Stories Of Horror

"Sadie"

"Watch out for Sadie."

"What?"

"Watch out for Sadie. She haunts the garage."

I searched the face of Carol, the woman who had been training me for the past week, waiting to see her wink or twitch the corners of her mouth into a mocking smile. Instead, I received a deadpan stare. Apparently this was serious business.

"I don't believe in ghosts." I said.

"Say what you want, but don't let the doors shut on you. We've had some nasty incidents in that area, and we don't fool around in there." She sighed, "Oh, never mind. It looks like I'll just have to come with you. I can't trust you to take this seriously."

Somewhat nonplussed, I followed Carol down the hall to the "garage." In reality, it was where the office supplies were kept, but it had been a garage once upon a time in the buildings past, so the name stuck. Or so Carol told me.

I had applied for the open sales position at the company about a month ago. Just around the time I had given up hope the H.R department had called me back saying that they wanted an interview. I knew absolutely nothing about the hair products they wanted me to sell, but I was desperate for any kind of occupation at that point. My first job out of college had been for a big name grocery chain, making sure that certain items were coded correctly, but when the grocery store needed to make cuts I was one of the first people to go.

Carol had been extremely friendly to me from the start. The company was housed in an old building with the previously mentioned garage attached. The staff was comprised largely of women, most of them beautiful and stylish, with a few male employees speckled here and there. Unfortunately, with the exception of Carol, many of the other employees seemed offended in some way by my casual appearance. In the past I had never been the type of girl to worry about brushing my hair or putting on lipstick. I did make an effort for my new line of work, and I pulled my hair into a neat ponytail to appeal to my peers. However, my lack of face paint or glitzy ornamentation deterred most from approaching me. Carol of course, being a free spirit of sorts as well as my trainer, did everything she could to raise my spirits. She batted her sooty eyelashes and pursed her lips in dismay when I told her of my fears of being permanently ostracized.

"Don't you think about those silly girls for a minute, hon. You are here for a reason and you can go places."

Well, she was confident about my potential, anyway. But she didn't take any nonsense. As she marched down the long hall in her startlingly pointed stilettos, I couldn't help but notice that she was glancing back at me and tossing her head in a way that meant something was irritating her.

"You don't have to come." I said.

"I don't want you to get hurt." Carol insisted.

We arrived at the turn that would take us to the garage. At the end of a shorter hallway was a set of heavy steel doors. They swung inward, revealing rather ordinary, if not dreary looking, cement flooring and walls. On the other side of the room was the door that would have opened to let cars or trucks in, and it seemed to have been bolted down permanently. Shelves lined the walls, and I took a quick mental inventory of where things were stored should I need to come back later. Meanwhile, Carol kicked a doorstop underneath the door to keep it from closing.

"That's important." She said, giving me a stern look. "The doors don't open from the inside, and there's no telling how long you would have to wait for someone to come and get you. As if that wasn't enough, the switch in here is faulty. Sometimes you can't get the lights to turn back on." I nodded, to prove that I was taking the ghost of Sadie and the task of closing the garage very seriously.