Sarah

by Polen, Teri

  . . . . .

  “I saw her last night, Finn. Sarah. She was sitting at the end of my bed and just about scared the crap out of me.” Palm trees swayed in the morning breeze and Finn and I had forgone the A/C, choosing to roll down the windows instead as he drove us to school.

  “Don’t take a swing at me or anything – remember, I’m driving and I literally hold your life in my hands right now, but could you have been dreaming? I mean, it’s possible, you know.”

  I wouldn’t lie and say that thought hadn’t crossed my mind this morning, but when I was drying off after my shower, I knew without a doubt that wasn’t the case. “I’m positive. Where Sarah touched my leg last night, she left a bruise in the shape of a handprint.”

  Finn was silent, squinting into the early morning sun. He was never quiet for this long.

  “Waiting.”

  “For?”

  “Your thoughts. I say a ghost was at the foot of my bed last night, left a bruise on my leg and you’ve got nothing to say about it? How about something like, ‘Geez, Cain, are you alright?’ You know, show a little concern, dude.”

  Finn laid his hand atop the console between us, palm up. “Well?” he asked, glancing over at me before shifting his gaze back to the road.

  “What?”

  “Don’t you want to hold my hand? You’re being kind of needy right now, and that’s the best I can do.”

  I shoved his hand back to his lap. Mom said sometimes Finn and I sounded like an old married couple and although I’d laughed it off, now I thought it might not be out of the realm of possibility.

  “Seriously, could you possibly have been dreaming and bruised your leg yourself? You know, squeezing it while dreaming, imagining it was her?” he asked.

  “I couldn’t have made the handprint myself. It’s too small to be my own. So what else you got?”

  Finn’s left arm was propped against the door as he ran his hand through his hair, making it stick up even more than it usually did.

  “Well?”

  “Maybe there’s not a logical explanation. We saw her on the video, you saw her last night, so we know she’s there. Did it hurt when she bruised you?”

  Getting out of the car in the school parking lot, I slung my backpack over my shoulder. “No. That’s another strange thing. When she touched me, it was feather light, but cold. Maybe I was so panicked I just didn’t notice. My heart can’t take being woken up like that every night, so we’ve got to try talking to her again. Either she goes all exorcist on me and spews green crap out of her mouth, or she tells me why she needs help. Maybe she wants me to contact her parents or something.”

  Finn pressed the remote button, locking the car behind us. “How could you even begin to have a conversation like that with her parents? There’s no way they’d believe you. With your concussion, they’d throw you back in the hospital for sure. Bet there’s an opening on the psych ward.”

  “Yeah, I’d come across as delusional,” I sighed, opening the door to the main hallway of the school. “Why don’t you come over this evening after practice and we’ll try to contact her again.”

  “I know what you’re thinking. If she goes all exorcist, you can push me in front of you, save yourself and run. But you know I’m all about new experiences. Maybe I’ll be able to cross helping a damsel ghost in distress off my bucket list.”

  . . . . .

  “Seriously, Cain, what kind of pervy fixation do you have for these football players? Or is it just a fetish for sweaty male athletes in general, because if that’s the case, it might explain some of the looks you’ve given me over the years.”

  Finn’s words sounded distant, almost like he was behind a door talking to me. Damn. It had happened again. I’d blacked out and wandered over to the football field, watching the team while they practiced. After a weekend with no lost time, I’d thought I was past this.

  “You did it again, didn’t you? You had no idea you were here until you heard me, right?”

  “Yeah,” I replied, rubbing my face. “Let’s just go home, alright?”

  “You’re sure you’re okay?” Finn asked, searching my face.

  I nodded. “Let’s go. And for the record, no, I don’t have a fetish for sweaty male athletes and even if I did, it wouldn’t be your backside I’d be staring at.”

  “You should be so lucky. Prime choice Grade A right here, sweetheart,” he said, slapping his behind.

  Chapter 15

  “So, just asking her to come out didn’t work last time. Do we need a Ouija board? Maybe a medium?”

  Googling ‘how to contact a ghost’ brought up over fifteen million results, but we still hadn’t agreed on the way to start. “How would I know, Finn? It’s not like I’ve done this before.”

  “Well, how about we start in the attic, you know, in the corner that was so cold, where you saw the blood. That seems kind of logical, right?”

  Finn might have said he lived for new experiences, but neither of us was too anxious to be the first up the stairway, and after losing two out of three rounds of rock, paper, scissors, that honor fell to me. When we realized we were tip-toeing instead of walking normally, our nervous laughter lightened the situation a little, although once we reached the top of the stairs, both of us stood there, peering into the cloaked, hidden corners of the attic, sweat rolling down our foreheads.

  “So, which corner is the cold one?”

  “The left side in the back,” I said, pointing past the stacks of dusty moving boxes.

  “Of course it would be in the back. In the darkest corner. The longest way from the door. The only way out of here if everything goes off the rails. Lead the way,” Finn said, releasing a heavy sigh.

  The single overhead bulb didn’t illuminate much so, armed with the additional flashlight app on our phones, we inched toward the far corner. Finn kept peeking around some of the boxes like he thought Sarah was going to jump out at him. Then again, maybe she would. How was I to know? She’d left bruises on my leg last night, so who’s to say she wouldn’t try to do something worse to us? I was really beginning to question my sanity and wondered what had made me think this was a good idea.

  I honestly didn’t know how we were going to do this. Just because I’d seen others communicate with ghosts on television didn’t mean I was qualified on my own. Last night’s attempts hadn’t gotten me anywhere.

  “Feels like the same temperature back here as it does over there – inferno level. Should we sit down? Chant or something?”

  “Again, Finn, why do you think I know the standard protocol for summoning a ghost?” I asked, now more irritated than nervous, wiping sweat from my face.

  “Well, she seems to like you, so maybe she’ll just show up since you’re here,” he snapped.

  “Or maybe you’ll scare her away. You tend to have that effect on women sometimes.”

  “Really.” Finn crossed his arms over his chest. “Well, I don’t see a trail of babes following you around, bro, so you’ve got no reason to talk. You still don’t have the cojones to ask Lindsey out.”

  “I don’t have to because she asked me out, and the only woman I’ve seen you with lately is my Mom. Wait – scratch that. Way too disturbing.”

  “At least I can….” Finn stopped abruptly, his eyes widening. “Cain, why can I see your breath when you talk?”

  And that’s when I felt it. While we’d been talking smack to each other, the air had turned bitter cold, like we were standing in a meat locker, not an attic with a temperature in the upper nineties.

  Sarah was here.

  Finn’s widened eyes threatened to pop out of his head as they flitted
around the attic, looking for her. I wasn’t any better, wiping my sweaty palms on my shorts, breathing heavily as if I’d just run up the stairs.

  “Sss…Sarah? Are you h-h-here?” I stuttered. I got no response, but the wintry air encasing us whipped around our legs, the scattered dust motes swirling into a miniature funnel cloud.

  “Try again,” Finn whispered.

  I licked my lips nervously. “I think you might need some help. Is that true? Can you answer us?”

  Maybe it was from the cold or because I was spooked, but I felt the darkness closing in, my legs quivered like jello, and I stumbled toward Finn. He caught my arm and draped it around his neck, tucked the phone in his shorts and wrapped his other arm around my waist, while I leaned heavily against him.

  “Cain, are you alright? Do we need to go back downstairs?”

  “No. No, I’m good. Just felt dizzy for a minute.”

  Finn’s gaze was fixed over my shoulder and I could see the short bursts of his breath in the air. I felt his arm tense. “She’s here,” he whispered, so softly I barely heard him.

  Still leaning on Finn, I turned slowly in the direction of his unwavering stare. Was it possible to both dread something, yet still be so curious you wanted it to happen? That’s the way I felt. Unsure of Sarah’s reaction – she’d already injured me once - I was still somewhat giddy at the thought of talking to her. The fanboy in me who loved horror movies was dying to see what would happen. Um, maybe that wasn’t the best word choice.

  Aside from being dead and not of this world, Sarah was kind of awesome. Her shape was still slightly unfocused and fuzzy, hair flickering between silvery white and a lighter brown color, and her eyes reflected the cold glint of steel. Remembering how she’d looked last night, I’d swear she seemed more solid, because I couldn’t see all the way through to the wall behind her.

  “Do you want to hurt us?” I asked softly. Her brow furrowed as she shook her head in a small movement. The room spun slightly and I must have leaned too far to one side, because I felt Finn pull me in closer.

  “Sarah, do you need help?” Finn asked, his voice huskier than normal.

  She slowly nodded in response.

  “Can you talk?” I asked. Until now, the way Sarah would sound, if she could talk, had never occurred to me. Would her voice even resemble a human’s? Maybe it would be gravelly, like her throat was full of dirt. Recalling how some of those possessed people in horror movies sounded, I thought it might be too much to handle if she sounded like any of them.

  “Yes, I can talk.” Normal - a little hushed, but completely normal.

  “Why are you here?” I asked. Although it looked like Finn and I were in no danger from Sarah, we kept our distance. Just in case.

  “I died in this house while it was being built.” Well, that answered one question. Sarah knew she was dead.

  “We figured it was something like that. They found traces of your blood here in the attic. Tell us what we can do to help you, because I gotta say, you’ve really been creeping me out, appearing in my bedroom at night, opening the attic door, freaking out my cat.”

  “What do you need from us, Sarah?” Finn asked. “Because we don’t know what to say right now. I mean, did you not go to the light? Do you want us to get a message to your parents? Have unfinished business?”

  The glow surrounding her glimmered brighter. “I guess you could say I have some unfinished business. I was killed here and need your help to make my murderers pay for what they did to me.”

  Chapter 16

  Finding murderers and making them pay? Not the answer we’d expected. After the initial shock, when I found my voice again, I asked, “Um, how could we do that, Sarah? How could we prove to the police you were murdered?”

  “Do you know who did it? Do you remember what happened?” Finn asked.

  Sarah surged in our direction, closing the distance between us. “Of course I know who did it! I remember every detail about the night I died!” Sarah snapped, her face a mask of fury, hair snaking in different directions.

  Finn and I staggered backwards, with him still supporting me, both of us unnerved at the sudden change in her demeanor. If someone told me right now Sarah was possessed, I’d have no trouble believing them.

  Whatever Sarah saw in our faces made her back off and take the anger level down a couple of notches, gradually floating back to her original position. Putting some distance between us again made me think her outburst wasn’t meant to intimidate us, only her emotions getting out of control. She’d been murdered here – I’d be harboring some anger too. But my body was poised to run at a moment’s notice if it happened again.

  “Can you tell us what happened?” I asked. “Do you even want to talk about it?”

  Sarah looked toward the window, an expression of sadness washing over her. “I’ll tell you what I can. My energy is fading, so I don’t know how much longer I can stay. I wasn’t the popular type in high school, guys weren’t falling over themselves to ask me out, but if you needed a good grade, you wanted to be my lab partner in chemistry or copy my calculus homework. And I was okay with that. Grades were my way out of here and I’d already been offered scholarships to some good colleges, away from my overly strict parents and those shallow people at school who never thought about life beyond those walls. A campus where there were more people like me. Maybe I was naïve to think that way, but it had to be better than high school.”

  Finn and I looked each other and nodded in silent agreement. Neither of us remembered much about Sarah, but she was right about the cliques at school. Like you needed to belong to one of them to validate your existence, and I could understand her wanting to get away from here and start over.

  “Everything changed in early March this year. Three guys, the type who’d never looked twice in my direction, started talking to me in class, complimenting me on my clothes, even asking me to their parties. At first, I ignored them. Why would they pay any attention to me and why would I care if they did?

  “I kept waiting for them to tell me what they really wanted, like getting me to do their homework or copy off my tests. But they never asked for anything, and I stupidly started to believe maybe I was enough, that they really liked me. They convinced me to go to a party at a house under construction and said a lot of people would be there, promising I’d have fun if I went.

  “I let myself get excited, thinking maybe I’d misjudged these guys and would really get to experience high school before graduation. But when we got here that night, it was only the four of us, and they said the others were out picking up beer and snacks and would be here soon.”

  The expression on Finn’s face told me we were thinking the same thing. No one else had been coming for a party. Feeling stronger now, I was able to stand on my own and move away from Finn.

  “You’re probably wondering how I could have been so trusting, why I believed them, and I’ve asked myself that a million times. But the part of me that was so excited guys might actually find me attractive ignored the rational part of me that knew better.”

  “Did they rape you?” Finn asked softly. I dreaded hearing the answer to that question, hoping so much it would be no. Sarah looked down before answering and I was afraid I already knew the answer.

  “No, they didn’t rape me, but that might have been part of their plan. I have to stop now, I’m getting weaker.”

  While listening intently to her, I hadn’t noticed Sarah was fading and could now easily see through her to the wall behind. “Wait! Sarah, before you go, can you tell us who did this to you?”

  Sarah spat out their identities as if she’d bitten into rotten food, and the echo of their names was all that was left of Sarah as she dissolved. “Jacob H
eadley, Nathan Nivens, and Liam Brooks.” And then she was gone.

  We stared at each other, speechless, stunned at Sarah’s revelation. Finn and I knew all three of these guys - not well, but we definitely knew who they were. They were in our senior class.

  “Football players,” Finn stated, his voice flat.

  . . . . .

  “Come on, Cain, you don’t see a correlation at all?” Finn asked, eyebrows raised in disbelief.

  We were at our favorite pizza place, a half-eaten, extra-large pepperoni, mushroom, and black olive pizza on the table between us, discussing what Sarah had told us. Not much comes between teenage boys and their appetites. “Okay, maybe, but I don’t see how it would be possible.”

  “I’ve found you at the football field twice now, staring at the players, and you have no memory of why or how you got there. You were dazed and confused while leering at them during lunch in the cafeteria. You’re a borderline stalker, my friend,” he said, taking a large bite of pizza, leaving a string of cheese dangling from his mouth.

  “So you’re saying I somehow subconsciously knew these guys murdered Sarah and that’s why I’ve been so fixated on them?”

  Finn swallowed, then slurped up the dangling cheese. “Hang on, dude. We don’t know for sure they murdered her. Maybe they were just responsible for getting her there and then something else happened to her. We have to wait to hear the rest of her story.”

  Rubbing my face, I nodded. “You’re right. This is serious and I shouldn’t be making assumptions before I know everything. So, what are you trying to say about me being a stalker?”

  Reaching for the pizza, Finn grabbed his fifth piece. “Try to stay with me on this and keep the brain cells still remaining open to ideas, alright? What if Sarah was somehow able to take over your body and mind? Control your actions so you don’t remember what happened when she was inside your head.”