Excerpted from POLTERGEIST, by Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece, via APOCALYPSE CONFIDENTIAL PRESS. Available now.
The world had gone blue. Almost no one was left.
Those who were left: a woman and the children in her care.
Not her children; children who had been left by others who had gone elsewhere some time ago.
Children left by the outcroppings of buildings.
Children left to freeze.
She had gathered them up, one or two at a time, from the places they’d been left. One perilously close to the inky pond that sometimes served as a drinking well. One sitting on the side of a pathway in ragged trousers, crying from the rubble stinging its little thighs. One outside the entry to what she had decided was a kitchen. When she unzipped its makeshift canvas door in a hurry to bat out the smoke from a charred rabbit, there the child was, looking up at her with big blue eyes. The child was tinged blue all around, even in the white parts.
One by the trash heap, sticking its fat fingers in to make the compost steam. Hungry, she wondered, idle, curious, or trying to keep its hands from turning even bluer and dropping off like icicles from an aluminum roof? When she picked that one up off the ground, two more popped their heads up from the other side of the heap, their mouths in soundless Os, and followed her inside.
Two holding hands by what she thought might have been train tracks, though she didn’t know if trains had ever come here. The tracks poked out of the hard ground for a few feet and then disappeared again into the mantle. They were useless, like so much that was left. Like she often felt.
One came toddling in through a tear in the plastic sheeting that flapped around in storms. It meandered over to the table, took a bowl and spoon, and began eating with the rest of them.
And one, the last one she’d found, was at the very edge of the tree line, nearly invisible and lost to the forest. She ran over and grabbed that one as soon as she saw it. She thought she might have been too late. Its skin was turning translucent, but when she got her hands on the child it turned back to the color of milky bluish gauze, a color and texture that covered everything in the world with a suet-like membrane.
She wondered if the gauze had been dropped from a great height so that it spread open like a parachute and coated everything in existence, or if it was a protective silk that had grown over her eyeballs and made everything look the same. But mostly she didn’t think that much about it. She accepted what was because there was nothing else to do.
This was what her life amounted to now: ten children in a glorified tent, none of them able (or willing) to speak. So what, she thought; they wouldn’t have much to say anyway. She never did, nor would have even if there had been anyone to talk to.
The days went by in endless lazy trails, everything blue and white and gray, even her eyes, which she thought used to be green. Her hair, once chestnut, now dulled to a faded ash barely a tone off from her muted skin.
The air was dimmed with soot and remnants of fires that still coated the oxygen molecules, the skies slick with polluted mucus. Everything visible sagged with additional weight beyond its apparent load. Tree branches bowed as though hung with sacks and ropes. The tarpaulins that covered the rooms in which she spent her days indented in places, though it never hailed, only rained.
Her own body felt closer to the ground, as though she had been wearing an overpacked case on her shoulders for months of mountain hiking. Such a heavy and volumetric world dampened every sound as though it was carried through tunnels underground across great expanses.Even the high wind at dusk that nearly knocked her off her feet was barely more than a whistle brushing her ear. Her own voice had become nearly inaudible. She couldn’t summon noises from deep in her gut, and so she mostly stopped trying.
The near-silence of all living and moving things made the other noise stand out. Somewhere underneath the sounds that should make up everyday life she heard a ritualistic and repeated thumping. It might take a long time to notice it, but once you did, there was no avoiding it. It crept into her consciousness and set up house and refused to leave. But it didn’t only come from under the ground. Sometimes it echoed far above her head. And sometimes the rhythm permeated every portion of the ether, so that it was barely noticeable but inescapable, breathed in and exhaled, the drumbeat of existence in a world past the edge of light.
Peering outside was like staring into static on late-night television after the networks had gone off air. A waving flag, an anthem, and then the image buzzing out. She remembered that, though it was from very long ago, and maybe it wasn’t even from her own lifetime, maybe it was something that had been told to her once by someone older than she was. Still, there wasn’t much she remembered from her past life, only what was conjured up by something she saw from day to day.
So the television late at night surfaced in her mind when she took a walk along the cliff edge by the bluffs and found it difficult to see more than a few yards ahead. Shapes appeared here and there in the distance: deformed trees with branches and no leaves scraping their scraggly ends through the atmosphere, or the last remnants of a structure that had once been a garden shed or a child’s playhouse.
But shapes didn’t appear in static, did they? The only connection she could summon was something distant that she’d seen a long time ago. A little girl with long and straight blond hair sat in front of a television late at night, tucking her nightgown around her bare feet. Her parents slept in a bed behind her.
They had moved into the house right before her birth, and though she was button-nosed and adorable, her brother was a better adjusted child. He was a little older and looked like the boy from every movie, whether he was riding a bike or meeting a ragged animal by the backyard fence or kicking a can down the street or walking on train tracks with his friends. The screen showed static because the networks had stopped broadcasting, but the little girl needed some sort of comfort and so she sat in front of the television in search of familiarity.
And then a shape appeared from inside the static: a hand made out of electronic signals that reached out to touch the girl. “They’re here,” she said, but no one paid attention until it was too late and she had disappeared into the ghostly tunnels that led to a secretive and cavernous spirit world deep inside the house.
The parents eventually found the girl. Right after they rescued her, the house crumbled to pieces and then imploded, sucked into itself like a black hole. It shone briefly like a baby star birthing itself from the rot, and then, like that, it was gone.
That was enough; they moved to a new house in a new neighborhood, far from the cemeteries on top of which the original one was built. The family was all right. The girl bounced back quickly.
But then the same thing happened again, and again, and even once when the girl visited her aunt and uncle in a gleaming metal skyscraper downtown. Even an apartment very far off the ground, untouched by the dirt that covered up an ancient burial ground, wasn’t safe because it really was all inside the girl. She was close to the spirits and they always came to look for her, but she was also addicted to television.
If she’d only been able to turn off the screen and stop staring into the static, maybe she would have moved past this preoccupation. But the fingers reached out past the borders of the movie screen and kept touching her, kept communicating with her, kept telling her to find her way back into the place that exists on the other side of this one, until they were able to reach her in another life, her real one, because the little girl who played the little girl died before she reached her teenage years. She’d been poisoned by the well water at her parents’ home, but blaming environmental conditions was too easy. It was really the work of the ghosts. They reached up from the center of the world and took her to her true home under the stygian waters.
Why is this the image I remember, the woman thought. It’s the only one that comes to mind. It’s because it’s about those thin places that children wear holes into, and that’s where I live now, she thought. The world has become both thickened and thinned, and the children are nearly indistinguishable from the ghosts that flicker among the trees.
The pond water was filled with worms and diseases and she boiled it before serving it to the children, but she found them nearly daily laying on their stomachs and trying to lap up the brackish water with their tongues like cats. She shooed them away and they looked dumbly up at her, as though she was the one who had done something wrong, as though she was trying to hurt them and stop them from what they were supposed to do.
She wasn’t trying to hurt them—she was trying to keep them alive. They just didn’t understand. They didn’t see how thin the world was, or maybe they did and they wanted to keep tearing at the worn parts until it was a stocking traced with ladders and so many holes to stick a curious finger through.
— Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece teaches Film Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Poltergeist is her first novel.