❝I like you. ❞
❝Was that supposed to be a joke?❞
. . • ☆ . ° .• -ˋˏ ༻❁༺ ˎˊ-°:. *₊ ° .
The evil that rested beneath Beacon Hills never truly went away. Following the death of a loved one, Madison Argent planned to finish her freshman year and gain c...
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XVIII. EIGHTEEN MILLION
"Meredith was only at my Grandmother's lake house once, but, I think once was enough." Lydia began.
"How'd your grandmother know her?" Derek asked.
"She didn't. She found her, because of another woman named Maddy, the woman she loved."
Madison's eat perked up at this. She felt the attention shift to her for a moment as she tugged at her bottom lip. "What? I'm not an old lady."
Lydia chuckled as she sighed. She rose to her feet and pulled out a picture. She passed it around to the others, the photograph being of two young women with smiles plastered on their faces.
"I never met her, but I saw her name everywhere. She used to be part of a yacht racing team. There were plaques and trophies in the lake house from all the regattas she'd won."
"How'd she die?" Parrish asked.
"How's not the story. It's what happened right before. My grandmother, Lorraine, used to work in San Francisco for IBM," Lydia started as she turned around to face the group.
"She was there on a weekend, catching up on work. She started hearing this sound...like rain. But when she looked out the windows, all she saw was blue skies."
"But she kept hearing the rain?"
"And it just kept getting louder. Rain and thunder cracking like gunshots in her head. So loud. She finally just screamed."
"Like a banshee."
"She called Maddy, who was planning on taking one of the boats out on the lake. But, Maddy said that the sun was shining there, too. So, Lorraine didn't say anything."
"There was an accident." Parrish said knowingly.
"It took them four days to find Maddy's body. And then it took decades to figure out how Lorraine knew. She started with parapsychologists, like the PhD in their name made it more scientific. They built the study in the lake house, according to every pseudoscientific theory they could find."
Madison paused for a moment, feeling an intense wave of deja vu. Her body shivered for a moment, although she didn't say anything. Instead, she did her best to ignore the feeling and focus on Lydia's story.
"None of it worked. So then she started going to a more extreme occult. Things like mediums and psychics. All of them were failures."
"Until she found Meredith." Madison finished, her brain clicking the pieces together.
"Exactly. They found her in Eichen House. This fragile girl who didn't understand the things she heard. They brought her to the study, and they almost killed her." Lydia spat.
"She was hospitalized for over a year. She...never really recovered. My grandmother drove her insane. And I drove her to suicide." Lydia spoke, her voice breaking at the end of her sentence. Madison wanted to stand up and hug her, but she knew it wasn't the time nor the place.
