With the round door handle in my hand, I turned it slowly and prepared for the worst. Holding my breath while my heart thumped like crazy, I opened the door wide enough for me to look up and down the darkened hallway.
No one stood waiting to kill me. Not even a presence tickled my senses.
The window at the end of the hallway was closed, filling the corridor with an unbearable, stuffy heat. A sliver of moonlight illuminated the walls and floor, even the top of the staircase. Shadows from the trees outside imprinted on the walls, and some of the branches tapped against the glass.
I released a breath, ready to head back inside and allow both my heart and mind to calm down. My hands were still mildly shaky and this wasn’t helping. Turning, I slid on something and gasped.
Looking down, I found a yellow envelope lying flat on the floor in front of the door. My name was scrawled in neat capital letters on the front.
Who the hell would leave me an anonymous envelope? There were no stamps. A hand-delivered letter from a shadow couldn’t be good news. Not when this incident had almost given me a heart attack. I don’t like shadows. I’ve had too many bad experiences with them.
My fingertips itched a little. I wanted to grab the envelope and rip it open to see what was inside. Maybe I’d finally won the lottery and could stop this whole thing if I wanted to. Except, I hadn’t played the lottery in years and I could never give up this ghost thing.
With that thought in my head, I bent down and picked up the envelope. I held it in my hand for a few minutes, turning it over, trying to guess what the contents were. A flat envelope filled with a letter? I hoped no one wanted to sue me for something that wasn’t even my fault. These days you just never knew. Get someone’s relative out of a property, and the family of the deceased could argue the ghost’s right to stay there, without being forced to vacate the premises.
Still, these ghosts weren’t exiled. There were homes for them to haunt, which was where they usually ended up because some relatives weren’t willing to accept a ghostly presence in their own home. They would kick up a big fuss, waste the court’s time, and all because they preferred not to cohabit with any spook—family or not.
The living can be so ungrateful sometimes. Sharing a home with a ghost isn’t so bad. Trust me, I know all about it. I’ve been living with my grandfather’s spirit for years.
Okay, I was stalling, but with good reason. Good news is never left behind anonymously. Besides, the envelope was too thin to contain legal papers.
I shut the door and headed back to my desk.
Sitting down in my uncomfortable chair, I stared at the envelope after throwing it on the desk. No return address or any indication of who it could be from. No clues.
Thinking about the possibilities was worse than actually ripping it open.
I picked it up with slightly trembling fingers, lifted the folded lip, and turned it upside down. A small square of white paper fell out.
All it said was Midnight @ 669 Wallace Street, in the same neat scrawl as the outside.
By the time I got home, it was past nine and my head was throbbing. I’d sat behind my desk in the office for over an hour, just staring at the piece of paper, wondering what the address meant for so long my eyes started to close. I wouldn’t be surprised if I’d slipped in and out of sleep. I wasn’t sure.
I do remember looking up the address on the computer.
There were a few Wallace Streets listed, but one happened to be in the suburb I lived in. It couldn’t be a coincidence, and I knew exactly where it was.
Serene Hills is one of the larger suburbs in Sydney, with a diverse mix of people from different economic backgrounds. It’s also a place that’s lost a lot of its shine and is way past its heyday. The north tip is separated by a motorway, but you can still see the city skyline from Wallace Street. If the rubble and chain-link fences around the abandoned perimeter don’t get in the way.
Wallace Street is a ghost town.
It’s in an area I was well acquainted with—the abandoned part of town. A place where the local council still hadn’t bothered to knock down old buildings and start new constructions on the vast land. I was surprised another apartment block hadn’t sprung up yet. It had become fashionable and quite common to knock down old places, keep a section of the old “vintage” façade, and build a multitude of Lego-style apartment blocks behind or around it. The urban sprawl was like an infectious disease.
Developers didn’t seem interested in building houses anymore, which was a shame. Though probably not as profitable. Why make money on selling one house when you could sell nine or twelve apartments? It’s all about business. I guess I wasn’t that business savvy. I knew enough to keep my own little operation afloat.
Wallace Street and the surrounding blocks are mostly old-style stores running down the length of a few streets. All of them have small apartments on top.
The old street used to thrive in the ’50s and ’60s when corner shops and takeaway stores were all the rage, but have been forgotten in the age of the large shopping centers. Today it’s easier to drive to a shopping complex with plenty of parking spaces. Everything’s in the one place. Convenient.
Spooks were very attracted to the area, and if development eventually happened, most buyers wouldn’t be thrilled to discover they’d be sharing a brand new place with a very old spook. Well, except for the freaks who went out of their way to find ghosts, there were plenty of those around.
Whoever had dropped off the address wanted me amongst those ghosts and isolation, but why? This wasn’t how customers usually went about acquiring our help. Besides, I was starting to get a little annoyed at people trying to jump the queue. The pile of files on my desk hadn’t gone down since this morning.
Okay, so Mrs. Prevette’s concerns were legit and the fee paid hefty, but the others needed attention too.
There was no way some mysterious person, who didn’t even have the decency to meet me in person, was getting my urgent attention. No way.
Wallace Street was a ten-minute drive from my house, but they’d have to wait for their turn. I live in West Serene Hills, on the rise.
“Oh, you’re finally home.”
I dropped the keys into a flat vase and left my handbag beside it. I’d purchased an antique-looking narrow desk to sit just inside the front door. I copied it straight out of the movies—its only purpose being to act as a dumping ground. It’s nifty, especially at this time of night, as soon as I walk in through the front door.
“Yep, I’m home. Have you been waiting for me?” I turned to greet my grandfather.
He shrugged. “Thought I’d come up for a bit of a chat, but you weren’t home yet. So I waited and waited. I was starting to get worried about you, Sierra.”
“It’s okay, Grandpa, I can take care of myself. You know I’m a big girl now, right?” I said with a smile.
“And you know I’ll never stop worrying about you.”
“Of course you won’t.” I’ll always be six years old to Grandpa.
He shares this strangely constructed house with me. Well, I actually inherited it from him since I spent most of my life living here anyway. It’s the same place we shared with my grandfather while my parents were still together. A three-story house with the middle level at the same height with the street, the bottom level below, built against a hillside that drops dramatically at the back, and my bedroom one level up.
Grandpa stays in one of the three bedrooms on the bottom level. Where it’s always dark and cool because the sun doesn’t get in much. The shrubs and trees outside the windows help keep in the gloom, which make it ideal for him. Ghosts sometimes like to behave a little cliché, that whole “stay in the shadows” stuff. He just liked to stay out of my way, though he never got in it. I loved having him around.
The other two rooms on the bottom level never get used because he doesn’t need to sleep. He’s just there. But I didn’t redecorate his room and left it the way it was when he was still alive
. I even left all of his belongings. Some might think it plain creepy, I just miss him a lot and wish I’d been able to do the same sort of thing for Grandma, but I was too young to secure any of the belongings my mother got rid of.
“Is everything okay?” he asked, taking a step forward. He was good at ghostly tricks—appeared as material as a human, wearing the clothes I last remember him wearing. Not the ones he was buried in, of course.
“Yeah, I guess.”
“That doesn’t sound very convincing.”
“Do you know much about demons, Grandpa?”
He shook his head. “Lucky for me, I behaved well enough during my corporeal life and didn’t have to find out firsthand. Why do you ask?”
“It’s nothing, never mind.” I dismissed the subject as I walked past him and entered the kitchen. It was best to avoid eye contact or he would see right through me. Not because of his otherworldly spiritual talents, but because he knows me so well.
There was no need to worry him.
“Sierra, you’ve never lied to me before, why start now?” Grandpa appeared in front of me, manifesting out of thin air with a frown on his face and both arms crossed in front of his thin chest.
I frowned. “Don’t do that freaky spook stuff. I have to put up with more than enough cheek from ghosts out there, without adding you to the mix.”
“I’m sorry, but it’s not like you to walk away like this.”
I walked around him and popped my head into the fridge to survey the contents. My stomach was swimming with coffee, but not much else. I pulled out a small bottle of water, a tub of butter and a container with sliced ham.
“Sierra?”
I sighed. “I know, and I’m the one who should be sorry. It’s just been a really weird day.”
“Honey, with your job, when isn’t it weird?”
I laughed, laying out the ham and water on the counter before reaching for two slices of sunflower-seed grain bread and smothering them with butter. “I encountered a demon today. Well, at least that’s what I think it was.”
“Why were you called in to get rid of a demon? I thought the Church handled those?” He sat on one of the kitchen chairs.
I nodded as I spread a few ham slices onto the bread. “They do, and a priest was there. It’s just that… Well, the priest wasn’t the one who got rid of it.”
“You did?” Grandpa raised a gray eyebrow.
Sometimes it’s freaky how he seems so alive. It’s easy to forget he’s a ghost. He’s too natural, has grasped how to use what’s around him in the material world to perfection. If more spirits adapted as well as him, I’d find myself out of a job.
“I sure did,” I said, closing up the sandwich. “Have you ever heard of demons behaving like poltergeists, or at least trying to pass themselves off as one?”
He shook his head.
I took the sandwich in one hand and the bottle of water in the other, heading for the kitchen table. I sat across from him, eyes scanning his reaction. Yep, he was worried. “Then maybe this wasn’t a real demon, though it sure acted like one. There were hot spots, and it reacted badly to religious icons. I don’t know. I mean, it’s not like I know much about demons anyway. Oh, who knows, maybe it was a ghost and that’s why I was able to defeat it.”
“You had to fight it?”
I took a bite before nodding. “Well, not so much fight.”
“Don’t speak with your mouth full.” He frowned for a second. “What about the Spook Catcher Council—won’t they have a problem with you dealing with something demonic?”
“I don’t know. If they don’t find out, I guess they can’t do anything. Besides, there’s no Council to take care of demons. Wouldn’t that be their prob?”
“Sierra, I’m curious. How did you defeat it?” Grandpa’s eyes narrowed, a habit he’d taken into the next life from his human existence.
“Well.” I paused to take a sip of water. My mouth was dry from all the shakiness and speculation. The memory of what happened with the demon still made me nervous and uneasy. But at least I wasn’t shaking, and the sandwich was helping. I was starved! “I’m not sure, but I think it had something to do with an outer body experience that somehow led me to some other patch.”
“What do you mean by some other patch?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. One second I was in the client’s kitchen and the next I was in a dark place I’d never seen before.”
He rubbed his eyes.
“What?”
“I guess it was bound to happen.”
Now I was definitely confused. “What was bound to happen?”
“You, your talent, it was just a matter of time before it evolved into something more.”
“Hold on, we don’t even know if I was responsible for getting us there. It could’ve been the demonic thing.”
Grandpa shook his head firmly. “No, I believe it was you.”
“Is there something you’re not telling me?”
“It’s just”—he sighed and averted his eyes—“your grandmother used to talk about a place filled with darkness. She said if her life or that of others were threatened badly enough, she could force herself into a black room with whatever was causing the threat. It was a way of isolating the problem. She called it a defense mechanism against evil.”
“Really? Why didn’t you mention this before?” I asked. How could my grandmother have access to someplace so strange? She wasn’t a witch. Then again, how did I get there?
“Because I didn’t know you could do it too.”
“Great. Is there anything else I should know?”
“Maybe just one other thing…”
I raised an eyebrow before taking another quick bite of my sandwich. “Yes?”
“I feel something odd stirring on this side, Sierra.”
I swallowed the lump inside my throat. Suddenly, the sandwich was starting to taste like cardboard. I stalled by taking a quick drink of water. “Odd how?”
“I don’t know. It feels like there may be a split somewhere in the fibers between your world and mine.”
Chapter Four
“It feels like there may be a split somewhere in the fibers between your world and mine.” Grandpa’s words kept echoing inside my head. I’d been involved in a toss-and-turn marathon since jumping into bed, with the same words waking me up whenever my mind edged anywhere near sleep.
“Damn!” I kicked off the sheet.
If what my grandfather claimed was really happening, a whole lot of trouble could be heading our way. A split could result in a dangerous opening between the demonic patch and ours. It could tear apart the system the Spook Catcher Council established for the spooks willing to break the rules. If there was a crack anywhere within the fibers keeping each dimension on its own course, the tear could eventually get so wide that all those pissed-off ghosts—the ones trapped in the ghostly patch for all eternity—could drift back in.
I didn’t know if they’d be hell-bent on revenge or not, but wasn’t keen to find out. Either way, they’d spell trouble.
I turned onto my stomach, punched the pillow a few times and threw my head back onto it. Everything about my bed felt uncomfortable tonight. I couldn’t find a comfy position and the sheets were sticking to my clammy body.
I’d gotten no sleep. There were too many things crowding my mind. Things I needed to ignore for at least eight hours. Wasn’t it enough that I could see ghosts and was forced to deal with them at all times of the day and night? Was I also destined to be cursed with insomnia because my brain refused to shut down for the night?
I peered at the alarm clock sitting on the bedside table. It was eleven.
Sleep wasn’t going to come my way anytime soon. The sooner I acknowledged it, the better my sanity would hold. So I jumped out of bed and padded to the adjoining bathroom attached to the back of my bedroom. Maybe a shower would help ease the burden.
Ten minutes later as I stepped into a pair of faded jeans and a light sweater, I felt
as refreshed as if I were facing a new morning. After brushing my hair and tying the shoelaces of my sneakers, I felt as if I could survive a new day on minimal sleep. I made my way out of my bedroom, taking the stairs as lightly as I could, trying to keep the squeaking of my sneakers to a minimum. No point in stirring Grandpa from whatever he was doing at the moment.
He claimed to sleep sometimes, but I knew better. What he did was more like a fading routine. He’d disappear and couldn’t be reached for a certain amount of time.
I hoped he was doing that now.
The house was dark and extremely quiet. But then, he never made much noise anyway.
I continued my light steps into the hall leading to the front door, where I pocketed my small wallet and grabbed the keys. I didn’t need a handbag where I was going. It would probably be a better idea to grab a gun or some sort of weapon, but I don’t like violence, or own anything I could use against some squatter or drug addict hiding out in the abandoned blocks I was about to visit.
After slipping out the front door successfully, I took a deep breath of the humid night air then strolled over to my car.
Wallace Street, here I come.
The small flashlight wasn’t helping, so I shoved it into my back pocket. I’d become so used to the dark, it was better to trust my own eyesight anyway. My beacon of a car—a 1972 Ford ZF Fairlane—was parked on the outskirts of the deserted blocks. It was safer there, even if it would be hard to ignore. The last thing I needed to add to everything else was my car disappearing while I made my way down Wallace Street.
Yeah, I was in the abandoned part of town, heading towards the address I’d tried to convince myself wouldn’t rouse my curiosity. At least, not until the other clients who’d used the proper channels were filed away as done. But lack of sleep was pushing me forward.
The narrow street stunk of urine and feces—both of the human, animal and vermin variety. The thought of rats the size of dogs entered my mind. A shiver crawled down my spine. Anything was possible in the abandoned cluster of streets forgotten by the city and quickly declining. The bright lights of Sydney glimmered in the distance. Not too far to lose sight of, but enough to have forgotten about this dark part of town.
A Patch of Darkness Page 4
