by Devon Glenn
“Done,” said Horace. “But I get to pick the players and none of them are you.”
Dar smiled slyly. So he was familiar with the game.
“Fair enough,” she said. “You’ll need at least one other person, maybe two, in order to continue.”
Horace looked around the room, massaging his mustache so vigorously that Dar worried the wax on his fingers would cling to her Ouija. His mother raised her hand hopefully. “Not you,” he said. “No silly women with their silly melodramas.” He turned to two of the other men in the room: the reedy gentleman in glasses and Carl Digges, whose mustache was much more restrained in length and curliness than his own.
“George and Carl,” he said. “Let’s go.”
Dar took Horace’s empty seat and watched with amusement as the three middle-aged men gathered around the Ouija board like schoolboys with their pockets full of marbles. Once all hands were on the planchette, the other two men turned to Dar for instructions while Horace eyed the board for any irregularities indicating a cheat.
“Ouija is a new game,” Dar said, “but it’s similar to one you’ve played before. We’ll be using a planchette for automatic writing.” She smiled to the group. “It’s as much a game for the spirits as it is for us. They can tell us their names, answer yes-or-no questions, and spell out one hint—and only one—about our futures. But we have to ask them the right questions. Ask the spirit world your questions aloud, and the answers will be indicated on the board.” The board had some prespelled words, including yes, no, and maybe, along with every letter in the alphabet. Written at the bottom was an easy exit for the players: goodbye. “Ask the ghost or spirit to identify himself first before you ask a question. Finn is still with us, but this game is open to any dead person, so one never knows who else might appear.”
“Ghost or spirit?” asked the man with the glasses. “What’s the difference?”
“Spirits have crossed over to the Other Side,” Dar explained. “Ghosts remain earthbound, usually because of a past trauma or unfinished business.”
It occurred to her that, for a ghost, Finn was awfully chummy with her and his descendent. She knew he couldn’t have crossed over, because he was covered in seaweed and missing a foot. When ghosts ignored the light and stayed in that transient space between worlds, they grew angry or depressed, having lost perspective as well as time. But Finn had offered advice to Horace about his future—the kind of foresight that, in Dar’s experience, was usually limited to the spirit plane. Dar also wondered why Finn had tapped on the window rather than simply drifting in through a wall like the others. He was sturdy, opaque, and his specter shone like a light bulb when most ghosts flickered like candles. He didn’t fit her description of a ghost at all.
Dar watched as the men argued about what their first question would be. The planchette wiggled beneath their touch.
“Who’s here?” Horace yelled at the board.
The pirate leaned over the board to spell out his answer, using the hands of the living to move the planchette. “A-R-R,” he wrote.
“That sounds like Finn to me!” Horace’s mother shrieked. The other women giggled in their seats.
“I’ll be the judge of that,” said Horace. “Finn, is that you?”
Finn pushed his game piece to the word yes.
The men exchanged puzzled looks. “Are you moving the piece?” Horace asked. The other two shook their heads. “I’m not either,” he whispered to himself, eyes gone wide. “Tell me, Finn,” he continued, regaining himself, “if you knew I was here tonight, does that mean that ghosts are with us all the time?”
Finn spun the piece to yes once more.
Horace’s mother gasped. “Even when we’re in the bath?!”
I-A-M, Finn spelled. He winked at Dar, who laughed for the first time that evening.
Horrified, Elva collapsed in her chair. Horace rushed to her side, retrieved smelling salts from her pocket, and took her hand.
While the others turned to the mother and son to see what would happen next, Dar locked eyes with Rahul. He shook his head disapprovingly, but he was unable to hide his amusement. Finn was a good find.
When Horace’s mother awoke, her son turned back to the other men. “That’s exactly something he would have said,” Horace exclaimed, finally convinced. “Keep going, boys. Wait! I have one: Did you walk the plank when you died?”
Finn looked at Horace with disgust, moving the piece to goodbye.
“He doesn’t mean that, Finn,” Elva intervened. “He reads too many pirate novels. Our family history fascinates him.”
Dar breathed a sigh of relief. She knew she had won over her toughest adversary, but she wouldn’t be able to keep him if Finn didn’t tell Horace something he wanted to hear. Finn shrugged and waited for the next question.
“Would you come back and live again if you could?” Horace asked earnestly.
Finn smiled sadly and pushed the piece to yes.
“Well, is it possible?” Horace continued.
Yes.
“Do you get to decide when it happens?” Horace asked.
No.
Horace worried his mustache yet again, racking his mind for his next question. It wasn’t every day that he got to speak to his dead pirate ancestor, after all.
Mr. Worthington used Horace’s silence to pose a question of his own. “So, Finn,” he said nervously, “do you see anything coming up in the future? For any of us here now?”
Finn, with a wicked gleam in his eye, spelled out a single word: L-O-V-E.
Mr. Worthington gulped. “Who…who will fall in love?” He pushed his glasses higher on his nose. The other men laughed.
Finn grabbed the piece and moved all three of the men’s hands forward until their arms stretched nearly off the board, pointing straight at Dar.
“Who, me?” Dar asked with mock excitement. She could feel the burn in her cheeks. Not here, she said to Finn with her thoughts.
“Will the suitor be someone in this room?” Lottie called out from her seat. She had been to enough of Dar’s séances to know that the medium never made the show about her; Dar knew that Lottie would take great pleasure in prodding the ghost for more.
Finn ignored Dar’s silent protest and guided the men’s hands toward yes.
Dar watched warily as Virginia pursed her lips and glanced hopefully at the table, her gaze settling on Horace and then back to Dar. Ignoring her mother’s stare, Dar scanned the crowd for Rahul’s gentle face—a handsome oasis in a desert of eligible men. He met her look with a smile.
She quickly turned away to check on Finn, who was now looking at something Dar couldn’t see. Signaling to Dar that another ghost had arrived, Finn tipped his hat and lifted the window to clamber out. This time, the guests heard him.
Everyone in the room jumped as the window rattled open, and a cool summer breeze drifted in. “Finn had to leave,” Dar said. And not a moment too soon. “Someone else is here.”
Whispers continued as Dar moved over to the Ouija board and sat down with the two men in order to continue the game. As soon as she did, a female spirit with graying hair and a round physique joined them at the other corner.
She calmly grabbed the game piece before Dar could touch it and spelled out the letters B-E-T-H.
“Beth, as in Beth Johnson?” asked Dar. Beth, who lived next door, had recently lost her mother.
Yes.
The redhead rose from her chair and moved toward the table. “Am I supposed to play the game?” she asked shyly.
Dar looked at the older woman’s face and made a quick decision. “Let’s just talk to her for a minute, shall we?”
Beth sat in an open chair near Dar and waited for a response. While some spirits merely said a word or two to identify themselves before moving on, others had messages that were more complicated than “I love you” and “I’
m happy now.”
Maud Johnson placed her hand on Dar’s, motioning for her to grab her pen and parchment. The spirit’s touch connected her to Dar, and in seconds Mrs. Johnson’s memories flooded in.
Her physical body remained at the table, scribbling nonsensical shapes on the parchment, but Dar’s astral body followed the spirit back to a past moment at Beth’s house, where Beth’s father was throwing plates at the kitchen wall.
Mrs. Johnson showed Dar where she had packed her suitcase, ready to leave, but before she could reach Beth’s room to bring her along, Beth’s father grabbed her by her collar, dragged her screaming down the hall, and pushed her down the stairs. At the bottom of those stairs she now lay in a crumpled heap.
Dar swallowed the lump forming in her throat, but the spirit wasn’t finished.
Mrs. Johnson showed Beth tiptoeing down the stairs, then pulling a bottle of brown liquid from a cupboard and removing the lid. She retrieved a spoon from the drawer but stopped, instead swallowing a large dose straight from the bottle.
“Laudanum,” Mrs. Johnson told Dar. The pharmacist across the street had sold the girl more of the medicinal version of opium than any physician would have advised. Dar had heard it was habit forming, but until now, she had never seen someone down it like a glass of lemonade on a hot day.
Moments later, Mr. Johnson’s footsteps thundered down the stairs. He poked his head through the door and looked at Beth suspiciously. “Do you still have that cough?” he asked.
Beth lowered her bottle, startled, and nodded. Spit flew from Mr. Johnson’s mouth as he hissed, “You lying slut.”
Disgusted by what she had just heard, Dar willed herself out of Mrs. Johnson’s memory. Back in her séance room, she stared down at her parchment. There was only one word written on it.
“Beth,” she said gently. “Your mother has come back to tell you that she thinks the…um…medication that you’ve been taking for your cough isn’t working. She says that before winter hits, you should travel south to warmer climates, perhaps to see your aunt in South Carolina.”
Beth stared at the floor. Even though Dar had worded her mother’s advice extremely gently, she could see the hot shame rising into the girl’s cheeks. “Yes,” she said to the room, “I haven’t been feeling well.”
She looked at Dar once more. “Is my mother in heaven now?” she asked quietly.
Dar held Beth’s hands. Dar had never seen heaven for herself, but she believed in the possibility of its existence because of people like Mrs. Johnson, whose face grew ever brighter at the mention of the Other Side. “Yes, of course she is,” Dar reassured her.
“Does she have anything else to tell me?” Beth asked.
“Just that she loves you,” Dar replied for the benefit of the audience, but she discreetly slipped the parchment into Beth’s hand.
Dar saw the color drain out of Beth’s face as she read the word: Run.
The medium collapsed into her chair, ready to be done with the evening. But the guests weren’t finished yet.
“So if Finn says that people can be reincarnated, and Beth’s mother says that there is a heaven, then which religion is right?” Horace asked, opening a can of worms that, in Dar’s experience, usually led to hours-long debates that went nowhere and sometimes ended in blows.
Dar sighed. Even with her intimate knowledge of the spirit world, she still couldn’t explain all of life’s mysteries. Thankfully, she didn’t have to.
“If there is room for so many different faiths on Earth, just imagine how much room there is in the afterlife,” Rahul suggested. “Just as rivers and streams flow by separate channels to fill the oceans, I believe all faiths that bring human beings closer to one another are moving in the right direction.”
Dar, who still had her pen and parchment in her lap, was absently spelling out the words eloquent, diplomatic, and, unexpectedly, handsome. These words, she realized, were not coming from the spirit world, but from her own subconscious. She wadded up the paper and dropped it under her chair.
“So if reincarnation is real and heaven is real,” Horace continued, worrying his hands together, “then is there also a hell?”
Mr. Worthington answered the question for him, and quite against his will, as an unseen force dragged his hand across the table, where the Ouija board was still waiting. The planchette beneath his fingers stopped at yes.
Dar looked around the table to see who was moving the man’s hand, because it certainly wasn’t Finn. All she could make out was a gray shadow of a person, whose very presence was causing the hairs on the back of her neck to stand on end. Elva, who seemed naturally sensitive to paranormal energy, shivered and tightened her shawl.
“Who are you?” Dar asked the figure.
“E-D-G-A-R” was the reply, but Dar knew no one by that name. She wondered why this Edgar wasn’t showing his face.
At that, Horace’s mother leaped from her chair and made the sign of the cross. “I’m covered in feathers!” she exclaimed.
“What the devil are you talking about?” Horace hissed. He pulled Elva back into her seat, put his arm around her, and looked suspiciously around the room.
Dar would have liked to hear Elva’s answer to that question—she was unfamiliar with the expression—but she had more pressing concerns. The good humor and camaraderie of the evening had all but vanished. No one in the room looked comfortable. “That was Finn,” Dar lied, forcing a smile. “He’s come back to play one last joke on us all before we conclude our evening.” She looked over to the open window, where the curtains were blowing in the breeze, letting in the draft that was chilling the room.
The guests sighed with relief, laughing nervously as they gathered their things and clutched one another’s hands on the way out. Virginia made her way down the stairs to ensure that the hallways were lit and that the trolley was on its way.
Only Lottie whispered in Dar’s ear as she accompanied her guests back to the inn. “You had closed that window before,” she said. “I saw you.”
But Dar didn’t have time to discuss it with her. Rahul rushed to the front of the room, blocking Dar’s path to the door. “That last ghost was cloaked in his own shadow,” he said, his voice low but earnest. “It’s very dangerous to let someone like that into your home.”
Dar looked at Rahul with bright eyes. “You can see ghosts, can’t you?” It was Rahul who first spotted Victoria on the séance room floor, and Rahul who had heard her mother’s thoughts. Did he know that she had also heard his thoughts? Dar traced her finger across her bottom lip to be sure.
“I avoid it when I can,” Rahul said, “but yes.”
Dar searched his eyes for a deeper response. He looked down quickly, avoiding her stare. “Does this happen often in your séances?”
Dar cocked her head to the side. “I suppose it’s not uncommon to attract some anonymous players in a game of Ouija. The ghosts are not always polite, I’ll admit, but it’s only a game. They can’t hurt anyone.”
Rahul shook his head. “That was more than an anonymous ghost.” Dar shivered at the harshness of his tone. But he did not soften his message. “Channeling souls is dangerous,” he continued. “When you dredge up people’s terrible pasts, you rob them of the present moment.”
Rahul’s words buzzed in Dar’s head like a mosquito in a lantern. She knew as well as he did that the final ghost who had entered the room was not friendly, but she would not let a stranger convince her that her method of communication with the dead was harmful. In one evening, she had reconnected a grieving grandmother to her lost granddaughter and possibly saved a troubled young woman’s life.
“The only thing that’s dangerous is debating religion in mixed company,” she said irritably. Then she paused to collect herself, took a deep breath, and softened her tone. “Perhaps there is someone you were hoping to talk to who didn’t show up tonight?”
“My ancestors aren’t the type of people who bring their pocket watches to the afterlife,” Rahul explained gently. “The dead have no use for material things.”
Dar bristled. “The spirits aren’t showing me ‘material things’; they’re showing me symbols that the living can understand. People need proof of life after death, and I can give them that. Why rely on blind faith when the evidence is all around us?”
“Evidence, you say?” Rahul reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a piece of newspaper. As he unfolded it, Dar noticed that the scrap had been unfolded and refolded so many times that it was in danger of breaking apart. “What do you make of this?”
In his hand, he held a portrait of himself. He was sitting side by side with a lovely young woman, each of them gazing forward with a solemn expression as if the other didn’t exist. Dar closed her eyes and inhaled, training her mind’s eye on the young woman’s face and waiting for something tangible to appear, like an unusual birthmark, a favorite sweet, a special object, or a secret pet name. To her dismay, she came up with nothing—the image of the woman vanished, leaving Rahul alone in the portrait.
“She’s dead,” Dar said. “I’m very sorry.”
“Yes, and…” He leaned against the doorframe, silently waiting for her to complete his sentence.
“That’s not her in the picture.” Dar’s cheeks reddened as she delivered the message from the Other Side. “She’s still with us, in a sense, but I can’t see her.” She tapped the picture with her finger. “Not in that form.”
She held her breath while she waited for his response. In all her years as a medium, this was the first time that a spirit had simply refused to give her any tangible proof. She was ready to pack her bags, hop the next train out of Cape May, and escape the shambles of her channeling career. But where would she go? Everyone between Washington, DC, and India would think she was a fraud.
“Thank you,” Rahul said. Tears sprang to his eyes. “That’s exactly what I wanted to hear.”