The Pool
Every Saturday and Sunday I opened up the pool. Six thirty on Saturdays, seven on Sundays. They never opened up earlier than those times on weekends. The pool wasn’t the worst place to be. It was quiet, not many people came, and it gave me time to think. Lots of thinking.
The pool is an old one with stained cement for walls and a ceiling. Grey tiles lined the floor, creating an uneven surface for puddles to form. It was a clean pool with plenty of clutter to make it feel comfortable.
People generally trickle into and out of the pool, and it’s rarely ever empty. But on occasion it is, yet it never feels like I’m alone. It’s always during those empty times that I may be relaxing on my phone and feel like somebody is behind me. I would jerk my head around to find nobody there. I usually think it’s nothing, just my overactive imagination conjuring up some entertainment for itself.
There is a click that reverberates from the locker room on occasion that makes me look to ensure everything is safe. Nothing is ever out of the ordinary and I go back to relaxing while the pool is empty.
However, there can be the unmistakable sound of a locker-room door opening to admit a person. The doors themselves are hidden from my vantage point, so I grab the guard tube and wait expectantly for somebody to walk down the stairs to the pool. Nobody comes. It could just be a guest deciding not to come into the pool or my imagination again, so I generally go back to what I was doing. There always remained the feeling of never truly being alone.
As I spent more and more time at the pool, I began to catch movement out of the corner of my eye. I jerk my head, expecting to see a guess, but find only the calm pool water and clutter. I get up to clean the clutter, disregarding the movement as a trick of my eyes.
Things like this didn’t happen much. Generally, just once a day when I’m at the pool, and I’m only there on weekends. A very miniscule part of my week. I don’t think about the tricks of my imagination much while I’m away from the pool because it doesn’t happen enough for me to really think about it.
There was one morning that shook me up though. It was a Sunday I believe. Nobody was in the pool and I was sitting to eat my breakfast. A nice hunk of pork ribs from the other night. I was invested in the savory taste and porky deliciousness, so when I saw movement out of the corner of my eye, I thought nothing of it. It was by the skylights, which were twenty feet in the air and located on the wall to my left. Yet, the movement persisted and grabbed more of my ocular focus. Just out of the corner of my eye, a humanoid figure cloaked in black stood on a balcony looking down on the pool.
This grabbed my complete focus, and I figured it was one of my bosses ensuring I was doing my job. The thing was, there was no balcony for them to be standing on. In fact, there was no figure there at all. Purely my imagination, right? Slightly shaken up, I quickly jotted down what I’d seen and began to recount all those times when I’d heard something that didn’t happen or seen movement that wasn’t there. A chilling thought also occurred to me. It was at that moment that I pieced together that I never felt alone at the pool even when I was. Could it be my imagination? I sure hoped so.
That thought lasted only for a moment as my rational mind kicked in. I was bored and my brain was just playing tricks on me.
As time went on, I found myself going to check the farthest lane from me more and more; specifically, in the deep end. I kept seeing a smudge at the bottom of the pool in that area. It looked deceptively like a person struggling beneath the water, yet when I went to check, the smudge was gone.
My fixation on that part of the pool grew to the point where I relocated my chair to that area. I wouldn’t let my attention wander from that area. The head guards began to call me the golden guard because my attention never wavered from the pool. They though it was because of my dedication to the job. Little did they know that it was because of this fixation of mine.
I found myself doing pushups and squats, not to keep in shape, but rather to pull somebody out of the pool when the time came. I became obsessed with that corner, dreaming about that smudge in the pool.
Finally, I got fed up with this fixation and told myself to relax. There wasn’t anything there and nobody was drowning. I took a deep breath and moved my guard chair back to its original position.
As the pool emptied and there was only a half hour left on my shift, I put on my shoes and began to close up. But that feeling happened again. That feeling of not being alone. That feeling of there being somebody behind me. I whipped my head around and jumped when there was actually somebody there.
After my initial shock, I smiled and asked the old man if he needed anything. His gaze wasn’t fixed on me though. It was a vacant, dead gaze. His eyes were blood shot and his skin was deathly pale. His mouth was slightly agape as well, as if he were putting no energy into his facial muscles. The oddest thing was he was soaking wet, yet I could have sworn he hadn’t swam.
“Sir,” I said, “are you okay?”
The man stood there and kept giving that blank look just beyond me. I blinked, and he was gone. Needless to say, I stumbled over my chair and nearly fell into the pool. I looked everywhere for the man, then it hit me. I looked to the corner of the pool I was previously obsessed with and saw that smudge. I hesitantly walked over to it and saw that same man, but at the bottom of the pool. I jumped into the water to get him out, but once I got to the bottom of the pool, there was nothing there. I climbed out, panting on the side of the pool. My arm was splayed over my eyes as I tried reconciling what I’d just seen and what wasn’t there.
As I regained my composer, a wall next to me that was normally blank was covered in news articles about a death in the pool. They were all yellowed with age. I checked the dates and saw that there was a death in nineteen seventy-seven. There was a picture of the man on it and I saw that it was the man at the bottom of the pool. My head began to spin, and I ran out of the pool, out of the building, and into my car.
That same day, I put in my two weeks’ notice and never went back. I didn’t care that I couldn’t use them as a reference because of my not showing up those last two weeks. Nothing would make go back there.