Possessions

by Nancy Holder

  With a loud splash, Belle jumped into the water and started swimming. The ghostly image seeped into the water, lighting it . . . slithering toward the boat.

  “Belle, no!” the others cried, as they massed on shore, shouting; but no one else jumped in. They were a blaze of glowing white, intertwining, thinning, undulating, blossoming.

  Wind pushed against the stern of the boat. I rowed, sparing no more glances at the water or what was in it. I couldn’t feel anything. Everything slid away. I was numb.

  The moon beamed down on the shore. The white glow shrank as I put more and more water between the boat and land. The white in the water thinned, winked out.

  Thank you for this boat, Troy, thank you, I thought, afraid for him.

  I kept rowing, unable to feel my feet. Then I looked down, and realized that the snow was rising around my thighs.

  I was taking on water. There was a hole in the boat.

  Trap, I thought. No, oh, please. Had he done it?

  Then, amazingly, my cell phone vibrated in my sopping jacket. I grabbed it.

  It was Troy. I tried to press the connect button. My hands were shaking too badly. I tried again, yelling, “Troy!”

  And then I dropped it, and it plunked into the water in the boat. I searched for it, my hand plunging into the ice water.

  I had to let it go for now. The water was rising. I was exhausted, and so cold. I looked around. The moon was too weak to show me the shoreline; a vast expanse of ebony blackness stretched in all directions. I tried to stay calm. I had to think.

  I had been a lifeguard. I could swim. But the water was freezing.

  I had to get out. Maybe I could flip the boat and use it as a flotation device.

  I would freeze to death.

  I looked in the direction I had come. I couldn’t see anything. Would they make their way to the other side of the lake?

  I couldn’t stay out here forever.

  I closed my eyes for a brief moment and tried to find the phone. No luck. Then I rolled myself to the right hard, and knocked the boat on its side. It sank beneath me and I slid into the water.

  My skirt was so heavy. I tried to get out of it but I couldn’t.

  I started doing the breaststroke, but the water pulled on me. I tried, so hard.

  I lost time, so much time. I knew I went under the water a dozen times, a hundred.

  I’m dying, I thought. Will I see my mom?

  thirty-four

  I couldn’t move and it was coming and it was here.

  I was panting, screaming, clawing.

  Sweat rolled off me. The back of my neck was cold but my forehead . . . my forehead, oh God. I couldn’t move and it was crawling toward the bed; one hand was on the mattress oh—

  Come to me come to me come to me come to me come to me.

  It was on my chest, it was pressing down, it—

  thirty-five

  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: Hey Lindsay,

  I looked for you at the bonfire but I couldn’t find you. I went to a party with Mandy but I must have drunk too much—I can’t remember a thing. I got all scraped up in the woods coming home. My parents’ll kill me. I have to go. My parents are here now. Troy asked me if I knew where you were, and he told me about you guys. He also told me that you wouldn’t hang out with him until he broke up with her. So . . . okay, I forgive you for that.

  Mandy and I are going to go riding over the break. She says her brother Miles is back and she can’t wait for us to meet.

  I wish I understood what’s going on with you. I do think you need to get some help. I really, really like you a lot, but I think that it might be better if we had some space for a while. Maybe you will feel better after you talk to someone. Please don’t be hurt. I want to be your best friend but, no offense, I’m just not sure who you are . . . and I don’t think you know, either.

  Love ya (really!!!!!!!),

  Julie xoxoxoxoxooxoxoxo

  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 am Lindsay Cavanaugh. i have not bailed. i did not break.

  i am here. and i am strong. and i’m going to make it

  through this.

  i think.

  haunted by: nothing. NOTHING.

  listening to: my mom’s favorite old records. “Bridge Over

  Troubled Water” by Simon and Garfunkel.

  mood: strong. resolved.

  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 rid
ing 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.

  I was suffocating.

  Then I bolted straight up with a gasp . . . and my terrified face was reflected back to me, in the oval oak mirror above my three-drawer dresser.

  Only it wasn’t my face.

  It was the face from the window, staring at me. The face with the black eye sockets.

  A terrible coldness welled inside me.

  Inside me.

  “No,” I whispered, shaking my head. The head.

  The head.

  The head in the mirror did not shake. It stared straight at me.

  “No way,” I said more forcefully.

  Help me.

  My heart pumped. I licked my lips.

  The image in my mirror did not.

  She was the one they had been looking for. And she was still hiding, inside me.

  Number Seven.

  Possession: me. I was possessed.

  “You can go now,” I whispered. “You’re free.”

  She stared at me for a long time; then slowly, very slowly, she shook her head. And deep inside myself, wrapped in the freezing endlessness of life inside the grave, I knew.

  “No,” I pleaded.

  It wasn’t over. Celia. She wasn’t free. The spirit wasn’t free.

  And neither was I.

  A silvery tear welled at the bottom of her empty eye socket and slid down her cheek. Then it clung to the oak frame of the mirror, dangling like a hanged man, and plopped onto my dresser like a drop of water into a lake.

  And I thought of more lines by Robert Frost, Memmy’s favorite poet and mine:The wood are lovely, dark and deep.

  But I have promises to keep,

  And miles to go before I sleep.

  I hadn’t promised anyone anything.

  “But I have,” the reflection said, her voice echoing. Then she said, “Troy.”

  And I knew she was bargaining with me, and I knew why.

  I had to go back.

  “Yes, there’s something the dead are keeping back.”

  —Robert Frost, The Witch of Coös

  Acknowledgments:

  With deepest thanks to the fantastic Razorbill team, Ben Schrank and my wonderful editor, Lexa Hillyer. Thank you to my agent, Howard Morhaim, and his assistant, Katie Menick. Thank you to my friends and family: Lucy Walker, Anny Caya, Leslie Ackel, Amy Schricker, Pam Escobedo, Karen Hackett, Debbie Viguié, and my super-nice daughter, Belle.

  Can’t get enough books by Nancy Holder? Check out this chapter from:

  PRETTY LITTLE DEVILS

  prologue

  Sylvia: “Damn it, Carolyn, I can still hardly hear you. Thank God you only have one more month on that loser phone. It doesn’t get any reception.”

  Carolyn: “I know. I cannot wait. Can you hear me now?”

  Sylvia: “That might be funny if I actually could hear you.”

  Megan: “Same here. I thought three-way calling was supposed to make this easier.”

  Sylvia: “Moving on. Listen, Breona threw down again. At the m
all. It was another Josh incident. She said he wants to go back to her, but he’s staying with me because I ‘put out.’ ‘Put out.’ Who even talks like that?”

  Megan: “You have got to be kidding me! What a slut! She is dead!”

  Carolyn: “So dead. But you know she was lying, Sylvia. Josh would never say that.”

  Megan: “Totally lying.”

  Sylvia: “It was like she was begging me to lose it right there in the mall, you know? It was in the food court. I was standing in line at Boudin’s and she just came over. She was smart to pick a public place. You guys know what I can do when I’m pushed.”

  Carolyn: “She’s so déclassé.”

  Megan: “Vraiment. Did you talk to Josh yet?”

  Sylvia: “Excuse me? There is nothing to talk to him about. She’s lying!”

  Carolyn: “God, Megan, you don’t believe her, do you? You don’t think Josh would actually say something like that about Sylvia?”

  Megan: “It’s just . . . I don’t know, I wonder how she can lie like that in front of everybody. Josh should know she’s lying about him to people.”

  Sylvia: “You have a point. Josh should know his reputation is in danger.”

  Carolyn: “Except . . . it’ll look like you don’t trust him if you talk to him about it.”

  Megan: “Then one of us should talk to him.”

  Sylvia: “Maybe Ellen should. She’s so nice. By the way, Ellen is our second agenda item, after we take care of this.”

  Megan: “Yeah, because she was wearing that retarded outfit again—”

  Sylvia: “Megan, second agenda item.”

  Carolyn: “Right. Back to the first. Breona is such a ho.”

  Sylvia: “Well, it’s just stupid anyway. The way she deals with guys is dysfunctional. If I ever thought Josh really was staying with me because I—because we—”

  Megan: “She’s so wrong. How can she think she can get away with this?”

  Sylvia: “That’s my point. She can’t. By the way, she talked about the incident too. You know which one I mean.”