The Specter in the Tadpole Room
Brigid Cawley
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The kids playing with blocks this morning built a fire station, a castle, and a temple for Belphegor. Miriam and I look at each other knowingly when Danny explains his temple to us. We could have told you two days ago that he was coming down with something when he slept during naptime for the first time in months. The temple isn’t quite enough to merit sending him home, but I’ll bet you anything he’ll be chanting to himself by the end of the day. His parents won’t want to admit he’s sick; a Belphegor possession means five days on exorcillin before returning to school.
I’m helping the kids put the blocks away when I wrinkle my nose.
“What’s that smell?”
Miriam shrugs and smiles blithely. “Don’t ask me.” Miriam has a terrible sense of smell, and her brain evidently compensates with an above-average sense of superiority.
I scowl and start to look around. In the three years Miriam and I have been teaching together in the Tadpole Room, our preschool’s second-oldest classroom, I’ve almost always been the one who deals with the kids’ accidents. Sure enough, I find Emily standing awkwardly in the bathroom next to a puddle of vomit, just inches from the child-sized toilet.
As soon as she sees me, she bursts into tears and tries to hug me. I take a step back and pat her on the head. She’s not likely to infect an adult, but despite six years as a preschool teacher, I’m very squeamish around vomit.
“Are you okay, Emily? What happened?”
She responds by opening her mouth to release gallons of briny, ice-cold water.
“We’re all freezing now,” she rasps. “Come, Miss Zoe. Freeze with us.”
“Oh, honey. I’m sorry you’re not feeling good. Stay right there, okay?”
Back in the classroom, I snap on a pair of gloves and open the childproofed cabinet with our cleaning supplies. I tell Miriam, “Call Emily’s mom. She’s got Lilith.”
Miriam sighs. “It’s that time of year, isn’t it?”
Lilith, the girl who drowned during the sinking of the Titanic, is a relatively harmless strain of ghost possession that’s been around for over a century. Easy enough to treat, but the tricky part is figuring out whether a kid is possessed or just going through a Titanic phase.
Emily sits on a little chair in the bathroom while I crouch on the floor to wipe up the mess. I use our strongest cleaning solution: water with two tablespoons of Clorox and a tablespoon of holy water, one of many compromises on possession protocol to appease the ever-battling church, state, parents, and doctors.
“Mom’s going to come pick you up, okay?”
“Mummy’s hands are so cold. So are mine. Feel.”
Suddenly, Emily’s little hands are around my neck. She just turned four last month, and her fingers aren’t long enough to get a good grip.
“No, thank you,” I say sternly. I stand up, and her weak grasp releases. “Sit back down, please. Do you want to look at a book while you wait?”
Emily nods meekly, so I grab her favorite Curious George. Her not knowing how to read has never lessened her love for books, and neither does Lilith. She turns the pages gently and hums to herself while I mop up saltwater.
When Emily’s mother arrives, she strokes her daughter’s damp hair and smiles. “Hey, Emmie. How about we go home and watch some TV?”
“Home,” says Emily dazedly. “Our home is the ocean now.”
Her mother winks at me. “Her big brother had Lilith a few years ago; we know the drill. Warm towels, chicken soup, and ragtime.” Emily reaches out her arms to be picked up, and her mother carries her out the door.
During afternoon circle time, I notice that Danny isn’t singing “Itsy Bitsy Spider” along with the rest of the kids. Instead, I make out his lisping voice muttering, “Out came the sun and dried up all the blood, and the bones of those who wronged me were ground into the mud.”
I called it. Textbook Belphegor.
I dread the lockdown drills we have to do twice a year. The school gave us a packet about explaining them to four-year-olds, and it’s completely useless.
“Let’s just bribe them with stickers,” I plead to Miriam, but she shakes her head.
“We’ll follow the guide. Bribes aren’t developmentally appropriate.”
“Sitting still and being quiet for ten minutes isn’t developmentally appropriate either, but we still need to do it.”
Miriam wins out in the end, as she usually does, so she gathers all the kids in the corner of the room as I turn off the lights and lock the doors.
“Sometimes something dangerous might be going on outside,” Miriam reads from the packet as I join her sitting on the floor. “And to stay safe, we need to hide and be quiet.”
“What kind of dangerous?” asks Danny.
“A bad guy with a gun,” Bo answers eagerly.
“Nothing for you to worry about,” I add quickly, giving Bo a sharp look.
“Miss Zoe!” shrieks Ava. “Gigi stuck her tongue out at me!”
As if a switch has been flipped, all the kids start shouting and arguing at once. It’s times like this that Miriam and I call them “the hive mind.”
“I didn’t! I only did it because she called me a baby!”
“I was talking to myself!”
“I heard Bo say a bathroom word.”
“He said a bathroom word too! He said diarrhea.”
“What’s diarrhea?”
“Miss Zoe, Danny said diarrhea!”
“I was just asking what it was!”
I stand up and announce, “Everyone who stays quiet gets a sticker!”
Miriam frowns at me, but you can’t argue with results. Every kid has gone silent, pressing their lips together or covering their mouths. Except for Emily.
“Something dangerous is already inside,” she drawls.
Miriam flips frantically through her packet.
“You won’t get a sticker if you can’t be quiet, Emily. Now is not a time for being silly.” I speak gently, assuming that she simply hadn’t heard me; she had gotten swimmer’s ear while she had Lilith and was probably still recovering. But she sneers at me.
“You locked the doors too late, Zoe. I’m already here.”
Then she starts to scream.
Emily’s mother looks exhausted when she arrives to bring her daughter home.
“We can’t catch a break, can we, kiddo?” she says in a faux-joking voice as she zips Emily’s jacket. She looks to me. “We’ve never missed a vaccination, and I don’t think she’s been around anyone who’s sick. What do you think this could be?”
“She just had Lilith… Maybe she didn’t quite get it out of her system.” I shrug. “I’m no spirit pathologist, though, so don’t take my word for it.”
Emily wrenches herself out of her mother’s arms and starts tearing around the room. The other kids cover their ears in anticipation.
“Everyone be quiet!” she booms. “Be quiet and hide!” She pulls toys off shelves, overturns chairs, and hurls books across the room until her mother finally grabs her and wrestles her out the door.
I look down, trying to catch my breath and compose myself. At my feet is the crumpled Curious George book, cover torn clean off the spine.
During naptime, Miriam picks up Legos while I repair the books with packing tape, squinting in the darkened room. We’ve put on the whale sounds CD and spent twenty minutes stroking foreheads and patting backs, trying to get the kids to sleep so we can have an hour of relative peace.
“It’s like you said,” Miriam whispers. “She still has Lilith. These parents always bring their kids back to school too early.”
Worry twists inside me. “But that didn’t seem like Lilith. She was acting like she had Malthus, screaming like it was a banshee bug.”
“It’s obviously not Malthus. She wasn’t speaking in Latin.”
I give up. Once Miriam makes up her mind, she isn’t open to discussion. But I can’t shake my unease as I tape yet another torn page, a kite pulling Curious George into the air and out of reach.
“Miss Zoe, Bo’s doing something bad!”
I don’t bother looking up as I say, “Ava, stop trying to get Bo in trouble.”
But Miriam gasps, “Oh my goodness, Bo!”
At this, I turn around. My stomach drops. Bo is perched five feet in the air atop the art shelf, a vacant expression on his face.
“It’s not safe to climb on shelves,” says Miriam cautiously. “If you fall you could hurt yourself. Do you want me to help you down?”
Bo blinks a few times, then matter-of-factly says, “You can’t help him now. Poor little Bo, too bad what’s in store for him.”
Miriam glances back at me. We’re thinking the same thing. Shit.
“Yikes,” I say. “Hey, Bo? Come down from the shelf and we can talk about giant squids for as long as you want.”
“No!” Bo grins. “I want to do something different.”
I look nervously at the sleeping kids, willing them not to wake up.
“Okay, Bo,” I say carefully. “What do you want to talk about, then?”
The CD starts to skip, the whales stuttering and keening.
Bo fakes a yawn, his eyes glinting. “I don’t want to talk anymore. I want to do this.”
He sweeps his arm across the shelf and shoves a dozen jars of art supplies to the floor, beads and popsicle sticks shooting in every direction. In the same moment, the blinds fly up and the overhead lights turn on, colder and brighter than they should be.
Immediately, everyone is awake. Some kids cry, others laugh, one does both.
“This is unacceptable, Bo!” I know as I say it that there’s no point; it’s not really Bo I’m talking to.
“Try to stop me!” he taunts. “I bet you can’t!”
Miriam swiftly grabs Bo and pulls him from the shelf, bracing herself for a fight, but he doesn’t resist. Instead, he clings to her, looking frightened.
“It’s okay, everyone,” I say shakily. “Lie back down, everything is fine.”
But then Gigi jumps up, thumb wet from sucking it in her sleep, and grabs a block from a nearby shelf. Without hesitation, she lobs it against the wall, plaster cracking.
“You can’t stop me!” cheers Gigi. “Walls can’t stop me!”
As she reaches for another block, I scoop her up, the smallest in the class and light as a feather. She writhes in my arms, kicking at my knees.
I notice that Bo now seems calm and alert. A possession one second and gone the next. I can’t make sense of it. But now Gigi…
“Let me go!” Gigi shrieks, leaning towards me to make the already earsplitting yell more painful. Then, just like Bo, she suddenly relaxes in my arms. Her thumb returns to her mouth.
“Watch this, Zoe!” Danny calls from behind me.
I whip around. Danny had cried when he was startled awake, and tears are drying on his cheeks as he lifts a weighted tape dispenser from my desk. He waggles it in the air, taunting me.
“Windows can’t stop me,” he shouts, and throws the tape dispenser at the window, cracks forming between our homemade suncatchers.
Frantic, I try to remember my trainings on what to do. I wish I had one of Miriam’s packets on how to talk my way through any problem.
“What are you feeling right now, Danny?”
Danny marches through the classroom, kicking over chairs and shoving tables out of his way. His light-up shoes flash with each step.
“Danny feels scared and anxious and sad,” he replies. “But Danny’s not here right now. I am!”
The moment Danny overturns the last chair, Ava chimes in from across the room, “Just kidding, now I’m here!”
I put Gigi down, realizing there’s no point in holding onto just one kid. Whatever possesses them is hopping from one kid to another faster than I can keep up. Miriam has ushered Bo and the others to the library in the corner of the room. Danny and Gigi are themselves again and watch with wide eyes as I step toward Ava.
“How are you doing this? Possessions aren’t supposed to work like this.”
“Says who?” Ava grins. “You’re not the boss of me.”
She twirls, light dancing off the sequins on her dress. The skipping CD sounds like rumbling laughter.
I struggle to keep my composure as I ask, “What’s your name?”
“I don’t know,” she says coyly, tucking her chin into her shoulder.
“Malthus?” I demand. “Oswyn? Drill? Asmodeus? Hildegard?”
Ava shakes her head happily and starts to spin again.
“I don’t have a name,” she sings. “Nobody’s given me one yet!”
“Then what are you?”
Ava stumbles, dizziness catching up to her, and she trips to the floor.
“I’m as big as an ocean!” shouts one of the kids from the library.
“And tiny as a germ,” squeaks another.
“Sometimes I sound like a huge explosion!”
“Sometimes I sound like bones breaking.”
“Sometimes I sound like babies crying. Waaah!”
Then all fifteen children start pretending to bawl, eyes sparkling, staring at me and Miriam. The noise is deafening. I can feel the sound in my chest and in the air around me, and the lights glow brighter still. Bo alone approaches me, climbs onto a table, and leans over to speak into my ear.
“You can’t keep me away. I’m already here.” I have to strain to hear him over the cacophony of wailing kids as he adds, “Wish the kids good luck.”
Then the lights turn back off.
The whale sounds return.
And everything is still.
The kids blink and look around in confusion. Miriam regains her speech before I do. “Everyone, go back to your nap mats. Please.”
Without a word of protest, they all lie back down as they were before. They clutch stuffed animals, twirl hair, suck thumbs. Miriam and I walk around the room, fighting the tremors in our hands as we tuck them in under their blankets, smooth their hair, fix Velcro shoe straps. Only once that is finished do I crouch facing the wall, pretending to examine the small hole in the plaster that
Gigi had left, and start to cry.
Andrea, our principal, gives us some pamphlets about preventing possessions in the classroom. They have titles like “Imaginary Friend or Foe?” and “Putting the Sanity in Sanitizing.” They appear to be decades old, one of them assuring its readers that “Pong” is not the name of a demon, no matter how much their children might be talking about it. Miriam pores over them, but even she admits there’s nothing on them that we don’t already know.
“This was not a normal possession,” I try to tell Andrea. “The time from infection to showing symptoms to being contagious is usually what… four, five days total? It was happening in seconds yesterday. And the way it affected the kids was way beyond anything I’ve ever seen. What are we supposed to do if it comes back?”
Andrea then refers me to the regional director, who emails me pamphlets titled “Picture Books to Help Children Understand Demonic Possession” and “Exercise to Exorcise” and reminds me that, while adults aren’t susceptible to being possessed, I can use my sick time for a mental health day.
I email back to ask if we can bring in a spirit pathologist, or even an exorcist. She replies brusquely, “Waitlists are six months long.”
Miriam and I are walking on eggshells the next morning, but the kids all seem back to normal, albeit a little quieter than usual. Emily is back, too. Her mother says that she calmed down the second they left yesterday. She was cleared for school after coming back negative for every diagnostic test her pediatrician had.
During morning circle time, I ask the class what they remember from yesterday’s naptime.
“We got sick,” Bo says softly.
“Can you tell us what it felt like when you were sick?”
Danny raises his hand. “Like I had so much energy.”
“But also really cold,” adds Gigi.
“I had butterflies in my tummy and in my neck,” says Ava.
The other kids nod. Danny picks his nose; I tell him to go wash his hands.
“Is that how you felt yesterday, Emily?” Miriam asks.
“Yeah, but only for a little bit,” Emily replies. Her voice is nearly a whisper.
“None of you are in trouble,” I try to reassure them. “Miss Miriam and I just want to figure out what was going on. If you start feeling that way again, let us know so we can help you.”
A few kids begin to squirm in their seats, others frown and look away. But Ava, who hasn’t once in her life held her tongue, looks straight at me and says, “It told me you’d say that, but you can’t.”
“I can’t what?”
“It told me,” she says patiently, like I were the child and she the teacher, “that you can’t do anything to help us.”
There’s a shout from the bathroom.
“Stay with Miss Miriam,” I say as I clamber off our alphabet rug, but Emily and Bo trail behind me as I rush to the bathroom.
I round the corner in time to see Danny tear the paper towel dispenser off the wall and loft it over his head. He doesn’t turn around to look at me when he speaks.
“Think you can wash me away with a little soap and water, Zoe?”
The sink’s drain is clogged with playdough, water on full blast and spilling onto the floor. I take a few tentative steps forward and slip, catching myself on the doorframe. Some water shouldn’t make the floor that slippery, but a four-year-old also shouldn’t be able to lift up something that was bolted to a wall.
“Put that down. It’s too heavy.”
“It’s too heavy for Danny.” He speaks tauntingly, in a way that would make Danny cry if he hadn’t been the one saying it. “But not for me!” At this, he hurls the paper towel dispenser at the wall. It breaks apart, shards of plastic skidding on the wet tiles.
Remembering Emily and Bo, I turn around and hiss, “Go back to circle time, please. Right now.”
But Emily pushes past me and, before I can stop her, walks steadily towards Danny. Maybe it’s her low center of gravity or her ladybug rain boots, but the supernaturally slick floor doesn’t slow her down.
“Emily, I’m serious,” I begin, but she shushes me.
“I have an idea, Miss Zoe,” she says with the kind of quiet confidence she only has when reciting a picture book we’ve read a hundred times.
“Sweet little Emily,” Danny says, smirking. “Don’t you know trying to stop me is a fool’s errand?”
“I don’t know what a ‘full serind’ is,” Emily replies.
Without warning, she darts her hands out and presses them on the sides of Danny’s head. With her thumb, she begins to stroke the space between his eyebrows, the way Miriam and I do to get a kid to sleep during naptime. Danny reacts the way he does to vegetables, scrunching his face and coughing, but doesn’t move away.
Then Bo darts past me, drops to the floor, and tangles his arms around Danny’s legs, a game they like to play with me, in which I pretend not to understand why my shoes have gotten so heavy.
“Stop wasting your time!” Danny growls, and the lights overhead flare brighter, the sink flows faster. But Emily doesn’t flinch, and Bo doesn’t loosen his grasp.
More kids have followed us to the bathroom. I hear Miriam shouting for them to come back, but they don’t listen. Ava and Gigi push past me and approach Danny.
“Stop,” I say weakly, but I don’t move. Ava’s words echo in my mind. It said you can’t do anything to help us.
Miriam calls to me as she jogs over. “What is going on?”
I don’t respond, just hold out an arm to keep her from stepping into the bathroom. I’m certain she would be as helpless as I am.
Gigi and Ava start to hug Danny tight, the kind of hug the kids call a “python squeeze.” One after another, every kid in the class treads through the rising water and joins them, clustering together like bees. Miriam and I have always joked that the kids have a hive mind, learning more by copying each other than listening to us.
Danny gets angrier with each child that arrives. He screams out expletives, but they garner no reaction from kids to whom curse words are either mildly funny or completely meaningless. So he looks towards me and bellows, “Done trying already, Zoe? You have the right idea. There’s something worth teaching them: how to give up.”
“Shhh,” whispers Emily while I remain speechless, heart sinking.
Suddenly Danny stops thrashing, and Ava instead starts to shout, “Quit it! It’s not working!” But she’s too trapped among the other kids to be able to move. She screams until she’s red in the face. Gigi, the closest one to her, reaches out and starts stroking her forehead, just like Emily had. I make out a few words of a lullaby she sings to the baby dolls.
“They can’t be doing an exorcism,” Miriam says breathlessly. “Only priests and congressmen can do that.”
“I don’t think this works like those other possessions.” Dread and hope tangle in me as I stutter, “This is something new.”
Ava relaxes, then it’s another kid shouting and pushing. Then another. The possession pinballs between them, staying for less time in each mind it passes to. When one kid tries to break free, the rest hold tight. I wait fearfully for it to grab them all at once, like it did yesterday at the end, but the moment doesn’t come.
Finally, Emily locks eyes with me through the huddle of children and gives me a teeth-baring grin. “It’ll get worse,” she says quietly, earnestly, a pinkie-promise voice far too much like her own.
Then, in an abrupt vacuum of energy that takes my breath away, it’s gone.
Silence echoes off the tiled walls as we all register the change. My eyes dart around as I scan for signs of possession in the kids’ eyes, mouths, posture, find none. Even though it’s over, I can’t bring myself to move; I feel turned to stone, an ancient statue with arms broken off. Bo quietly stands and turns off the sink.
I feel no relief, only an overwhelming sense of foreboding. It may be gone for now, but I sense it still, lurking in the shadows of the future to attack again. It’ll get worse. What will these kids have to face in the years to come? There must be innumerable threats awaiting them–unconquerable demons, tireless ghosts, already breathing down their little necks. And, just as surely as I know they are in danger, I feel certain I cannot save them.
Then I see the kids start to giggle and push each other around and splash in the puddles of water. Gigi declares “the meanie potato head” gone, and their laughter multiplies. And I wonder if they aren’t as powerless against this specter as I am. Maybe they’ll be able to solve the problems that Miriam and I can’t. And until then, we’ll help them in our small ways. We’ll teach them the sounds that letters make, how to count to 100, when to say “please,” and “thank you,” and “I’m sorry.” We’ll help zip up their jackets and sort fingers into gloves before going out in the cold.
And then we’ll wish the kids good luck.
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After two years as a preschool teacher in Boston, Brigid Cawley now lives in Los Angeles. Her short fiction has been published in the Wilderness House Literary Review and Atticus Review.
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