by Jean Ure
Cunningly, I said, “When are Mum and Dad due back?”
I saw Angel’s eyes flicker towards the kitchen clock.
“We’d have to tell them what happened,” I said. “Then Mum would want to know how I’d found out about seances and I’d have to say that you told me.”
Angel was indignant. “I did no such thing!”
“You told me how to spell it.”
“So what? I didn’t tell you to go and do it!”
“You should have checked,” I said. “We’re only young, we’re not responsible.”
Angel’s face turned a sort of mottled beetroot.
“You are an utterly repulsive child,” she said. “I don’t wish to have anything more to do with you!”
I said, “Good. So we can go back upstairs.”
“Go and see if there are any more ghosts,” said Tom. “Whoo-aaah!”
He is not usually that silly. As a rule it is difficult to get him to say anything at all.
“Have you been at Dad’s whisky?” I said.
Tom looked hurt. “I don’t touch whisky, I’m a teetotaller!”
Jem giggled, in a slightly mad fashion.
“She’s gone and overdosed on sugar,” said Tom.
We managed at last to get back upstairs. It wasn’t till we were safely in my bedroom that Skye, with an air of guilty triumph, slid her hand up her sweater and produced a slice of bread.
“I took it from the bread bin,” she said. She smiled, hopefully. “I thought we could… you know! Try again?”
If it had been up to me I’d have said no problem. Go for it! But that is just me. I suppose I am a bit bold. Plus I felt really sorry for Skye. In spite of reckoning it was all rubbish, she was obviously desperate to have another go. But Jem was already starting to look apprehensive.
“We’re not doing it again?”
Skye’s face fell. “I thought you wanted to help me find Gran’s pencil?”
“I do,” said Jem, “I do! But I don’t want to do a seance again!”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ve got loads of ideas. I’ll think of something!”
Over the weekend, Angel kept glowering at me and Tom kept flapping his hands and going “Whoo haah!” in this silly, high flutey voice. Mum looked at him in surprise.
“I think he’s going senile,” I said. “Either that or he’s been at the whisky.”
Mum said, “Tom?”
“I told you,” said Tom, “I’m a teetotaller.”
“So what’s with all the whooing and hahing?” said Mum.
Tom sent me this sly glance. “We reckon there’s a ghost in the house.”
“Rubbish,” said Mum. “Total nonsense!”
I was glad that Mum was so sensible and down to earth. It would have been awkward if she’d asked questions. I really thought I’d got away with it.
But then, on Monday morning…
“I’ve been having nightmares,” said Jem. “All weekend!”
She announced it proudly, like it was some sort of special accomplishment. Like she’d won a competition or got an A for her maths homework.
“I woke up screaming,” she said. “Mum came rushing in thinking I was being murdered!”
“But nothing happened,” I said. “Why are you having nightmares all about nothing?”
“It was scary,” said Jem. She tossed her head, defiantly. “Anyone says it wasn’t, they’re a liar!”
I was prepared to admit that maybe, just for a few seconds, it had been scary. “But not once we’d discovered what it was.”
“Rags,” said Skye. She still sounded bitter. “I told you he shouldn’t have been there.”
Omigod! She was still going on.
“Look, I’m sorry,” I said, “it was the bread. It won’t happen again. All I’m saying, there isn’t any reason for nightmares when all it was was just one poor little innocent dog trying to get something to eat. OK?”
Jem pursed her lips. She was wearing her stubborn expression; the one that means she’s not going to listen to a word you say.
“Could just as easily have been something else.”
“But it wasn’t.”
“Still could have been.”
Me and Skye exchanged glances. Skye shook her head. Jem can be just so illogical at times, there is no conducting any sort of rational conversation with her.
“It’s very dangerous,” she said, “getting in touch with spirits. You never know what’s going to turn up. There’s all sorts of evil out there.”
I didn’t quite know what to say to that. Skye muttered, “That’s just a load of rubbish.”
“It’s not! It’s not rubbish!” Jem assured us of it, earnestly. “There’s good spirits and bad spirits and you meddle at your peril!”
Excuse me? This was our friend Jem speaking? Even Skye seemed a bit taken aback.
“I told Mum,” said Jem, “and sh—”
“You told your mum?” I stared at her, horrified.
“I had to! She wanted to know what my nightmare was about.”
“What was it about?” said Skye. “As a matter of interest?”
“Horrible black shapes all flapping and moaning. Mum says we’re too young to hold seances; she says we’ll upset ourselves.”
I said, “I didn’t upset myself.”
“That’s cos you have no imagination,” said Jem.
What cheek! I have a huge imagination. I am always imagining things. I am just not morbid like Jem.
“Did your mum say anything else?” I said.
“Just that Angel did the right thing making me drink hot tea.”
“She didn’t say anything about telling my mum?”
Jem said no, but I had this uneasy feeling. Mums talk! They gossip. They bump into each other in supermarkets and stand for hours grumbling on about their children and how they’ve cut holes in their bedroom carpets or burned down the garden shed or gone and held seances when they’d been expressly told not to.
I sighed. I could already feel a lecture coming on.
Sure enough, Mum was waiting for me when I got home that afternoon. She said, “Jem’s mum came round today.”
I said, “Oh?”
“She wanted me to run up some curtains for her.”
“Oh.”
“She was telling me,” said Mum, “how Jemma’s been having nightmares.”
I said, “Jem’s always having nightmares. She’s got this really morbid streak.”
“Which isn’t helped by her supposedly [this is mum speaking so I reckon supposedly is OK?] best friend frightening her half to death!”
“It was Rags,” I said.
“It was you!” said Mum. “Seriously, Frankie, I want you to promise me… no more seances. Do I have your word?”
I said yes, cos what else could I say?
“I know it just seems like a bit of fun,” said Mum, “and I’m not saying there’s any real harm in it, but some people do find it upsetting. Sensitive people,” said Mum. “Like Jem. You wouldn’t want to be responsible for turning her into a nervous wreck, would you?”
I agreed that I wouldn’t. It was all a bit depressing. I just didn’t see how Skye was ever going to find her pencil.
It is very hard to admit this, but if it hadn’t been for Angel I might almost have given up. Me, that hates to be beaten! And Angel, of all people. Not that she encouraged me. She was still going on about the seance and how I was just, like, totally irresponsible and nobody in their right mind could say she had anything to do with it.
But then this spooky thing happened. I got up on Tuesday morning to hear Angel screeching in the bathroom. Mum came scudding up the stairs going, “What on earth is the matter now?” I scudded after her, followed by Rags. We found Angel with her face close to the bathroom mirror, screeching as she pulled open one of her eyes and hysterically peered at it.
“What’s the problem?” said Mum.
“My eye!” Angel spun round, dramatically. “Look at it!
”
Me and Mum both looked. Seemed just like any ordinary sort of eye to me.
“It’s red!” wailed Angel.
“Nonsense,” said Mum. “A little bit pink, that’s all.”
“That’s how it started last time!”
A few months back she’d had this infection – minor infection – and had to put drops in her eyes. Nobody except her would ever have noticed there was anything wrong, but she’d gone, like, way over the top and refused to leave the house for days on end. Now she was at it again.
“How can I go out with my eye like this?”
“Oh, don’t be so dramatic!” said Mum. “If it makes you any happier, we’ll bathe it in salt water. For goodness’ sake! Don’t go looking for trouble.”
That was when it struck me. It was one of my horoscopes: Be on the lookout: trouble ahead. How spooky was that???
“I just feel so guilty!” I waited till me and Jem were on our own next day, walking round the schoolyard at break. I didn’t want to say anything in front of Skye.
Jem said, “Cos of Angel’s eye?”
“No! There’s nothing the matter with her eye, she’s just a drama queen. But don’t you see? It was one of my predictions! Be on the lookout: trouble ahead.”
Jem did this thing where she twitches her nose like a rabbit. “I don’t get it,” she said. “What’s it got to do with Angel?”
“It’s what she was doing! She was looking in the mirror… on the lookout! Convincing herself that her eye was going to go again. Plus,” I added, just to make things quite plain, “it’s trouble ahead. Right? Your eyes are in your head!”
Jem said, “So what? Doesn’t mean your horoscope was put with her star sign. It’s probably just coincidence.”
She’d tried saying that before. But it had to be more than just coincidence. That was the third of my predictions to come true!
“Thing is,” I said, “we can’t afford to just give up. Not when I might be the cause of everything. It’d be like letting Skye down.”
“Mm. I s’pose,” Jem admitted somewhat reluctantly. “But I don’t want any more seances!”
I told her that we couldn’t, anyway, cos I’d promised Mum. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t try something else.”
“Like what?”
“I’ll think of something,” I said.
I thought about it all the rest of the day. I’d tried the tea leaves; I’d tried the pendulum; I’d tried the crystal ball. What hadn’t I tried? And then, suddenly, it came to me – a Ouija board!
As soon as I’d got home and had my tea, I raced up to my room and put “Ouija boards” into the computer. From what I read, I really, honestly couldn’t see there was anything for Mum to get fussed over. It wasn’t like we’d actually be meeting any spirits; just asking questions and waiting for the answers to appear. All you needed was a board with numbers and letters on it, and something to use as a pointer.
I had an absolutely brilliant idea for the pointer! Just a few weeks ago I had accidentally let Rags into Mum and Dad’s bedroom when I’d gone in there to use the printer, and by mistake I had knocked a load of stuff off Dad’s desk, including the mouse, which Rags had immediately jumped on. By the time I got it off him, it wasn’t working any more. As I said to Dad, it wasn’t Rags’ fault; he probably thought it was a rat. Dad agreed that Rags wasn’t to blame. He seemed to think if it was anyone’s fault, it was mine for letting him in there. They always say that. Everything is always my fault. I am used to it.
Anyway, I’d brought the shattered mouse back to my room for Rags to play with, except he didn’t seem interested any more, now that he’d successfully killed it, so I’d chucked it in my waste bin and there it was, just waiting to be recycled. I do believe in recycling! The little wheel it ran on was still working. All I had to do was find something, like a pencil stub, maybe, and stick it on the end, and hey presto! (Magic word.) A perfect pointer!
For the board I could just have used sheets of paper Sellotaped together, but I like to do things properly. I waited till Dad had gone off to the DIY store, where I knew he’d be most of the afternoon (Dad just loves the DIY store!), and I waited till Mum was safely shut up in the front room with one of her ladies, where I knew she would also be most of the afternoon, cos she had this big fitting to do on bridesmaids’ outfits. I didn’t know where Tom was, but Tom didn’t matter. What was important was that my annoying sister was also out. I could get to work with no one to spy on me!
I went down to Dad’s shed (the one they accused me of setting fire to) and looked around to see what I could find. Dad has all sorts of useful and interesting stuff in his shed. There was a large cardboard box on the workbench. Empty! Exactly what I needed. It was a good box, nice and stiff. I slit it down the sides very neatly and carefully and cut round the bottom edges so that I ended up with a large rectangle. Perfect!
I took it indoors and up to my room – creeping on tiptoe along the hall, just in case – and spent the next hour lovingly decorating it. At the top, on one side, in red felt tip, I wrote the word “YES”, and on the other side, “NO”. I then took a black marker and wrote the letters A to M in a half-circle, and underneath, in another half-circle, N to Z. Underneath that, I put numbers, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0, like it said on Make your own Ouija Board. As a finishing touch, down at the bottom, I wrote “Thank you”, cos of needing to be polite and treating the spirits with respect.
I was quite proud of my Ouija board! I wish we did that sort of thing at school, instead of boring cooking and sewing. We did once make houses out of shoeboxes when I was at primary school, but Rags went and sat on mine and squashed it. I bet if he hadn’t, it would have been one of the ones on display. I sometimes think that if I don’t go for a career helping people, like giving them advice, or telling them what to do, I could have a career making things. If there are careers in making things. Maybe I could be an inventor. It is just a thought.
When Dad came back from the DIY shop, he brought a copy of one of the local free papers with him. Guess what I saw on the first page? An ad for Ouija board sessions!
YOUR QUESTIONS CHANNELLED
THROUGH GENUINE PSYCHIC.
ANSWERS GUARANTEED.
How often did that happen? It had to be an omen!
Excitedly, first thing Monday morning, I told Jem and Skye about it.
“On the front page… an advert! There’s this woman that you go to and she asks questions for you and gets the answers.”
“You’re suggesting we ought to go to her?” said Skye.
“No! I’m just saying… it’s an omen!”
Jem seemed doubtful. “I thought omens were bad?”
“Not if they’re good ones.”
“But how would you know?”
“What she means,” said Skye, “is it’s like a sign, saying ‘Go for it!’”
“But it could be a bad sign.”
“If it comes to that,” I said, “anything could be anything.”
There was a pause.
“That is so profound,” said Skye.
Well, I thought it was.
Jem said, “I don’t get why you’re so excited.”
“Because –” I tried not to sound too triumphant – “I’ve already made a Ouija board for us! It’s all ready and waiting. We can ask it things whenever we like. It’s just a question of where we do it. See, I’m not sure we should use my place again cos of – well, cos of Rags.” I didn’t want to admit that it was cos of Mum. Playing with a Ouija board mightn’t be the same as holding a seance, but I sort of had this feeling she still wouldn’t be too happy. Probably Jem’s mum wouldn’t, either, which only left Skye, and even she seemed hesitant.
She said, “I suppose you could come round after school. Just so long as we don’t let Mum know what we’re doing. She says she doesn’t want me to keep on searching. She says it’s making me upset and I should just try to forget about it.”
That was three of our mums against us. Li
fe certainly is an uphill struggle at times.
Anyway, we decided that if we were going to do it, then we should get on and do it. I said that next day I would bring the Ouija board into school with me – which, as it turned out, was one of those things that was easier said than done. No way would it fit into my schoolbag. I had to use a big carrier and hope Mum wouldn’t ask me what I’d got in there, which fortunately she didn’t, being in too much of a hurry to get rid of me so she could make a start on her bridesmaids’ outfits.
Angel’s beady eyes, needless to say, homed in. She said, “What’s in there?” Like it was anything to do with her. I told her quite smartly that it was none of her business, whereupon she swished her hair and said, “Suit yourself! Not really interested, anyway.” So why ask? She just can’t ever stop interfering.
At break time I showed the board to Skye and Jem. They were impressed! You could tell. They gazed at it for a long time without speaking. I could see the awe on their faces. And then Skye said, “Why have you put S before R? Is that some kind of special Ouija thing?”
I must admit to being a little irritated. “It’s just a small mistake,” I said. I mean, really! Like it mattered. The letters were all there; who cared what order they came in?
“What’s this?” said Jem, picking up the mouse.
“That’s the pointer,” I said.
“Why’s it got a bit of old pencil stuck on it?”
“So that it can point!”
“I thought with a Ouija board you used a tumbler,” said Skye.
“Well, we’re using a mouse!” It was my board; it was my idea. “If you think you can do any better…”
“You don’t have to get all huffed up,” said Skye. “I was only asking.”
I was about to put the board back in its carrier bag when Daisy Hooper came clumping past.
“Ooh, is that a Weejy board?” she said. “We played with one of those at Christmas. My gran got a message from a girl she was at school with. She didn’t even know she’d died! Dead scary.”
There are times when I could happily throttle Daisy Hooper. Opening her big mouth. It was all we needed! Jem plucked anxiously at my sleeve as we went back into school.