The Board We Buried

It had been twenty summers since I had seen the lake house on the Bluffs. The porch still creaked beneath my feet the same way it did when I was fifteen and full of feelings I couldn’t yet name. Fear, longing, hope and all the messy pieces in between. I brushed my hand over the chipped paint on the walls and the banister. I could feel the years roll through me like the waves of the ocean. Even now the air still smelled like damp pine needles and burnt marshmallows from the smores we used to make all those summers ago. I half expected to hear Ella’s laugh from high in the trees.

Instead silence stretched like a rubber band in the air.

I came back because of the letter. No return address. No signature. Just one sentence written in shaky handwriting.

“It’s back.”

I didn’t need more than that to know what it meant.

THE BOARD.

Ella and I had been inseparable that summer. We were fifteen and fearless. She lived across the street from me in our quiet small city but our families rented cabins beside each other in the summer. Our summers were a string of dares, smores, suntans, sunburns, raspberry cakes, blueberry stains on our shirts and hands and endless scrapes, bumps and bruises from our adventures on the lake.

That summer was the last real summer before high school swallowed us up whole. The summer that Ella brought the board. It was not exactly a Ouija board. It had letters and numbers like one though and that weird sun-moon in the corners. But the letters were not carved, not printed and the wood was darker and worn like it had been passed through many hands over the years.

“I found this in the attic.” She told me, smiling. “My Nana said it is cursed.”

“That’s always what Nana says.” I laughed.

We waited to use it until late at night. Her parents were asleep and mine were long asleep probably due to too much wine at dinner. We lit a dollar store candle and sat cross legged across from each other in my room. In between us was the board. We opened the sliding glass door to let in the nightly breeze.

“What should we ask for?” I whispered.

Ella raised her left eyebrow, the way she always did when she was thinking and tilted her head slightly. Her long dark curls spilled over her shoulders reminding me of an angel.

“Something real. Something true.” She said.

So we asked who liked who and what our futures held and lots of other silly things a fifteen year old would ask. And then she said, “What is the one secret in this room?”

I felt the air thicken in the room. It wasn’t the cables flickering. It was something much colder and something much older. The planchette moved slowly across the board.

Y-O-U

I blinked. “Me?”

The board didn’t stop.

A-R-E-Y-O-U-N-O-T-W-H-O-Y-O-U-T-H-I-N-K

I laughed nervously. “Okay, that was spooky. Did you move it?”

Ella shook her head. “No, I swear I didn’t.”

The planchette jerked between both of our fingers.

D-A-N-G-E-R

We both sat back. The planchette kept moving on its own without us touching it.

“Turn on the light.” I screamed.

Ella did and the board seemed normal again. Just words and symbols. But I felt something, something different. I felt a sinister shift inside of me.

That night I couldn’t sleep. I laid in bed and stared at the ceiling for hours wondering what it meant.

The next day Ella would not look me in the eye. By the afternoon we had a plan: We would bury the board. Ella said that we could not burn it because you were not supposed to burn something that was cursed. Her Nana told her that. We would have to hide it deep. We took it behind the cabins to the oldest pine tree with roots that looked like sleeping snakes in the ground.

We didn’t talk as we dug. We wrapped the board in an old flannel sheet and put it in a garbage bag. Then we buried it two feet deep and marked the spot with two rocks, one for her and one for me. Neither of us ever talked about it again.

By the time summer was over Ella was distant . We drifted apart. Eventually our families stopped coming to the lake. I saw her one last time at our mutual friend's birthday party a few years later. But by then she was already someone else.

And now twenty years later the board was back. I found it in the exact same spot we had buried it. No dirt had been disturbed. No stone out of place. But there it was propped up against the pine tree with not a scratch on it or a sign of rot. It had not aged a day. I picked it up slowly. The wood was smooth and cold in my hands.

“I knew you would come.”

I turned around and Ella was standing behind me. Her black hair was now streaked with grey and her eyes were darker than I had remembered.

“Ella.” I breathed hard.

“I got the letter too.” She said walking closer to the tree. “I thought it came from you.”

“It wasn’t.”

“Of course it wasn’t.”

We both stared at the board.

“It doesn’t make sense.” I said. “We buried it. We swore we would never talk about that summer again.”

“It came back to me first.” Ella said. “Last year on my front porch. Then it disappeared again. A week later I got a phone call. No loud voice. Just whispering.”

“What did it say?” I asked.

She hesitated before answering. “It’s time.”

She looked up at me. I felt a cold chill seep into my body.

“Time for what?”

“To finish what we started.” She said.

We took the board back to the cabin and just like before we sat across from each other cross legged and we lit a dollar store candle. Everything the same. Except this time I was scared. I was scared of what I might find out.

Ella placed her fingers on the planchette. I followed with my fingers. The board stayed still for a long time. Then slowly it began to move.

Y-O-U-A-G-A-I-N

“No.” I whispered. “Not again.”

But the board did not stop.

Y-O-U-B-R-O-K-E-T-H-E-P-A-C-T

Ella looked at me. “What pack?” Ella looked at me. “We didn’t make a pact. “

Y-O-U-D-I-D-N-O-T-T-E-L-L

Ella looked at me again. “Tell what?”

The planchette didn’t move. I swallowed hard. All of a sudden my mouth felt dry.

“I didn’t know what it meant back then.” I said. “But later I started to figure it out.”

“Figure out what?” Ella asked.

“I am not what you call normal.” I whispered. “I see things sometimes. I have dreamt about things which have come true. I thought it was just some weird coincidence at first but my grandmother told me that it was not a coincidence she had the gift too.”

“You think that it is a curse?” Ella asked.

“No, I think that the board was trying to tell me something. Something it recognized in me.”

Ella stared at me for a long time. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because of the way you are looking at me now. You are looking at me like I am the one who brought all this on. Like I made it happen. Like I brought all this to you with the board.”

Ella flinched.

“You do believe that it is not my fault don’t you?”

“I was scared.” She said softly. “I felt something that night. And you changed after that night. You got quiet and distant. And I thought that you hated me.”

“And I thought that you were dangerous.” I said.

The candle flickered. A wind moved through the room although the windows were closed. The planchette moved again.

I-T-S-N-O-T-O-V-E-R

Ella stood up. “I don’t want this. I never did want this.”

The board spelled C-H-O-S-E

“Choose what?” I asked.

But the board did move. It went silent. We sat in silence.

“I don’t think that we buried deep enough.” I finally said.

Ella laughed nervously. “Maybe we buried the wrong thing.”

I looked at her. “You’re not afraid anymore?”

“No.” She said. “I think I was afraid of what it meant if you are right it meant that the world around us was not right. Not as right as we both thought it was.”

I touched the board one last time. “So what do we do now?”

Ella stared towards the trees. “We finish it. We finish what we started twenty years ago.”

Together we carried the board to the lake. The sun had already set behind the hills and the water was black. We wrapped it again. But no flannel this time. Just in thick chains we found in the tool shed. We weighed it down with rocks. And this time we didn’t bury it.

We walked until we reached the water and then we walked into it until we were waist deep. We let it go. It sank without a sound.

Ella turned to me. “Do you think it is over? Do you think we did enough?”

“I don’t know.” I said. “But, I think we had to come back and we had to face it. And we had to choose.”

“I choose to remember.” I said. “Even the parts that were uncomfortable and even the strange parts of that summer.”

She nodded. “Me too.”

We stood there in the water letting the silence engulf us as we thought of that summer again for the first time in twenty years.

And somewhere beneath the surface the board slept again.

For now.