Story Series | Chapter Two

Chapter Two | Now

After a dozen windswept trips to the van and back, all of Audrey’s belongings are piled in the foyer. She stands in the sea of boxes for a moment, trying to decide what she’s more eager to do with her few remaining sunlit hours: explore Montmartre, or get to work on the house. 

But as soon as she unrolls one ornately patterned rug and positions it by the fireplace, she’s hooked. She’s been waiting months for this — for a project to consume, or, more truthfully, to consume her. Soon, the cardboard tundra comprising most of the main floor has decreased noticeably and the space already looks loved and lived-in. Plopping herself into her squashy armchair by the fireplace, Aurey scans what’s left of the boxes at her feet, then glances warily at the spiral staircase. She needs a bed frame. A mattress. 

“That’ll be interesting,” she mutters, forking a hand exasperatedly into her tangled hair, briefly imagining herself trying and failing to drag furniture up the twisting, narrow stairs. She shudders. That is a Later Problem. 

For now, it’s 8:00, and through the windows, Montmartre is awash in an irresistible fluorescent pink. Feeling she has thoroughly earned a bottle of merlot — and some dinner, she’s ravenous — Audrey decides to take a break and traipse out for some supplies and some people-watching. Beaming around at today’s progress, she swings her purse over her shoulder and makes for the door. But when her hand touches the door knob, she pauses. 

The hairs on the back of her neck prickle and goosebumps swell all across her exposed skin. She feels strange. Almost feverish. She leans against the door frame and swallows the sudden, senseless anxiety bubbling up inside her like bile. It’s fine. She’s fine. She’s hungover, hungry and tired. That’s it. She won’t let her unhealthy subconscious sabotage this first day of her fresh start. 

Outside, the wind has disappeared, making room for a warm and opulent evening. Shaking off the chills lingering on her skin from the drafty house, Audrey marches up Rue des Saules beneath a jewel-bright sky, breathing in perfumed air, which instantly remedies her momentary malady. 

In minutes, she’s in the dancing heart of Montmartre. All the bars and restaurants are aglow and abuzz with drunken chitchat in a dozen different languages. She recognizes her new neighbourhood, has explored it before, but that was years ago. So she dives in, keeping one eye on her food options and the other on the rest: vendors selling handmade crafts and apothecary items, about to close shop for the night; tourists ogling in every direction; shop owners hauling in their wares for the night; couples necking in alleyways or cuddling on curbs while licking vanilla creme glacee.

She takes her time winding through the thinning, sunset-washed packs of pedestrians and after a ten-minute wander she finds herself in a quaint market shop, where she buys as many bottles of wine and snacks as she can carry before stepping back out into the sticky midsummer air. Only in Paris does humidity feel like a libido enhancer — as though some ancient, cheeky goddess has parked herself atop the basilica to sprinkle her homemade sex-essence over the herds of heart-eyed wanderers. Audrey smiles to herself and fills her lungs with it, hoping the warmth permeates the house while she’s out. 

Somewhere over the din of the people and shops and the sound of her own shoes clacking against the cobblestones, Audrey can hear live jazz. She nearly groans with yearning. That, wherever it is, will have to wait until tomorrow night — she’s eager to get back to work on the house — but it wouldn’t hurt to sniff out the source. Soon, she’s walking up to an old cafe she remembers visiting with her father at least once. The patio is packed with happy diners, all listening to a band of young musicians playing amongst them, apparently having as good a time as its audience who are dancing around the tables or otherwise clapping along with the beat. 

Audrey allows herself to eavesdrop the rest of this song. She inches her way to the patio’s edge, where other passers-by have paused their meanderings to watch and listen, their faces split in impressed smiles, their phones up, recording. Audrey sways slightly with the rhythm and watches the musicians each working their unique magic: a guitarist, bassist, drummer and pianist. All, of course, hot. 

The song finishes and Audrey shifts her paper grocery bag so she can join the spirited claps and whoots from the crowd. Even some of the patrons and employees of neighbouring restaurants make noise. Then she turns to leave, taking one last glance at the band as they take a breather between songs, and her eyes land on the pianist, who’s nodding thoughtfully as the guitarist leans in to tell him something, apparently instructing him. The pianist takes a sip of what looks like whiskey and nods again, but his eyes suddenly flick to meet Audrey’s. Her heart skips like she’s fifteen years old, but she holds his gaze and tilts her head in curiosity as he smiles slightly, lifting his glass in a distant “cheers.” She laughs and quickly pulls one of her bottles from the paper bag and raises it in response, and the pianist laughs too, making his guitarist friend peer behind him, but Audrey is already turning away. There’ll be plenty of time for that later, she tells herself, though there’s a giddy spring in her step as she disappears into the swarm of foot traffic. 

***

It feels good to be home. 

But it’ll feel even better with some music. 

She pours some wine and builds a small snack plate. Noshing on fresh baguette, parmesan and marinated olives, she surveys her cardboard boxes to find her dad’s ancient gramophone. Gingerly, she sets it up next to the chair by the fireplace and, if only to be oxymoronic about the thing, she places a ’90s R&B album under the needle and tinkers with it until the volume is as high as it can go. 

Standing back to admire the already half-complete living room she’s arranged, Audrey shivers. It’s still cold in here. She finds the vintage thermostat and cranks the heat, knowing it’s not a very summer thing to do, but she’s over the chilliness and she’s sure the climate in this place just needs a little something-something to get back to a normal, human-friendly temperature. Besides, her hydro expenses are no object. 

The stench appears a few minutes later. It’s like burnt hair. 

Her mouth full of olives, Audrey winces, trying to determine the source, then realizes it’s probably the ancient, long-unused furnace. 

“Fuck,” she mutters, gulping down more wine. The smell doesn’t even mask the mouldy essence she noticed permeating the house earlier; they just complement each other like some abhorrent eau de parfum, some cologne called My House Used to Be Abandoned. She snickers at her own internal joke, then quickly frowns again at the insistent stench. She’d open the windows to let in the June air but she’s not sure the wind has fully disappeared and she doesn’t want another shutter-slamming fiasco. But she has an idea. She locates her box of candles and clusters them along the fireplace mantel. She lights all fifteen of them, willing them to work their magic. After half an hour, the medley seems to have dissolved most of the reek, or at least masked it. Or maybe she’s just telling herself that. Either way, her goosebumps are disappearing, and she’s feeling more at ease every minute. 

The next hours blow by as Audrey continues filling rooms with her idiosyncratic treasures and depositing paint cans and rolls of wallpaper into each room, having neurotically predetermined the colours and patterns for almost every corner of the house. When the moonlight and the itching in her eyes tell her it’s time to wind down, she replaces the D’Angelo record with some Frank Sinatra and, with great effort, drags her bedtime essentials upstairs to slap together yet another makeshift bed, unfurling her trusty air mattress and filling it with air before topping it with her duvet. She takes a step back and almost laughs at the sight of her small, double-sized mattress perched like a casket in the middle of the large room, her ten or so boxes of “BEDROOM SHIT” arranged around it like cardboard bouquets. 

Grateful that the house has finally warmed up, Audrey takes a brief, very messy shower in the freshly installed claw-foot tub (she adds “shower curtain” to her growing list of things to buy), she emerges from her ensuite bathroom and checks her phone. God, it’s 2:30 a.m. Her head is spinning from the wine and with an overwhelming to-do list — she still needs a fortune’s worth of furniture; she needs to prime and paint and wallpaper; she needs internet… 

She dumps the rest of her wine into her mouth, lights a pre-rolled joint and forces herself to retire these thoughts for the night. 

Downstairs, Frank Sinatra is skipping. Yawning, butt-naked except for the towel wrapped around her head, Audrey spins on her heel and skips down the stairs, empty wine glass in one hand and nearly-finished joint in the other. 

“In love forever—in love forever—in love forever—in love forever,” Frank croons over and over. But as Audrey descends the stairs, yawning, she hears the record scratch and suddenly he’s back on track: 

“It turned out so right,

For strangers in the night.”

Audrey stalls near the kitchen, her eyes on the far corner where the record is now spinning to a grainy halt. Odd — she doesn’t remember that being the last song on that side. The house fills with silence. 

She shrugs, takes one last drag of the joint and steps up onto the kitchen landing, where she lazily puts it out in the sink. She places her glass in there, too — two more things she can properly deal with in the morning. 

For now, bed. 

She blows out her candles, turns off the lights and climbs the stairs. But she’s nearly reached the second floor when something makes her slow to a stop. 

It’s a sensation similar to what she felt just before leaving the house earlier, a general unease, an inexplicable buzz in the veins. Goosebumps rise all over her naked body despite the warmth gushing from the radiators. 

She feels like someone’s looking at her. 

A wave of white-hot terror washes over her, more an instinctive, physical sensation than an emotional one. She looks cautiously, almost curiously around, but in the darkness behind her, everything seems normal. 

She’s just drunk and high. And stark nude in an unfamiliar place.

She takes another tired step but stumbles, gripping the railing, when she actually hears something back down on the main floor. A crackling. Heart thundering, she peers back down the staircase and gasps. A flickering orange glow is emanating from the direction of the kitchen. 

Barely thinking, she runs downstairs, and she screams. The sink is on fire. 

“Oh my God!” 

Audrey turns on the tap with a jerk of her hand, wincing as the flames lick her skin, but the gush of water barely reduces the flame. “Fuck, fuck, fuck…” 

In the corner, the gramophone starts spinning again. 

“Strangers in the night--strangers in the night--strangers in the night--”

“Oh, COME ON,” Audrey screeches, looking frantically from the flames to the gramophone and back again, astonished.

The tap still running, music still skipping, Audrey dizzily grabs an unopened bottle of wine and smashes it into the sink, dumping its contents into the flames, dousing them instantly with a loud hiss. 

Chest heaving, releasing exasperated yelps, Audrey lets the smashed bottle fall to the floor and she grips the counter, wondering if she’s about to pass out. She risks a glance into the now blackened sink, cursing herself for being too lazy to properly dispose of that roach. What a waste of a perfectly shiny new sink. And a perfectly good bottle of cabernet sauvignon.

She wipes her wine-soaked hand on the towel that is amazingly still wrapped around her head, although askew.

“Strangers in the night—strangers in the night—strangers in the night—”

Audrey concentrates on gulping deep breaths as she surveys the mess she’s made of the kitchen: red wine and glass everywhere, on the floor, the walls, the counter… 

The counter. There’s something on the counter. She squints, trying to steady her vision. It’s a tally mark: four lines etched into the wood with a fifth line crossing over them. 

Behind her, the record continues to skip.

“Strangers in the night—strangers in the night—strangers in the night—”

Audrey’s still gazing stupidly, exhaustedly, at the strange mark on the counter when she gasps: another tally is being scratched into the surface, one line at a time, before her eyes. 

She can’t even contemplate the impossibility of the situation. Still clutching the counter, she watches, dumbfounded, as a fourth and fifth tally appear on the same surface, line by line, gaining momentum. In seconds, dozens of them are covering the kitchen, the scraping sound rising with the scratching of the record.

Before she can try to grasp what’s happening, she hears a click behind her and whirling around, she watches in horror as the front door swings open, ushering in a strong gust of wind.

Too incredulous to scream, to think, Audrey seems to watch herself from the clouds as she sprints to the door but it slams shut before she can reach it. With a shriek, Audrey doubles back and sprints up the stairs, trailed by the ear-piercing scraping of the tallies still being etched manically into every wood surface around her.

She sprints to the second floor and bounds into the master room, where she slams the door and locks it. The noise, amazingly, is snuffed out instantly. 

Sobbing silently, partly in shock and partly because she’s the angriest she’s ever been, Audrey falls to the floor and crawls over to her mattress. There’s no going back out there now. 

Vowing to throw out the rest of those pre-rolls she bought, Audrey shakily plugs in her headphones and curls up under her duvet, quivering violently in the quiet darkness. Her towel is long gone. Gasping, sobbing, her phone quivering in her hands, she scrolls through it to find her favourite album. But she freezes when she notices movement in the corner of her eye, on the floor next to her mattress.

Audrey lowers her phone to watch as a single line is etched into the wooden floorboard. Then a second, and a third. Finally, one last line is scratched into the wood, this time slower and more deliberate than the others. She waits, but it seems this tally is finished at four. 

The silence in her room is complete save for her own thumping pulse. Distantly, like it’s a hundred miles away, she can just hear the record finally crackling to a halt:

“It turned out so right,

For strangers in the night.”

Audrey stares at the mark in the floor for a moment, her vision darkening. She’s either dying, fainting or falling asleep. Right now, she doesn’t care regardless. 

She ducks under the covers, shivering, and somehow opens her music app to find her dad’s favourite album. Her favourite album. 

Tonight, like countless other nights in her past, it’s the familiar sound of the Riley Sheppard Band that draws her into sleep.