Sarah Benadine is Dead

Chapter IV, Part II

Somewhat ironically, in her later years when Shannon Malone would think of her first year at Briargate she would think, before anything else, of her first meeting of Allison Groves. She would never remember what exactly had been said, or what she'd taken as her first meal at the school, but she would remember, clear as a bell, a tall, blonde girl sitting down across the table from her, hazel eyes amplified behind a pair of rectangular glasses. She would wonder every so often if things would have gone differently if Allison had chosen a different place to sit, or if the way everything would turn out had already been written by fate or something like it, and it would have gone the same either way.

The beginning of the year banquet at Briargate was held on Labor Day, just a few days over a week after Faye's birthday. August had skid into September before anyone was truly ready to give up the summer, the way it is every year. That particular year there was something different lingering behind the fondness for warm weather and the dread of the coming snow-shoveling and the insidious villainy of black ice: the constant awareness that time was drifting on without an answer to what happened to Sarah. And with that came the fear, so strong and so real it was nearly palpable.

Shannon was, at the time, too young to have articulated any of this if she'd been asked, but she'd felt it all around her that August and that September, lingering in the air and hiding just out of sight and out of reach like a phantom, and she'd feared it would be a long, long time before it went away. If it ever did.

Una, Liam, and Shannon Malone piled into the family car under a dome of hazy orange sky. She was dressed in her Sunday best; her mother had done her hair, forcing the long black locks into tight braids. Her palms were sweaty. As her father pulled out of their driveway that Labor Day evening, 1955, she stared out the window but didn't see a single thing.

Una and Liam kept up a steady conversation through the drive. Their voices were a soft drone that soothed Shannon's touchy nerves. A sense of finality hung over her like a cloud: there was no turning back now from what she was about to begin, whatever that may be. There is perhaps a kind of intuition that's always alerting people when things are going to go south. Some listen and some don't. It seems stronger in children. They aren't yet hampered by more sensible reasoning. Adults think. Children feel.

Briargate was situated in the far northwest corner of Clearwater, enclosed by a ring of trees. There wasn't much in terms of grounds; the back of the school opened right up to The Forest. The Forest didn't have a true name, but the way the townspeople talked about it commanded the proper noun: The Forest on the edge of town, where some kids said you could find werewolves and the ghosts or the skeletons of their victims. Others thought that to be nonsense, but everyone knew to stay out of the place; a group of teenagers had gone out one night in June, 1950 to have a smoke and drink and hadn't reappeared until three days later, scratched up and scared out of their wits. They'd never said a word about what had happened those three days—the most widely accepted theory being they had simply gotten terribly lost—but parents cautioned their children to stay out of The Forest ever since.

The abandoned woodworking factory could also be found in The Forest, but even those with the loosest tongues didn't like to talk about that.

Shannon was hyperaware of all of this as her father drove on under the canopy of trees, following the slightly winding road that led to a gravelly parking lot. Briargate loomed out of the windshield, tall and vine-covered and ominous. Only a handful of other cars occupied the parking lot; most of the students had already been moved in throughout the past week. These were the vehicles of Clearwater residents, the parents inside chatting with faculty or taking care of last minute business, the children preparing for another (or perhaps, like Shannon, a first) year in this place. The stone building, aged but unyielding, beckoned.