The Green Man

Thanksgiving at Belvedere College and lonely seventeen year old MARNEE CARTER is the only student left in the huge rambling building. Plain and unpraised, no one has invited her to spend their break with them.The students, all Brahman bright and beautiful have no time for her accept to bully and ridicule her.And they all had sex halos.The other girls tormented her, sweetly scented but saber sharp she says in her notebook, a notebook with more white than words.Marnee was easy game for them, this strange American girl, silent and jerky. Why should they waste time with her?Alone in the building she begins to hear and see things. Are they real or just in her mind?Only Marnee knows the truth – or does she?Her journey had begun a few months earlier.It was a powerful mixture of feelings as she passed through the gates with Belvedere College arching from one post to the other like a wrought iron rainbow. The first time she saw it she knew she was meant to be here and those feelings grew and grew.From her first arrival she is aware of a presence, a voice from the past, the voice of someone trying to change her, warn her, someone so different to her. It spoke of a time when the place had been full of teenage anticipation, squeals and screams, girls and boys, breaking voices, flirting voices.Sexy voices.Now they were just dead voices.And only she can hear them.The rambling old building has many secrets and slowly reveals them to her but is it all just a cry for help from lonely friendless Marnee or is there something altogether more mysterious at work? Is it all in her mind?The one thing she needs most of all is a friend, eventually she makes one.The problem is this friend is dead.Strange noises from a deserted upper floor, which Marnee investigates and finds the caretaker there but no one believes her, an intruder stalking her and she flees from. The mysterious boathouse, the death of the Mistress many centuries before, all play their part.Aiden the counselor tries to penetrate Marnee and fails. The only other person there is Josiah, the old caretaker. He has noticed her. And he knows what bed she sleeps in.Number eight.Slowly she pieces together the past and the tragic teenage love story from a hundred years earlier from the clues all around her, subliminal and gently seeping into her subconscious. There is no real tipping point, just a slow realization that grew from the very start as she passes the tests the building sets her.She learns about the May Queen and the Green Man who have stared at each other across the Lady Chapel for centuries. Deeper and deeper she is drawn into a world of myth and custom and the stronger the voices become.One night Marnee enters the forbidden West Wing to relive that tragic night so long ago and there she learns the truth and is changed forever by the experience.It becomes a near death experience as she tries to control these powerful primeval forces.Her dead friend wants Marnee to live the life she never had chance to.To live it.Not die it.