The Forest of Sleepers (Nowhere Book 2)

s e v e n : a f t e r e f f e c t

 The Mysterious Case of Sal Hickory occupied a large but secret portion of Birdie's mind. For years, she'd worked at the Nowhere Post under the sickening rule of her boss, Sal Hickory, who was four years her elder and who had been in love with her since high school.

After Birdie refused to return his affections, he'd fired her from writing the ghost's obituaries for the paper.

Come to find out, however, Sal Hickory had been dead for nearly ten years.

It didn't make sense how she'd never even suspected that he'd been a ghost.

In retrospect, she'd never seen him around other people or heard him talked about by anyone else at the Post. She'd just assumed nobody wanted to talk about him, which was fair.

But why had she never felt his spiritual energy? Why was he so...human?

She'd been to the newspaper archives, searching for his obituary, and sure enough, she found the case of Sal Hickory. He'd died at age fourteen after drowning in a river.

His family lived on the outskirts of town, his father being the former director of the paper. After Sal's death, however, the Hickory's had removed themselves from society and nobody had heard from them since.

There was one question that was prominent in Birdie's mind.

How could a ghost survive ten years? He'd missed at least four eclipses and hadn't passed on into the afterlife. Most ghosts barely lasted to their second eclipse before fading to nothing.

Sal had done the opposite of fade. He was almost a living thing again. Except that now, since they'd awoken Gwydyr, she hadn't seen him at all.

This thought always scraped at the back of her brain as she wondered when or if she would see him again. And hoping, for the most part, that she wouldn't.

Sal's metaphorical ghost, however, still haunted her whenever she was in the newsroom.

She could almost feel him creeping around the floorboards, leering at her, glaring down her neck.

Especially when she was alone.

Georgia Taylor, the new director of the Post, had recently appointed Birdie to be the head writer and organizer of the Sunday editions.

Birdie had said yes immediately without thinking about her own schedule. She was in her last year of high school, and Nowhere prided itself on their educational system especially since it was such a small town, so her homework and studying had increased tremendously.

Her parents had said she could still work at the press if her grades didn't suffer the consequences, thus Birdie Penny was a terribly busy bee.

Currently, she had seven handwritten articles spread across her desk. Five of them were written by her and two of them were supplied by "Miss Myrna" and "J.D. Shaw", which were both the same person who wrote under different pseudonyms.

Since the paper was comparatively tiny to most tribunes, Birdie's duties as head writer also included editing.

She skimmed the articles, wrote corrections, changed many paragraphs in her own work before taking them to the massive printing press in the center of the room.

Her low-heeled Mary Janes made a satisfying thunk thunk thunk across the wooden floor and she began arranging all of the metal letters into their respective places along the wooden rows.

As she began the tedious task of arranging every word to match each article, she found that she enjoyed the simplicity of the process.

That was when the ringing began.