An Afternoon Summoning

“Mom will catch us if we do this at night. We have to do it now while she’s busy with Uncle Julius,” she explained to her brother, Mark.

“Jane, there’s a reason why Mom doesn’t want us playing this.” Mark then pointed at the blazing afternoon sun that was shining through the entrance. “And besides, the old lady at the library said that doing this at any other time of day will make it hard to communicate.”

“Hard but not impossible,” I said as I hung up the thick tablecloth to block the sunlight. The only thing illuminating the interior of this small tree house was a candle that Jane saved from All Saints’ Day.

Mark sighed. “I’ll be straightforward. Let’s play something else.”

“Kuya, you're such a killjoy!” Jane pouted. She doesn’t really respect Mark and vice versa, but in this Filipino family, the adults made it a point to call the older people “kuya” for boys and “ate” for girls even if we were in the US.

“There’s no way this is even real! It’s just a marketing scheme meant to waste our money.”

“And that’s why I made our own!” Jane insisted on using pink cartolina then copied the stuff shown on the original board. She also had with her a small drinking glass that she used earlier.

“It’s summer vacation. You’re doing something meant for Halloween.”

“But it’ll be fun! We might actually be able to talk to someone!”

I doubted that. I would know because I agreed to pretend to be that someone. Jane wanted to get back at her brother for scaring her with a horror movie. I, on the other hand, wanted to bring back memories of the good old days when I would play it with Ate Lila, my older sister.

Mark got up from his spot. “Whatever. I’m leaving. Why not play with Ate Zoe instead?”

Jane grabbed his arm and pulled him down. “There has to be a guy in the group for this to work! Please stay!”

 “I’ll buy you Snickers,” I tempted. If there's one thing Mark likes, it's definitely chocolate.

Not a second later, Mark accepted my offer. “No taking back. You’re getting me Snickers once we're done.”

I nodded my head to that. I then confirmed to Jane, “You’re the medium, right?”

“The one asking questions? Of course!” she beamed.

“God, help me,” Mark grumbled. “Only you get to ask questions?”

“Actually, anyone can; it’s just that Jane here is the one who’s formally asking,” I said.

“We’re literally asking thin air. What’s there to be formal about?”

“Okay, everyone!” Jane clapped her hands in front of Mark’s face. “Gather around the cartolina and put your fingers on top of the glass.” She then flipped the glass so that the bottom was facing up. “We’re going to warm up by moving the glass around in circles on the paper.”

We were moving the glass counter-clockwise when Jane began her incantation. “Spirit of the glass–“

“Oh, wow,” Mark whispered sarcastically. “She even memorized it.” I shushed him.

“–move among us. Be guided by the light of this world and visit upon us.”

I waited for her to finish the intro. When Ate Lila and I were doing it, we would ask right away if the spirit was present then one of us would push it to YES. We didn’t have all this “we do not allow evil influences” stuff that Jane was saying now.

Jane finally asked the first question that would signal my cue. “Spirit of the glass, are you with us?”

I pushed the glass towards the word YES. For those of you who don’t get what’s going on, Spirit of the Glass is simply another version of Ouija. It’s a tool that can supposedly communicate with spirits. My aunt doesn’t want them playing this because she thinks that it could open a portal for a demon. My take on this is that it’s just a fun game that shouldn’t be taken seriously.

It went like this for a while. I would relay a question, or Jane herself would ask trivial questions like, “Who has a crush on Mark?” (It was funny seeing the look on his face when I spelled out his classmate’s name and after this, he believed even more that one of us was pushing it) and “Do you like spaghetti?” to which I happily answered, YES. Mark refused to ask any questions and only wanted to have his Snickers.

When the question “Do you like history?” came up, I was going to direct the glass to NO. All of a sudden, a force pushed it to YES. I looked at Jane who was smiling. She must’ve taken control. From what Dad told me, Jane loves history.

That assumption was quickly proven incorrect. After answering another question, Jane gave me a perplexed look that said, “I thought you hate spiders.” I mouthed the words, It wasn’t me. It was at this moment when Jane confronted Mark.

She took her fingers off the glass and accused her brother. “Kuya Mark! You’re moving the glass!” I also removed my hold and looked at Mark.

“Am not! I was forced to play this. What makes you think I’m moving the glass?” Mark held on to the whole bottom of the glass and moved it around in circles mindlessly.

“Because Ate Zoe isn’t moving the glass anymore…” It’s only been around a few minutes since we started the game and she already slipped up. She awkwardly laughed and didn’t attempt to cover it up. “Whoopsie daisy.”

The older of the two smiled smugly. “I knew it. It was a set-up to get me scared, right? If it makes you feel any better after all the effort”–with his free hand, he made air quotes–“you put, I did feel goosebumps for a second.” He then looked at me and said, “Ate Zoe, you promised me Snickers.”

“But wait,” I stopped Mark before he could convince me into getting a whole bag, “if no one’s moving it, then who is?”

“It’s all in your head," the smarty-pants of our family laughed. "People can sometimes make tiny movements without them realizing. I read it in Dad’s newspaper. It’s called the ideomotor effect.”

His smile dropped when the glass he was playing with suddenly moved to NO. Mark began pushing the glass around again. “See? That’s an example–” The glass quickly went to NO again.

I immediately put my hand on top of Mark’s. I motioned to Jane to put her hand on mine. She then quietly asked, “Spirit of the glass, are you with us?”

YES

I felt my hair stand up. Shivers went up and down my spine despite the hot summer heat. Mark and I looked at Jane and let her ask the question that was all on our minds.

“Who are you?”

A few seconds passed before the glass moved on its own in a rather fast pace.

404

“404? As in ‘not found’?” Mark asked me.

“Ate Lila used to text that to me,” I recalled. “It means ‘I don’t know’ in SMS.” When I got my first cellphone, Ate Lila gave me a list of all the abbreviations and acronyms she could think of. We couldn’t type that many characters back then, so we had to shorten words and phrases to save space. Pictures became pix, tonight became 2nite, I love you became 459, and so on.

Mark couldn’t believe that he was now playing along but curiosity got to him. He asked the spirit of the glass, “Why are you here?”

When the glass continued spinning, Jane repeated his question. It began to spell out a word.

“It only responds to Jane,” I said as the glass was moving over the alphabet. I remembered us agreeing earlier for her to be the medium. Does that mean it can only hear her now that we’re asking it questions?

H-E-L-P

“Help.” Jane pieced together. “What do you need help with?”

S-O-L-V-E

“Solve what?”

K-I-L-L

Jane was about to pull her hand back when Mark yelled, “Jane! Don’t let go now!”

“I don’t want to kill!” she whimpered.

I gave my interpretation of the message. “It doesn’t want us to kill; it wants us to solve its murder.”

Mark agreed with me and told Jane, “Ask how it was killed.”

“You ask, Kuya!”

“Idiot, it only responds to you now.”

Jane visibly gulped then asked, “H-how were you killed?”

H-A-N-G

Hang. The last hanging punishment I’m aware of happened when I was only three years old, but the last time I heard someone dead by hanging was barely a year ago. A batchmate of hers found her hanging from the ceiling fan in the home economics room. No one in her school really knew why the happy-go-lucky girl would do such a thing, but there were many speculations. As for my family, not a single clue was presented to us as to why Ate Lila decided to commit suicide.

I sometimes blamed myself for it. Maybe she did show signs, but I never noticed. I decided that helping this spirit solve its own murder case would alleviate my guilt a bit.

Our next question was, “When were you killed?” The murder case should be around late 90s to present times if the spirit knows and uses number messages meant for SMS.

05

“2005,” Mark marveled in amazement. “That’s last year!”

“No shit–STICKS.” I was in the presence of a 7-year-old and a 9-year-old. I had to watch my tongue, but it just slipped out. She died in 2005 too.

I told Jane to ask, “Where were you killed?”

The glass spun around faster then spelled something out two times the speed of the last answer.

O-L-F

 “OLF? Our Lady of Fatima?!” Jane was having a harder time keeping up with the moving glass. Her nails dug into my hand to tighten her grip.

Our Lady of Fatima. It’s a Catholic title of Mary. We all know that because we attend a Catholic school. It can also refer to–

“Our Lady of Fatima University!” I exclaimed. Hope surged in me; at the same time, I felt sick. If the spirit we were talking to really was her, then someone killed her then made it look like suicide. “Ask her if she knows who killed her!”

 “Do you know who killed you?”

The glass went between YES and NO several times. It wouldn’t give us an answer.

“Why is it acting this way?!” Jane cried.

“There’s too much going on right now! It’s confusing the spirit! That’s why we’re supposed to do this at night!” Mark responded, probably remembering and believing the words of the old lady they were referring to.

The spirit finally stopped at YES.

We still had one more question to ask, and I felt stupid for not directly asking it first.

“Who killed you?”

The glass kept going around in circles faster and faster. An inexplicable wind started whirling around us. Before I could cover the flickering fire of the one candle we had inside, the wind blew it out. There was supposed to be a little light coming from the entrance since wind was blowing in from that direction, but the curtain wasn’t flapping wildly like I expected it to. All four sides of the treehouse were dark.

I pried my hand out and hurriedly crawled to the left side. I felt for the cloth then forcibly took it down.

The wind suddenly stopped. I noticed that the sun was beginning to set. What was seemingly less than ten minutes turned into six hours. We had spent the entire afternoon in the treehouse.

I turned around and saw Mark and Jane breathing heavily. The glass finally stopped at GOODBYE.

 “The old lady said that wandering spirits sometimes don’t remember who they are and get hostile when they’re summoned this way…” Mark said, “but her last message was 459. She remembered at the last second then ended it herself.”

 “She chose to say that instead of saying her killer.” Jane looked at me with teary eyes. “I miss Ate Lila!”

From below, my aunt called, “Kids! Get inside now! It’s dark!”

We gathered our things and climbed down the treehouse. When we got inside the house, Auntie Margie asked why Jane was crying, so Mark told her that we were telling scary ghost stories.

When midnight rolled in and we were sure that our parents were asleep, we attempted to summon her again. No response. We tried the day after and the day after that, but nothing happened. By the looks of it, our first was our last time.

And that was what happened during my last elementary summer vacation. I flew back to the Philippines with my Dad and prepared for a new school year at a new school.

Our Lady of Fatima University, here I come.