“Pfft” I made a dismissive noise as if I wasn’t afraid. Obviously, I was. There, just the two of us, alone in that old abandoned house in the middle of the night. “Of course I don’t…”
“Then get a move on and set up the fucking board, pussy.” Tyler said cooly over his shoulder, individually placing and lighting small black candles around the barren dusty bedroom. “It’s almost the witching hour.”
“I’m doing it, I’m doing it…for fuck’s sake…” I unzipped my backpack and took out the spirit board before laying it flat in front of me, surrounding it with white candles and placing the glass on top. “We know it’s bullshit, anyway. Who cares if we’re a minute late? Are you gonna be all sulky when Elvis doesn’t show up to sing you a song?”
“It’s Halloween, dickbird. All Hallows’ Eve. If it was ever going to work, it’d be tonight…”
With the room flickering in the dim light, we took our places facing each other on opposite ends of the board, placing our left hands on the glass. The air tasted stale in there, literally, I could taste the decay on my tongue. My biggest concern at that point was inhaling mold spores or catching my skin on a rusty nail and getting tetanus or being devoured alive by one of the many giant spiders that’d made their nests in the darkest corners which I cringed to look at. Sensing my impatient urgency, Tyler told me to just ‘close my eyes and clear my mind’, which I did, reluctantly. Anything to get this crazy shitshow wrapped up so that we could get back to Mike’s party on the other side of town. I felt pretty damn stupid trespassing in that hellhole dressed as a pirate, minus an eyepatch. Tyler on the other hand was much more appropriately costumed with his spooky black hooded robe and plastic-gold pentacle medallion; of which I hadn’t stopped laughing at since I first saw him that evening. Why I ever let Tyler talk me into bailing and going there of all places, I’ll never know. Morbid curiosity, perhaps? Maybe I just couldn’t stand another minute of that dickhead Blake and his shitty fucking attitude, all drunk and ready to fight over nothing. I hoped he’d be gone or passed out by the time we made it back, then I might actually have a chance to make some progress with Becca. She’d been particularly distant at Mike’s, upset by all the drama.
We sat in uncomfortable silence for a while, I honestly can’t even say how long, before Tyler finally felt it appropriate to speak. He let his voice flair as if he were the lead performer in some silly magic show.
“Spirits! We seek your presence! We seek your knowledge! Please! Come towards us!”
Another indeterminate moment of silence passed, not even the wind whistling outside interjected, and Tyler tried his hand as a conjurer once more with the same over-the-top dramatic inflection.
“Spirit! Please make yourself known! We seek your company! Can you let us know if you are here with us?”
Still, nothing. Tyler glanced around in frustration and I went to stand, done with the whole thing.
“This is fucking stupid, Tyler. Let’s g-”
“Don’t take your hand off the glass!” The look on Tyler’s face as we locked eyes was half of surprised amazement and the other a reserved dread, he gripped the back of my palm tighter, pressing it into the glass. “I can feel it…”
“The fuck are you talking ab-” I began, before being cut off by something unseen. I felt it too. Like the air grew thicker, switching in an instant from the expected dry staleness of a dead home to the macabre miasmic odor of something else. Something else entirely, like a burning garbage fire. Death. “Tyler… what the fuck?”
“Shhhhhhh!” Tyler hushed me, drawing his free hand to his lips before motioning around the room with it. “Listen…”
Then, as soon as he’d said it, I could hear it. A soft tapping, slowly traveling from one end of the ceiling to the other. Right above us. Steadily and with clear intent, it continued its slow circuit of laps in what I assumed was the attic. Tracing us, going between Tyler and I. Choosing.
“What is your name, spirit?”
The glass shuddered beneath our palms and Tyler had to remind me to keep my grip loose, which wasn’t easy. I could see that he was opening his mouth, likely to ask the question again, but before he could speak the glass began to slowly travel letter-by-letter across the spirit board… crawling like a bug. I barely even had my hand on it. Stifling the urge to run or to look away, I concentrated on the letters, scrawling them down as my fingers shook until the name was entirely spelled out.
C-H-R-I-S-T-I-N-E
“Holy shit, we need to get the fuck out of here, Tyler. This isn’t funny anymore, c’mo-”
Tyler shushed me again, regaining his composure. He applied more desperate pressure onto my hand, urging me to stay. I could tell he was trying to recall the other questions he’d prepared beforehand, but it was obvious that he was about as terrified and astonished as I was. In a voice quivering through his intended confident tone, Tyler continued; now well beyond the flippancy of his initial theatrics, he spoke tentatively.
“Christine…” The glass trembled, and it was all I could do but to convince myself that it wasn’t real. That none of it was. It couldn’t be. A soft whimper escaped my lips, my eyes closing tightly in fear. “Can you make yourself known to us?..”
The silence was entirely deafening, as if I couldn’t even hear our twinned shallow breathing anymore. Then, after an eternity, I found the courage to open my eyes. There, in the far corner, I saw what could only be described as a corpse. Hunched up, with its mangled bloody and bruised legs contorted around itself and its broken purple-pale arms twisted around the back of its head. The dead-eyed monster was staring me down, gawking with bulging white marbles between its thick strands of sticky brown hair. Its wide-open mouth was a gaping black hole. An abyss. Without a thought, I grabbed Tyler by the arms and pulled him through the open doorway, sending the glass tumbling in our wake as we rushed back down the creaking staircase and into his shitty red Corolla parked on the sidewalk. I didn’t look back, but I couldn’t stop screaming.
As Tyler sped us away from the house, I found my ability to breathe lacking, let alone able to find the words to describe what was right there lurking just feet behind him through my shock. I’m not ashamed to say that I started crying right there in the passenger seat, weeping like an inconsolable lost child. Tyler was in the middle of calling me a slew of degrading names, when suddenly, the radio turned on inexplicably through no action of our own.
Static made it impossible to decipher what was playing, but it was something slow and soothing. Soft jazz. Oldies. We simply stared into each other’s stunned faces, frozen, until Tyler turned his attention back to the road and launched into a screaming fit of his own. There it was, in the middle of the dark country lane, all contorted and bent in every unnatural way imaginable. The car screeched as Tyler frantically jerked at the wheel and we went straight through a wooden barrier and over a ditch before coming to a smoking wrecked stop amongst some trees, rolling several times in the chaos.
We were upside down when I woke up. Tyler didn’t. His face, I’ll never forget it… all wet and red. Utterly crushed. Dragging myself through the shattered windscreen, cutting my forearms as I shimmied through the opening, I cried out for help but none came, and I felt myself slipping away. The dark of the woods grew increasingly opaque, like a heavy film covering my drooping eyes, and I began to fall backwards into an onyx chasm of calm nothingness.
The fluorescent hospital lights stung at first, but as my vision began to adjust I took solace in the fact that the ordeal was over. I scrambled internally, trying to piece together what had happened to me. Then I saw it, crumpled up in the corner, staring my way without eyes… right through me. It was Tyler. His necrotic pulp of a face leaked thick black sludge onto the blinding white hospital tiles beneath. Blacker than tar. Black like the abyss…