Ouija Session

Tea lights flicker in the darkness and paint moving shadows on the walls. Fake cobwebs and paper spiders hang from lamp shades. A very unscary ghost dangles from the ceiling, slowly turning. Empty beer cans are standing on the massive wooden table and the air – it smells of cigarette smoke and cheap cologne and anticipation.

David places the planchette on the shiny lacquered surface and smiles mischievously. He’s a skinny guy with a massive Adam’s apple. His red locks are close-cropped and hundreds of freckles adorn his pale face. He’s undoubtedly the one who brought the Quija board.

“Are you guys ready for this?” He asks, putting on his best villain-in-a-movie smile.

“Dude, bring it on,” says Jeffrey gulping down his beer and belching loudly. The room erupts in laughter.

“You’re disgusting” the gorgeous blonde girl next to him pokes him with her elbow. I don’t know her name yet. Angélica, small with beautiful short black hair sits across and rolls her eyes. Next to her sits a chubby Korean guy with glasses, Hyun-Wook.

“Okay, we need to place our fingers on the planchette. Are you ready?” Adam says.

“Hold on, isn’t there some kind of opening ritual?” Hyun-Wook asks laughingly. Jeffrey places his fingers on his temples and closes his eyes, dramatically saying: “Yes, we need to clear our miiiiiinds.”

“You guys are idiots” Angélica rolls her eyes again.

“No, we need to move the planchette a little and then ask a question” David say all-serious. “But apparently it’s very important to move the planchette to GOODBYE in the end – or the ghost will escape from the board,” he smiles his mischievous little smile at the blonde girl and I realise two things immediately: firstly, he tries to impress her because he has a huge crush on her and secondly, she is not alright with this situation. I can see that she’s scared but doesn’t want to show it.

“Alright, let’s go” Jeffrey says and slightly touches the planchette.

We all join in and the planchette moves in smooth circles across the board.

“There it goes” David laughs.

“Who should ask the first question?” Angélica asks. She seems intrigued.

“I’ll do that” David says, focused and hell-bent on being the center of attention. He’s the kind of guy who gets up and leaves when he loses at Monopoly, I think. This is not Monopoly.

“Are there any ghosts present in this room?” He asks loudly and I am the only one that catches his side-glimpse to the blonde girl. The planchette moves in a circle and finally stops at YES.

“This is fucking crazy,” Jeffrey says.

Like a very light cold breeze turning a pinwheel in the other direction, the atmosphere in the room changes. Drunkenness and silliness fade dimly into the background what stays is a subtle – very subtle uneasiness. Smiles become faker, laughter shorter and louder.

“You guys aren’t moving this, right?” Hyun-Wook asks, “because I didn’t move push it at all.”

The small circle of young people agrees. No one’s pushing it.

“I don’t like this” the blonde girl says. She’s drop-dead beautiful.

“There’s nothing going to happen to you, Sarah” Adam says reassuringly, the jerk wants to scare her deliberately to be all protective later, when it’s over, I think.

“Can you tell us your name?” Angélica asks, she’s obviously having fun.

The room falls silent and again the planchette glides over the board, alle eyes following it.

F-G-Z-Z-K-A-A-S-C-T-K.

“That’s a terrible name” Hyun-Wook says drily and Jeffrey laughs out loud. Adam looks at them angrily, he doesn’t want his great event to be ridiculed.

“Let’s try again” Angélica says and adds “we did not understand. Can you tell us your name, please?”

Silence.

The planchette spells out: Z-A-K

“Zac, here we go” Jeffrey smiles.

“We just have to be nice to him, I guess” Angélica smiles.

“Yeah” I say laughingly but nobody hears me, they are too absorbed in the board.

Sarah shifts uneasily in her seat.

The small group of people has slowly gained a conspirative quality, like children who know they are doing something Mom and Dad haven’t allowed. Conspirational glances are shared all around.

“How have you died?” Jeffrey blurts out and before they can really react the planchette already starts moving and this time a lot faster. It circles the board a while and then the word C-R-A-S is spelled out.

“Poor guy was run-over by a car” Hyun-Wook says into a room as silent as a mortuary.

Sarah has stood up and says “I don’t want to do this anymore. This is stupid.” It’s obvious that she’s frightened. He Bambi eyes are widened in terror. Poor Sarah.

“Yeah, we should probably leave it at that,” Jeffrey says all-sober all of a sudden and making it painfully obvious to the others that he’s just as scared as Sarah. I smile but they don’t see it.

Of course, this is David’s time to shine.

“Come on, you guys. This isn’t serious. Don’t be such a pussy, Jeffrey.”

Jeffrey crosses his muscular arms and sits there silently with a pouty face and a hurt ego.

“Come on guys, this is fun” Angélica says and laughs at Sarah, “What do you think will happen, Sarah? A ghost will appear in this living room?”

“I don’t care. You guys are all in on this. And you ... and you ... and you try to scare me and that’s fucked up!” He voice is breaking and she’s close to tears.

“Sarah, no one’s trying to scare you, okay?” Jeffrey says soothingly, holding her shoulder. “Right, guys?”

Everyone tries to calm her down.

“All I know is, this fucking thing is moving on its own. And if nobody is pushing it, who is?!” She yells.

“Zac,” Angélica is giggling.

“This is not funny” Sarah says giving her the death stare.

“I’m sorry” Angélica says with a false I-won’t-do-it-again look on her sharp face.

“Come one, guys. She’s really scared” Hyun-Wook says, fidgeting nervously around on his beer can.

“Yeah, let’s do that. Then I’ll take her home, alright?” Jeffrey is saying in a vain attempt to save his face and boy, I can feel David’s anger without even looking at him.

Sarah slumps back into her chair, defeated and this time really sobbing a little.

We all place our fingers on the planchette.

Adam has to be play alpha male again and bluntly aks the ultimate Ouija board question: “How will I die?”

He seems surprised by himself and the others look at him in terror.

“Jesus Christ, dude” Hyun-Wook whispers.

Before any kind of interference can occur the planchette races along the board.

C-A-N-C-E-R

The small group of accomplices sits there stunned like they are actually sitting at Adam’s funeral. Sarah starts to cry pressing her face against Jeffrey’s broad shoulder.

In the flash of a moment I can see Adam lying in a clean hospital room, still skinny, still full of freckles, passing away, while rain beats upon the window pane.

Jeffrey is pissed-off and scared. All colour drained from his face.

“You’re happy now?!” He asks David, still holding the crying Sarah.

“Guys, let’s stop this” Hyun-Wook, the voice of reason, says. Angélica also looks like she wants to give up, whispering “Coño.”

David looks Jeffrey straight into the eyes and asks coldly: “How will Jeffrey die?”

“Fuck you, dude!” Jeffrey screams, his head beaming with redness and he lets go of the planchette.

Too late, the planchette has already started and gently glides beneath our fingertips.

H-R-T A-T-T-A-C

An old and still muscular but also plumber Jeffrey lies on the floor in a hardware store, shaking in spasms. A trucker cap on his greying black hair. An image comes and goes.

All energy is sucked out of the room. I look at them sitting around me. They are not goofy or silly or tipsy anymore. Their faces look sad and tired. Orange deathmaks swimming in a dark room. Adam looks sad too and I know he actually feels bad. They sit around, scared, not sure what to do with themselves. A minute in absolute silence passes.

I look at them in all their vitality and youth and I feel jealous because of it. A group of people, now friends, with their short and insignificant but beautiful lives still ahead of them. They taste and touch and feel and love and laugh and cry until the inevitable but gentle darkness swallows them all.

“I guess we should say Goodbye to Zac” Angélica finally says.

I like her the most, so I lean over to her and gently whisper in her ear “Goodbye, Angélica” and as the goosebumbs creep across her neck and she convulses in her chair, Hyun-Wook pushes the planchette to GOODBYE and I disappear into oblivion and gentle darkness once again.

Changeling

They exchanged him. I knew right away. I could read it in the sorrowful face of my father and the lonely sobbing of my mother in the dark candlelit room of our old house even though they pretended that nothing had changed. That boy. That thing that lay in my brother’s crib it wasn’t meant to lie there. It wasn’t even meant to be.

The babe that was clutching to my mother’s breast had gone. Disappeared. Instead it was lying there. The eyes as black as night. A face as pale and beautiful as a waning moon.

When the villagers came to welcome the babe the old Lena knew as soon as she laid her eyes on him just like I did. Her huge gnarly hands grabbed me tenderly by the shoulders and a sharp sigh escaped from her mouth. A hiss escaping between her crooked yellow teeth. I saw fear crawling over her wrinkly, coarse face. Old Lena knew the old ways. The ways of the earth and the trees and the mountains. The people in the village despised her, shunned her but they came to her when illness befell them, when they needed advice or help that our good pastor couldn’t give. I can still hear feel her breath reeking of wine close to my ear and her voice, like the trickling of sand: “He’s not your brother, girl. The hidden folk took ‘em.”

He grew up fast. Unusually fast. A frail sickly boy. The people spoke of such matters but they said that the devil’s children or the children of the ‘little people’ were malformed and ugly but he wasn’t, his black eyes staring beneath long black eyelashes, glowing like rubies when the light fell upon them. The villagers turned their heads, when he walked through town holding my mother’s hand greeting him with a strange veneration, unfit for a little boy. He never answered. He was as mute as a fish. A silent as a grave.

When he sat in our yard the animals came to him like he called them to keep him company. He was especially fond of cats and spent hours stroking their fur. Even little birds, sparrows and finches landed on his shoulders and hands, twittering. Unmoving like a stone he sat there. Peering into the dark woods, seeing things not meant to see.

He grew mischievous. Things happened to me. Misfortunes. Small at first but getting worse. The milking stool collapsed when I sat on it. The hot pan that burned my hand. The horse kicking but missing me. The ice that cracked beneath me when we skated on the frozen lake. The accident with the sickle. I could feel his eyes on the back of my head every time those things happened and when I turned around I could see his smile as cold and sharp as a knife. He knew that I knew. He wanted me gone. 

Nobody believed me.

I searched for old Lena and found her. Her voice like the trickling of sand answered me: “Girl, when you get home pretend to boil water in hollow eggshells. The changeling will reveal itself. But beware! Whatever it does, do not look into its eyes.”

When I got home he was sitting there, expecting me. His black eyes staring right into mine. He hit the table with the palm of his little hand. Rhythmically. Like a slow drum but he never ceased staring. I pretended not to notice, cracking open the eggs. When I had laid the hollow eggshells in front of me the drumming stopped. Every muscle in my body was tense as I still felt his eyes peering at me. I made belief that there was water boiling in the eggshells and heard his steps approaching me. I turned around and with a feeble voice I told him to be careful, because the water was hot while trying not to look into his eyes. I could see his mouth though, twisting into a smile that somehow reminded me of a gutted cat I had seen years before. My heart pounded so hard that its beating drowned out all other sounds in the rooms. I noticed that his teeth were long and sharp. Made to tear bloody flesh from bones. Made to snap bones in two.

A voice emerged from this mouth. A voice as old as trees. As old as wind. A murmur like an animal trying to sound like a human. Every hair on my body stood up as the voice spoke:

“Sister, I saw the egg before the hen. I saw the acorn before the oak. But never have I seen someone boiling water in eggshells.”

With a shrill laugh that I can still hear in my dreams he was gone.

Feeling sick, I lay unto the floor shaking and trembling until I heard a babe crying in the other room. I approached the crib and held my baby brother against me and sang to him to calm him, to calm us both. 

A whisper from the woods - PART II

17th of October, 1996

I remember that Carl and me were playing in the woods on a late afternoon. We were walking along the forest path, lost in a conversation I do not remember. We had our swords, that Carl carved from sticks with his beloved knife. His grandfather had given it to him as a birthday present to the horror of his mother. First, his parents had forbidden him to have it but finally allowed him to carry it with him on our trips through the nearby forest. Carl was a strangely responsible-minded child. When games got out of hand, he simply stopped and walked away without saying a word to draw his orcs. He avoided violence and despised schoolyard fights. Naturally this made him the target of bullies and older boys but Carl refused to care and simply stayed his goofy and dreamy self. The memory that stands out to me the most is when we were on a school trip to a farm and he was holding a rabbit tenderly in his arms. It nuzzles his face and he laughs his unique explosive laugh while the other children stand around him and can’t help but laugh along with him.

Even today I can smell the autumnal forest. I see the place in my mind’s eye but not as clear as in my dreams with the crying children. The grey autumn sky shines pale through the branches that are not yet leafless. A thick root coils snake-like before us into the forest path, which is covered in yellow leaves.

We want to turn around and go home and then it happens. Suddenly it is deathly silent. No bird is chirping. No woodpecker is drumming. Absolute silence. I know immediately that something is wrong and Carl knows it too.

A nauseating feeling creeps into me. It is hard to describe. I have felt something similar watching the solar eclipse three years later. The same silence, the same feeling but a hundred times worse.

Then it happens. The thing flies towards us. It is enormous. In a stomach-turning way, it is both human and animal. It has gigantic back wings which rush over our heads – it is the same rushing noise that haunts my dreams.

Big red eyes glow down on me. It whispers to me in a language that sounds long forgotten. In a short moment, only for the fraction of a second, I know that it knows that I can see it, although I am not supposed to see it. A thought that rises to the surface like a fish snapping at an insect only to descend into the darkness below again. For a split second, the thought breaks through the surface like an image that appears in your mind’s eye the second before you fall asleep.

I start crying and it is over. The whole event takes a few seconds. It flies away above us and the obnoxious feeling disappears. Carl and me are standing on the forest path with open mouths and listen how the birds are starting to chirp in the sombre woods around us.

Without losing words, we run home as fast as we can. Drenched in sweat and with red faces we collapse in front of the door of Carl’s parents. The days after, we are busy drawing the “monster” and telling our parents and eye-rolling classmates.

Carl can’t let this thing go. He waits for our biology teacher, Mr Hofmann, after class and shows him our pictures of the thing in the woods. Mr Hofmann is someone who takes children seriously which is why we turn to him. He listens with an amused smile and takes a thick book from the shelf and shows us an illustration of a barn owl.

“Boys, I think you have startled a barn owl. Look, it has big eyes, wings and can be found in our forest. You see, sometimes when it’s dark our imagination can play us tricks. Especially when it’s a dark afternoon out in the woods”, Mr Hofmann says smilingly.

 Carl and me feel reassured. The memories fade and we never lose a word about the afternoon in the woods. A silent pact is made that we agree on having seen a barn owl, although in a secret dark corner of my mind I know that what we saw was definitely not a barn owl.

When Carl dissappears months later the images return. With a paralysing dread I know that the owlman took Carl. Screaming and crying I fall into the arms of my mother and tell her that I know who took Carl away, the monster in the woods. Still today I can hear my mother console me:

“Oh Jacob, my Jacob. Don’t be afraid.“

My mother knew that I searched for a reason of the disappearance of my best friend. My childish psyche was unable to cope with the grief and pain of losing Carl, so I tried to explain what happened and eventually suppress feelings of guilt with my imagination. She told me the same thing as Mr Hofmann, if you imagine something very hard, you start to believe it although it maybe never happened.

I started to block out the event in the woods and a possible link to Carl’s disappearance.

Then the dreams came. The fire. The screams. The crying. And the man. His clean-shaven ordinary face looking at me motionlessly.

November 2015

On the 13^th of November, 2015 I the recognise his face. It stares at me with an unhinged expression from a police file.

It belongs to the man that is arrested for arson and the murder of three children over the course of 20 years. One of his victims was Carl de Ruiter.

The police officer tells me that the murderer was sexually abused as a child and responsible for several acts of animal cruelty, his need to relieve his aggression and re-enactment of his own abuse lead him to set fire to a barn the night before his arrest. Animals in the fire pulsates through my head as the police officer lights his cigarette and mine. The evidence, that was found after his house has been searched, is clear.

He was found in a panic-stricken state, confessing everything and begging not to be left alone because the “thing” would take him with it to the crying children, he had murdered. He murmured absurd things about red eyes and that it would whisper to him from the woods. “Possibly a manifestation of his guilt” is what is said to me while my stomach sinks deeper and deeper.

With his arrest the dreams stop. My nights are peaceful and I feel like I could sleep for a thousand years. The dreams I now have vanish with the morning light but one dream stands out to me. I have it the night of the arrest.

I am standing in the woods again. The root coils into the path like a wooden serpent. The October sky shines gloomy through the branches. Carl’s laughter rings out behind me. I turn around and call for him. “Carl! Carl! I can’t see you!” I follow his laughter and look behind the trees.

Suddenly, for the first time, Carl is standing in front of me. He’s a child and I am an adult know and I realize how small he is. I start crying. “Carl, you are not alive. You are dead“, I sob with a tearful voice. Carl smiles sadly and reaches for my hand. As I try to take it, he turns into a barn owl. With a few flaps of his wings he rises completely silent into the air and flies away.

A whisper from the woods - PART I

September 2015

The dreams have returned. The same cold panic that woke me as a child and made me rush from my bed with a pounding heart. They always begin with the rushing noise, then the images and finally the paralysis.

I know the noise but then the images appear. Fire. And the screams of animals. Sometimes it is a fleeting image of flames, sometimes it seems so real that I can feel the heat on my face and smell the stinging smoke in my nostrils. And the screams. A deafening crescendo of inhuman bellowing that rings in my ears long after I am standing in my bedroom desperately trying to order my thoughts – Who am I? Where am I? Cold sweat sticks to my skin and my heart is beating so hard hat I think it might break my ribcage any moment.

But the worst thing is the paralysis. I remember reading in a book that it is called “sleep paralysis”, some sort of state between being awake and being asleep. Your body is asleep but your brain is active. Some people hallucinate demons into their bedrooms, others feel a pressure on their chest but I am lying in bed unable to move, desperately trying to fend off the flames that are licking at my face while the screams are close to blowing out my eardrums. I try to move my arms and legs but a numb paralysis makes it unable to move. Seared with panic I try to scream but my voice does not obey me anymore.

         More than once I was lying over the toilet bowl to regurgitate half-digested food, shaken by muscle spasms that I can feel hardened in my back and shoulders days later.

The “fire dreams” are increasing in the last months and they mingle with the other ones. The ones that come in October. The ones since Carl disappeared.

         I walk through the woods, in which we saw it and I can hear Carl’s laughter behind the trees. When I look around the trees and I think I can see him and hear his snorting child’s laugh sound behind another tree. Suddenly the laughter turns into crying and I can hear various children weeping behind the trees. Then there’s a man standing in front of me but I don’t know him. Panic-stricken I shake off the paralysis and I realize that my pillow is soaked in tears. I am having these dreams since I am ten years old and they always come to me when the day of Carl’s disappearance approaches annually.

I think it is the attempt of my brain to recapitulate what happened in order to process it. But the “fire dreams” are new. I have been dreaming them for only one year. Through some kind of psychological short circuit I sometimes think I am hearing the children crying in the fire or the animals screaming in the forest. What I am always hearing is the hated noise. The noise from the 17^th of October, 1996.

1996

Carl der Ruiter was my best friend. Since our first day at the Friedrich-Schiller elementary school we were inseparable.  We were joined by the shared outsiderdom of overwrought boys that are lost in their fantasy world for hours. While the other children were in the local football team or chasing through the woods with their mountain bikes, we were staying at home, drawing endless cards of fantasy worlds or playing Warcraft 2, later recreating the epic war between orcs and humans on playgrounds or in the nearby forest. Carl was always the orc, while I was always the human. Just like I always was the ninja turtle Rafael, while Carl was Michelangelo. And no turtle suited him better than goofy Michelangelo.

Carl had an explosive snorting laugh that made my mother and even the teachers laugh when he let it detonate in the classroom.

         He imagined the strangest monsters and drew them meticulously on printing paper and was scared the most by the fuzzy VHS tapes his cousing gave him. Secretly we watched Mortal Kombat, Terminator and Army of Darkness, Carl always hiding behind his hands when Ash fell into the pit. Of course we didn’t say anything to our parents just like we painstakingly hid the booklet of Warcraft 2 because it showed an orc licking blood from a chopped-off head.

I think our mothers were worried because of our excessive imagination, especially when Carl made the barbie dolls of my sister to the prisoners of Shredder.

When Carl disappeared he left a black hole that sucked everything into it. From one day to the next he vanished from the face of the earth, like the ground swallowed him up. The police searched for him, deducted, questioned but Carl had turned into a memory in a matter of a few weeks. The lively boy was gone. His body was never found. Thousands of children dissappear every year in Germany but almost 99 percent reappear. Carl never reappeared.

The hysterical screams of his mother, his crying father, the troubled faces of my parents and teachers and the empty chair in the classroom shattered my childhood like a hammer blow. I prayed to God at night for Carl to come back or searched for him in the woods. In a way I am still searching for him in the woods in my dreams.

Sometimes I wished his body would be found to receive the closure that also his parents desperately wished for. But Carl remained gone.

He was seen for the last time, leaving school but he never made it home.

I was shell-shocked. But not only because of Carl’s dissappearance but also because of the thing that happened a few weeks before on the 17^th of October.