The Screaming Season

by Nancy Holder

  We moved from their yard with the privet hedges to the path leading into the woods. I looked to my right, where the lake pushed back the forested shore. Lara had been friendly to me the first time I’d gone down to the lake, to watch the terrible prank Mandy talked Kiyoko into doing. It had been Lara’s job to entice me into becoming one of Mandy’s robots. Now she’d probably just as soon push me in the lake.

  Lara walked in front, and Sangeeta and Alis flanked me. It would be easy for them to overpower me if they got possessed and decided it was time to kill me. I pretended that the carton was too heavy and stopped to reposition it in my arms. The three kept walking. I stayed behind all three of them, watching the backs of their heads.

  The path grew steeper, and the trees began to crowd us. The sun dipped low, and gray shadows crossed our path. Tendrils of fog spread along the ground. The temperature dropped.

  We kept going. The three friends were chatting about a spa in Santa Barbara they’d all been to. Even though they went to amazing, expensive places on vacations, it seemed that they all went to the same ones. They even complained about it—“Maui again! Oh, God, we’re going to Paris!”—and cheered each other up by buying more things. Clothes, jewelry, purses, high-tech gear.

  Fishing line?

  I followed the climbing vines of fog with my gaze, because I knew that we were getting close to the operating theater. I was beginning to lose my nerve. I didn’t think I could go in there again.

  Lara looked back at me and smiled. I shifted the box again and forced one foot in front of the other. The wind blew right through me; I looked up at the darkening sky and smelled the promise of rain.

  Then I made myself face the operating theater head-on. The circular roof had fallen in, as if a giant had made a fist and pounded against it. Windows had blasted out, and their iron fittings had completely rusted away. Huge gaps in the walls revealed bushes growing inside the structure, their spindly branches like veins.

  Where a door had been, there was only a gaping mouth, and to the right, the burned-out top of the tunnel looked like a mound in a graveyard. That was where it had happened, where the girls had died. The tunnel was the death trap where Celia had started the fire, and the rage of her six victims had burned for over a hundred years.

  I felt it in the ground beneath my feet; I heard it in the trees. Fury. Wounds so deep that they bled black hatred. Too much damage for this land, for this place. The unfinished business of the dead infected us like an illness. It owned us. We were all possessions of Marlwood.

  “Come on,” Lara said.

  She was standing in the doorway. Sangeeta and Alis had already gone in. I smelled smoke. I always did. At first it had frightened me. I had looked for fires. I hadn’t realized the flames were burning inside me.

  I’ll die in there. I always thought it.

  I had to do this. I had tried to go home, tried to ignore everything, but neither had worked. I knew there was nothing else I could do. It was time to face it.

  I walked toward Lara, and she disappeared inside. Steeling myself, I followed, ignoring the stench. Battery-operated lanterns had been placed along the floor of the narrow passageway. The operating theater itself was on the same floor. Beyond the ruined wall to my left, Troy had performed the fake lobotomy on Marica on Valentine’s Day. And on December 16, barely two months before, these girls had tried to kill me by setting me on fire.

  They had made me stare at the white head until I was mesmerized . . .

  I did do it. I did break the head, I realized with a start. I could almost remember it, but not quite. But I knew.

  Julie had been right to get rid of me.

  Swallowing hard, I almost dropped the heavy box. The bottles clanked. My back ached. My forehead was throbbing.

  “Yo,” Lara shouted from below. “Let’s go.”

  She had reached the lower level, down a flight of stairs, where the tunnel led into the building—where a hundred years ago, they would wheel the girls in and prep them for surgery.

  A surgery that David Abernathy would perform on them.

  I carried the box down the stairs to find Mandy’s usual party arrangements intact from the last blowout—the little tables and chairs, lit by a votive candle. The votives were green, and scatters of glittery shamrocks had been sprinkled around them. So much for mocking my suggestion that we decorated. When on earth had anyone had time to order St. Patrick’s Day party supplies?

  The first party I’d gone to here, Mandy had assembled a wind ensemble. Judging by the weird Eurotrash trance music booming over a music system, tonight we were wired for sound.

  “Oh, God, finally,” Mandy said, rushing to me. She reached out her arms; I started to hand the box to her, but she made two fists and put them under her chin. I rolled my eyes and set my burden on the nearest table, knocking over the votive candle. I leapt forward to grab it.

  “Careful,” she chided me. “Jeez, Lindsay, I began to think you weren’t coming.”

  “Wouldn’t miss it,” I replied.

  “What did you bring?” She opened the box, peered inside, and gasped in horror. “Paper plates?”

  “And plastic glasses. Sorry, the elephants have the night off. We had to trek all this in on pack mules.”

  “I guess that’s not the point tonight.” She showed me a bottle of tequila, unscrewed the cap, and chugalugged several healthy swallows. Pressing the back of her hand to her mouth, she held it out to me.

  “We have to be careful,” I warned her. “We have to keep our wits.” I felt a pang; that was what Shayna had told me. Keep your wits, in case a dybbuk came after you—a spirit haunted by what had been done to it or what it had done to someone else.

  “We have to stop from screaming,” Mandy countered, giving the bottle a wag.

  I took it from her and had a swallow. Frankly, most hard liquor tasted the same to me—horrible—and I didn’t understand the allure. I mostly got weepy and tired when I drank the stuff.

  “Okay, now, we need a strategy.” Her eyes darted from side to side; she was jittery already, and the evening hadn’t even started.

  “Are you on anything?” I asked her suspiciously.

  She scowled at me. “Not that that’s any of your business.”

  “Are you insane? Of course it’s my business.” I hesitated, and then I made a decision. “Listen, I went in your basement and I found this. On the old wheelchair.”

  She jerked. “What old wheelchair?”

  She knows about it. She knows it moves by itself.

  I pulled the lighter and the candy from my pocket. She picked up the lighter and flicked it. A small yellow and blue flame appeared. Then she examined one of the squares.

  “I think this is gum,” she told me. She handed it back. “Save it.”

  I put it back in my pocket.

  “Anyway, okay, we’re all done here.” She rubbed her hands along her arms. “What are you going to wear?”

  “What I have on, I guess.” Which was my baggy flares, Doc Martens, my black long underwear top, and my jacket.

  She blanched. “You can’t. You’re my co-hostess. You look like you’ve been sleeping in a Dumpster.”

  “So what? Mandy, we’re not having a party to have a party, remember?”

  “But we can’t just give up. I mean, then they’ve won.” She was serious. Her blue, Miles-colored eyes were enormous. Her shiny lips were parted in distress. Mandy could not fathom going through this evening without looking good.

  It was such a different way of thinking that I couldn’t even go there. It wasn’t so much that she was shallow as that she had a strange sort of integrity.

  “Okay, that’s it,” Lara announced, walking up to us. “Everything’s ready. We’ll go get dressed.”

  They were all leaving. I couldn’t stay here by myself.

  “Come over to Jessel with us,” Mandy said. “We’ll fix you up.” She grabbed a handful of my curls and scrunched them. “I’m sure we’ve got some products you can us
e.” I remembered products. And measuring my eyebrows and caring about all that. I’d lost ground while my mom was sick, too distracted to worry about my fashion IQ and what my kind of scent I should be wearing. Despite that, I’d gotten sucked into the Jane machine and I had briefly turned into a hot chick. Once that had blown up, I’d chucked all my magazines and makeup and turned into a “crazy-haired lesbian,” as my cousin Jason had called me, only without the lesbian part. Too bad for me: my first mad crush was Riley, and look how that had turned out.

  The four girls headed for the exit. I forced myself back down the corridor, breathing more freely when we got outside.

  We trooped back to Jessel, and Mandy took me into her room. It was pristine. She had folded all her ruined clothes and put them in bins in the attic. She had ordered scads of new clothes, and at least half of the coats, sweaters, pants, shoes, and tops she showed me still had their price tags.

  First there was an interminable fashion show, during which she decided to wear a sleeveless black and metallic handkerchief top over bronze leggings and black and bronze high heels that she told me had been handmade, using measurements of her feet that she had faxed the company. She applied bronze makeup with the skill of a professional, using sleek, natural-bristle brushes and a magnifying mirror. She added bronze earrings and a cool cuff with abstract designs of beaten metal.

  I knew she was going to dress me up, and I just let it happen. In the house with the ghosts and the wheelchair that moved, the haunted turret room and secret tunnels, I was Mandy’s dress-up doll. She swathed me in a short scarlet dress, sheer black leggings that came down to the middle of my calves, and black stilettos. She threaded black and gold bangles up my arms and twisted gold chains through my hair until it was pulled up and away from my face Jane Austen style.

  Then on came the makeup, layer by layer. I remembered the smell of makeup, the excitement of girls putting it on together. Concealers, highlighters, blush. She decided to make me smoky, which I found bizarrely ironic, but I let her do it. Her hands were shaking and she cracked open a bottle of champagne to calm down. I was thinking tequila and bubbly were not the best combination, but I didn’t say anything this time.

  “Oh, you look so great,” she said. But she was getting shakier. It was getting closer to go time.

  Then she was glossing my lips and adding something sparkly to my cheeks. She sprayed my hair and misted me with perfume from Spain that had an unpronounceable name.

  “Close your eyes,” she said, grabbing one of my hands with both of hers and leading me toward her full-length mirror. She was excited for me, happy for me. This was the part of Mandy that sucked me in, and made me want to like and trust her. She had charisma to spare, when she felt like sharing it. Girls like Mandy were storms, then clouds, then sun. And the sun was so warm that you wanted to bask in its glow when it was out, daring the burn.

  She tugged on my wrists. There were heaps of clothes everywhere, and because my eyes were closed, I was stepping on them in my ridiculously high heels, which were a bit tight. I was definitely wearing my Doc Martens on the walk back to the party.

  “Ready?” she asked.

  I wasn’t. I was terrified that when I opened my eyes, I would see Celia in her tattered linen shift, staring at me with her white face and her black eye sockets. Or worse, wearing my face. I had a horrible image of Mandy putting makeup on over a bare skull, running lipstick over rotten teeth. That I wasn’t going to be there in the mirror.

  “Mandy,” I said in a low voice. “I can’t look.”

  There was silence.

  “I know,” she whispered finally. “I’m afraid to look too. Here.” She pressed on my wrists and I made a half turn.

  “Now,” she said.

  I opened my eyes. We were facing each other. We would be each other’s mirror. Mandy smiled at me and shook her head in amazement.

  “Behold. You are transformed.” She wrinkled her nose. “I think I did too good a job. No one is going to look twice at me.”

  “You look fantastic,” I said honestly.

  “Really?” I had never heard her sound so unsure. Dressed in thousands of dollars of designer clothes, wearing the best makeup money could buy—much of it hand-mixed to the specifications of her San Francisco “style team,” she still wasn’t certain that she looked good. It completely blew my mind.

  “This is you, being nice,” I said. “Being really nice.”

  “I have it in me,” she confirmed, “to throw the occasional bone.”

  “No. You are part nice. You’ll just have to accept it.”

  She smiled shyly. Mandy Winters, shy. Down beneath all the wounds, there was a sweet girl fighting to get out.

  “This is you, rising from the misery,” she said, almost as if she could read my mind. “To party again.”

  She started to reach out her arms, the way she had in the operating theater. Then she pulled back, again. And I was the one who initiated the hug, wrapping my arms loosely around her. She was bony.

  “Don’t mess me up,” she said, holding back.

  Hugs could mess people up.

  Wise Mandy.

  MANDY LENT ME a beautiful black wool maxicoat and a little purse. I put in lip gloss and then, on an impulse, the lighter and the gum. I wore my Doc Martens and carried the high heels.

  We went back to the operating theater, broke out the bottles, and cranked up the music. The girls started arriving, gawking at the tables and chairs, asking how we got all this stuff into a condemned building. I really couldn’t say. It had happened before my time in the Mandy brigade.

  My dorm mates arrived in a group, and none of them recognized me. Rose told me she wanted to marry me. Julie still said nothing, but she couldn’t stop staring. The music throbbed and the candles flickered, and no one but me could hear the echoing screams of dead girls pleading for their lives.

  Our guests included dozens of girls and a few guys, including Julie’s Spider, who made a point of coming over to me and giving me a hug. He told me how great I looked, then fixed Julie with a meaningful stare as she kept her distance. She finally smiled at me, but her heart wasn’t in it.

  You were right, I wanted to tell her. I broke your head. I am crazy.

  Tension was building in the room—and in me, and in Mandy. As part of our detective work, she was playing a “game” where she would sit across from someone and hold their wrists with her fingers pressed against their pulse. Then she’d ask them questions. If their pulse sped up, they were lying. I watched carefully, taking mental notes.

  “Have you ever done something really . . . evil?” she asked Charlotte Davidson.

  Charlotte was silent for a few seconds. Then she said, “Yes.”

  “Was it here at Marlwood?”

  Paling, Charlotte nodded. Then, without prompting, she blurted, “I peed in the pool.”

  Everyone who was looking on—a circle of at least twenty people—burst into groans and laughter. Charlotte looked down, humiliated.

  “Oh, my God!” Lara shouted. “That’s disgusting!”

  Why did you tell her that? I wondered as Charlotte wobbled to her feet and shambled away. She was completely mortified. What made you think you had to?

  Mandy made party guest after party guest answer her questions. There were no more confessions like Charlotte’s. Susi didn’t tell about her bed wetting. Gretchen’s OCD stayed private. And there was no way in hell that Maeve would reveal her dreams of becoming a guy.

  “Okay, enough of this,” Mandy declared. “New game.”

  I had approved of this one in advance too. This time, you had to let Mandy look you in the eyes. Sitting practically nose to nose, staring, she would tell you if your pupils were dilating, which meant you were lying. Because excitement made pupils dilate, and lying was exciting.

  Spider was her first victim. He made faces at her while she tried to embarrass him with her questions: Do you lie awake at night thinking about Julie? Have you ever written Julie a love poem?
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  Laughing, he played along. As Mandy and I had agreed, I watched the watchers. I kept track of who came and who went. I looked for suspicious activity.

  The night wore on. Lots of drinking, dancing. More guys from Lakewood showed up. Troy was not among them, and his schoolmates had the decency not to mention his name.

  “Okay, now, let’s see, how about Marica?” Mandy said as she plowed through victim after victim.

  Marica sat down in the hot seat. Mandy leaned forward to gaze into her eyes. Then Mandy jerked back her head and looked over at me.

  She was completely white. Her lips moved, but no sound came out.

  Marica made a face. “What is it? Do I have bad breath?”

  People laughed. After another moment, Mandy threw back her head and joined them.

  “No. I saw a zit,” she replied, and looked at me again. I dipped my head. She had seen something in Marica’s eyes.

  A ghost?

  There was more laughter. Mandy cleared her throat and leaned forward again. I zeroed in on Marica, watching her like a hawk.

  “Have you ever kissed a girl and liked it?” she asked Marica.

  “I sure have,” said a voice behind me. A very familiar voice. A voice that had shattered my world.

  I turned around.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  RILEY.

  I almost fell off my high heels.

  Riley, here.

  Now.

  He was tanned, light brown hair surfer sun-streaked. His brown, gold-flecked eyes wide with amazement. His Grossmont High blue and gold letter jacket bulked over his broad shoulders, and a white T-shirt was loosely bunched around his nonexistent hips. He had on a pair of faded jeans and scruffy cowboy boots. A look I had always loved. Loved. Yes, yes, yes.

  Troy was a distant memory, if, oh, if . . .

  There was no if. No one drove fourteen hours by accident.

  He stared at me as if he had forgotten how to speak. I panicked, wondering if he was seeing someone else—Celia—until I remembered that I was glammed up as I had never been glammed before. He had seen me in the Jane days, but these were the Mandy days.