Peripheral Vision: A Supernatural Thriller(3)
The music seemed to grow louder as her mother’s blue eyes glimmered in the sunlight that beamed through the front windshield… and then the world flickered, like a film running off its track. Everything slowed down. Everything but the screech, the scream, and the bang. Then it was all grey.
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As a child, Sarah had always felt different. It wasn't just one thing that she could put her finger on, but rather a general feeling that engulfed her whole being at times. An “extra sensitive” was how she would eventually come to think of herself, but as a little girl, she just thought of it as the feeling. It was strange, but sometimes, she would dream about events before they happened. Like the time Tommy Moore-he lived just three houses down-broke his arm on the monkey bars at Holly Glen Park. Sarah had dreamt about it the night before, but she didn’t realize it at the time. That was because back then, her dreams weren’t linear, they were just snapshots, really. All she saw in her dream, was a piece of rusty metal, a small hand and she heard a child crying. She didn’t know it was Tommy, nor did she realize it was on the playground.
Of course, after it happened, it made perfect sense. The monkey bars at the playground were old and rusty. As Tommy swung from one bar to another, he cut his hand on the rusty bar, which caused him to reflexively let go mid-air and sent him plummeting to the ground. He laid on the ground sobbing, his arm twisted beneath him in an unnatural position. It turned out to be a compound fracture that required hours of surgery to fix the nerve damage, and Sarah could’ve stopped it. Or could she? She carried guilt about that incident for months after.
Other times, Sarah would have waking dreams and visions. During some of these occurrences, there was usually a familiar, tingly presence of déjà vu, like she'd seen or heard something before, and then nothing more. But there were moments, like the car accident, where there was just no mistaking the feeling. It always came from the pit of her very being, and it always preceded something awful.
After the car accident, it only got worse. The dreams became more defined, and more lucid. And in waking, she would be struck with immobilizing feelings of shame and depression. The residual effects of seeing, but not being able to change anything, lead her foster mother to get little Sarah in to see a child psychiatrist, Dr. Brown.
Dr. Brown was a very tall man, especially to little Sarah. He seemed God-like to the little girl, with his booming voice, vast knowledge and stature. When he spoke, they listened. It was Dr. Brown, that got little Sarah started on the pills. That was twenty-five years ago.
“What's in a dream?” Dr. Brown had asked her as a child.
Sarah wondered that as well. He had explained to her, that at times throughout history, dreams had been known to provide guidance or even outright answers. But what if there were more questions than answers? And why did some tend to recur and others fade to grey, even before her feet hit the cold floor in the morning? Sarah didn’t know, her young mind couldn’t process what was happening to her. And as an adult, some twenty-five years later, she was starting to believe that she never would.
Gate 17
Sarah’s eyes suddenly flicked open. It took a minute or two for the focus to adjust to its new settings. Her surroundings slowly defined themselves, and an outline began to take shape. It's the feeling again, Sarah thought. I know this place. The dark outlines of the shapes around her soon filled in on themselves and rendered her new location. She looked down at her bare feet, they were small again, just like when she was a little girl. Her small toes were covered with dirt. Just above her ankles was the hem of her blue nightgown. It was always the blue nightgown for some reason.
Sarah shivered as a cool breeze moved across her skin. She was standing on an old gravel driveway, surrounded on both sides by a row of aging cedar trees, and leading up a small hill to a small white house with a porch swing. The smell of cedar reminded her of Christmas morning. Her father, who had always tried to be different than the neighbors, was a cedar tree man, and not a pine man.
The sun had already set, but the lone streetlamp at the end of the gravel driveway, was enough to show Sarah the way. The edges of this world were somewhat blurred. If she tried to look past the row of cedars on her left, or past the streetlamp behind her, the images just seemed to fade and distort into grey until she was forced to look away, for fear she'd go crazy. Boundaries. She thought, as she began to carefully walk up the driveway. She stepped softly, to avoid hurting her bare feet on the pointed rocks that were scattered in with the smaller gravel. As she reached closer to the top of the hill, the driveway curved slightly to the right and ended near a dilapidated garage structure that leaned to the left. Sarah's attention, however, was more focused towards the front porch of the house, and the porch swing.
“Yes,” she spoke out loud, “I've been here before.”
She shivered again at the sound of her voice. The voice of a child. And then the music started in. Somewhere inside the house was an old piano, and now that piano welcomed Sarah to the porch. The song was familiar, but a name is a difficult thing at times. She looked back down the driveway. The streetlamp now seemed miles away, and the trees seemed to reach up into the night with no end, no top. A creak came from the porch swing, and her eyes followed. The wooden swing was suspended from the porch ceiling by two rusted chains. It had started to sway in the light breeze, and the chains were now squeaking as it moved back and forth. Maybe it wasn't the breeze after all. As Sarah's small feet carried her towards the swing, she realized that it wasn't empty anymore. Now seated on the swing and intermittently pushing off the wooden porch floor with her feet, was a beautiful young woman, with shoulder length, dark brown hair. She faced out towards the driveway and seemed not to notice Sarah.