David Nahm - Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky

She did not believe in ghosts and certainly did not believe the stories the other students passed around about Jacob haunting the third floor. She could remember the year before when it was still haunted by the dead girl. Plus, Jacob wasn’t dead, just missing, so it didn’t make any sense to say that he was haunting a place where he didn’t die.

Despite knowing better, Leah was still scared of the third floor. Perhaps Jacob did not haunt those halls, perhaps nothing did, but whenever Leah had to go up there on an errand for a teacher, some cold worm wriggled in her mind and she filled with fear. The empty eyes of the gauntlet of doors watching her as she moved down the hall, even without the possibility of the undead, it was too much. There were worse things in this world than spirits and haunts, real things hiding behind doors, watching you through cracks in a shade.

It had been her misfortune for her teacher to ask her to go up to the library and return with a filmstrip. At the top of the stairwell were the heavy old doors that opened into the hall and at the other end were the north double doors of the library. She stood there at the end of the hall and saw nothing but the reflection of the distant light on the ceramic tile. She closed her eyes for a moment, breathed, and then opening her eyes again, began to walk down the hall. For a few feet it was fine, just as always, because nothing ever actually happened. For a few feet it was fine. But then she felt something brush her ankle. She stopped and looked down instinctively, her mind at that moment, too late, thinking ‘don’t look.’ But she did look. Nothing, of course. Just a phantom feeling on young skin. But as she stood in the middle of the wide empty hallway, looking down at her ankles, she heard something behind her. A soft, shrill sound. A squeak. By the stairwell door, the girls’ bathroom door opened slowly. Just a little. She stood transfixed, unable to move. The door, a heavy wood fire door like every other door in the old school, swung inward, inward on a dark bathroom. She could see in, but only a short way as the little light from the hallway did not invade that bathroom very far. The light was out. A dark eye opening. She watched, unable to move. The door stopped moving and just at the edge of the gloom, she thought she could see someone standing. A young figure in the faint dark, still, unspeaking and she began to call out, her body flooded with joy and relief, recognizing him even as his face was lost in the lightlessness and she was about to call his name and then she remembered and she knew that it could not be and she stood silent, her mouth open and trying to scream but unable. Abruptly freed of the spell, Leah ran toward the light of the library. She hit the door at full speed, but the doors did not open and she hit her nose on the glass, leaving a streak on the glass and a thin stream of red blood down her lip. The doors were locked and there was a note from the school librarian that said, Be Right Back . Leah was trapped. She looked and the door to the bathroom was still open. She could hear something, not from the bathroom this time but in one of the classrooms. A sliding sound. Her whole body shuddered with the slamming of her heart. Then, just as slowly as it opened, the bathroom door began to close. When it shut, with a dull clunk, she ran to the stairwell door, burst through and down the steps, two at a time. On the second-floor landing, she could see out the window onto the side of the school. The morning fog was still full, and illuminated with flecks of morning sunlight. She looked out the window, panting, but even before she looked, she knew what she would see down there on the sidewalk. Someone walking by, a dark shape in the bright fog. The figure paused for a moment, glanced up, and Leah took off running again.

She hadn’t seen anything. No ghoulish figure of a long-dead student. No shambling corpse of a long-dead teacher. No spectral lights or disembodied voices. She hadn’t seen her brother. That night, replaying the event in her mind, she could only say she saw a door move. The thing was, as she thought about that door, from the safety of her bed, she realized how disappointed she was that she hadn’t seen anything else. She wanted to see something. She fell asleep trying to imagine what she could have seen.

But then, the summer before they started high school, her family went to the beach. The following fall, with the help of Judge Whitehead, when he was still just an attorney in private practice, the family petitioned the court to have Jacob officially declared dead. They’d held onto hope and circulated photographs with various advocacy groups and even tried to get some attention on national television, but there wasn’t any interest. Then one day, a group of middle school children found a pile of Sunday dress clothes folded up neatly in the attic of an abandoned house just outside of town. There was blood on the shirt and pants. Mr. Shepherd had to go down to the police station and identify the clothes. Leah couldn’t sleep that night, hearing her mother’s sounds.

But before that, when they still hoped, the family drove to the Outer Banks of North Carolina and they sat on the sand. Mr. Shepherd walked to the pier and looked at the rising dark and listened to the waves break.

Flickers of ocean air in morning light. A girl was on the beach, out on the shore playing in the surf. Tall stalks of grass topped the sandy banks and the wind spoke through them. Years later, in bed in the apartment complex, with her window open and listening to the breeze breathing through the new leaves on the nearby trees, Leah remembered the voice of the wind in the tall grass on the dunes and she wondered if it was the same voice, saying the same thing. It had been her family’s first beach trip without her brother. Her mother sat inside with a book, but didn’t read, her eyes sat on the words and waited. They kept saying that this trip was just what they needed. Her father walked along the shore alone, trying to get to the distant pier, but always turning around before he reached it. “It never seems to get closer.”

She thought of the wind in the tall grass, there in the full-size bed in the one-bedroom apartment of her adulthood, and she thought about the girl playing, wet red hair, skin was already burning — pale flesh sprinkled with cinnamon. Mirrors rimmed in rope, dried starfish and scallop shell. She walked down to the water and saw the girl was sitting right at the edge, tossing her head to the side as the waves broke on her body. Her oval face covered in freckles. An upside-down mouth. Her father asked her to walk with him and she watched as their footprints faded behind them with each tongue of water, watched the pier resist their advance, and when they returned, the girl was gone.

One night, she walked with her father to the pier. There was an arcade on the boardwalk and Mr. Shepherd gave Leah some quarters and left her at the bright door as he walked down the pier alone. Inside, the light was plagued by flapping wings and the air swirled with the sounds of failed levels and a group of boys in shorts, without shirts, began to hoot at her. One leaned in and began to sniff her hair while his friends howled. “I’d fuck her,” and then laughter and, “You’re sick, man.” Leah became afraid to be alone in that noisy room, even though there were dozens and dozens of children and teenagers milling around, leaning into the electric boxes, watching one another play, and she ran out and down the pier looking for her father. The pier was dark, illuminated only by a few lamps on high poles. There were a few people on the wet wood hunched over their tackle boxes or buckets of fish guts, cleaning up and getting ready to go home. She kept seeing men standing in the shadows and thinking they were her father only to find, just as she was close to them, that they were strangers, leaning on the railings, looking at the stars above or back at the glowing windows of the condos on the shore. At the very end she found her father and as she ran to him, she realized he was making a strange sound and she stopped. He heard her approach and turned to the sound, unsure who was running up to him, and he saw his daughter. She could not see the look on his face. She could not tell what he was doing. “Honey, why are you—” but he stopped and seeing that she was crying, he leaned down and hugged her, though she was getting close to being as tall as he was at this point, and in the faint light she could see his wet face and realized he’d been crying as well. He held his daughter and Leah realized that in all those years, she’d never seen her father cry for Jacob. The weight of the loss had been written on him daily, but she’d never seen him lose control and as he held her, she also realized that he must think that she was crying for the same reason and she felt a quiver of guilt that she’d found something else to cry about.