ghost had roamed Marlwood, and had killed Kiyoko. I remembered when Celia told me that Troy had been pushed, when he had been found unconscious in the woods. I shivered, realizing that the spirit of David Abernathy had nearly killed Troy, too.

It doesn’t matter anymore,
I reminded myself as Riley, Miles, and I drank coffee in the headmistress’s office.
Marlwood is free. And so am I.

We three were wrapped in blankets, shivering. All my dorm mates had surrounded me, hugging me, crying with me. Julie had brought me some clothes. Now they were all sitting in the reception area with Marica, who didn’t remember anything but knew she had somehow been involved in the horror of that night. Miles and Riley were given a change of clothes as well. I wasn’t sure where they came from, but I was grateful that the two guys were sitting quietly—in shock, but not taking swings at each other.

Riley was ragged, but Miles was in terrible shape. All the color had drained from his face; he had seen his sister dead and her murderer kill himself in a horrible, gruesome way. Did he truly believe that Dr. Morehouse had been possessed? If he did, he didn’t tell the police that, and neither did I.

His father was on his way, with an army of lawyers and people to “take care of” Mandy’s body. I couldn’t help but bitterly wonder if all her so-called friends were speed-dialing their designers to get them dressed for her funeral. Poor little rich girl.

Dr. Ehrlenbach arrived at about three in the morning, and I was shocked at the change in her. Her mask-like, wrinkle-free face was sagging and lined, as if all the Botox had been drained from her body. Her black hair, usually slicked back, hung in unkempt lanks around her chin line. It was said that Dr. Ehrlenbach was at least sixty-eight. That morning, she looked it.

But I had never been gladder to see her. She took charge, ushering us all upstairs. We climbed creaking stairs into a spacious room dominated by a fireplace with a heavily carved wooden mantel. A staff member glided in quietly and laid a fire, which soon crackled and blazed. I didn’t even flinch at the smell of smoke and the sight of the fire.

A border of two-foot-tall stained glass windows of nature scenes rimmed a bay window that looked out onto the campus. I had no idea how much of the campus would be visible from the second story of the admin building. How much had we really gotten away with, thinking we were sneaking around unobserved?
How much did Dr. Ehrlenbach really know?

Lights were on in all the dorms. Tonight the housemothers couldn’t pretend that their charges were safely snuggled in their beds. No one was asleep. Mandy Winters was dead, and Dr. Morehouse had drilled into his own skull.

Riley and I sat next to each other on a burgundy leather couch, me in sweats and socks I had knit myself, wrapped in blankets. He put his arm around me and I shuddered hard and leaned my head on his shoulder. Miles stared out the window. We were the survivors. We had made it through.

Through this, and through my past. Riley had seen me at my worst—when I had completely lost it in the theater at Christmas; when I had dissed my best friend, Heather Martinez, to impress Jane. And I had seen him at
his
worst—when he had had sex with Jane in my parents’ bedroom, during a party Jane had pressured me to throw.

He’d jumped in his car and driven fourteen hours to find me, and help me, without a real explanation as to why. All he’d known was that I needed someone. And he had come because he wanted that someone to be him, Riley Kincaid. For the crazy girl in the torn jeans and the army jacket and the ripped, oversized sweatshirt that she wore because it had belonged to her dead mother.