The Screaming Season

by Nancy Holder

  “There’s nothing here,” she announced.

  My mind was racing. In my fantasies, I was already offering to come stay with Claire, getting a Ouija board, trying to contact my mother. I felt totally out of control. I could call back my mom. Maybe even become possessed by her.

  Marica walked out of the room. Trembling, I lingered, furious with Miles all over again for losing Mandy’s notes.

  Then I realized what I was thinking: They were Mandy’s notes. Mandy was the one who had contacted the dead in the first place. The one who knew how.

  I walked out of the room. The door clicked sensibly shut, and I looked at Marica. Then I leaned against the door as if to force it to stay shut.

  There were other doors that I could open.

  I would keep that date with Mandy.

  FIFTEEN

  JULIE CAME BACK from her meeting with Dr. Morehouse to announce that she was the captain of the Blues, an exalted position considering that she was only a freshman. The list had been posted while she was in session. If we’d had juniors and seniors, that might have been even more exalted, but I kept that thought to myself and toasted her in the commons with sparkling apple cider provided by the staff. There would be Cristal champagne later, after we were supposed to be snug in our beds. Most of the girls had the most incredible stashes of liquor, chocolates, and munchies. There was a seemingly endless supply.

  But first there was dinner, and then it was study time. Mandy time. I told Julie I was going to the library and scooted out of the front door. But I remembered the scent of geraniums, and felt the tender bruises on my forehead, as I walked in the direction of the conservatory. Crickets scraped, and an owl hooted a melancholy warning to nearby rodents.

  As if in reply, there was scurrying in the dirt behind me. Maybe what I was doing was foolhardy. I hadn’t told anyone that I was meeting with the great Satan, but maybe Mandy’s posse of evil knew. Maybe this was an ambush.

  Wind whistled hard, pushing away some of the layers of clotted mist. I kicked up piles of it as I walked past the staring horse heads. Above me, to my left, the iron, tulip-shaped cupola of Founder’s Hall stood out in bold relief; behind it, the admin building floated gauzy and dreamlike.

  After a few minutes I stood outside the conservatory, in the same location where I had stood before after I’d spied on Dr. Morehouse and Rose. Yes, spied. That was the only word for it. Then Celia had come out to play. A chill shot down my spine. Maybe this wasn’t the best of my ideas. Not that any of them of late had been much good.

  A small light flared inside the Victorian-style structure of glass and wood. I glimpsed a strand of platinum hair behind the yellow flicker. Mandy’s face glowed as she set the candle in a black candleholder on the same glass table where Julie, Claire, and Ida had played cards. There were other things on the table, but I couldn’t tell what they were.

  Moving back into the shadows, I found the outer door to the conservatory and turned the knob. It was locked.

  There was a click. The door opened, and Mandy faced me on the threshold. She was wearing pencil-leg jeans, heeled boots, an emerald cashmere sweater, and a black leather jacket. A candle flickered beneath her chin, casting goblin angles and hollows on her face. Bruises splotched her fabulous complexion—on her forehead and high on her left cheekbone.

  She actually looked glad to see me.

  “I thought you weren’t coming,” she said. Her voice was high, shrill. Scared. I wasn’t sure if I should find that comforting. Probably only if it was me she was scared of.

  “Who else knows you’re here?” I asked her.

  She frowned at me. “Why?”

  “Everyone knows I’m here.” That was a lie, but I wasn’t about to tell her that. “They’ve got the place surrounded. One false move and they’re taking you out.”

  Rolling her eyes, she reached around me and shut the door. I was a bit dashed that she seemed unconcerned about my nonexistent backup.

  Soundlessly she led the way back to the table. There was a Ouija board with the letters of the alphabet, A through Z, in a semicircle. The numbers from one to nine were printed in a straight line below. GOODBYE was printed beneath the numbers; YES in the left-hand corner, and NO in the right. In a black votive candleholder, another candle sat—unlit, and some books stacked beside a bottle of red wine and two glasses. Both were full.

  She set down the lit candle and picked up the wine. Handed one to me and raised hers in a toast. I was already a little queasy and I had no idea if Mandy had maybe drugged my glass. Or filled it with arsenic.

  Seeing my hesitation, she took back my glass and sipped from it, then took a drink from her own. I crossed my arms and she set both goblets down.

  “Who beat you up?” I asked.

  “No one.”

  With a heavy sigh, she sank into her chair and raked back her hair with her hands. Her little finger caught in the bandage and she jerked on it. The gauzy strip lifted up on her forehead and I saw a dark circle, like a deep bruise, directly in the center.

  “I think,” she added.

  I sat down across from her. Mandy Winters and me, alone in the conservatory. Alone anywhere. By choice. Unbelievable.

  She leaned toward me. “I went for a walk at the lake. And I guess . . . I must have gotten dizzy and fallen . . .” Her voice grew faint. I heard what she wasn’t saying. She didn’t know how it had happened. And she had lost time, as I had.

  “Who was in your room last night?” I asked her. “When you had on your nightgown and the wine and all?”

  “What are you talking about?” She took a hefty swallow from her glass.

  “Last night, when you were in your nightgown. You looked straight at me before you closed the curtains.”

  She looked dumbfounded. I had never been able to tell how much she knew about her own possession. If she remembered what Belle said and did when she took Mandy over and if nightmares and visions of the past dogged her the way they did me.

  “Are you sure that was me?” she asked.

  “No, actually. I’m not.”

  She exhaled slowly and looked down at the Ouija board. I picked up the little putty-colored triangle used to point to the letters and examined it. She shifted uncomfortably, as if she thought I might be struck by lightning for daring to touch the sacred plastic, and I set the triangle back down.

  “You did this to us both,” I said. “ With all your mumbo jumbo.”

  “I didn’t think it would work.” She drank more wine. Her hands were shaking. “I—I had a dream about it and it seemed, well, interesting, and then it was like someone was guiding me to the answers . . .”

  “To the things that were needed. In the basement.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Miles told me he took all my notes and journals. And lost them.”

  “He thinks Troy beat you up. He said he was going to kill him.”

  She was silent for a long time. Then she reached down at her side and picked something up. It was in her fist.

  She turned her hand over and opened it. Inside lay the black knitted silk choker Troy had given me for my birthday. The silver crescent moon that had been attached to it was missing.

  “Where did you get this?” I asked her.

  “It was lying next to me on the ground when I came to.” She set the choker on her Ouija board and fumbled with the bandages on her head, trying to pull them back over her forehead. She was trembling, hard.

  “I know Troy gave it to you. He told me about it when he broke up with me.” She sounded more like her old self—kind of perpetually pissed off, and always better than me.

  “Why would he tell you that?” I picked up the choker. The last time I had seen it, it had been in the top drawer of my dresser in my dorm room. And Troy had never been in my dorm room.

  But Miles had.

  “So, you think he might have left it beside you to rub it in?” I persisted. I had a thought. “Or do you think I was the one who came after you?” I went on high alert. Was tha
t why I was here?

  She put the Ouija board triangle on the board. Studying it, she finished her glass of wine and reached down again, hefting the bottle onto the table. She poured herself another full glass. I decided to drink mine. Jane had taught me how to appreciate wine, and we’d preferred the astringent reds. In Jane’s circle, getting drunk was hugely uncool.

  “You planted Troy’s ID bracelet on Julie’s skirt,” I said, “when she was attacked on the beach.”

  “No.” She shook her head. “You assumed I did, because he gave it to me. But someone took it from my room.”

  Her room was usually locked. I knew that from personal experience.

  “And someone took this from my room,” I said, holding up the choker like a dead rat. “I didn’t give it back to him.”

  “Oh, my God,” she said.

  “It would be just like you to fake all this. To get back at me, and him, or just to mix it up.”

  “The good old days.” Her eyes sparkled as she readjusted her bandage. “When all I did was terrorize the peasants.”

  “And troll for five unsuspecting accomplices for your murderous little plans. To kill me.” Before she could argue, I grabbed her wrist. “To kill me.”

  “I didn’t know that was what Belle was really after, I swear I didn’t.” She looked away and gave her arm a wiggle, to break contact. “She just said that she wanted to experience life again. She envied us for being alive. And for having so many great things.”

  “And you believed her?”

  “Why wouldn’t I?” She lifted her chin. “I do have a lot of great things.”

  “You’d think someone who was dead would be less shallow,” I declared.

  “Maybe, but I . . . my mind was on something else.” She sat back, resting her hands on the arms of the chair, looking regal. I let go of her.

  “On your own brother.”

  Her eyes narrowed and her face went hard. “I know your mom died. She was sick for a long time.”

  “Keep her out of this,” I warned her, even though it would be a good moment to bring up my questions about getting in touch with her.

  Mandy nodded, staring at the board. “My family was like that. Any kind part of us, any good part, died slowly, year after year.”

  I grew quiet. Maybe she would tell me something true. Or at least useful.

  “I read everything I could to figure out what was going wrong. I did find out that families pick out someone to blame when that happens. Suddenly one of the kids is the problem, or the mom, or the dad. In our family, it was Miles.”

  She placed her two forefingers on the plastic triangle. It scooted toward the D. I wasn’t sure that she was moving it.

  “Our family therapist helped it happen,” she went on. “Helped it be Miles’s fault. I think Dr. Greene liked the big checks Daddy wrote out. Or maybe Greene got pissed off when Miles asked him about the complaint that had been lodged against him when he worked in a group home.”

  The triangle moved to the I.

  “On his recommendation, Miles was sent to a residential care facility. They cut off all his hair. He tried to escape. So they medicated him and tied him into a wheelchair. I could smell the pee on him.”

  “God,” I said.

  “They said he was resistant to treatment. So they sent him to a different facility. I wasn’t allowed to see him at that one. My mom would cry when she’d come back. And then she’d drink.”

  My father had gotten drunk once, when the doctors told us my mom’s disease was terminal. The next morning, he apologized to us and threw out all the alcohol in the house.

  “She’s been on all kinds of antidepressants and sleeping pills ever since,” Mandy continued. “She OD’d. Everyone said it was an accident. The first time.”

  The triangle began to drift across the board.

  “The second time, they said that it was Miles’s fault.”

  The triangle rested on the E.

  DIE.

  I pushed away from the table.

  “Whatever happened, I wasn’t a part of it,” I said. “And whatever deal you made with Belle had nothing to do with me or my life.” I picked up the Ouija board and tipped it toward myself, grabbing the triangle and throwing it on the ground. “And you came after me, all of you, after you got rid of Kiyoko.”

  “I don’t remember coming after you,” she insisted. “God, Lindsay, honest, I didn’t know what was going to happen. And I did not have anything to do with Kiyoko.”

  She leaned forward again, tears welling in her eyes. Maybe they were real.

  “I don’t remember trying to hurt you.”

  Because you don’t want to, I thought. But how many times had I been unsure that it was actually happening? I’d come to in all kinds of places—the operating theater, the old library—not sure about what had really happened, or what I’d dreamed, or maybe even imagined.

  “I know I’m in too deep,” she said. “I’m looking for a way out.”

  Me too. And Celia had told me that the only way out was to kill Mandy. Had Belle been equally informative?

  “Miles told me what happened with the scooter,” she went on. “That there was something in the road.”

  “Maybe it was you.”

  She shook her head. “Lindsay, I think someone is trying to kill us. I mean, like a person. Like the Stalker. And I’m really, really scared.”

  “Welcome to my world,” I said coldly.

  “Lindsay, please.” She looked younger than I had ever seen her look. She was my age. Sometimes I forgot that. All her money and power gave her the illusion of maturity, but she was only sixteen years old.

  I looked at the choker in my hand. I thought about the ID bracelet. In both instances, Troy had been involved.

  “I think we should confront our ex. See if he knows anything,” Mandy said, also looking at the choker.

  “At the very least we could tell him what a dirtbag he is,” I suggested.

  “That’s the spirit.” She grinned, and a ghost of the queen bee I knew and loathed shone through her misery. “We’ll go over there and tell him.”

  “Seeing us together would totally freak him out.”

  “So we’ll freak him out. Together.”

  Maybe this could be my way out. Working with Mandy, who had started the possessions in the first place. If anyone could figure out how to end them, it would be her.

  Could I actually be insane enough to trust her?

  Desperate enough?

  “Seal our pact,” she said. “With a drink.”

  I put my glass to my lips and drank. Drank it all down. I loved the bitterness. The bite.

  In sync, we threw our glasses against the stone fireplace. It seemed like a crazy, OOC thing to do. But we did it together, without a moment’s hesitation.

  “We’ll go tonight,” she said. “Late.”

  “Not on the scooter.”

  “We’ve got a boat at Jessel,” she said. “We can row over.”

  I guffawed. “I knew it. Oh, my God, do you think I’m an idiot?” When she just looked at me, I snickered. “Like last time, and I got in the boat with the hole in the bottom? And I went out to get away from all of you when . . . ” I trailed off. She had been possessed when it had happened, and evidently she really didn’t remember.

  “What?” she said. “Are you still talking about Kiyoko? I swear to you, Lindsay, I’m not going to drown you.”

  Maybe she didn’t know that water rendered the spirits powerless. When Belle Johnson and the others had raced after me, the lake had protected me from them. As I rowed away, one of them had jumped in after me, dissolved, and faded away. If anything happened out on the water . . . if Belle decided that it was a good time to put Celia out of her misery . . . all I had to do was push Mandy in.

  That was a good thing to keep to myself.

  “I swear to you I won’t kill you in the next twenty-four hours,” Mandy said.

  “The sad thing is, in our world, that sentence makes s
ense,” I said.

  “Ours is a wider world,” she agreed. “So, let’s go over after everyone goes to bed. Say, elevenish?”

  “Sure.” More sneaking out. I doubted I’d get expelled if I had a Winters with me. “But it’s just us two. If you bring anybody along, I’m leaving.”

  That made the lake an even better choice—we’d be landing on Lakewood property. I didn’t know the layout of the boys’ campus, but I was willing to bet it’d be harder to sneak a bunch of girls in via the land route. Less chance of a trap.

  “Just us two,” she agreed.

  “No Miles.” I had a thought. “He won’t really try to kill Troy, will he?”

  She laughed. “My brother’s a big teddy bear.”

  “Hardly.”

  “He only acts scary. I think it was his way of pushing back in all the psycho wards.”

  “That’s comforting.”

  “I’ll meet you down at the water. Do you know where the tie-up is? By the no-trespassing sign?”

  “I do. Elevenish,” I said.

  “This will be fun.” She hoisted the bottle of wine in the air. “Wait and see.”

  And she drank it down.

  SIXTEEN

  AFTER I LEFT Mandy, I started back to my dorm in the increasingly heavy fog. Nobody kept tabs on us during study time, but almost everyone studied, because getting good grades was not a given and most of the parents expected a good return on their investment of fifty thousand dollars a year. As for me, I was expected to earn my keep with a sky-high GPA.

  But as I walked along the path and gazed into the fog, my body flooded with cold. From the top of my head, ice seeped into my brain and ran down the bones of my skull. I could feel it behind my eyes, aching in my cheekbones, freezing my chin. My chest hurt; my ribs felt as if they had crystallized and would shatter if I breathed too hard.

  “Celia, no,” I whispered.

  The cold increased, stiffening my muscles, and I shuffled forward like an old woman. I tried to work my jaw, but it clamped shut.

  “Rigor mortis,” she whispered.

  Then I was walking toward the admin building, just as cold, but able to move. Grunting in protest, I was propelled up the walk; then I moved to the left—she moved me to the left—and I lurched past the porch where I had seen the head. Then past the wall and down the side of the building to the door that led to the storage area. My icy hand grasped the knob; I was trembling all over. My head tipped back and I saw the bonewhite moon in deepest, frozen blue velvet. Fog, as if out of nowhere, began to tumble down, and when I exhaled, it was as if more fog was rising to join the falling mist. I was surrounded by milky white. I couldn’t see a thing.