Any good school of a certain age will be the subject of outlandish tales that are almost certainly untrue. Once, the students of Edna L. Toliver Elementary School shared this tale: The third floor was unused for a reason. Once, years and years ago, there had been a young girl that something terrible happened to. It was just before the school year ended for the summer. The teacher let the students go out to play on the playground but told the young girl that she could not play because she’d done poorly on a test. She had to stay and do some extra lessons. So the whole class went out to play on the playground, which thrilled them because it wasn’t even recess time. They flooded out on to the swings and slides. This was before the school built the new playground in the back of the building, the safer playground with soft woodchips and swings with rubber-coated chains. This was the old playground on the side, the remnants of which were still there like the rotten remains of a vanished civilization, and which the current student body was expressly forbidden to play on. Moss covered and overgrown. So these children, blessed with an extra recess swung and played tag and yelled and screamed and eventually the principal of the school, alerted to their presence by the sound of unfettered joy, came rushing out of the school to see what was happening. He asked them what they were doing and where their teacher was and they said he was inside and he let them outside to play. The principal clapped his hands and ordered everyone to return to the school and just as they were leaping from their swings, frowns forming, they heard a terrible shriek from high above them. They looked up to the third floor, their floor, and just at that time they saw the young girl who had been made to stay fly from the open window. She fell, down and down and landed on the cement sidewalk that curled around the school. Blood ran from beneath her in rivers. At that point, everyone began to scream and run toward the door into the school. The principal went to the girl, but it was clearly too late. Inside, the screaming children ran to their classroom, instinctively, only to find within the teacher in a pool of his own blood, dead, slumped in the corner, scissors still protruding from his neck. The screaming increased and others came out of their classrooms to see what had happened. There was no school the next day, but no one took any joy in it. And to this day, no one knows what happened. Some of the young, self-appointed historians passing the story along claimed that the teacher had tried to attack the student and that she had killed him in self-defense and then flung herself from the window out of grief. Some said that the teacher threw the girl from the window in a fit of rage because she could not get the lesson right, for he was a stern teacher, and it was he who killed himself out of guilt. Yet another story claimed that the girl had killed the teacher for no reason and then leapt from the window for no reason other than to thrill at the feeling of falling. But since the summer before Leah’s last year of the school, the story had become that the third floor was haunted by the ghost of Jacob Shepherd.
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.