The Unseen

by Bryan, JL

  Cassidy, Barb, and Reese downed her entire drinks, but Tamila took a small sip, wrinkled her nose, and coughed. She waved her hand in front of her mouth and set her mostly-full glass on Cassidy’s dresser, shaking her head.

  “What? How can you wuss-gag on vodka? It has no taste,” Reese said. “Who wants seconds?”

  “We don’t want to waste all of it right away,” Cassidy said.

  “It’s not wasted if we drink it.” Reese winked, and Barb laughed.

  “You know what we should do? A full moon is the best time to contact the dead,” Barb said.

  “Why would we want to do that?” Reese asked.

  “To see what’s on the Other Side,” Barb replied.

  “Isn’t that why the chicken crossed the road?” Tamila asked, but only Cassidy laughed at her joke.

  “I’m serious, let’s do it,” Barb said. “Let’s talk to the spirits.”

  Cassidy bit her lip. Barb thought death was dark and romantic, but Cassidy didn’t find it romantic at all. Her own father had died when she was six years old.

  “How do you want to contact the dead, Barb?” Cassidy asked. “A séance?”

  “Oh, this is all part of your ‘Look at me, I’m so Gothic and mysterious and weird’ thing,” Reese said to Barb.

  “It’s better than your ‘Look at me, I’m wearing a see-through shirt’ thing,” Barb countered.

  “Bitch!” Reese replied.

  “Slut!”

  Reese gasped and slapped playfully at Barb, who tackled her in return. Cassidy watched them, drunk and friendly on the bed beside her, and still couldn’t think of a single good reason to ever hang out with Reese again.

  “Want to do the séance, Tami?” Cassidy asked.

  “That’s not funny,” Tamila said. “Let’s talk about something else.”

  “Yeah, a séance!” Reese suddenly seemed interested now that Tamila was clearly uncomfortable.

  “We used a Ouija board at my cousin’s house during Christmas,” Barb said. “It really does move by itself, it spells out words. It was creepy.”

  “Those are dangerous,” Tamila said. “We did a study unit on them at church. Ouija boards, Tarot cards, Satan-worshipers, Wiccans—”

  “Hey, Wiccans worship nature,” Barb interrupted, sitting up and looking serious. “Not Satan. Satanists don’t worship Satan, either. I read the Satanic Bible. Well, like three pages of it.”

  “Then that’s a rip-off,” Cassidy said. “What are people who worship Satan supposed to call themselves if they can’t use the word ‘Satanist’?”

  “They need a name,” Barb said. “They should organize. They need like a devil-pope, and a whole Satanic bureaucracy—”

  “Stop it.” Tamila said. “Stop saying ‘Satan.’”

  “Are you fucking serious right now?” Reese asked. “Let’s break out that Ouija board, ladies.”

  “No! They can make people crazy. There’s demonic possession, ghosts...if you really read up on this, Reese, you’d know. It’s dangerous,” Tamila said.

  Reese and Barb looked at each other, then burst out laughing.

  “Dangerous? They’re made by Parker Brothers,” Reese said.

  “I don’t have one here, anyway. I bought one in middle school, but my mom found it and threw it away before I could use it,” Cassidy said.

  “Did she throw it in the sinkhole out back? Like next to the old homeless-person mattress?” Reese asked, and she and Barb broke down laughing again.

  Cassidy felt herself blush—part anger, part embarrassment—and she poured herself more wine.

  “We can make one!” Barb, who knew Cassidy’s room as well as Cassidy herself, stumbled across the room and opened the door to Cassidy’s tiny closet.

  The closet door was covered in drawings, as were all the walls in Cassidy’s cluttered room. Her oldest works were approximate drawings of Oscar and Elmo from Sesame Street, in the medium of Crayola, just above the springy doorstop that had fascinated her as a small child.

  From there, the drawings had spread up and out, bats and dragons done in colored pencil and marker, then attempts at portraits of people she knew—her mother, her father, her kindergarten teacher, and some preschool friend whose name she’d long forgotten. Later works included paintings of trees, spiderwebs, and a homeless one-eyed cat who lived in the parking lot.

  “You could draw an awesome spirit board, Cassidy!” Barb carried out poster board and a shoebox with markers, glue, scissors, and bottles of glitter, which Cassidy had used to create the colorful, shimmering flowers on her dresser drawers back in middle school. “It would be so much better than the store-bought ones, anyway. You know it would.”

  “You want me to make it?” Cassidy smiled, a little excited by the idea of creating something new. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she wondered if they might contact her father’s spirit, wherever it was, but she certainly didn’t say it out loud.

  “We’d better not,” Tamila said.

  “Come on, Tami, it’s something we can all do together. What goes on a Ouija board? Just letters and numbers, right?” Cassidy asked.

  “You also need a YES and a NO so the spirits can answer questions, and a GOOD-BYE so they can leave when they’re done,” Barb said. “Use the glow-in-the-dark markers.”

  “Good idea!” Cassidy replied. Barb hopped up to light the three scented candles in Cassidy’s room. Tamila frowned.

  Cassidy carefully wrote out the alphabet in three rows of green letters, then added numbers from zero to nine. She wrote YES and NO in the upper corners and GOOD-BYE at the bottom.

  “And maybe a big FUCK YOU in case they get annoyed,” Reese suggested, and Cassidy snickered and added FUCK YOU between the YES and the NO.

  “This isn’t a joke,” Tamila said. “I’m not doing this.”

  “Blah, blah, blah.” Reese rolled her eyes.

  “Now we just need to decorate it,” Barb said. “There’s usually a sun and a moon...”

  “We can do better than that.” Cassidy drew a blue moon, a green clover, a red heart, and a purple horseshoe before realizing she was imitating the ingredients of a Lucky Charms box. “Wait, this is stupid.”

  “That’s what I’ve been saying,” Tamila said.

  “It looks good!” Barb countered.

  “Make it more occult-y,” Reese said, with a sharp grin at Tamila.

  Cassidy used the nozzle of her Elmer’s Glue bottle to sketch stars in each corner of the poster board. She dusted them with red glitter and blew off the excess, leaving four sparkling red pentagrams.

  “That seems like a bad idea,” Tamila said. “Just take off the pentagrams, okay?”

  “The pentagrams are great!” Barb said.

  “Hell, yeah, keep them,” Reese nodded.

  “What other occult symbols are there?” Cassidy asked.

  “Inverted crosses?” Reese suggested, then smirked at Tamila’s shocked look.

  “There’s a symbol for each horoscope sign. I’ll sketch them...” Barb drew the symbols on a scrap of notebook paper, and Cassidy copied them in marker around the edges of the posterboard—blue waves for Aquarius, a red bull pictogram for Taurus.

  “The symbol for Cancer is a sixty-nine?” Reese snickered, looking over Barb’s shoulder.

  “That’s what Cancers like. I’m a Cancer, so I know,” Barb replied.

  “Here it is—the ultimate Ouija board.” Cassidy held up the colorful, glittering poster board. “We should be able to talk to ghosts from all over the world with this thing.”

  “Sweet, international ghosts! Let’s see how it looks in the dark.” Barb turned out the light, leaving the room in the dim glow of three candles. The letters and numbers glowed an eerie green. Outside, the trees rustled in the wind and light rain tapped on the balcony.

  “Maybe I should go,” Tamila said quietly.

  “Maybe you should!” Reese snatched the newly made board from Cassidy’s hands and tugged Barb down to the carpet with her. “Come on,
let’s call up some dead people.”

  “What do we use as a pointer?” Cassidy asked.

  “You mean a planchette?” Barb drained her wine glass, then placed it upside down in the center of the board. A few droplets of red wine dribbled down and blurred the glowing letters M and N. Barb and Reese laid their fingertips on the base of the inverted glass.

  “Let’s do this!” Reese said.

  Cassidy slid down from her bed and sat across from Reese. She placed her own fingertips on the glass along with the other two girls.

  “One spot left,” Cassidy said to Tamila, who had made no move to leave the chair.

  “I’m not doing it.”

  “Come on, Tami. It’ll be fun. Please?” Cassidy resorted to a begging tone, locking eyes with Tamila. What she wanted to say was: I am desperately trying to make you part of the group here, so please stop acting like such a tromboner tonight. “As a favor to me?”

  “It does work better with four people,” Barb added.

  Tamila sighed, looked at the board, and reluctantly left her chair to sit next to Cassidy, while offering a shaky, frightened smile to no one in particular.

  “Okay. Let’s get it over with,” Tamila whispered. She placed her trembling fingers on the base of the upside-down wine glass. “We should say a prayer first.”

  Barb and Reese found this hilarious, and Tamila frowned at their peals of drunken laughter.

  “Let’s go,” Barb said. She closed her eyes. “Are there any spirits—”

  “Come talk to us, spirits!” Reese interrupted, closing her eyes and also swaying from side to side. In her best drama-club voice, she projected, “Speak to us, give us messages from the world of the dead...”

  The glass trembled under their fingers, and Cassidy gasped. Everybody leaned in for a closer look, but the glass became still again.

  “You should say only good spirits,” Tamila whispered. “Or we could end up talking to demons, or evil ghosts, or dead murderers...”

  “Calling all demons, evil ghosts, and dead murderers!” Reese cried out in a slurred voice, then doubled forward, laughing.

  “Be serious, Reese,” Barb said. In a louder, more formal voice, she asked, “Are there any messages from the Other Side? Like from our spirit guides or totem animals?”

  “Totem animals,” Reese snickered.

  “We all have one. Mine’s a frog,” Barb told her, and Reese laughed and shook her head, tossing her blond hair.

  “You look like a frog!” Reese said.

  “Sh! It’s moving,” Cassidy told them.

  The wine glass shuddered again, and this time it began to slide over the poster board, the lip scraping and smearing a few of the still-wet letters, gathering glowing paint around its rim.

  The glass moved across the alphabet to the word YES in the upper left corner of the poster, scraping up glue and glitter from a sparkly red pentagram along the way.

  “Who’s doing that? Are you doing that?” Reese asked Tamila, who shook her head, her wide eyes fixed on the board.

  “Hello? Are you a spirit?” Barb asked.

  The glass slid half an inch, then right back into place. YES again.

  “Who are you?” Barb asked. “I mean, to whom do we have the pleasure of speaking?”

  The wineglass lay still for a moment, then vibrated and hummed as if someone had plinked it with a fingernail. The glass slid over the alphabet.

  Cassidy felt her heart racing. She hadn’t expected it to work at all, and it was starting to freak her out. She wished they hadn’t turned off the lights.

  The wine glass smeared its way across the board, its entire rim glowing green now. It stopped at the letter N, and didn’t move again until Barb said the letter aloud. It stopped again on the I.

  “N...I...” Barb said.

  “Nipple?” Reese suggested.

  The glass continued on to the B, then H...A...and then it stopped on Z.

  “N-I-B-H-A-Z,” Barb said.

  “It’s just nonsense,” Cassidy said.

  The wineglass jerked under their fingers, then flew to the word NO, dragging their fingers with it.

  “Who’s doing that?” Reese asked. “Is it you, Cassidy? Barb? It’s you, isn’t it, Barb? You big Goth girl.”

  “Sh,” Barb said. “Nib...haz? Is that right?”

  The wineglass zipped over to YES.

  “What does that mean?” Cassidy asked.

  The wineglass spelled out N...A...M...E.

  “Your name is Nibhaz?”

  YES.

  “Sounds like a demon’s name to me,” Tamila said in a soft voice.

  “Pfft, shut up,” Reese told her. “Like you would know.”

  “Do you have a message for someone here, Nibhaz?” Barb asked.

  YES.

  “For who?” Barb asked.

  C...A...S...S...

  Cassidy felt her blood turn cold.

  “Oh, shit, for Cassidy?” Reese asked.

  YES.

  “Nibhaz, what is your message for Cassidy?” Barb asked.

  The four girls watched as the glass crept back and forth along the top row of text. D...I...E...

  “Die? It’s telling her to die?” Tamila gasped.

  “Sh, it’s not done yet,” Barb told her.

  “Yeah, it’s not done yet,” Reese echoed, her eyes fixated on the glass.

  Cassidy shivered, trying to think of any non-scary word that started with “die.”

  “Diesel?” Cassidy asked in a shaky voice. She expected someone to laugh at her, but nobody did.

  The glass moved back to the letter D.

  “Died,” Barb said. “He’s saying he died, I think. He’s a ghost.”

  The glass whipped over to the word NO, then returned to the letter D.

  D...I...E..

  D...I...E...

  D...I...E...

  “Does it stand for something?” Cassidy guessed, trying not to sound scared. Her heart was thundering inside her chest.

  “Is it somebody’s initials, Nibhaz?” Barb asked.

  NO.

  “He’s telling her to die! Are you people blind?” Tamila snapped. She took her fingers off the glass and stood. “I’m gone. Forget this craziness.”

  “You can’t let go until the spirit says GOOD-BYE!” Barb yelled at her. “That’s how people get possessed!”

  “Oh, now you believe in demons?” Tamila asked, brushing off her knees.

  “Please don’t leave me, Tami,” Cassidy whispered. She was genuinely scared now. “Not until this is done, okay?”

  Tamila looked at her a long moment, then sighed and reluctantly sat on the floor again.

  “Make it quick.” Tamila returned her fingers to the glass. “I mean it.”

  “Nibhaz, is there more to your message?” Barb asked.

  YES.

  “What?” Cassidy whispered.

  The glass flew back to the top row of letters.

  D...I...E...

  It moved faster, back and forth, never leaving the top row.

  DIE

  DIEDIEDIEDIEDIEDIEDIEDIEDIEDIEDIEDIE

  Cassidy watched in horror, spellbound as the glass raced back and forth, smearing the top row of letters into an illegible green streak, but still sliding back and forth, back and forth, touching the spots where the three letters D, I, and E had been.

  She wanted to let go and pull away, but her fingertips felt glued to the wine glass. The glass became icy, burning cold under her fingertips, a crust of smoking frost forming inside the bowl and along the stem.

  She could feel the terror growing inside her like an abyss opening in her guts, yet she was unable to let go, or to move a muscle, or to speak. All four girls watched the glass scrape back and forth, back and forth, as though hypnotized.

  A rainy gale lashed against her bedroom window. The balcony door blew open and slapped against the wall, cracking the door’s glass pane. The wind brought cold rain into the room and blew out two of the three candles.


  The girls screamed and leaped to their feet. Cassidy took a step back from the board she’d made, and so did Barb and Tamila, the three of them spreading out and away.

  Reese crouched over the board, staring, ignoring her blond bangs as they blew across her eyes, her blue eyes bright and entranced. The wine glass had stopped its back and forth sliding. It was in the middle of the board, still upside down, slowly rotating though nobody was touching it anymore. It gathered a thicker coat of frost and emitted a hollow ringing sound, as though someone traced an invisible finger around and around its rim.

  The glass rose slowly from the poster board, levitating just an inch in the air. Reese watched it, mesmerized, reaching her fingers toward it as the other three girls backed away.

  “Reese, look out—” Barb began.

  Reese slapped out her hand and smashed the glass down as though squashing a bug. It broke, sticking her fingers with long shards, but she didn’t seem to care.

  She crushed her hand down on the glass and rolled it back and forth, slicing up her fingers as she broke the wineglass bowl into pieces. She smeared her blood across the glowing green alphabet.

  “What are you doing, Reese? Reese?” Cassidy asked.

  Reese remained crouched over the board, rolling the broken glass back and forth, back and forth.

  “Reese!” Barb shook the girl’s shoulder. “Stop cutting yourself!”

  Reese looked up at Cassidy, and the look on her face turned Cassidy’s insides to ice. Reese wore an expression that could only be described as true evil. Her blue eyes had narrowed to angry slashes. Her nose was wrinkled in a look of disgust, nostrils flaring, the entire lower half of her face downturned in a bitter, brutal snarl, her canine teeth prominent between her pale lips.

  When Reese spoke, it was not her own voice, but something like the roar of a lion, a sound far too deep and loud to come from inside Reese’s anorexic little body. It shook the timbers in the walls and floor of Cassidy’s apartment, toppled the lamp from her nightstand, and sent a sheaf of poems and drawings sliding off her bookshelf. The wind scattered the papers across her floor.

  “You will DIE you fatherless WHORE-BORN, you dripping spawn of a stray BITCH-CUR!” roared a rasping voice from Reese’s open mouth, though her lips barely moved.