Two dark-haired girls with makeup to match, and look, they’ve found something.
An oeil-de-boeuf at the gable admitted a circle of afternoon light that fell on nothing and illuminated even less, catching only the turn of dust motes.
Mary pressed deeper into the eaves, her black-lacquered nails trailing the spines of forgotten National Geographic issues, while Delia hung back near the pull-down stairs as if undecided.
“There’s a whole world up here,” Mary said.
Their grandmother was not dead, only resting, they’d been told — in Ft. Lauderdale with a courtyard view and all day Jeopardy! — but the attic had already begun its eulogy. Cardboard boxes labeled with writing that was too deliberate for their mother’s, too block for their grandmother herself.
“Come look at this,” Mary said.
The object was shoved under a mannequin, its legless, armless torso draped in a white slip, and at first Delia thought her sister had found something terrible. The vivid image of a body flashed before her eyes.
But it was only a box. Flat, the size of a pillowcase, printed cardboard flaked off at the corners. Mystifying Oracle, read the lid, in a font designed to suggest antiquity and suggesting the early ’70s instead. The pointed finger of a crone. A crescent moon.
“Absolutely not,” Delia said, which was how she’d said yes to her sister for as long as she could remember.
The board lay nested against a velvet blue liner. The planchette with its heartlike window of plastic wedged into the upper corner.
“Grandma had a Ouija board,” Delia said.
“Grandma had secrets,” Mary teased, drawing one finger along the board’s alphabet. Her nail left a thin trail in the dust.
The shadow of the mannequin moved across the rafters, and for just a moment it had hips, a suggestion of a woman turning away.
“We’re doing this,” Mary said.
The neighbor was mowing the lawn in perfect alternating strips of dark green, light green, dark green. Their mother was on the phone with the facility in Florida, her voice pitched to the register she used for things she couldn’t fix. Delia sat across from her sister on the bare floor, their knees almost touching, the board between them like a forbidden domain they were about to enter without a passport.
Mary went first, because she always did.
“Ask it something,” Delia said.
“You’re supposed to just let it go.” Mary had clearly done research, which meant she had watched videos on her phone at two in the morning, which she would deny. “You don’t interrogate it. You open yourself.”
“I’m not opening myself to anything in this creepy old attic.”
But her fingers were already on the planchette, and so were Mary’s, and the planchette was already moving. Not dramatically. Not a lunge across the board. A drift, like a boat released from its moorings onto a deep, dark sea.
Delia looked at her sister.
Mary’s eyes were wide. “I’m not doing that.”
“I know,” Delia said. She knew her sister’s hands the way she knew her own, had known since they were small enough to sleep with their fingers interlaced. Mary was not moving the planchette. Delia was not moving the planchette.
The planchette was moving.
Not the way they’d expected, no violent lurch, no cartoon haunting. Just a slow, confident slide. It found its first letter and stopped.
Then the next. The attic had gone absolutely silent except for the distant whirl of the lawnmower, but then that too stopped.
H.
“Mary.”
“I see it.”
E.
The mannequin stood in its corner and the slip hung perfectly still. There was no draft. Nothing explained the cold that had arrived the way it did in dreams. A dramatic drop in temperature that came from everywhere at once until the trembling arms of both girls were covered in goosebumps.
L.
Delia became aware that she’d stopped breathing in any meaningful way. She hunched to take up as little space as possible. She thought: We should not have come up here. We should not have opened that box.
E.
N.
Helen.
The planchette stopped. The girls looked at each other across the board.
Then it moved again. Slower now.
L. O. V. E. D. M. E.
“Oh,” Delia said.
The cold lifted. The room was another attic crammed with boxes and mothballs.
Mary sat back on her heels. She looked, for once, like she had nothing to say.
“Good for her,” Delia said.
“Yeah,” Mary said. “Seriously.”
Jeff Radwell is a novelist, essayist, and short story writer. His fiction is featured or forthcoming in Consequence, Hobart, and Thimble.
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