Hunted by Darkness

The Smell of a Past Life

Sarah

Light was bursting through the window when she woke up. She was roasting under the covers, but she was reluctant to push them off her. Searching blindly for her phone under the covers, her hand closed around it somewhere under her.

Almost eleven.

Part of her didn’t want to get up. She had nothing to do, nowhere to go. She had internet access on her phone now, but she what could she look at? With a sigh, she emerged from under the blanket and got up after all.

Not wanting to go down in yesterday’s clothes, she got changed first.

It was a relief to hear noise coming from the kitchen. Her mother was sitting at the table, her finger playing with the corner of a magazine’s page.

‘Finally! I thought you were going to sleep all day!’

‘I came in late last night, sorry.’

‘That’s ok. I’m sure Mary and Alex took good care of you,’ she smiled. ‘Sit, I’ll make you something to eat. Tea?’

‘Sure.’

Sarah watched her mother busy in the kitchen while she sat and thoughtlessly turned the pages of the same magazine. Her phone vibrated with a text message from Mary.

‘Hope you’re ok. Alex told me what happened. He’s feeling really guilty.’

‘What did he tell you happened?’

What could he possibly have said? Last she had seen of him, he had dropped to the floor like a puppet without a master. Did he even know what did happen? If so, she wanted to hear it.

A few minutes passed without an answer. Her mother set a plate with eggs, bacon and toast in front of her, with a steaming cup of tea to wash it all down. She had forgotten how hungry she was. By the time the next message arrived, she was already half-way through her breakfast.

‘Well… he said he was a bit too… forceful and he scared you or something. I don’t know. Look, he’s liked you forever, and it was hard for him to ask you out in the first place. Then the accident… anyway. He’s been waiting for a long time. He said some guy interfered and knocked him out and then you weren’t there anymore.’

She was pretty sure that’s not how it happened. That big guy hadn’t had a chance to lift a hand when Alex punched him and then he fell, hard by the looks of it. The bigger they are…

What Mary was saying didn’t make that much sense. Then again, if that black thing hurt Alex, maybe that’s how he remembered it.

But even if she accepted that, she wasn’t so sure about his explanation for the other thing. Was she really to believe that this was just a mistake? An excess of passion? It made her think of those horrible men in books who swore they would never to it again after beating their wives and always failed to keep their promise.

And that wasn’t even the reason why she wasn’t sure about giving him another chance. That kiss had been anything but romantic. It hadn’t even been passionate, just… yucky. It wasn’t what she had expected after reading all those books and watching all those movies. I mean, sure Old Sarah must have had her fair share of kisses, but since she didn’t remember it, she could only go by what fiction told her. She wasn’t delusional; she didn’t expect it to lift her flying into the air. No, none of that. But she thought there would be warmth, comfort, the excitement of being so close, feeling each others body. Alex’s embrace had been cold and wet, more like being trapped by a vice than being hugged by a lover.

The bottom line was she didn’t know if she liked him. Old Sarah might have, but she didn’t know him, and he still behaved as if she hadn’t lost her memory, as if all he had to do was wait for everything to go back to normal, whatever ‘normal’ was.

‘I don’t know,’ she texted back after a few minutes ‘I need a few days to think about it.’

‘Right, I’ll let him know to give you some space. He won’t be happy, though.’

‘Well, sorry my amnesia is such an inconvenience to him!’ she typed. Her thumb hovered over the send button, but she thought better of it and deleted the message.

‘You never gave me Lucy’s number after all. Could I get it now please?’ she sent instead.

Then nothing. Sarah lifted her head from her phone to find her mother staring at her.

‘Sorry, I shouldn’t be on my phone… I mean, is there a rule?’

‘Well, it’s ok. I know you’re getting reacquainted with your friends. I won’t tell anybody,’ she winked at her.

Sarah made her mouth smile. Her tea had become lukewarm, borderline undrinkable. She gulped it down as her mother asked questions about her shopping experience, all while keeping an eye on her now silent phone. Mary had been fast enough with her replies when it came to her brother, but now, not so much. Maybe she was looking for it, she thought, pushing it all out of her head.

After that, she spent the day at home, helping her mother with the washing, and preparing dinner. She read for a while, and they even watched a movie. Dinner came and went, and nothing. She obviously would have to take matters in her own hands.

After dinner, she decided to delve into the depth of her old life and see if she could find Lucy’s number written somewhere. Maybe Old Sarah kept an address book of some description. Samson wagged his tail next to her as she stood frozen in front of the room’s door. Her mum was out, and she had been able to let the dog in the house for the first time since she came back. Patting his head, she felt safe entering the space with him by her side.

She hadn’t gone in since that first day. What was in there terrified her. It felt as if all her memories were trapped in there, as if at her fingertips, and yet unreachable. That bedroom’s content was a reminder, vivid in colour and texture, of her inability to recall her past, and she’d like to forget about that.

The door opened, disturbing the layer of dust, flakes floating in the air, shinning under the few rays of sun coming through the curtains. She opened the curtains and the window to ventilate the room; it was stagnant in there.

She made her way around the space. The desk was covered in books and papers, as if it had been used and left half-way through a task. They looked like school books. Her mother had told her she went to university, but she hadn’t wanted to know even what she was studying, and she couldn’t remember why. Maybe it felt like cheating.

By the look of it, English or maybe Literature. She closed them before throwing them on the bed. She had no interest in that right now. The notebooks, however, could be useful. Sarah leafed through the pages, trying to see if she would have written down the number somewhere. There were pages and pages of lined paper covered in a scribble that she couldn’t even make out. She sat down and reached for a pen, trying to copy one of the lines. Her writing was nothing like the one on the page.

Ever since she woke up, she had treated her old self as a different person.

Old Sarah.

Yet, she was still surprised to find that their writing was completely different. New Sarah might be more different from her old self than she ever thought.

All the notebooks and pieces of paper she had checked were now on a neat pile. No number on them, though. Samson lied on the floor with the sound of a balloon deflating.

‘Yeah, that was exhausting for me too,’ she sighed.

There was no computer or laptop there. Actually, there was no computer in the whole house. Wasn’t that strange in that day and age? Sure, many people out there didn’t have one but, if she went to university, didn’t she need one? In any case, there was no hope to find any backups of her old phone on it, since there wasn’t one.

She checked inside books that were lying around, hoping for a piece of paper to fall out of them, but still nothing. Finally, out of ideas, she grabbed the nearest textbook and browsed its pages. Since she couldn’t find the number, she might as well take a look at these; it might be interesting.

She had no memory of studying any of this. Textual analysis and dramatic irony sounded line Chinese to her, yet common sense dictated she must have known these things once. It was strange; she hadn’t forgotten math or how to read and write, so why would she forget about this? She turned pages, looking at the pictures and tables, wondering if she could learn it all again, wondering if she even still had an interest in it.

As she came to a picture of a man in a soldier’s uniform, she found something scribbled in pencil on the edge. It was a bit worn out, but she could make out what it said, and she couldn’t believe her luck. It read the words ‘Lucy new,’ followed by a mobile number.

‘Yes!’ she exclaimed with a jump.

Samson lifted his head an inch off the floor, looked at her, then went back to sleep.

*********

Gabriel

Gabriel sat in the small waiting room. Nobody ever went there, so there was no need for any more than three chairs. It was all for show. He knew it, they knew it. Magazines were spread over a small table with pictures of women dressed in jackets and jumper with big shoulder pads. Somebody must come and clean the dust off them, he thought, because nobody would have touched them in years.

‘Miss Vogel will see you now,’ came the receptionist’s voice, a young girl around his age that smiled at him as he walked down the hall.

The door at the end of the corridor was ajar, bright light seeping out.

Inside, a large white desk took most of the middle of the room. The wall behind it was made of glass, the sun shining through it like a thousand spotlights. A woman sat at the desk, her face in shadows. The sun traced a wavy halo over her blond hair. He noticed her hands, artfully resting in front of her, her long fingers intertwined.

He stood, half-blind, in front of the woman while her hand dived into a drawer, searching for something. With a push of her fingers, the windows darkened, and he was able to see again.

‘Sorry about that. Take a seat, please.’

He did as he was told, shaky. His hands wrapped around the metallic armrests, trying to become steady.

The woman’s face was visible now. She was not a stranger to him. They had met before, yet every time he saw her, there was something about her that took his breath away. It might be the deep green of her eyes or the curve of her neck, or even the sheer glow of her skin. She was youthful to the eye but old to the spirit. She was the kind of woman nobody could ever get to know, even if they sat with her for a hundred years. There was something permanently obscured about her, something visible enough to taunt the spectator, but always out of reach.

‘How can I help you today?’

Gabriel hadn’t been able to say a word yet. He felt drowsy with the scent of jasmine, and there was a familiar itching at his fingertips.

Once. He had touched her skin once, and that’s what he had felt. It was a tingling sensation, as if he was about to touch an electrical current.

He took a deep breath and pushed those images away. It always happened when he was in her presence. He never gave it a second thought while he was away, but in there, only a couple of yards away from her, the images popped into his mind over and over again. He couldn’t stop wondering if she was thinking about it too.

Still, that was far from the reason he had come here in the first place.

‘I need help.’

‘I believe we needed your help too.’

He refrained from grimacing. He knew it would come to this. After all, they wouldn’t move a finger in any direction without something in return, something that suited them. He didn’t say anything, though, preferring to listen for now. Her voice was deep, almost masculine, thick as honey.

‘Was it a few months ago already? I think it was,’ she left the desk behind, her athletic figure embraced by the white fabric of her two-piece suit. ‘We found you, and we brought you here. We asked you to bring her back, didn’t we?’

She was facing the window now, her back turned to him, her hands clasped behind her back. He nodded, knowing she couldn’t see him and sure she would know anyway.

‘And yet here we are. You are sitting there, empty-handed, and we are still far from solving this little problem of ours.’

‘It’s not that easy, Elsebeth.’

Within the time it took for him to blink, the woman was standing right next to him, her mouth only a centimetre away from his ear, her breath burning his skin. His whole body felt tight.

‘It would be easier’ it was like syrup trickling over his skin, ‘if you hadn’t developed feelings for the girl, wouldn’t it?’

‘I told you, we did as you asked, but nothing happened other than her getting hurt,’ he shuffled uncomfortably in his chair.

‘Yes, that was unfortunate. It was certainly not what we had hoped for,’ she walked back around her desk, sitting delicately on her chair. Every movement exacerbated the shapes of her body, the hollow of her small back, the line of her collarbone. ‘So what is the issue?’

‘She has also lost her memory.’

The woman raised a delicate eyebrow.

‘I can’t… she doesn’t remember me. She doesn’t remember anything before what happened.’

Elsebeth Vogel leaned back in her chair, her arms resting loosely over her lap.

‘That’s certainly inconvenient, but I don’t see what  you expect us to do about that.’

Gabriel was starting to lose his patience. He had followed her orders; he had been a good little soldier. More than a soldier, but that was before he met Sarah. It would be flattering to think that Elsebeth was this difficult out of jealousy, but he doubted she was that involved with her own emotions to be led by such passions. No, she had an ulterior plan. The playing around, this aura she was purposefully irradiating, it was all a game. He’d rather she came out with it already.

‘You have power; surely, there is something you can do! Somebody in the organisation, maybe?’

‘In all honesty, there is probably more you can do to trigger her memory than we can.’

He was appalled to find the reverberation of truth in her voice. Anger boiled in his veins, as much at her as at himself. He bit down, raging, his eyes lost on the marble floor, trying to find an answer.

‘I see,’ she smirked, ‘you haven’t approached her at all, have you? What have you been doing all this time?’

A deep redness crept up his collar, his face burning.

‘Lurking like the little dog you are, if I should hazard a guess,’ she laughed. ‘What is it that scares you?’

The issue with Elsebeth was that she could hide the sun with a finger, but he couldn’t hide a single flame on a candle, even if he hid it in a box. She could read people like a book, and he was a well-known volume to her.

‘It’s more than just fear, isn’t it?’ she stood up once more, approaching him without any tricks. Her presence, standing so close to him, commanded him to stand up. ‘What is it?’

She looked up at him, the sharp green of her eyes diving into his murky grey.

His knees felt weak. As he stood into her light, his eyes hooked to hers, he couldn’t imagine not being there, yet his mind was full of another. How could he believe his feelings for Sarah to be so strong, yet be unable to resist this woman? A few inches away from her body, the scent of her skin intensified. Her perfume, the smell of her hair, a distant hint of sweetness, a reminder of being closer to her. He could hear her breathing.

His body might be responding to her power, but his mind, the small part of it that remained unclouded, was still holding onto Sarah.

‘What if…’ his voice faltered, ‘what if she doesn’t love me again?’

Her mouth ignored his concern and found his with the wisdom of an old lover. Her hands climbed up his chest, her fingers creeping up his neck. He wanted to pull her against him, except that he was forgetting something.

What had he come here for, now? What did he want that had made him come back to this place where he had sworn he would never step into again? Not to be r***d like this, indeed.

His hands closed around her arms and pulled her away from him.

‘Enough!’ his voice was rough.

She walked away, laughing, before sitting back down, while he tried to do the same with as much dignity as he possibly could, his body wound tight.

‘Will you help me or not?’

‘There is only one thing I can do, I suppose, but you’ll probably find it underwhelming.’

‘What is it?’

‘First, you need to promise me you will bring the girl back. We need her.’

‘I told you…’

‘The fact that you didn’t notice anything happening doesn’t mean nothing happened.’

He gritted his teeth.

‘It’s a take it or leave it, I am afraid.’

‘Promise she’ll be safe.’

Elsebeth rolled her eyes.

‘Of course.’

He watched her, trying to read her. He knew her too, after all. Surely he could read her the way she read him. Except he didn’t have her sort of power. There was no telling what was behind those green eyes.

‘What is it you can do?’

She leaned over her desk, a spark in her eye.

‘I can give you a referral.’