Sam leaves for school in the morning with a runny nose and returns to me in the afternoon with muddy shoes and dirty hands. I know she’s been in the river. She goes every year, diving for answers in the form of anything the police never found. Her eyes brim with the ghosts Lotte spent a lifetime chasing.
“I think you should make sure the shed is locked up tonight,” Sam tells me. She has Lotte’s wild red hair and oyster-colored eyes; now at thirteen she’s beginning to show signs that she inherited from me her susceptibility to bouts of anxiety, the tendency to peel back a nail till it bleeds. I want to laugh, want to grip both her shoulders and wring the worry out, but my own doubts bloom like unsettled sediment.
“Tell you what,” I say. “You go have fun, and don’t worry about it, and I’ll take a look. But I’m tellin’ you, that thing hasn’t opened in years.” I offer her a smile I don’t believe in, and she nods, reflecting it with the same uneasiness before darting out the back door with a notebook and pencil in hand.
In October the daylight sheds its skin by four-thirty in the afternoon. When I shuffle outside to check the shed it’s just dark enough that I can see every window in the town blinking awake, all pale yellow eyes. The hills arch and yawn, feline, to greet the dusk.
The moment I step foot onto the path leading down to the shed that familiar sepulchral haze rises up to greet me, and I remember how I cannot divorce this once innocuous outbuilding from the tragedy it witnessed on this very night five years ago. How, in the aftermath, even the house schemed against both of us, Sam and me. The kind of lonely Lotte left behind got in the lungs. It coiled into the shape of an ache. The walls held all their breath until we reluctantly accepted silence, and then, once we’d made my peace with the sound of our own throats whistling, they had expelled every sigh at once. Rigid wood has no room for pity. Even now the hallways make themselves dark in ways I don’t recognize. They warp. The shadows gnaw.
When she wasn’t working in the shed Lotte was by my side, theorizing about what made a haunting residual, what tethered the soul to earth once the body was buried. I would listen to her, with her wild hair and wildebeest way of speaking, as she explained to me the idea of trauma as a thing that clings to a place like disease clings to the body: without malice, without intent, but an agent of harm all the same.
“Well,” she would start, and her chin would make a nest of my collarbone. “It’s the whole thing about unfinished business. And that’s what I aim to do, you know. Finish the business. Or if I can’t, I’ll find a way to make them believe I did.”
“That sounds interesting,” I would reply, wetting my finger and flicking through whatever novel I was in the midst of devouring. “But c’mon, Lotte. Take a look at this world. I just don’t see why anyone would stick around longer than they have to, y’know.”
Lotte’s frowns employed every corner of her body, the machine of it folding into cold, unspoken irritation. She would look her disappointment at me, and some voice in my brain would mutter how I deserved it.
“Look, your skepticism doesn’t make it any less true,” she would say before rolling over into whatever world her mind wandered when it wandered away from me.
I later came to realize that this conversation fit the definition of a classic haunting: a recurring event marked by the restless movement of spirits reliving and reliving and reliving, eyes glazing over from the senseless repetition yet unable to stop it from occurring.
As I reach the back of the shed I feel the senseless horror filling my lungs; my heart bucks like an unbroken horse. I quell it with a reminder: Lotte’s shed has been locked up tight for years. She kept that combination memorized, so buried with her memory it remains, and, as insurance that I would never, by simply existing in the general area, disrupt the delicate settings of her ghost-finding instruments, she made certain that no matching key exists. Up until now I have allowed her privacy even in death, believing without believing that if my curiosity ever frothed at the mouth and hungered beyond hunger to know what secrets cobwebbed the murky interior of that shed, the defense mechanisms put into place by my imagination would flee and I would be stuck facing the cracks in the wall and the peelings of the wallpaper without so much as a half-maintained hope to shield me from the reality of our dirty dishes, our leaking pipes.
In the handful of times I’ve dared venture down here to try and make sense of what happened, the silence surrounding the area has been almost numbing. But today I hesitate before turning the corner because I can hear the instruments whirring and clicking inside, their spinning needles spinning tales of all the phantoms I’ve never believed in. I suck in a breath when I see that the door to the shed has been flung open. Wanting to but not wanting to, I peer inside, unable to tamp down that hungering curiosity. The gloom drapes itself over dust-blanketed shelves stacked high with moth-eaten notebooks. Maps pinned to the back wall curl inward at faded edges, and a handful of VHS tapes sits atop a workbench next to an ancient radio. I take a step forward, cautious, as if testing a patch of ice to see if it might hold under my weight. Immediately the radio spits itself alive, and I recoil. In a whirl of hisses and beeps it brings on static tides words spoken from mouths located miles away:
“—looks like it’s gonna be a clear night, Paul,” the radio host says, following his own statement with a laugh.
As if to prove him wrong, the wind laughs back in the language of rattling leaves.
I panic. I slam the door behind me and let the wind curl around me and the sky is the color of a bruised plum. Suddenly I want nothing more than to be locked up inside with the TV going, with strangers’ voices cracking jokes over canned laughter to distract me from foolish superstition and anniversaries of terrible loss. From the neighbors’ property some yards away I hear the German shepherd huff and bark a signal to the clouds: bring down the storm, he growls through moon-curved fangs. Bring down the storm so I can loose the howl my ancestors gave me. He catches sight of me, and I feel his eyes on my back as I trek up the hill to fetch Sam. On nights such as this, which Lotte believed were capable of “blurring the veil between worlds”, she would take Sam up to the abandoned barn to study the owls. Sam still ventures up to the barn on nights like these, claiming she finds herself there without consciously desiring to go. She claims it’s where she feels closest to her mother.
I crest the hill and the barn flattens itself against the sky, trying to trick the pre-storm light into making it appear two-dimensional. Contrary to what poets say, storms appear slowly; all the hairs on the back of the neck would agree that no tempest births itself without first leaving a whisper at the base of the skull. I can feel the soil sizzling in preparation for the rain. The gut-sick feeling of apprehension, of a forest and all its wards holding breath until the first peal.
As a child I had gotten it into my head that every old barn blurring past the half-cracked window of the backseat of my parents’ car had been born abandoned. They must have sprouted into sudden existence, all wooden bones decaying into something for licking clean, and covered in vines for withering, and topped with a crown of moss. This barn in particular has always seemed so much a part of the landscape that I can’t imagine it ever serving a purpose beyond housing owl families, broken glass, the kindling for local legends.
Pulling back the shroud of vines obscuring the entrance, I blink away the darkness as my eyes adjust. Sam is sitting, cross-legged, in the dead center of the dirt floor. She puts a finger to her lips when she sees me, then points upward at the rafters, where a barn owl the color of the Atlantic turns her head at an impossible degree.
“I checked, but the shed was locked up tight as always,” I whisper. Sam seems to collapse inward as the tension dissolves.
“Okay,” she says in the same hushed tone. “Thanks. Sorry, I dunno what I was worried about. It’s silly, but every year I wonder if it never happened at all. Like we’ve just been waiting a really, really long time for her to come back, and one day she’s just gonna drive up the road and barge in while we’re watching TV and tell us to get up, we’re going for a family drive.”
“Hey, speaking of TV, how about you and I go pop in a movie and order take-out? Something tells me there’s a storm coming in. Just a hunch. Like Lotte’s intuition.”
Sam pushes herself up and wipes the dust from her jeans. We walk outside and the sky is the color of rot, of something wilting.
I recall the radio man telling Paul it was going to be a clear night.
Lightning unzips a cloud and forks across the dark horizon. It touches down in a patch of wood learning for the first time the meaning of light, and I cling to Sam harder than she clings to me.
A shiver shocks my spine. I think of the night Lotte informed me that a phantom tremor is broadcast to the body to inform it of someone standing over the site of its future resting place. Predictably, I had rolled my eyes at the obvious superstition. Predictably, she had responded with that soul-splitting smile. Whatever you say, she seemed to tell me. Even without speaking, Lotte had always had the last word.
A second bolt plunges to Earth in a kind of twisted Icarus impression, gnarled and forked like a crude stick-figure rendered out of electricity. Instinctively I put myself between Sam and the light as thunder ebbs against our eardrums.
“Mom?” Sam asks. The light-figure turns its light-head at an impossible degree. That conversation about haunting replays itself in my head again and again like a ghost retracing its steps. I feel that eerie yet unmistakable sensation of being observed by an unseen observer. That maggoty crawl of the skin that whispers down the neck in the early hours.
The instruments are whirring. The shed is open.
From inside the barn we hear that moon-faced owl ask, “Who? Who?”
We spend a minute spellbound, wrapped up in twin hopes, before it begins to pour.