The Unseen
By Kassandra Alvarado
Copyright 2015
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***
I was fresh out of college in the spring of that year, easily jaded with my job prospects in my field of choice...History Major, go figure. Applying at different places around town, I was hired on at a Fast Food joint smack dab on the middle of a busy street across from the local mom and pop store. I liked to say a job was a job was a job - maybe, despite my family’s comments behind my back about having a “joke job.” I got along fairly well with my managers during the afternoon shifts and was rarely asked to work the closing shift as I was still new.
One day, a fellow coworker called the store and asked to speak with me. We’d never been too friendly with each other; I’d seen her kids around the lobby waiting for her on more than one occasion. Truthfully, I was a little surprised that she’d ask me out of everyone else to exchange shifts, my early one for her late night one. I had nothing better to do on that evening and readily agreed.
The day of the shift change was the Friday of that same week. The time flew by fairly fast and soon I was greeting my new workmates on the evening shift. For a few hours or so, we’d cooked and sent out hot food to be bagged in white bags and sent out across the wide counter. Things had died down when the shift manager called me over and asked me to clean the outer room built onto the front of the restaurant. It was accessible through a door to the lobby and was called the PlayLand. The interior was wall to wall glass windows, dominated by a large set of multi-colored tubes and small octagon spaces high above with round porthole windows looking out over the rest of the room. Small tables with connected benches occupied most of the floor space.
By the time I started, the few people that had been inside had left with their tribe of collective kids. Although, the lights were on, evening was falling outside and cast a subtle gloom over the tables and chairs. Usually, I wasn’t bothered by such things and started sweeping under the shadow of the largest yellow tube. As crushed fries rolled under the bristles of the grimy broom, something creaked above me.
Like the sound of settling weight beneath a child’s light step.
I stiffened and peered up above.
The door across the room opened cautiously with a small tyke about to slip in.
“The PlayLand’s closed.” I called, forgetting for a moment the sound I’d heard. The little girl stepped back into the lobby sheepishly and I continued cleaning. Must be the ventilation system, I thought. Once the trash was picked up, I began on the tables. The smell of ammonia replaced the greasy burger smell that had lingered over the atmosphere.
In the still, warm air broken only by my brisk movements, I heard another sound, that of someone tapping on glass as if to get my attention. My head jerked toward the windows overlooking the lobby then to the cars passing by on the narrow curved stretch from the drive-through to the street. No one. Nothing at all.
Perplexed, I was much slower in returning to my cleaning than before. I was glad when I was able to wheel out the large blue bucket of mop water from the back room. Although, I wasn’t easily scared, somehow I couldn’t completely mark the incidents off as coincidence.
Later, when I talked to one of the girls who usually worked late; she confessed that she’d always been nervous in the PlayLand when the on-duty manager would send her to clean up for the night. She told me one time, it was past eleven when the lobby had barely closed and she and another girl were cleaning the lobby restrooms. She said that they’d both gone into the respective sides and were only gone for a few minutes when they stepped out with the mop and the other with the broom and dustpan. She remembered spotting the open door first, the door to the PlayLand that had been just locked by the floor manager fifteen minutes before. The girls exchanged looks and thought maybe the manager had gone in to check the cleanliness of the room. Just then, the floor manager came from the back with a tray of trash from her break meal.
“Weren’t you just in there?” My coworker asked puzzled.
“No, I was in the back.” The manager was on the young side having only been recently promoted at another location before moving closer to where she lived. “I thought I’d locked that door.” She touched the keys clipped to her belt and looked mystified.
I got a chance to talk to that same manager the next shift I worked while she manned the fryer. “Hey, so has there been any kind of weird things going on around here lately?”
Her pretty face screwed up thoughtfully, “well, now that you mention it, there was this time when I’d gone out to my car to get something I’d forgotten. It was really late, like maybe around three in the morning. I’d been sharing shifts with Brenda, and was due to go on break. I don’t know why but as I was heading back toward the restaurant, I looked toward the darkened playroom and swore I saw movement inside. No one had been inside the playroom for hours, I’d locked it myself. Determined to get to the bottom of things, I went back in and unlocked the door, checking everywhere for any sign of a person being inside. When I found no one, I relocked the door and went on my 10.”
She shrugged to me and dumped more fries. “Guess that’s just part of the quirks of working here.”
I wasn’t satisfied with Tanya’s easy dismissal. I wanted answers. Patty, one of the cooks in the prep area, still remembered the time when they’d had the smaller outer building still operational and orders were taken from there and transferred by computer to the next window inside the main building. Patty had once worked in there before being trained in the kitchen.
"That was years ago, before the current owners bought the franchise from corporate. It was a slow evening, few cars on the road as the fair in the next city had just opened over the weekend. I'd gotten up to stretch my legs, carrying the headset over my shoulder. The speaker box pinged as if someone had driven up to the menu board. I hadn't seen any cars, but I still answered with the greeting. Nothing. I leaned forward and peered out my window, expecting to see headlights bouncing off the curb. But, there was no one. At the time, I just dismissed it as a faulty connection."
"But?" I prompted, keeping an eye on the screen above.
Patty started prepping parfaits, pinching frozen blueberries between gloved fingers.
"That was before."
"Before, what?"
"I heard them. Los Ninos."
Despite the warmth of the open grill, I shivered.
"It was a similar night, quiet...," Patty's voice lowered as she peered into the depths of memory. "A few cars had passed down the side street and then no more after nine. Again as before, I'd settled in with my thoughts, broken by the sound of the speaker box. Something made me hesitate on answering. There was a chill in the summer air, I shuddered. Then, I heard laughter...like children at play, yet the parking lot behind the restaurant was dark as can be and when I asked Brenda if anyone had shown up on the monitors later, she rolled back the footage and said no one had. Even now, I can't explain it."
Patty's story had left me with more questions than answers. We were all rational adults, and in the case of the slightly younger girls, fairly level-headed. We couldn't all be imagining things, some mass delusion. But, if I accepted that, then where did that leave us?
"Patty," I left the kitchen on some cardboard run, catching up to her as she was leaving. "Patty...do you think the restaurant could be....haunted?" I whispered the last part, my eyes wide in my face. I wasn't entirely willing to subscribe to the supernatural without some input. "I don't know," she stopped by the doors. The PlayLand was well lit, bright with the sound of living children's laughter. "I've never given the existence of ghosts much thought." She brightened at my downcast look. "Why don't you ask around some more...compil
e everyone's experiences then see if you can dig up any history on the place, like what was here before. You're the History Major after all."
I supposed she was right, nodding.
"Then, what do I do with the evidence once I've found it?" But, there was no one there to answer my question. That night, I returned to the loft above my parents’ garage. My old room had been turned into a yoga/rec room and they'd been fairly disinclined to turn it back once I'd called them up and said I was moving back after college. Mom had suggested the small loft above the garage that dad had refurbished. It had a tiny kitchenette behind sliding doors painted a warm cream color, hardwood flooring and a set of stairs down to the cavernous garage below with a door leading to the main kitchen.
In the rain it was terrible, especially running to the bathroom in the middle of the night. The lights were off in the house when I pulled up the driveway. The one thing I'd kept from my college days was my small economical Toyota Prius. That, dad had condescended to cosign for and going on five years, my car was nearly paid for. I sat there in the dark for a few minutes, not bothering to manually crank open the garage door. Dad had come banging on my door one night complaining that the noise had awakened them.
I'd been trained to look through archives, mid-semester researcher, part-time archivist at the expansive library housed in an old building dated to Colonial times. I hadn't ever given much thought to the history of the town I'd grown up in. To my modern eyes, there seemed hardly anything to know about the small, dusty town at the edge of a lake reservoir. Setting my soda down on a hardwood coaster, I turned on my laptop. There weren't that many listings for New Smyrna on the search page, nor on the second.
Undeterred, I changed my query. New Smyrna 1923, the year the town was founded. The hourglass in the corner revolved in circles. I waited patiently, sipping my soda. The page flickered and a low wind whistled past the eaves. I glanced to the dark window reflecting the night across from me. The window looked out over the street. Somewhere a street lamp flickered. The web page took a long time to load; maybe my router was going out. I frowned at the thought and tried reloading. The second the cursor hovered over the circular arrow beside the address bar, the page jumped and text displayed in neat rows.
"New Smyrna founded 1923...built on the site of old town San Miguel de Los Noches. This settlement dated back to the 1700s. Another small settlement was located on the eastern end of the township, known as Smyrna; it flourished in the late 1890s, but was abandoned due to the resurgence of Lake Mead, eventually flooding the settlement. The remains of Smyrna can be seen underwater on clear days and is a popular spot for local history buffs." I read quietly to myself. "Huh. Wonder how many drowned?" It made sense that a tragedy like the one Smyrna experienced, would lead to more than one disgruntled spirit.
Further down, I came across a blog link to a faded article concerning the tragedy at the lake bed. A chill ran through me staring at the clammy white faces, lying prone on the bank. Damp dresses lied wetly plastered against the bodies of women and young girls. Men lay stretched out on canvas, their eyes milky and staring.
"Scenes of Horror and Disbelief," ran the title and others in some such vein. The gist of the article seemed to run toward the general belief that an underground dam had broken through, allowing the natural flow of the water to flood the dry bed. The dam had been built on Goody Harrison's land, some thought illegally. The story wasn't notable for its dramatic style imparting reaction rather than cold hard facts. Disappointed, I scrolled back to the original search results.
A tragic flood...,
The town named after Smyrna rather than San Miguel de Los Noches...,
On an online forum, I spotted a comment from someone who claimed to be a descendant of Goody Harrison's. He claimed she'd been wronged by the settlers who'd always been jealous of her fine stone house built from rounded rock.
I was more inclined to dismiss his claims until someone's comment beneath his, piqued my interest.
"…yeah well I heard from a friend's friend that down there's a legend. The old witch swore to return from the grave and take the children of the settlers who'd wronged her!"
The children...?
Frustratingly enough there wasn't anything else of note in the discussion board.
My next query turned to missing children's cases for Colima County. I wasn't surprised there weren't many, a few abductions, some who’d wandered into the lake during family outings.
Abandoning my search query, I typed in accidents on Main St New Smyrna, Colima County. This proved to be much more fruitful. Ten years ago, there had been over 100 accidents alone on the rocky stretch of road leading into the town. That road turned into Main St at the Panama junction.
Men, women and...children. Little girls and boys run down by a plethora of vehicles. Mostly hit and runs...,
I was saddened reading of their deaths. Life was cheap, it seemed. Glancing at the clock, I stifled a yelp. Nearly two am and I had to work tomorrow!