Electric Elizabeth: A Novel

  "Yes."

  "I'm sure the tenants don't speak much," she said.

  "You'd be surprised how much talking goes on in that cemetery."

  "That's just creepy."

  "And that's why you never visit or stay with me?" I asked.

  "Darling, you know it's a long drive for me in that junky car—"

  "And you don't stay with me even when I offer to drive," I said. "I drive to school and to see you every day. I'm thinking you're afraid of me."

  "That's why I'm in bed with you," she said.

  "Okay, then you're afraid of my house."

  ( . . . )

  "Is that it?" I asked.

  "Everything you've told me about that place, that town," she said. "Everything it did to you. I don't know if I'd ever want to see that."

  "My parents are gone. The people who've bothered me have moved on. Most of them, anyway."

  Liz remained quiet, then let out a sigh. I could tell she was working through something in her mind. Had she been facing me, I would have seen her eyes, black in the room's nighttime blue, shifting as if sorting through columns of data. I would have seen her lips purse, her thick eyebrows knitting as her mind gamed out scenarios, figured and refigured options.

  "Tomorrow's Saturday," she said. "Maybe you can drive me there tomorrow."

  I smiled, held her tightly. She ran her fingernails over my arm, kissed my hand. We said nothing else that night. I fell asleep listening to the white noise of the television in the next room and the hiss of tires from passing cars on the road out front.

  ***

  It's called sleep paralysis.

  When I was a boy, I'd awaken when the house was at it quietest, when the room was at its darkest, and I'd be frozen in atonia. My eyes would search the room, my head unable to turn. I'd feel something in the room, something dark and moving like a ghostly tornado whirling in the shadows. There'd be voices in the room, black shapes flittering at the corners of my vision. I'd struggle to sit up, but something heavy and unmovable would push down on my chest until I'd fought with gasping breaths, and, like pulling myself from quicksand, sit up. The shapes would vanish, and the dark presence in the shadows would evaporate, leaving me in an empty room with curtains drawn back to a moonlit or star-filled sky.

  Doctors told my mother it was common: the waking and sleeping cycles colliding, my brain aware that it's dreaming but not yet ready to wake up, sleep hallucinations walking through reality.

  The night before I drove Liz to my house, I awakened on my side, atonic, my eyes wide, my head unable to move. There were no sounds except the ambient sound of the occasional car outside, the creak of thin walls, the popping of floorboards.

  Out of my eyes' corners was a vision of Liz standing before the room's window, her body naked and carved out of the darkness by dim moonlight. She looked out the window, pressed her right hand against the pane and moved her fingers over the surface in slow circles, tiny blue sparks jumping from her fingertips, the arc light reflecting her face in the glass. As she swept her fingers over the pane, her dark eyes followed, unblinking, empty, her mouth closed, lips straight.

  The air crackled like Fourth of July Sparklers, but soon I closed my eyes.

  I awoke to a blood red sunrise and to Liz beside me, blanket up to her nose and snoring softly. I leaned over and kissed her forehead.

  ***

  On the drive to Blackbridge, Liz looked out the window, watching the forests thicken as Lowland Road split away from the main route. She rolled down the window and took the wind into her face, blowing back her hair.

  "Should I stick my head out the window?" she asked. "Lap up the air like a dog?"

  "You could," I said. "Wouldn't you be swallowing a lot of bugs, though?"

  "Good point." She stuck her arm out the window instead. Even though spring had arrived and the trees and weeds were in full bloom, the air was still cool, and I knew it would get even cooler as the road turned into the gap. The sharp hills rose around us as we passed into the gap, and the light took on that darker, heavier quality I'd grown used to in Blackbridge. As tree arches covered the road in darkness, Liz uttered a low "Wow." To our left, the Lackawanna River swelled from melting upstate snowpack, and the main rail line ran parallel to the shoulder. At one point, we passed a large gray Delaware and Hudson locomotive thrumming toward Blackbridge, its deep engine rumble rattling the road.

  Soon, the trees parted, and the road curved right into the town limits and became Polaris Avenue.

  "We're here," I said. Liz nodded, looked through the windshield with squinting eyes.

  "It's a little bigger than I thought it'd be," she said.

  "People actually wanted to move here at one time."

  "And now?"

  "People visit, see the freak show, then leave. Most everyone who lives here has been here for years. I never see anyone move in here anymore. Maybe in fifty years there'll just be the cemetery filled up and that's it."

  "Kind of morbid," she said.

  "Certainly is." I turned the car onto Jay Street, past the few houses, past the empty lots, up the rise, and finally to my house. We pulled into the driveway, and I shut off the engine. Liz just sat, unmoving. "What's wrong?" I said.

  "That's the cemetery back there?" She pointed behind the house at the headstone-filled field a hundred yards away.

  "That's it," I said, opening the door. She got out, closed the door, and looked around.

  "You really are isolated out here."

  "It's not so bad," I said, pulling her evening bag from the back seat. "See? There's a few houses down here, and if you turn the corner here, there's more houses. That's the Lackawanna River back there, and the Susquehanna's over there. They merge a little down that way. The locomotive that we passed rounded the bend and made its way to the railyard. That's where most of the noise comes from," I said, pointing at the locomotive. "Railyard over there. Used to be really busy decades ago, not so much now." I motioned for her to follow me into the house, and she followed, her eyes scanning the high hills, the antenna farm beacon lights throbbing with red regularity.

  I took her through the house. The living room. The kitchen. The stairwell. My old bedroom. My new bedroom. The bathrooms upstairs and downstairs. The attic. The basement. I took her to the back porch and pointed out the Lackawanna, the road we'd just taken, the rail line, the gap through which we'd just passed, the cemetery she'd just seen.

  "And that's where the town ghosts come from," she said.

  "I guess you can call them that," I said.

  Liz grabbed my hand. "You think I'll see them?"

  "Everyone does."

  She let out a deep breath. "What do they do?" she asked.

  "Do?"

  "The ghosts. The wisps."

  "Not much, really. They float. They seem to want something, but no one knows what. They don't speak, but sometimes you'll hear wailing."

  "Wailing? Jesus. You hear that every night?"

  "Not every night."

  "I don't know if I'm going to like staying here."

  "Didn't your scientific mind say it was all bunk?"

  "Bunk in a supernatural sense. It could be completely natural and still scare the hell out of me, like Tsunamis or earthquakes."

  "It's not that bad," I said. "They never caused me harm. Just the people."

  "Those are really high hills," she whispered.

  "They sure are."

  She put her arms around me, and I put mine around her. We stood on the porch under Blackbridge's heavy light listening to river rapids and wind in the woods.

  ***

  That night, we sat in chairs on the back porch at dusk and waited, Liz kept warm with a throw blanket from the living room. An hour later, three greenish balls of light floated from the eastern hill treeline and drifted to the Lackawanna River. They stopped, grouped tightly around a lone tree, then moved in single file as if pushed by wind. They bounced off
tallgrass and entered the cemetery where they wandered the paths for several minutes before winking out one by one.

  She moved close to me, vanilla perfume filling my nose. I leaned over and kissed the top of her head. "You're the only other person who's been in this house besides my parents and I, you know that?" I said.

  Liz looked up. "No other family?"

  "None."

  "Your parents didn't have anyone over to visit?"

  "My family wasn't get-together people."

  She looked at the cemetery again. "So what did you do? For fun?"

  "Fun?"

  "What did you do besides sit in your room?" she asked.

  I shrugged. "Nothing. Sat in my room, kept the door shut, read and wrote. I used to take walks out along the river and the forest over there. I liked taking walks. Most of the time, anyway."

  "Didn't you spend time with other people?"

  "I spent most of my life running from people, Liz."

  She pulled the blanket around her chin. "You know, Milt, in the time we've known each other, you've never had a friend that you've told me about."

  "Never had any," I said.

  "You have to have friends," she said.

  "Some people do."

  "All people do."

  "Well . . . I've got you now," I said.

  She sighed but said nothing.

  In the next hour, the eastern hills erupted with wisplight, blue-white globes spinning and bouncing through bush and branch. When some made it to the river, their light cut luminous shafts in the mist. Some bounced over the river, floated up the southern hillsides then disappeared in the underbrush.

  Liz watched the ghostly display, the light reflecting in the blackness of her shifting eyes.

  ***

  "Have you ever touched one?" Liz asked. "One of those ghosts, or whatever?"

  We lay in bed facing each other, the heavy comforter encasing us in warmth.

  "Never," I said. "Some people said they have."

  "They say what they feel like? Are they hot to the touch?"

  "They're supposed to be cold to the touch, like shoving your hand in snow."

  We'd left the curtains open, and the large windows gave Liz a complete view of most of the town and the hillsides. She pointed behind me. "Look," she said, "there's a bunch of them in that building up there."

  I looked over my shoulder, caught a glance of The Heights aglow in wisplight. "That's the old mental hospital," I said. "Been closed for as long as I can remember. They get a lot of wisps up there; it's almost like a playground for them."

  "Who lives up there next to it?"

  "The Burkes. They used to own over half the town, own properties all over the state. I went to school with one of them, you know? He didn't go to private school. Just went to school like the rest of us. His name's Bentley. Have no idea where he is now."

  "People live up there with all those things?"

  "They're probably used to them. The Burkes get to look down at all of us from there, so I guess they don't want to walk away from that. There's really nowhere in this town to walk away to. Like I said, you get used to those things."

  "What do you think those things want?" Liz asked.

  "Maybe a mix of nothing and a desire to cause trouble. Like the old Will-o'-the-wisps that try to lead you astray. People outside town think they're gases of some sort or some sort of electrical charge in the air, but I don't know. People have followed them into the river, into The Swamps, into the paths of locomotives. I stay clear of them."

  She nodded. "I still haven't seen those vapors."

  "You going to move in?" I asked.

  She smiled. "Should I?"

  "Yes, you should."

  She turned her back to me, grabbed my arm and put it around her. "I need to give thirty days' notice to my landlord."

  "Okay."

  "I'll need to store some of my things in your basement."

  "That's fine."

  "Okay then," she said.

  I held her tightly, kissed her neck.

  "Goodnight, Darling," she whispered.

  "Goodnight."

  As Liz breathed next to me, the atmosphere in the house shifted, like air after a lightning storm, clean and light.

  As she slept, a green glow spilled in from the street—a vapor floating down the road in its search for its unspoken thing. The glow intensified, then faded with a soft moan.

  I let Elizabeth sleep.

  ***

  "Is it always windy here?" Liz asked while we walked north on Vela Street. She continuously brushed her hair from her eyes. The sun was bright that morning, the air cool and damp.

  "Breezy days and windy days," I said. "Sometimes the air calms down, though. But usually it rushes through the river gaps. Even when it's calm on the other side of the hills, it gets breezy or windy here. Just part of life. You get used to it."

  "Sounds like you get used to a lot of things here," she said.

  "You have to."

  We hopped over a large crack in the sidewalk, and Liz pointed at The Heights. "Ever been up there?" she asked.

  "Never. The Burke's don't like visitors. Ever since the hospital closed they've kept most of the hill as their own. Sometimes service trucks go up there to work on the antennas, but that's it."

  "I noticed the antennas," she said, pointing to the antenna farms on the hilltops. "Your whole town's ringed by them."

  "Television antennas, microwave antennas, radio antennas, antennas I don't even know what they're for," I said. "Five sets of three antennas. We've got bridges for trains and bridges for electronic signals. Kind of poetic, right?" She seemed transfixed by the antennas, their blinking beacons, their candy cane-like orange and white paint, the long guy wires extending from the masts into the earth. "I used to think a lot about what the antennas were sending over the town," I said. "My mom had this cheap shortwave radio, and I'd hide in my room and listen to all these weird signals and imagine that the antennas were broadcasting secret messages or something. You think that's weird, don't you?"

  "It's not weird, Milt," she said. "Let me ask you: Didn't you ever want to find out where those weird signals came from? Didn't you ever dream of hopping a bus or a train and just—going?"

  "Why'd I do that?"

  "To see what's out there. Past the hills, past Scranton, past the state line."

  "Never gave it much thought," I said. "Maybe it's all the same. Just filled with a lot of bad people and bad things."

  "You really think that."

  "Why not?"

  "Am I a bad person?" she asked.

  "Of course not. I found the one good person." I put my arm around her and brought her close.

  "There're lots of good people out there, Milt," she said. "There're lots of good things to see and feel out there."

  I shrugged. "Probably. Like I said, never gave it much thought."

  "I don't know if I'm a good person, Milt, but I know there are good people out there. My parents were good people. I've had friends who were good people."

  "Was your friend Colleen a good person?" I asked.

  "Low blow, Milt."

  "I didn't mean it that way, Liz. I'm just curious what you think of her."

  "What I think of her," she said. She lowered her head, probably working through her thoughts. We crossed the intersection of Apusa Avenue where the neighborhoods became denser, where the height and sharpness of the eastern hills became more stark. We kept walking straight where the street transformed into a hard-packed gravel trail that continued into a thick grouping of pine trees.

  "Let's turn here," I said.

  "Where's that trail go?" she asked.

  "A chapel."

  "A chapel? Back there? I'd like to see it."

  "You sure?"

  "Sure I'm sure."

  "Okay then."

  I'd not seen the St. Hildegard Chapel in years. It sat in a miniature forest that used to
be a neighborhood until the 1920's when a fire destroyed sixteen homes in the area. The area was cleaned out, the homes never rebuilt, and the paved road was never extended beyond Shrike Street. Pine trees covered the area now, and someone, no one knows who, had built a small chapel in a clearing at the center. It was a simple stone structure, and the last time I'd seen it the chapel was clean and looked relatively new, but that was over ten years ago. Most people had no reason to visit it. The shadows were said to whisper angrily there while wisps and vapors roamed the grounds during full moons. Most felt it best to leave the place alone.

  The gravel path passed through a passage of blue spruces and Mondell pines, dense and alive with birdsong. They occluded the sunlight, letting only dim splotches of gold speckle the footpath.

  "It's pretty here," Liz said.

  "Lot more trees here than I remember," I said. The path transformed from gravel to gray flat stone, the spaces filled with moss and lichen. Gradually, the trees parted and opened to the central clearing where the chapel sat in murky sunlight. We followed the path to the entrance, and I told Liz what little I knew about the chapel. We walked around its rectangular perimeter, Liz running her hands over the smooth stone, running her eyes over the sharp-pointed copper roof, the slanted copper crucifix at it apex, the small stained glass windows set into the walls with saints lifting their arms to the heavens.

  "No one knows who built this?" she asked.

  "Not really. I heard it was built over a winter, if you can believe that. One day there was nothing, a few weeks later, this place shows up. I know the church raised money to build this path to it years later, but no one knows who built it or who keeps it clean." I walked her to the front door and opened it. "My mom said she used to come here during the day."

  "They leave it open like this?" Liz asked. We stepped inside, where it was cold and dark, the only light reds and blues from the windows and a row of lit candles flickering next to the door and behind an altar made of polished stones like the chapel itself. The floor was tightly packed flat stones, the six pews were gray wood. Somewhere, breeze whistled through a fissure. Behind the altar, a Byzantine-like Christ icon gazed from the shadows.

  "It's always open," I said. "Someone comes, sweeps out the place, and lights the candles." We sat in a pew in the back. Liz looked at the windows, the ceiling, her eyes tracing every stone, every crack, every angle and spot of light.

  "You believe in God?" she whispered.

  "I don't know," I said. "You live here long enough and see and hear enough things, you start thinking there's more than what's in the science textbooks, but I don't think about it too much. Do you?"