"It's your turn to make dinner!" Adelaide yelled through her brother's closed door. It was getting close to seven o'clock, and she was starving. She hadn't seen James since he got home from a weekend baseball game and gone straight to his room. He always took it personally when they lost, like the whole game was on him.
Adelaide understood, but she was hungry, so she didn't have enough patience to give him space.
"James!" She yelled for the fifth time, banging her fist on the door. A loud slam from the other side of the living room made her jump. The small bookcase next to their couch held years of books and abandoned textbooks, most of which were now scattered across the floor.
"What the hell." Adelaide muttered as she went over to inspect the books. The shelf didn't appear to have moved, but the books decided to jump off their shelf. Her confusion was interrupted by another loud slam behind her as James finally emerged from his room and shut the door behind him.
"Jeez, you didn't have to throw a fit," He chuckled, raising an eyebrow at the mess. Adelaide glared at him, bending down to pick up the scattered books. James didn't offer to help, but made his way to the kitchen to start cooking.
"Took you long enough. What were you doing?"
"Napping." James shrugged, pulling some bacon out of the fridge, and grabbing the carton of eggs. Adelaide laughed to herself, knowing she couldn't argue with him. They could both sleep through a rock concert. They had to get used to loud noises and yelling at all hours growing up in their house.
"What's for dinner?" Adelaide asked. She had finished cleaning up the books, and joined her brother in the kitchen. He'd started cooking the bacon on the stove, and the smell made her stomach growl loudly.
"I thought we'd have breakfast for dinner, like when we were kids," James explained, offering her one of his cheeky smiles. When he wasn't sleeping, James was usually smiling. Most of the girls at college would do anything for that smile, but Adelaide usually found his persistent optimism rather annoying.
"So," James started, as she patiently watched him flip bacon and whisk eggs together, "what are we doing for Halloween tonight?"
"Uh nothing," Adelaide laughed. James would be the one to try and make plans a few hours before. She had decided weeks ago she wouldn't be going out on Halloween. She was a couple months away from graduating, and she needed all the free time she could to focus on passing her classes.
"Oh come on, it's Halloween! We have to go out. Some of the guys are having a big party over at Tucker's house, it'll be fun!" James was practically begging, giving her puppy dog eyes and everything. Luckily, Adelaide grew up with him, and had grown resistant to his charms.
"No thanks kiddo, but feel free to have all the fun you want without me," She laughed. Most little brothers would die if they had to show up at a party with their older sister.
She and James had always had a tight bond. Ever since their mom had passed away, they'd had to depend on each other to pay for rent or groceries, or anything really. They'd gotten so much closer because of it.
"You're no fun..." James pouted as he popped some bread into the toaster. Adelaide shrugged, snatching a piece of bacon from the plate he'd just finished. He went to yell at her, but she'd already shoved the whole piece into her mouth.
Instead, he rolled his eyes and slid some scrambled eggs onto a plate for her. She grabbed the toast and put a very generous spoonful of strawberry jam on top. The exact breakfast she'd make for them on Saturday mornings in elementary school.
After they ate, James changed into his costume for the party. This year he decided to go as Harry Potter, which Adelaide thought was a boring costume. Though she did have to admit that with the robe on and an eyeliner lightning bolt on his forehead, he looked surprisingly similar to the wizard character. His dark hair was always a disheveled, curly mess, so he didn't have to do much to fit the part.
James left for the party shortly after that, leaving Adelaide alone in the apartment. Luckily, she welcomed the peace and quiet with open arms. She had a week of accounting lectures to catch up on, and James was usually her biggest distraction.
Adelaide pulled her hair into a bun on top of her head, doing her best to ignore the bangs that fell back down because they couldn't reach the top of her head. She turned her stereo up, grabbed her laptop, and got to work.
A couple hours into the night, a couple of trick or treaters had come and gone. She was onto her last lecture, and starting to feel sleepy. Adelaide decided she needed a break, and something to wake her up.
She made her way into the kitchen from her room, turning on every light as she went. Just having the lights on was usually enough to wake her up, and trick her brain into thinking it was daytime. Just in case, she decided to reheat some leftover coffee from that morning.
While the microwave whirred and her inspirational quote coffee cup spun in a circle, Adelaide hummed a song to herself. She couldn't hear her music playing from the kitchen, and it was eerily quiet in the apartment. But even over the sounds of the microwave and her humming, Adelaide heard sounds of someone talking.
"James? Are you home already?" She asked aloud to the empty room. She knew he wasn't home yet, but didn't have another explanation for the voices. Abandoning her coffee with twenty seconds left to go, Adelaide checked the front door. No trick-or-treaters, nobody outside, and the door was locked up tight. And still, the faint whispering she heard got louder.
Adelaide felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. The voices were distant, hushed, far away, and they were right in her ear, right behind her. She felt like it may have been coming from her room; maybe a song playing on her stereo. She made her way around the corner, inching closer to the open door at the end of the hallway.
The whispering grew louder and louder. When Adelaide reached the door and started to push it open further, she felt like the sound was vibrating inside her brain.
Beeeep.
Adelaide let out a shriek as the microwave alarm blared, and the cellphone in her pocket started to ring. Before she had a chance to pull out her phone, the lights in her apartment disappeared. The microwave stopped beeping, her music stopped on the stereo, and she was left in darkness.
"Shit," Adelaide mumbled, shaking her head to get out of her trance. Their power had gone out again. She was sure they had paid their bill this time, but it could have the apartment complex.
She hurried to the front door, stepping out onto their little porch. Their first floor apartment had a small, fenced in yard, which led to to the parking lot. Their neighbors on either side had lights on their patio, and didn't seem to have lost power. Adelaide had almost stepped off the porch to go talk to them when her phone rang again.
"Yeah?" She answered quickly when she picked up. The only one who ever called her was James, so she already knew who it was.
"Why didn't you pick up? Oh, whatever - look, can you come pick us up?" James asked in a hurried, slurred voice, "Dylan was supposed to be DD but he's sloshed."
Adelaide groaned internally. James' baseball friends were the worst.
"Yeah, of course. I'll be there in ten." Adelaide told him, already hurrying inside to grab a jacket and her keys. This wasn't the first time she'd had to pick James and his friends up, and she was sure it wouldn't be the last.
She couldn't do much about their missing power anyway, except hope that it would be back on by the time she got home. As for the mysterious voices...Adelaide chocked that up to exhaustion.
———————
As the weekend went on, and Adelaide became fully convinced that someone was playing a prank on her. That, or she was actually starting to lose it.
Her Saturday night spook was only the beginning of weird occurrences. She had the strangest dreams, full of weird symbols and distant screaming and never ending woods that she couldn't find a way out of. She woke up sweating so many times, she finally gave up trying to sleep.
She spent Sunday morning trying to study before her shift at the diner, but kept getting interrupted by more whispering noises, or the lights in her room turning off out of the blue. When Adelaide made it to the diner, she broke two coffee cups without even touching them. They flew away from her when she went to grab them like they were repelled. She went home very confused, and with a chunk missing from her paycheck.
Adelaide had made it through Monday morning without any frightening incidents, but she wasn't sure how long that would last. James was very theatrical, and he was a fan of spooky witches and all things Halloween. It must have been some elaborate prank he was pulling on her - that's the only thing that could explain it.
"You're late," Bill remarked without looking up from his computer when Adelaide rushed into his office.
"So sorry about that, I ran into traffic," She apologized with a forced smile, "Do you know where Corrine is? I didn't see her at her desk when I came in?"
Adelaide had the key she had dropped in the front pocket of her backpack, and she wanted to make sure Cora had it back. She hoped it wasn't to anything important that she would've needed over the weekend.
"She quit today. Called me this morning, and said it wasn't going to be a good fit." Bill replied flatly, as if it was an every day occurrence. Adelaide was a little shocked at the sudden change of plans - but not very shocked that Cora decided not to stick around. She didn't seem to be very accustomed to working on computers, and didn't seem very knowledgeable about accounting either.
"Oh okay, well she left her house key or something here the other day..." Adelaide explained, pulling the key out of her backpack to show Bill. He still hadn't looked up from his computer screen, but he glanced at the key in her hands.
"Just leave it on my desk, I'll mail it to her," Bill answered with a motion to the front of his desk. Adelaide set it down next to his nameplate, "By the way, you're going to need to stay late tonight. Richard messed up the filing again, so we're going to need to redo all of it before the client meeting tomorrow."
Adelaide didn't respond. She sent Bill a thumbs up, mentally cursing Richard. This wasn't the first time she'd had to stay late and do the busy work around the office, and it wasn't the first time it was the other intern's fault.
She spent the rest of the afternoon deep in the mess of Richard's filing mistakes. She discovered he had not only spelled a client's company name wrong on a week's worth of paperwork, but had mixed up two different client's data for the past week. She was tired, but glad that there hadn't been anymore flying coffee mugs or mysterious voices.
Adelaide called James and told him to eat without her as it started to get close to six. A couple hours later, she had finally finished sorting all the information and relabeling the data. She was one of the last ones in the office, and she didn't bother saying bye to the few overachievers who stayed late.
The downtown office was, unfortunately, one of the many without nearby parking. Adelaide had to park her car a couple blocks down, which seemed fine in the middle of the day. At ten o'clock at night, she regretted parking so far away. She gripped her car keys tight in her hand, ready to use it as a weapon if she had to.
James would have told her that she was overreacting, and Boston was perfectly safe. But she didn't share his positive view of the world. Adelaide knew more than she wanted to about bad things happening in the world, and she'd had to learn how to defend herself.
She'd made it within a block of her car when something out of the corner of her eye caught her attention. Even in the dim streetlights, she saw something glistening on the sidewalk. Adelaide glanced around to make sure no one was nearby before she bent down to pick it up.
"What the..."
The glistening object was the same key she'd just left in Bill's office. She thought it might just be a similar key, but when she flipped it over, the same elaborate "E" was inscribed in the metal. Adelaide was pretty positive Bill had left the key at the office so he could get it back to Core, but that didn't explain why it was left abandoned on the sidewalk.
Before she could think about it anymore, she heard a voice behind her. She hadn't heard any steps approach, but suddenly there was a middle aged man standing in front of her.
"What's that?"
She jumped at the sound of his voice, a deep and raspy, thick Italian accent. Adelaide stepped away instinctively, which she regretted immediately. The man had approached her from the street, so moving away from him placed her in the entrance to the alley.
"Oh, uh, nothing. Just dropped my keys." Adelaide lied, pulling her hand down and hiding the key behind her leg. She forced a smile, hoping this man was just a highly curious stranger with questionable social skills.
"Let me see the key." He demanded. It was clear he wasn't asking. He took a small step toward her, and she mirrored his actions, stepping away. He raised one of his thick eyebrows and smirked at her.
"Look, I don't want any trouble, I just-" Adelaide moved her hands up to show she was innocent. She didn't want to fight him, and she'd give up Cora's key if she had to. She didn't know her that well anyway.
Before she could offer the man the key, he moved like a snake, and snatched it out of her hand. Adelaide prepared herself for him to advance on her, but he moved back, staring at the newly acquired key. He ran a hand through his dark hair, and smiled triumphantly.
"There we go," He gave the key one more stare, before pocketing in his leather jacket, "Now I'm gonna need you to come with me."
"What? Are you crazy?" Adelaide asked in shock. She had her car keys in her other hand, and fumbled to get them in position to use them if she needed to, "Look I gave you the key okay, do you want my wallet? You can have it!"
"I don't care about your money," The man laughed, taking another step toward her. Adelaide tensed, "You're coming with me."
"The hell I am." She planted her feet, and readied her car keys, preparing for a fight. The man laughed again, and lazily waved his hand in the air. Her car keys went flying out of her hand, hitting the brick wall next to her and falling to the ground. Adelaide barely had a second to process how that was possible before the air was knocked out of her. With another wave of his hand, a force hit her square in the chest and sent her flying backwards. She landed on her back with a thud, and took in a couple sharp breaths.
"Don't make this harder than it needs to be. Just come with me, and no one has to get hurt," He took a couple steps toward her. Adelaide had felt ready to fight and defend herself, but now that she was truly defenseless, and he was towering over her, she was scared. Her mind flashed back to the countless nights that ended the same way, with her father standing over her instead of a stranger. He had the same look on his face then as the stranger did now - ready to attack without remorse.
"Stay away from me," Adelaide's blood boiled knowing that she had ended up in the same vulnerable position. The stranger sighed at her resistance, taking another step closer to her.
She closed her eyes, focused on her deep breaths and the adrenaline coursing through her. She wasn't going to back down this time, and let him win. She wasn't that cowardly little girl anymore. She was a fighter.
When Adelaide opened her eyes, determined to put up a fight, the stranger was nowhere to be seen. She scrambled off of the ground, looking in every direction to see where he had gone.
She found him ten feet away, laying unconscious on the sidewalk.
Adelaide didn't know how he got there, why he wanted the key, or why he wanted her to go with him. But she wasn't going to stick around and find out.