Saving Sarah

Maureen hated Halloween. Although ten minutes remained of the boutique's operating hours, she trudged to the front entrance door. She flipped the sign over to read ‘Closed.’ After locking the door, she stared, for a moment. Central Avenue, the town's main street, buzzed with activity, but Maureen expected the diner and the costume shop to be the only businesses left open, soon, like she did for the past five years since she'd returned to Little Field. She was about to turn away when a group of monsters caught her eye.

There were four of them: a vampire, a witch in a black dress and a black pointed hat, and two ghosts. Maureen recognized Matthew Stephens as the bloodsucker, Sarah Foster as the witch, and suspected it was Harry and Hillary, The Grayson Twins, hidden beneath the white sheets. She wondered how fun the teens might find masking if she told them things like ghosts, goblins, and ghouls really existed, and she knew they were real because she saw them.

Maureen especially hated when the spooky holiday fell on a weekend. Knowing they didn't have school the day after the Day of the Dead was celebrated, some of the teenagers would put on their costumes and come downtown to Central Avenue to aggravate and play tricks on the adults and to scare the younger kids. As Maureen stood staring, she saw Matthew, Sarah, and the ghosts were well on their way of creating a bit of chaos.

With her disdain for Halloween growing stronger by the second, Maureen turned away. When she swung around, she came face to face with a spirit.

The phenomenon occurring for twenty-five of the thirty-two years Maureen had been on earth. By Christmas of the same year she lost her grandmother, she was seeing spirits, orbs, angels, fairies, and other indescribable entities. But even if she did not possess the ability to see and hear the dead, and to spy other-world creatures, she usually detected their accompanying scents. The spirit before her, now, smelled like roses, and caused memories of Maureen's Grandma Lilly, her mother's mom, to inch to the forefront of her mind. Still, her dislike of the holiday outweighed her memories. Go away, she shouted in her mind at the ghost.

She stepped forward. She paused. She remembered the sensation filled her the last time she walked through a ghost. Not caring to feel as if red ants were burrowing beneath her skin, Maureen stepped aside. She strolled past the spirit.

She had taken three steps when the boutique swirl.

Maureen gripped her temples and shut her eyes. After the floor steadied beneath her feet, she opened her eyes and dropped her hands. She swung around, the sudden movement threatening to disorient her. But the spirit was gone.

Maureen turned back. This time, flashes of images stopped her.

Snippets of places and faces zoomed through Maureen's mind. Most of the images were blurred and blended into each other, but she struggled to make out what she saw.

The visions ended as suddenly as they began.

The episode left Maureen unsteady and with a headache. She lumbered to the small office at the rear of the boutique. She plopped down into her chair behind her desk. Who was the spirit and why had it visited her? Maureen sought to make sense of the brief images lingering in her mind. The clearest flashes were those of a young girl's face, a grave yard, and a coffin.

Maureen recognized the girl's face.

Although she was unable to fit the pieces of the puzzle together just yet, Maureen did suspect the visions meant something possibly happen to this girl.

Lacking more significant clues, Maureen might unfortunately be forced to wait until whatever harm awaited the teen had occurred before she could really help.

With a heavy heart, Maureen finished locking up the boutique. She headed home.

Her twenty minute drive led her past homes whose porches were decorated with skeletons, cobwebs, bats, and plastic Jack-O-Lanterns glowed orange.

The drive ended at a two-story Victorian home near the woods on the outskirts of town. Maureen parked her sedan. She sighed. A sense of loneliness usually flowed through her, leaving the pit of her stomach hollow when she returned home, and she usually just sat behind her steering wheel to let the loneliness lift.

Maureen coping mechanism failed her, this evening, which didn't surprise Maureen. The loneliness was also usually its heaviest during holidays, even Halloween. She thought of how much her grandmother used to love decorating their home for Halloween and Christmas. She missed her grandmother the most during holidays.

Inside her home, Maureen devised a simple potion of her own to get rid of her headache and to quell her loneliness. She took two Tylenol pills with water, and then made her a cup of tea.

Not expecting any trick-or-treaters or other guests, Maureen stretched across her couch. Soon, she fell asleep.

Almost three hours later, she bolted awake at the sound of the grandfather clock. Despite being awakened suddenly, she could tell the clock's deafening chimes were too loud and distorted.

The clock fell silent when she sat up. Creaking along the floorboards replaced the silence. A shiver tingled across her back of Maureen's neck, and trickled down her spine. Rather than sparking fear, the shiver left her with a strong sense of uneasiness.

She rose from the sofa. As she was turning to face the room's doorway, furtive movement caught her eye.

The crackling halted. Maureen crept to where she'd seen a dark shadow edge past the doorway, but found the hallway between the foyer and the staircase empty. She turned back toward the living room, and the spirit from the boutique greeted her.

"I should've known," Maureen mumbled. More reasons why she disliked Halloween: the veil separating the dead from the living was at its thinnest during Samhain, and the doorway between the planes inched opened a little wider. Go away!

On the trail of her words, images burst through her mind.

The pictures spilled into her head, tripping and tumbling into each other.

A voice floated beneath the images. Broken words repeated like a chant. Needs help! Trapped! Grandma, help!

The words bled into each other; the images collided.

Maureen grew disoriented, and reached out for the nearby wall. Seconds after she steadied herself against the wall, the visions and the words ended. The spirit lingered. Maureen let her mind absorb the images. A cemetery, a shattered pumpkin, and a house loomed in her thoughts. The spirit disappeared.

If she hadn't recognized Sarah's face, earlier, or didn't recognize the house, Maureen would be getting ready for bed. Instead, she grabbed her coat, her cell phone, and her keys. She rushed to her car. What propelled her to action was she suspicion the dead visitor was Sarah Foster's grandmother. She didn't recognize the woman because she was probably born after the elderly woman died. Or, perhaps, she was too young to remember when the woman passed.

Maureen drove to the farthest corner of Little Field. When she arrived at Eternity's Gates, the town's cemetery, she steered her car onto the bone yard's old road. The sedan bounced slightly as its tires rolled along the unpaved roadway, crunching pebbles and catching small potholes, here and there.

Maureen parked about fifteen feet from the house.

Allowed to remain standing for the past two and a half decades, the house where she had spent the first seven years of her life was nothing more than a testament to decay and neglect, now. Attempts to keep the house boarded up apparently failed; some of the plywood was pried off the downstairs windows Maureen saw from where she sat. In its heyday, the two-story house was painted a pleasing yellow on the outside and surrounded by an open field instead of chipped headstones and overgrown burial plots.

Maureen pulled herself from her thoughts, and opened her driver's side door. Despite the full moon casting bright silver light, she grabbed the flashlight from the glove compartment before leaving the car. Her loafers crunched the pebbles, this time, as she trudged toward the house.

The closer she got, the harder her heart pumped. She halted when she stood about five feet from the dilapidated house. Her breath came in short bursts as memories resurfaced. She remembered being taken away after her grandmother's death, having no other relatives to take care of her. She'd lost her parents in a car accident when she was five, two years before she lost her grandmother. Soon after being placed into Foster Care, The Walters took Maureen in and ended up adopting her. Twenty five years later, she'd returned to Little Field as Maureen Walters. No one seemed to remember who she really was.

The sound of the kids running outside the house, taunting her grandmother Halloween night so long ago filled her head. When the sight of her grandmother clutching her chest and collapsing invaded her mind, Maureen shut her eyes.

After a few seconds, the memories slinked back into the corners of her mind. She opened her eyes, and continued on her way.

The memories faded, but her thoughts kept churning. As a young girl, she had been too young to understand, but now she knew why her grandmother lived on the edge of town. It was because of the same sixth sense ability she, herself, now possessed. The town must have treated her grandmother like an outcast, all those years ago. No wonder she hated going into town, and rarely did so.

Maureen's own fears began to make more sense, also. The sight of the old house caused her to panic, but brought clarity, as well. She more fully understood why she'd chosen to live a mostly secluded life, and why she'd never told anyone about her psychic abilities. And why she hadn't revealed her true identity when she returned to Little Field.

The people of Little Field had ridiculed and turned their backs on her grandmother. So why should I use my own ability to their advantage? Maureen mused.

She turned to leave.

Something shook the overgrown grass was once a part of the house's lawn.

Maureen paused. She swung the flashlight toward the movement. A black cat darted out from in between five feet tall blades of grass.

Startled, Maureen lost her footing and tripped. Her forehead smacked against a large rock as she landed hard on the ground.

She lay still, waiting for the ground and the sky to unwind themselves from each other; for the world to stop twirling. When the spinning subsided, she eased herself up. Standing again caused her to stagger. She waited, once more, surveying her injury as her vertigo waned. After touching the painful spot on her forehead, she lowered her hand. She peered at her stained fingertips. The blood seemed to shimmer beneath the illumination of the flashlight.

Unsure, at first, about whether or not she should go on, Maureen wiped her fingers on her jeans, and took a deep breath. She forced her legs to move forward. Despite her injury, she couldn't abandon Sarah. There was a strong possibility the girl was in the house and in greater need of help.

Maureen ignored the thin line of blood trickling down the side of her face, and lumbered toward the house.

The cement porch was the only part of the house had weathered the past years well. Maureen's careful steps led her through the rotted front door. Eerie noises filled the house as nighttime breeze blew through busted windowpanes and holes in the walls. The house creaked and squeaked. Candles and other Halloween decorations and props told Maureen the kids seemed to use the place as a haunted house. Her adoptive parents had salvaged family photographs and donated the furniture after her grandmother's death.

More careful steps led Maureen into the former dining room.

Her heart plummeted to her stomach at the sight of the coffin.

Caked with dried mud, the casket appeared to have been there for a while. A floor beam from above had collapsed and fallen diagonally across the coffin, its top end leaning against the nearby wall and its bottom end resting on the floor. The bottom end had also fallen onto a plastic pumpkin, shattering the thing into pieces.

Thanks to the thin astral veil Maureen had despised earlier, she detected Sarah was growing unconscious inside the coffin. She pulled out her cell phone to dialed 911.

Static filled her phone. Maureen screamed. She needed help. "Please, hurry," she yelled through the crackling. She hung up and tried calling again, but each of her other four calls ended up like her first call. Besides praying her calls got through, somehow, Maureen tried stretching her mind to summon future knowledge.

Not one who usually sought to know future happenings as she was normally approached by spirits and ghosts, Maureen only resulted in causing her head to hurt more. She scolded herself for even trying. She'd never been able to predict when something was going to happen to herself or anyone else she was close to in an emotional sense. Still, there had been a strange stirring in her egged her on to try, this time.

When blue and red flashers reflected against the rotting house walls, she had her answer--Sarah was rescued.

Maureen tried explaining what happened, but the fire and rescue team swept past her, all but ignoring her.

Soon, a reporter and camera crew from the local newscast arrived. Not approached by them, either, Maureen rushed to her car.

On the way, a crushing sensation filled her head. She halted and gripped the sides of her head. She fainted as a cloak of velvety darkness oozed down onto her.

When she woke in the hospital, she knew without a doubt. Still, she needed to see with her own eyes Sarah was safe, now. She slipped from beneath the gurney's white sheet and made her way to Sarah's room.

Valerie Foster, Sarah's mother, caught Maureen lingering outside Sarah's doorway, and led Maureen into the girl's room.

Inside the room, the heart monitor's incessant beeping faded to the back of Maureen's mind. The sight of the spirit visited her and warned her of Sarah's plight awed her more. The elderly woman stood along the side of the bed opposite where Sarah's father stood. She gazed up and smiled at Maureen.

Although all signs pointed to a full recovery for Sarah, Maureen figured a few other kids, including Matthew and The Grayson Twins, would end up in trouble for trespassing and leaving Sarah when she got trapped. Maureen also thought maybe, just maybe, she could get used to this, nonetheless. Her pit of her stomach told her and her second sight end up helping others a lot from now on, although she needed assisting from another side.

"Ready?" Valerie questioned rhetorically, as a tunnel of white light burst opened along the wall in the hospital room.

Maureen hesitated, watching as a shadowy figure walked forward within the light. When the figure revealed itself as her grandmother, Maureen stepped forward. She placed her hand into her grandmother's hand. After Sarah's mother and grandmother, spirits who already crossed over years ago, dissipated into orbs of white lights shot away through the ceiling, Maureen followed her grandmother into the light.

Written For & Placed 2nd in The Halloween Tales Contest, October 2004.