Below The Dark

Chapter 3: Sadie

Sadie rubbed her eyes as she lifted herself from bed. Her hand fumbled beside her pillow to silence her alarm, and she stretched as she got up. She checked the time. Past nine. Throwing the covers aside, she leapt up from bed and walked out into the small living room. As usual, her roommate Lani had woken up far earlier than her, and now she was sitting by the balcony, typing furiously in her computer.

“There’s breakfast in the kitchen,” Lani said without looking up. “And some black coffee. And we’re out of sugar.”

“I’ll go get some later,” Sadie yawned; she had stayed awake well past midnight, watching random videos on YouTube. And something had woken her up in the middle of the night, but she couldn’t remember what it was. A cry maybe. Or a laughter. She couldn’t place it.

Sadie Pine had been a lifelong resident of Wyke. After her parents divorced, her father moved out of the town to Bangor, and her mother learnt to grow more resilient. Maybe that was why Sadie rarely had had much freedom. And even lesser ambition. When the time came for her to choose her career, she just went with the flow. She got herself admitted into Wyke Community College, even though her mother had wanted her to try her luck somewhere better, and she had no other future plans for her career. She had just decided to do an English major and get the hell out of this town. Anywhere else would be better.

And soon after that, she told her mother that she wanted to live alone. Independent. Her mother was reluctant about that, too, of course, but she stayed adamant, and finally she was able to rent this meagre apartment in Sunrise Towers.

“Sunrise my foot,” she had said when she had first seen the deplorable condition of the building.

Anyway, she shared the apartment and the expenses with her childhood friend Lani Kalahi. Lani had far too much ambition than Sadie, but her student loans couldn’t afford any of the big colleges, and perhaps that was why she had chosen to stay back in Wyke and go to college here. Like Sadie, she was also doing an English major, but because she wanted to. She had mapped out the rest of her life; finish college and get a job as a writer in one of the most top-notch publishing companies in the States.

Sadie sometimes envied Lani for her organisation and her determination. Sadie’s life had mostly gone through turmoil; her parents’ court battle which lasted more than a year, moving out of Wyke to her mother’s brother’s house in the nearby town and then coming back when her mother and uncle had a falling apart, and finally watching her mother flit between jobs all the time. She had somehow never learnt to be stable; she just wasn’t able to know what she actually wanted.

With still a month to go before college, Sadie had gotten herself a job in the local pharmacist’s. Lani, too, had gotten a part-time gig, but as a freelance writer in Wyke’s only magazine. Her job was to sit at home and write articles and short stories, something she absolutely loved to do, and just mail them over whenever she finished. Sadie, however, had to go to work every day, and deal with a bunch of stupid customers and her irritating employer.

So it was an hour later that she tied her vivid red hair in a ponytail, patted Lani hard on the back and startled her, and went out. Tossing her keys in her hands, she went straight downstairs, and around the building to the back. There was a strict policy that all vehicles belonging to residents were to remain in the basement garage. The first time she had tried parking in the space near the gates, a security guard had come hurrying to her and shouted at her for no reason.

She made the steady descent down the sloping path of the basement. She didn’t like this place at all. It was always so gloomy and dark. Sometimes the drivers and sweepers of the building would sit in the basement and play cards, but today it was empty. A pair of tube lights were the only sources of light in the vast basement, apart from the light coming in through the entrance.

Her bike was at the far corner of the basement, standing between two cars – an SUV and a sedan. She whistled to herself as she snaked through the narrow spaces between the parked cars and made her way to her own vehicle. She tripped once on the pedal of a bicycle, and cursed as she moved it away.

But even though she was calm, at the back of her mind she knew that whistling loudly was just an excuse for her to break the silence in the basement. There was something terribly creepy about this place. Not the basement only, but the entire building. It was so terribly old. The walls hadn’t been painted in years, and the paint flaked off in many places. On one of the walls in the basement someone had made an ugly graffiti. There were cobwebs in every corner, and broken furniture and scraps of metal piled here and there.

There was a steady drip-drip sound coming from somewhere. A leaking pipe, perhaps. Sadie looked at the elevator shaft which descended down here. In the darkness, it looked ominous. There was a car parked right in front of it, so it wouldn’t do any good anyway. She dodged a puddle of petrol as she walked.

For a moment she was startled out of her wits as a cat suddenly meowed somewhere near her and bounded away. “Whoa,” she said to herself, and closed her eyes as she waited for her rapid heartbeat to slow down. Every time she came down here into the basement, she was always on her toes. She just didn’t know why. What was there to be scared of here in the basement, except for a few spiders and rats, maybe?

Sadie reached her bike and swung herself around it. Not bothering to put on a helmet, she started the engine and was about to drive away when form the corner of her eye she saw a shadow on the other side of the SUV. She could her pulse increasing again as she looked there. Nothing. She shook her head and drove out of the basement.

She didn’t see the woman sitting in the sedan, staring at her.