Sarah Before

by Craig Shepherd

  “I’m sorry Jane, you really don’t have to help me with this. It really isn’t your problem, and I don’t want you getting dragged into something you can just as easily walk away from,” Sarah half meant what she said, but still dreaded the thought of Jane taking her up on the offer to retreat.

  “What kind of friend would I be if I left now?” Jane spoke through a yawn, clearly still adjusting to her wakened state.

  Sarah was still held together by an element of calm. Despite how quickly she had tired the night before, the feeling of vitality and clarity was still present. She couldn’t say she wasn’t afraid, but the fear was more like the caution an experienced sky diver would feel. There would always be a focus on safety, but there was no paralysis fastening them in the doorway of the plane. Preparation was at the forefront of her mind, and the internal voice which would normally talk her out of doing something was held at bay for now.

  “If we’re going to do this, we really need to be prepared and have a plan,” she remarked to Jane. The truth was, she had been thinking about it since she woke up, unaware Jane had told her last night that she would develop a plan of action. She had drifted to sleep without even hearing Jane’s words.

  “We do. I’d like to say I have it all mapped out for us, but I couldn’t think straight after you went to bed. I’m not even sure how long I sat there, but my head was all over the place,” Jane was alert now, her eyes adjusting to the daylight streaming through the kitchen windows. It brightened up the flat, muted colors of the room in a way the exposed light globes on the ceiling seemed incapable of doing. “The only thing I do know, is we need some kind of protection. I feel like I would want protection going into that building even if there was nothing crazy going on. No offence to your neighborhood.”

  Sarah handed her a mug of coffee, assuming she might need something extra to completely escape the land of sleep. “None taken, the place looks like a horror movie waiting to happen,” she realized the words were chosen poorly, a fact confirmed by the startled look on Jane’s face as she picked up the warm mug. “Sorry, that didn’t come out right!” Sarah laughed as a means to push back the feeling of apprehension creeping into the small room.

  “I have a knife in my bag, that’s something,” Jane spoke matter-of-factly, as though it was normal to carry a concealed weapon and think nothing of it. Sarah’s eye’s widened in fascination at Jane’s admission. “I used to work at bars remember. Nobody walks to their car at the end of a shift without some way to protect themselves. Some of the girls carried guns, but that wasn’t for me. I just needed something to feel safe, as I imagine both of us will today.”

  Jane had begun speaking with all the sharpness of a military operative planning a raid. It also wasn’t lost on Sarah that she was taking it as written that some kind of peril lay ahead. In her unusually calm state, Sarah had considered the opposite. They may find absolutely nothing. If that was the result of their bravery today, it would come with a sense of relief, but not without a measure of disappointment they were no closer to solving the problem.

  “True. Well, I have pepper spray. Somewhere. To be honest I never carry it with me. I should, but considering how often I leave the house, it never became a habit,” she felt a little insecure when sizing up her pepper spray against Jane’s weapon, but something was better than nothing in this instance.

  Would pepper spray even have any effect on…?

  She didn’t want to think it, and had to get this stupid notion out of her head, but it lingered in a darker, less rational part of her mind.

  Ghosts. Ghouls. Demons.

  She swatted the thought away quickly, realizing Jane was speaking and she had missed half of it.

  “ - just a deterrent. It’s the best we can do.”

  Rather than show she’d hardly heard a word Jane said, Sarah replied immediately, “OK, so what are we going to do? I’ve been thinking and I can only see two options. We can try getting into the yard of the building and look around, but I’m not even sure we would even be able to see anything on the balcony,” she saw Jane holding her gaze intently, and all of a sudden it seemed their relationship had changed, become more serious. For the moment it was no longer a casual friendship, but had morphed swiftly into a professional operation. Sarah pulled the mug to her lips and sipped at it before continuing. “The other option is more ambitious, but it seems like the only way we’re going to get anywhere. I can work out which apartment matches the balcony, maybe we just knock on the door and see what happens.”

  “It seems so unpredictable. I don’t want to be caught off guard, but I think you’re right. What are we really going to find unless we just hit this head on?” Jane spoke again with certainty. “How about actually getting there? How are you feeling about getting out?” Some compassion fed into her all-business tone of voice.

  “I really think I’m OK. Like I said last night, I doubt I’m cured, but I feel so much better. The thought of getting out there isn’t playing on my mind at all. I won’t pretend I’m not scared of what we’ll find at the apartment though,” her words came out effortlessly and honestly. At least for now, the normal fears were completely gone, as though they had been burned out and carried away in plumes of smoke on the breeze. She could only hope it stayed that way.

  Despite Sarah’s words and Jane’s pragmatic, confident manner of speaking, the reality was a sense of foreboding neither of them could really understand in the moment. There was perhaps an element of bravado in both women, and maybe it was all they could do to convince themselves things would be alright. Regardless of the fact Jane had only recently woken, and Sarah was only recently rising from the broken shell of a woman she had become, there was a level of adrenaline running through both of them. Binding them together to create a mutual strength they could both feed upon.

  Neither one of them knew with any degree of certainty that things would go smoothly at the Selwood Avenue apartment building. They just had no intention of letting the other know how terrified they really were.

  CHAPTER 17

  Both women wore thick jackets into the cold morning as they made their way along Western Avenue. The sun was still mostly obscured by light cloud, but the day was light enough. Cars, as yet unused, lined the street, most of them still with a covering of frost across their windshields. Just enough to create a haunting winter streetscape, the picture only missing the fragments of snow clinging to the tree branches. As had been the case for some weeks now, the trees along the street looked hunched over, their branches hanging downward, empty and thin from the lack of leaves. On a clear night by the light of the moon, Sarah thought they would create a horrifying silhouette of menacing arms reaching out of the darkness. It wasn’t the first time she had been unnerved by them.

  Ahead of them was the intersection of Western and Drummond where they would turn towards Selwood Avenue. They didn’t speak until reaching the intersection, both of them using half their energy to stay warm and the other half to suppress their feelings of nervousness.

  “How are you going?” Jane spoke first. She understood if she was nervous, the effect could be two-fold for Sarah. She could almost feel the fear under her skin, chilling her further than the cold air around them was, and knew that for Sarah, it would be far worse.

  “I’m not too bad. I’m cold, but it’s a nice distraction. Just stay close to me, OK?” Sarah’s breath followed her words, short bursts of frosty vapor dissipating far more quickly than the winter fog it resembled. The women shared a nervous smile as they turned onto Drummond, both knowing it was only three hundred feet until they reached Selwood Avenue, and once they arrived, there would be no turning back. They both knew they would want to, but wouldn’t. It was an unspoken promise they had made with themselves.

  A car drove past to their left, the exhaust pumping thick plumes of white cloud over the spray of water flicking up from the tires. The streets around them were so cold Sarah wasn’t sure if there had been rain the night before, or whether a sheet of icy
frost was just melting on the road as the day went on. Either way, she worried the car was going too quickly in the slippery conditions. It was none of her concern, but she welcomed the diversion of her thoughts away from the task at hand.

  Stopping as they entered Selwood Avenue, Sarah cast her eyes further ahead. The whole street looked eerily similar to her own, and she wasn’t particularly surprised. The menacing, dead arm tree branches bothered her the most. They lined the street, appearing to reach out and call her towards them. She shivered, but quickly rubbed her hands together, pretending it was due to the cold rather than the dread she felt from those twisted arms stretching down the street.

  A gust of wind blew around them and Sarah looked down to see decaying, brown leaves swirling around her feet.

  “How far along is it?” Jane asked. “Is it that one there?” She pointed to a building maybe five hundred feet down the road, on the same side of the street they now stood.

  Sarah couldn’t see much detail on the building, but it did seem to be the biggest building on their side of the road. From this distance it just looked like a big, grey cinder block.

  “I think it has to be. I guess we have to get closer to make sure, but I think all the other buildings on this side of the road are too small,” Sarah’s reply was straightforward, but the trepidation bubbling beneath her voice wouldn’t stay hidden for long.

  Jane linked her arm in Sarah’s as they walked on, and Sarah felt the gesture was providing just as much comfort for Jane as it was for her. The breeze blowing around them had become bitter, and both women were feeling it in their bones despite wearing multiple layers of clothing and woolen caps.

  They closed in on the apartment building, and as it rose in front of them, Sarah was convinced it was the one. The exterior was grey, or at least had been at some point. The concrete had been painted the color of steel, but it was now so weather-beaten and worn it no longer held the new building gloss it once had. The paint was peeling from most of the horizontal joins in the concrete, like it had been torn downwards. Not in strips, but in large semi-circles that tapered as they fell further down the walls. The bare concrete underneath was now black, stained by the damp weather and ensuing mold. Blackened teardrops.

  The near side of the building had no balconies, just a deteriorated hedge of trees running down the side, rising a bit higher than a standard fence. Not a traditional, thick box hedge trimmed into a neat border, but rather a tangled mass of different trees planted close enough together to provide some sort of privacy. The trees were clearly not looked after, and only added to the general untidiness of the whole building. The side wall was nothing more than a discolored wash of black and grey. It stood out because it was the only apartment building on this side of the street, and while it did look like an eyesore, it was the building’s size that made it seem worse than the rest of Selwood Avenue’s structures.

  None of the houses on the street were going to feature in home and garden magazines in the near future either. Much like her own house, this area was old. There was no better way of describing it. If these streets were mouths, they would be littered with rotting teeth with no gold replacements in sight. It was just that kind of neighborhood. There wasn’t a lot of money in Calston, and parts of it like this had been mostly forgotten by the bigger business end of town, and that suited her fine. She didn’t mind the run-down facades running along the streets. In fact it felt to her like the perfect place to disappear and live in peace, until recently.

  Jane walked about half a step in front of Sarah as they came upon the fence line, stepping around a pair of stray branches jutting out onto the footpath. The thinner, haggard end of one branch scraped across the arm of Sarah’s jacket but caused no lasting damage. Along the front of the property stood a corroded metal fence, maybe ten feet tall. Every second picket stood higher than its neighbor, repeating the pattern all the way along the front, and in a different neighborhood and different time, it would have been a majestic structure. It was almost like the front gates of mansions Sarah had only seen in movies. She noticed that much like the walls of the building, the paint had peeled from each metal spike a long time ago, leaving behind only flecks and thin strips of the once rich, cream colored paintwork.

  Even in the icy Calston winter, where the morning frost would linger until midday and stunt the growth of the grass beneath it, the front area of the building had still managed to cultivate healthy tufts of grass. It pushed its way through the gaps in the fence and onto the path in front of them. Through the fence, the overgrowth continued all the way to the front wall, the green and gold mixture of dead and live grass almost reaching the split, rotting timber ledges of the ground floor windows. Any garden that may have once brightened up the front of the building had long been consumed.

  They moved slowly along the fence line, not in the way a predator stalks its prey, but with each step masking a hesitation to follow the last. Sarah’s outstretched hand ran across the metal spikes of the fence, dislodging a layer of condensation and sending drops of water cascading down each piece of metal she touched. The water was freezing cold on her fingers, yet she barely felt it, her absent-minded tracking of the fence merely a distraction to quell the emptiness in her stomach.

  The metal spears of the fence came to an end, and Sarah’s hand was now touching brick work. Her hand fell back to her side, realizing they had reached the path leading straight to the front door. The brickwork had once been a rich cream color matching the metal fence, but it no longer held any brightness. Each brick had faded to a flat, light-brown color, and there were patches of moss and mold growing in spots all up and down the pillar. The other side of the pathway was the same, and looking at it closer, she realized the moss was growing in almost every piece of grout between the bricks, and spreading out from there.

  She wondered if anybody even owned the block of apartments. She couldn’t imagine owning or managing such a property and never having the inclination to hose down the brickwork to get rid of the mold. Even if you let the rest of the building degenerate to the point of condemnation, surely the front gate and walkway would be given some TLC to keep the curb appeal.

  The gate itself was no different to the fence in its materials, except it was in two parts that closed together. The top would have formed a perfect semi-circle arch if the gate closed neatly. As it was, the hinges had pulled away from the brickwork on the top-right side, leaving a chunk of brick missing and the right gate hanging loosely. Its lower extremity rested on the concrete path behind the other gate.

  The left gate had an ornate metal number ‘2’ on it, and the hanging, broken gate had a ‘9’. Until now, the concrete monstrosity in front of them had just been ‘the building’, and as Sarah cast her eye over the numbers, she preferred it that way. Now it was 29 Selwood Avenue, and took on the ominous nature of a haunted house in an old film.

  Nobody goes up to 29 Selwood Avenue.

  The women exchanged a nervous look, their eyebrows rising in unison to convey it was now or never, and Jane wrapped a cold hand around the frozen metal of the broken gate. The bottom corner scraped along the concrete to start with, leaving a bright white scratch mark behind it. Selwood Avenue stood still, with no movement around. Aside from the low hum of cars driving along adjacent streets, their little part of the world seemed silent until the scraping of the gate on concrete and the squealing of rusted hinges broke through. Jane sidled through the opening with Sarah trailing close behind.

  The way this building had been left to deteriorate so badly, Sarah thought it could be completely abandoned. Emptied out as though the inhabitants had fled in the night and never returned, but as she glanced at the ground floor windows, she could see one had curtains drawn and the opposite window’s curtains were wide open. She thought it strange the curtains would be open if nobody lived there. Not to mention the reason they were here. She knew someone (or something) dwelled on the second floor at least.

  “Let’s go. Too late to turn back–“ J
ane’s sentence was interrupted by her own startled scream as the metal gate clanged into its counterpart behind them. Sarah clutched for Jane’s arm as she heard the scream, partly frightened by the noise of the gate, partly by her friend’s outburst.

  The grotesque, black-grey building towered above them, the color of the walls darkening and lightening in a fluid, moving pattern as clouds shifted overhead and cast brief flashes of light which were quickly obscured again. Sarah was painfully aware they were a long way from anywhere with self-closing, hydraulic gates.

  Both women expelled long sighs of relief when they realized it was just the gate, their combined breath joining in the air in front of them before rising out of existence. Sarah took the lead now, stepping along the concrete path which was mostly obscured by over-hanging blades of grass. It was still easy enough to see the path took a straight line to a set of two steps, which they reached quickly.

  The double door at the top of the steps seemed awfully out of place against the dull backdrop of the once-painted concrete walls. It was framed in lengths of timber which had been white, and it took Sarah back to the day she left her parent’s home in Pokona for the last time. The paint and lacquer had curled and peeled away from this doorframe in the same way. The dark, empty hole she felt in her stomach right now gave her no confidence she wouldn’t vomit outside this doorway, the same way she had outside her parent’s door as a sixteen-year-old, but she took Jane by the hand, searching for a comfort to take those thoughts away.

  The door itself had a dark, wood-stained finish, almost like mahogany, and the gold plated doorknobs weren’t chipped or corroded in any way. The entrance wasn’t nearly as run-down as the rest of the building, and even the hinges were visible, such was the shine remaining on the steel. Sarah could picture them catching a sparkling gleam in the night, assuming the characteristically outdated glass light casings that adorned each side of the doorway actually worked. They looked like miniature vases not tall enough to securely hold a bouquet of flowers.