Dead Weight
A Ghost Story
The gym that I work in is haunted. Dave and Lucas are arguing about which machine they will personally haunt. Statistically, it will be the pool. But Dave has claimed the StairMaster—Lucas, the power rack.
Vicky doesn’t join in. I wipe down the stationary bikes with her, the grease on their wheels turning red and goopy as it meets the white rags in our hands. Working here is harder for her. She has laundry duty downstairs next.
The Brindell University gym’s ghosts are famous. We made national headlines when Olympic bronze medalist Hailey Reed drowned after swim team practice. There were wild rumors—how could one of the best swimmers in the world drown? It was hazing. Or drugs. Or murder. We’ll never really know. The family refused an autopsy, and she was quietly buried.
The rumors quickly snowballed into their own mythology. Students who had never known her spun theories built on meticulously catalogued gossip. Then the video came out. It showed a hazy distortion moving up and down her favorite lane, over and over.
That was three years ago, before I was a student. The day I interviewed for this job, halfway through my freshman year, I passed a camera crew from The Buzz. They were interviewing students about George Powers. He had died on the indoor track upstairs. Heart attack. Doping scandal. No one who stopped for the cameras had known him, but they all got to talk about his death anyway. They said they were scared. And saddened. So tragic, they lamented. He died too young.
I met George on my first shift. Sweeping the tracks in the after-hours half-light, I heard a cough. A hazy silhouette leaned against the wall just in front of me, hand to chest. He coughed again. I looked at the dust I had carelessly stirred up.
“I’m sorry.”
I gently swept the particles of dead skin and dirt away from George. He still coughed. If I were dead, I don’t think I could stand a strange girl staring at me with so much pity. So I averted my eyes and set about cleaning the rest of the track.
Now Dave is asking me which machine I will haunt. Vicky is downstairs in the laundry room, and Lucas is taking money to the safe. I don’t know Dave very well, so I lie.
“Hmm. The parking lot. I’d frighten Dean Owens into finally giving us free parking passes.”
Dave laughs at that. Vicky comes through the stairwell door, arms full of clean, white towels. I lift one stack from her hands and onto the counter. We fold them while Dave attempts to look too busy to help.
“Dave!”
We look up to the balcony of the administrative offices. Lucas’s hands are on his hips, a comically-large clip of keys dangling from his belt.
“Why weren’t you answering the walkie? I’ve been calling your name.”
“Uhh…I don’t think it’s here. Something wrong?”
“What do you mean—just, find the walkie. Or one of you two find it. I need Dave up here for a minute.”
Dave slides off his chair and stretches, bending so far backwards his hands brush Vicky’s hair. She slaps him away. Dave giggles as he heads upstairs.
“Do you want to look down there while I look around up here?” she asks.
Vicky hates the ground floor. I nod. Cool air hits me as I open the stairwell door. Creaking pipes and the whir of generators guide me down. I prefer the dark as long as I can make my way. The lights buzz too loudly.
At the bottom, I turn on my phone’s flashlight. Everything looks grey in its thin cone. I check the offices and the locker rooms. No walkie-talkie. At the door of the storage room, I hesitate.
For Joe’s sake, I slow my breaths and smile. I knock and announce myself, even though I know he cannot answer and, likely, cannot hear me. It is the only privacy and dignity I can offer him now.
“Hi Joe. I’m just looking for something. Dave lost the walkie-talkie again, can you believe it? And Vicky was too chicken to come down here. She still…well, she’s doing well.”
I blabber as I search the tops of boxes and scan the shelves of cleaning solutions, avoiding the silhouette of feet hanging before me. When I’m sure the radio isn’t in here, I say goodbye and close the door.
Joe was top of our class. Our friend. I don’t have the heart to tell him that Vicky still cries every shift. That there’s a hard knot of anger and shame I may never work out of my chest. I don’t know if the dead can feel guilty. But I don’t want to risk it.
The pool is dark but not still. Hailey Reed is swimming her laps. A blip of crackling static catches my attention, and I see the dark shape of the walkie-talkie on the edge of the deck. As I bend to pick it up, I realize the sound of lapping water has stopped. A voice, but not one of the ones I would expect, emerges from the static.
“Can I stop now?”
There is a shadow in the water by my feet. My mouth feels dry as I search for the right words to say. But that strange voice, the one my brain refuses to acknowledge as Hailey’s, crackles through the radio again.
“I don’t think I should be here. Can I go home?”
My legs are trembling, and I kneel next to the water’s edge.
“You can stop now,” I whisper.
“Can I stop now?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t think I should be here. Can I go home?”
I cover my mouth with my hand to keep myself from sobbing. I grab the walkie-talkie and run to the hall. Another voice bursts through the radio, loud and irritated.
“Devin! Did you find the radio yet?”
A beep.
“Yes. Coming up now.”
“Hurry. I’m not missing Happy Hour at Fiona’s again.”
I am running up the dark staircase with only my phone light when my foot slips on a wet patch. I teeter on the side of my boot. The stairs are concrete rimmed by unforgiving, ridged steel. I imagine tilting backward, falling, cracking my head and bones as I roll.
My arms flail, and my fingers find the railing just as my body swings back. I pivot, slamming my back against the concrete wall. Pain shoots through my lower vertebrae and the back of my skull.
Lucas and Dave are arguing about their sports brackets as I approach the desk. Vicky meets my eyes, frowns, starts to ask, but Dave cuts her off.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“God, Dave.”
“I’m fine. Let’s go.”
In the parking lot, I sit in my Corolla. My head hurts, and I should probably see a doctor. Then again, I don’t feel concussed. I just can’t stop thinking about the words I heard by the pool. Ghosts don’t talk. At least, ours don’t.
I wait for the last cars in the lot to pull away. Then I get out and climb down the hill. Thorny weeds catch in my jeans and I cling to the bark of sturdy pines for balance. At the bottom, there is a service door to the basement. I forgot to lock it earlier. I slip inside.
I hear Hailey swimming again. My phone light follows her silhouette as she cuts cleanly through the water, barely disturbing the surface. I realize I left the radio at the front desk, and I shudder at the thought of climbing the dark stairs again. Instead, I sit at the edge of the pool and turn on my recording app.
After a few minutes I stop and listen back. I shouldn’t be surprised when it’s silent, and I’m not exactly. I feel anxious now. There is no way for me to be certain this will work without simply diving in.
Stepping over the memorial plaque set into the deck, I cross the braided rope that separates her lane from the usable ones. I strip down to my underwear and ease myself into the cold water. The shadow is swimming away from me, about to reach the end of the lane and turn back. I think about Joe, still hanging in the supply closet; George, still struggling to breath on the track; the others we pretend are just props for media attention. All stuck in a public loop of the final moments of their lives.
She’s swimming towards me now. I feel her through the water. I put my hands out and hope she can hear me.
“Hailey, stop.”
The shadow pulses toward me with another stroke. It is hard to define her shape as she glides toward me so quickly.
“You can stop, Hailey, you can go home.”
She is right in front of me now. I can actually see the dim outline of her fingers as they reach up and over and into the water. The swim cap on her head makes her silhouette appear misshapen and alien.
“Stop! Please. You’re dead. You’re dead. You don’t have to be here.”
A prickly chill hits me as her shadowy form collides with my skin. Then numbness. I fear I am sinking. But I hear the voice again, repeating the same words, over and over, over each other, merging into a scream.
“Can I go home?”
“I don’t think I should be here.”
“Can I stop now?”
I feel my arms and legs move, but I am not moving them. I start to kick, and my arms cut through the water in clean, powerful strokes. My head turns so my mouth can gasp air, but I am not the one who turns it. I have no control.
My muscles and tendons stretch beyond what I have trained them to endure. Searing points of pain spark all along my body. I swim lap after lap after lap, breaking myself piece by piece upon the water. I don’t know how much more pain I can take. How long my heart can keep up with this frenzied pace. And I can’t stop.
I can never stop.
Thank you for reading Every Nook Uncanny. If you liked what you read, please share and comment. The audio version of this story will be available this Friday. You can follow Mae on Twitter.