by Nancy Holder
Something vibrated against my side, and I started. I was so out of it that at first I couldn’t figure out what it was. Then I realized it was my new phone. My old one was rusting at the bottom of Searle Lake, where I myself had nearly wound up. I had a new number, and not that many people had it. I could count them on one hand.
Was it Heather? Why was she calling me all of a sudden? Had something happened to her or my family? No more, I begged the universe.
“Yes, Dr. Ehrlenbach, she’s been sedated,” Ms. Simonet was saying, and I grunted, startled by the sound of another human voice. Had my scary headmistress arrived to check on me? “Yes, have a good trip.” She’s leaving? Abandoning us?
The room went silent again. Ms. Simonet must have been talking on the phone to Dr. “Ehrlenfreak,” as we called her. I envied my headmistress; she could get out of here. Then I thought of everything hanging on her shoulders—Kiyoko’s death and the school’s reputation. The wealthy parents had to be asking if Marlwood Academy was safe enough for their blueblooded children. For them, Marlwood had been one choice among many when it came to posh boarding schools that cost around fifty thousand dollars a year. For me, a scholarship student given late entry from the wait list, it had been my only escape.
I screwed up again, I thought, tears sliding across my temples. I had a breakdown in San Diego, sure, but here, away from civilization . . . I tried to kill my boyfriend with a hammer.
Only, Troy wasn’t my boyfriend. And when I had tried to kill him, I had thought he’d been possessed . . .
. . . by the ghost who, at that very moment, might be creeping around my room in the infirmary. Out of body, not in someone’s else, like Celia was in mine. I sensed frosty shadows moving against the wall, then dripping down onto the floor and sliding toward my bed. I had dreams of someone crawling over me, pinning me where I lay. Dreams both waking and sleeping .
“Count backward from ten to one,” whispered the ghost of Dr. Abernathy, “and I’ll make it all better. You will never, ever be afraid again.”
I shook with fear as he floated closer. I was alone in the bed, unable to call for help.
“I’ll make it all better,” he said again. “I’ll make it stop.”
And in my hazy desperation, I was tempted to obey.
“Ten,” he prompted.
Nine, I thought.
And then I heard Celia screaming.
TWO
“WRONG.”
“You are so wrong, and so stupid,” Celia hissed as I shifted and twisted in my bed. I was sinking into the mattress. Something was wrapped around my neck. I couldn’t call out to Ms. Simonet; I couldn’t push the little button attached to the bed.
“You have no idea what’s been going on out there while you hide.”
She was pissed.
“You know what you have to do. You know how to set me free. And instead, you lie in here . . . ” Darkness engulfed me. I was frozen to the bone; I could see nothing but blackness. I couldn’t touch anything. Smell anything. There was dirt in my mouth, and mixed in with it was something burnt.
“This is where I lie. This is my soft bed and my pillow. And these are my visitors.”
Razor-sharp pinpricks sliced my face as furry paws ran over my cheek and across my nose, down the center of my forehead to bite my cheek. Rats. I fought to move my arms or shake my head, but I could do nothing to protect myself. They kept biting and scurrying.
My hair was coated with mud, and I couldn’t breathe. I had been buried alive.
“It’s not even as good as a grave,” she said spitefully. “It’s a garbage heap, in the forest, on the road. It’s where I am. And it’s where you’ll be if you don’t help me. I swear it, Lindsay. You will end up here. For the rest of eternity. Awake. Aware. And suffering.”
“Like me.”
I finally managed to gasp, opening my mouth. My nostrils were clogged with dirt. Something wriggled against the roof of my mouth. I wanted to kick and scream, but I couldn’t move.
Then she yanked me out of the dirt and down a lane. Smoke surrounded me. The black trees to my right bobbed as I passed, as thunder rumbled. Branches encrusted with jet-colored ice began to pump up and down as if heavy objects were tied to them.
The forest is trying to grab me, I thought. I glazed over . . .
. . . and saw phantoms sitting in the boughs of the trees: glowing blurs of girls in linen shifts, with skulls for faces and bones for arms, shrieking. They leaned toward me as I ran past, extending their arms, wailing and sobbing. From a tree on my left, a figure dangled from a noose around her neck, rocking back and forth, back and forth, like a bell. Her bony fingers grabbed at the rope. A crack shot through the darkness, and her neck broke.
She screamed. Everyone was screaming.
I was screaming.
The trees began to thin, and the figures dropped from the trees like rotten fruit. The hanged girl vanished. Other girls appeared on either side of the road, standing in rows and banging on walls I couldn’t see. They were screaming; all around me; the world was nothing but one giant scream.
The wind mixed up all the shrieks and I heard the desperation, the terror and fury. I heard them dying. White shapes, white figures; the mountain was alive with the ghosts of dead girls, enraged by their fate.
The screams stretched into echoes. Clouds crossed the moon, throwing me into darkness as the girls glowed and winked out, reappeared, sizzled with white light. Their shifts disintegrated into tatters; their skull faces shattered; something of them became nothing more than a weak, shining mist in the darkness.
But I kept screaming.
“Stop it, Lindsay!” Ms. Simonet yelled. The lights flared on.
Dream. Oh, God.
“I’m sorry, sorry,” I managed, weeping. “Please, please.”
She did something to my arm. It hurt.
I slid down deeper.
The screams came back.
THREE
“FEELING BETTER?” Ms. Simonet asked me, trying to sound like she cared. She was checking on me in the shower room, where she had brought me to clean up.
Maybe she knew I was fragmenting beneath the warm spigot of water. I was pressing against the shiny white tile, back flat, head lowered, eyes shut so I wouldn’t see what I was imagining there . . . a pair of hands, pushing me under the water, in one of the huge bathtubs in the bathroom that was in my dorm. I knew it wasn’t happening; I knew it was one more of Celia’s horrible memories, but I couldn’t stop my panic.
It was the drugs, I told myself. The drugs that had thrown me into one nightmare after another the night before, torturing me with flashes of images like this one and worse—the girls in the forest; eyeless faces laughing; the ice pick; the mallet; and what the girls looked like after Dr. Abernathy finished with them—the living dead. Zombies. The phantoms of Marlwood.
And all their rage lived on.
“Lindsay?” Ms. Simonet said, in the curt tone I was beginning to recognize as her What do I do with this girl? voice. Other students at Marlwood had gone bonkers, but they were rich. That was understandable: being able to have what you wanted whenever you wanted it created a lot of pressure. It was less cool for me, a poor girl, to be a problem. I was on scholarship; all I did for the school was use up resources.
“I’m fine,” I managed to say, clearing my throat. My throat hurt. My lungs hurt. I was tired. I raised my chin and opened my eyes. Just white tile and a spigot. No hands, no drowning.
“This will keep happening until you stop it,” Celia promised me.
“Go away,” I whispered fiercely. “I hate you.”
“I can’t stop it,” she replied. “It’s up to you.”
Gritting my teeth, I pushed back the shower curtain and grabbed the freshly laundered hunter green towel, burying my face in it as I shook. There would be more drugs if I lost it again, and they might send me home. That was all I wanted to do, but it was the one thing I couldn’t do. It had to end here.
There was a l
ittle cherrywood dressing room off the shower room, and I found my favorite raggedy jeans, my mom’s UCSD sweater, and a black turtleneck sweater neatly folded. I smiled weakly, realizing that Julie had brought me a care package from our room.
There was also one of my preferred black sports bras and a pair of black boyshort underpants. The boyshorts were a Christmas present from my stepmother, CJ. Freckly, young, strawberry-blonde CJ was more fashion aware than I was. Back when I was in Jane’s superclique, I had been totally fashion conscious. But it was a good thing I had quit the style race before I’d arrived at Marlwood. There was absolutely no way I could compete with the other girls, who truly thought nothing of dropping a grand on a pair of jeans.
“Now that’s nuts,” I said aloud, feeling a little like my old self.
I dressed, swallowed down the cold dose of bright pink antibiotic Ms. Simonet left for me, and brushed my teeth. As always, my hairbrush hated my OOC curly black hair. There were matching black smudges around my eyes that gave me a cool, smoky look. For free. Eat your heart out, Urban Decay.
I went back to my holding cell, aka my room in the infirmary, and found all my dorm mates sitting in a quasi-semicircle on plastic chairs: Marica, Claire, Ida, Julie, and Elvis (whose real name was Haley). It was either a party or an intervention.
“Good morning!” Julie cried.
Julie jumped up and crushed me in a hug. She was five-seven to my five-two, with another two or so inches added by her heeled boots. Heeled anything was new for her; she used to hunch over to compress her height. Now she was in love, and that made her feel both powerful and pretty.
On the gray-metal-and-Formica roll-around table by my hospital bed sat a green plastic tray with covered dishes and a large Marlwood coffee carrier with a lid. Next to it they had positioned the only normal chair in the room, an overstuffed burgundy leather chair.
“We brought you breakfast,” Julie said, stating the obvious.
“And homework,” Claire drawled, her Maui tan from the holidays finally beginning to fade. “You’d better get your butt back to classes or you’re going to flunk out of here.”
“Oh, my God, don’t stress her out,” Ida snapped, smacking Claire on the arm. Ida was Iranian, very exotic-looking in a sleek black trench coat and messy Kate Moss I-don’t-give-a-damn hair.
Elvis was equally beautifully dressed in a bronze cashmere sweater, black leather pants, and expensive boots. Marica, from Venezuela, played off her flamenco-dancer looks with scarlet and black, plus her enormous emerald earrings, which had been her grandmother’s. Everyone’s makeup and hair were in place. At an exclusive all-girls school like ours, the stakes were incredibly high when it came to parwading your family’s ability to make you look as good as possible. We had professional models and actresses in our midst, but even the amateurs were Teen Vogue worthy.
“Seriously, Linz, it’s not that bad,” Ida added.
“Maybe your parents could hire one of the faculty to tutor you,” Elvis suggested, then blanched as she obviously remembered that my parents had no money. My dad was still trying to pay off the stacks of bills our insurance hadn’t covered when medical science had failed to save my mom.
“Um, or we could help you,” Julie said, as everyone started nodding like bobble heads and smiling brightly. Too brightly, with eyes a bit too wide to be genuine. They didn’t know what to make of me. I had gone completely crazy in the operating theater, but the cracks had been appearing way before then. At least, that was how it would appear to someone who didn’t believe in ghosts.
“Rose too, of course. She wanted to come with us,” Julie said, which seemed a bit random. Poor Julie was nervous. “But she had to cram for a test.”
“Oh, that’s okay,” I said.
I felt Celia shift anxiously inside me. It wasn’t okay with her. She had begged me to kill Rose when Rose had become possessed. If Rose hadn’t been so drunk at the time, she would have posed a greater threat, and I might have had to hurt her—at least—to defend myself. For some girls, the possessions came and went. The spirit that had possessed Rose seemed to have moved on. Same thing with Julie. I didn’t know why.
Mandy Winters, whom I had detested on sight, was possessed by the spirit of Belle. Allowing herself to become possessed was a deal Mandy had made—a pact with the devil—in some twisted bargain to protect Miles, her twin brother, or be his girlfriend, or both, at least as far as I could tell.
Miles. My skin crawled. My face tingled. Ruled by his own demons, Miles had been the one to carry me out of the operating theater when I had raged at them all, shrieking that I would kill them. At the time, I had been fully possessed by Celia, who was even more insane than he was.
Cold flooded me as if she were protesting my opinion of her. Denying her my attention, I sat down in the leather chair, and everyone else sat back, as if they could relax now that my academic fate was being seen to.
Celia’s grip faded. Not for the first time, I realized she had a greater hold on me when I was under stress. Even after all that had happened, I still had moments when I wondered if she was real. I had suffered a nervous breakdown back in San Diego. But I hadn’t imagined things, hadn’t seen things that weren’t there. And I wasn’t imagining them now. Marlwood was haunted.
It was.
I was.
I lifted the lids to the breakfast selections—they had brought me everything from a veggie-and-cheese omelet to a bowl of Froot Loops—and my stomach lurched. I was hungry, but I didn’t know if I could eat anything. I wanted to sit my dorm mates in rows like elementary school students and give them a lecture on the real history of Marlwood. To tell them about Celia, and Belle, and the man the two girls had loved—the doctor, David Abernathy. The man who had betrayed them, leaving them and five other girls to die an excruciating death. But who would believe me?
“Okay, so here’s the dealio,” Elvis said, and everyone scooted a little closer, getting down to business. “Ehrlenfreak left. They’re saying it’s a fund-raising tour, but we all know it’s damage control.”
“Oh, my God, don’t say that around Lindsay,” Claire said. “Jeez.”
Ida huffed. “Oh, please, hardly anyone saw Lindsay go bonkers. No offense, Linz, I know it was a high fever. I think they paid off Troy with a starting position on the basketball team over at Lakewood, and Miles and Mandy are here. So what damage is there to control?” Claire looked unconvinced. “Word gets around. You know how connected our parents are. Look at Rose’s parents’ divorce. It’s in all the tabloids.” She wrinkled her nose. “They don’t want us in the tabloids.”
“Yeah,” Ida said, “but the Hyde-Smiths are way juicy. Rose’s dad owned half the world before the collapse and her mom’s, like, thirty.”
“Forty-five. She’s had a lot of work done,” Marica said. “She has to get out now, or she’ll be too old to find another billionaire. Poor Rose. No money, and her mother’s nothing but an aging trophy wife.”
Marica took the lid off my coffee and offered it to me. I shook my head. She took a little sip, perfectly lined and colored lips blotting on the cardboard, and sighed with pleasure.
“But Claire is right,” Elvis said. “Marlwood has a board of directors and trustees. Ehrlenbach probably needs to convince them that she’s still in charge.”
There was a brief moment of silence, and then they all burst into laughter. The corners of my mouth twitched, but I couldn’t let myself go, not like them.
“In charge. Right,” Ida said, guffawing.
I started picking at the food, watching them as they laughed harder and harder, thinking about all the ways our headmistress was not in charge around here, until they were almost screaming. They shrieked like wild birds. Marlwood had been a pressure cooker from day one. Even for them, it appeared. Maybe we were all one scream away from losing it.
“So is Mandy talking about what happened?” I asked. It would be so like her to take advantage of my breakdown and use it to focus attention on herself.
“Strangely, no,” Claire said, shrugging and giving her head a little shake. “Everyone at Jessel has actually been pretty quiet. Withdrawn.”
“They’re recharging. So they can drive someone else crazy. And I don’t mean you. I mean Shayna.” Maricia pointed to the omelet on my plate. “Speaking of recharging, that’s protein.”
“Have you heard from Shayna?” Ida asked me, and I was startled, because no one had brought her up since we’d come back from the winter break. Marlwood had beaten Shayna down.
“I called her once,” I began, not sure how much I should reveal. I would definitely not tell them that Shayna and I had discussed various methods of exorcising dybbuks, which was the Jewish term for restless, disembodied spirits that possessed the living. Dybbuks had unfinished business.
After she had left school, I had found her phone number and called. She was crying. Everyone thought she’d gone crazy, but I had reassured her that I completely believed that she had seen a ghost. We’d gotten disconnected and I had called back, but her number was suddenly no longer in service. I figured her father the rabbi had had it disconnected to prevent anyone from shattering whatever hold on reality Shayna had regained since she’d left Marlwood. I hadn’t heard from her since and I didn’t know any other way to reach her. I had thought that in this day of texting and the net, no one could lose track of anyone. But I wasn’t even sure I could keep track of myself.
“How is Shayna?” Julie asked. “Do you think she’ll come back?”
“Sure, that’ll happen.” Claire snickered.
“What really happened to her?” Julie looked at me. “No one’s ever said. She was so scared that night.”
I did say. I tried to talk to you about what was going on, I thought, looking at Julie. But you didn’t want to hear it. You thought I was jealous of your friendship with Mandy. While I was afraid that Mandy might try to kill you.
That was what I couldn’t tell them—we weren’t talking about the politics of normal high school life, as abnormal as they were. This wasn’t about mean girls and cheating boyfriends. This was about life and death. And the ironic thing was, a mean girl and a cheating boyfriend had pushed me over the edge in the first place, back in San Diego. But the life-and-death evil at Marlwood had pulled me back up.
