His voice sounded so horribly ordinary. It could have come from anywhere: the back of the line at the grocery store, a stalled train car, a busy intersection. But he was here, trying to sound gruff and failing by dint of having to try, in her living room.
“You’ve been chosen,” Cam told him. “But whether or not you accept is still up to you.”
“Cut the bullshit, bitch.”
Cam hadn’t truly expected any of this to work. At best, she’d hoped to distract or confuse him long enough to think of something else. His fear astonished her. Least of all did she expect to feel exalted by it.
Eyes on him, she slowly bent over to pick up the pocketknife, ready to either run or to kick him in the groin if he moved. “You’ve got a name for me. What shall I call you?” She tucked the pocketknife back in her pocket and immediately worked to slide the fishing line off it.
“Who else is here?” he demanded, gripping his own knife tight.
“Only us. Surely you checked when you came in? But please, have a look around. I’ll wait.”
He shook his head slowly, still an eerie sight in his deer skull mask, but he was no longer striving to stand himself up straight and lift his chin. He wasn’t performing now. “Who the fuck are you?”
Taking a beat, she said, “Exactly what I told you. I’m a medium for the spirits, and in this matter, I am inconsequential. The messenger could have been anyone. The person the message is for, on the other hand, could only ever have been you. They want to talk to you. Will you-”
“Just get it over with,” he snapped. “What is it, already?”
Resisting the urge to grin, Cam explained, “At present, I can only hear fleeting snippets. We have to establish contact.”
He was halfway to believing her. A little further, and she might be able to build sympathy. A plan was beginning to take shape in her mind. Cam only needed enough time alone with her phone to text Birch, who could call the police on her behalf. Then there was the matter of the intruder potentially retaliating as soon as the authorities arrived, or of said officers shooting her instead of him, but her odds would be better than in a direct confrontation.
What mattered now was getting him to see her as human enough to deserve using the bathroom. She would text Birch from there. Whatever came after, so be it.
The intruder straightened himself. “Go ahead, then,” he challenged her, his bravado a promising sign of suppressed fear.
“Lower light helps with focus. I’ll close the curtain if you get the light.”
“You’ll stay put,” he grunted, heading for the window.
Glancing around her, Cam saw no good place to ditch the fishing line. If he caught her with it at this point, the entire charade was over. She slid it up her sleeve for the time being.
He pulled the blackout curtain closed and approached her on his way to the light. Cam held her breath when he came to a stop directly in front of her and brought his masked face right to hers. He said:
“You’re even more entertaining than I’d hoped. Better make this worthwhile. I’ve got all day, but you don’t.”
Curling her hands into fists in her pocket to curb the shaking, Cam reminded herself that she might very well be dead already if she hadn’t changed the course of his plans. Every minute remaining to her was a defiance.
He brushed past her and turned out the light. It was overcast enough outside that what little sunlight came in through the curtains hardly mattered. Timid rainfall tapped on the window.
“Now what?”
“There’s a spirit board in the chest,” she said, stepping out of the way. As he moved to retrieve it, Cam asked, “Have you ever used one before?”
He shoved aside candles and broken cell phones Cam had been meaning to figure out how to recycle. “It’s just a ouija board, right,” he answered flatly as he pulled it out and set it on the chest along with its planchette.
“Mm. You got me. The average person is usually more impressed when I say spirit board as opposed to ouija board.”
This was not really Cam’s experience. Reactions varied from person to person- some responded to a perceived old-fashioned, mystical vibe in the name spirit board, while others carried a deep-seated fear of the more familiar term that nothing else could touch. She worried she’d begun to lay it on a little thick in finding ways to call him special. She went on:
“My family and I used this one when I was a teenager. We would light my mother’s scented candles to set the mood. All of our seances smelled like lilacs.”
“It’s all bullshit.” He moved to sit on the floor at the opposite end of the chest from where Cam was standing. “But go ahead.”
Taking a seat, Cam cleared her throat and explained, “I’m using the board to open a line of communication. Once established, we won’t need it to talk to the spirits, but we will need it to close the line when we’re finished. Now, I would normally have us hold hands for this part, but we’ll skip that step.”
“Do it.” He placed the knife parallel to the ouija board, sharp side facing Cam, and laid his hands palms-up on either side of the chest.
The rain picked up outside. Cam stared at his hands, uncertain of her next move.
He said, “If we’re not even going to do it right, we might as well skip to the fun part. Unless that’s what you want.”
She regretted saying anything about it. Seeing no other option, Cam reluctantly joined the tips of her small fingers with his. He grabbed her hands, engulfing them, and squeezed hard enough to make her gasp in pain.
“Go on,” he goaded her.
Cam rode out another wave of panic with a long breath, in and out. “Spirits,” she announced. “We come to you, as bidden. We stand at the door and invite you.”
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He didn’t quip this time. Cam had a feeling about him. She’d attended many seances going back long before Con Tact. Some people came to them looking for a fun time, some with skepticism set in stone, some with earnest belief, and some- like her father, and like the man sitting across from her, she suspected- wanting to be convinced.
Her toe knuckle, growing sore from overuse, managed another two knocks. She said, “Yes. Come in.” Two more. “You have to invite them in, too.”
He gripped her hands tighter still and said, “Come in.”
It wouldn’t take much more force to start breaking bones. If he weren’t wearing gloves, he might have felt her palms sweating from the pain alone.
“Welcome, spirits. He’s here. The man I have risked everything to help you reach. If you’re with us, use this spirit board to make your presence known.” She nodded toward the board and told him, “Now we take hold of the planchette.”
He leaned in. “Maybe I like holding hands.”
“Perhaps now you’re ready to tell me about John.”
“I don’t know any John.” He let go, disgruntled, and placed his fingers on the planchette.
A horrible ache pulsed through Cam’s hands. “It will work best without the gloves.” As unlikely as it seemed that he would be so easily convinced to leave behind a fingerprint, she had to try.
“Cute,” he said. “No.”
“Spirits,” she moved on. It was easier to keep her voice steady now. “Are you with us?”
Cam waited for him to make the first move. She’d once spent an entire summer reading about and experimenting with the ideomotor effect- the theory that ouija boards, pendulums, dowsing rods and the like worked through unconscious movements of the human body. People could move whichever object they’d chosen for otherworldly communication with no idea whatsoever they were doing it. Cam liked to think of it as a direct line to the subconscious. Her personal favorite tool had been a purple quartz pendant on a delicate sixteen-inch silver chain, sadly confiscated not long before she left home.
The intruder’s breathing pattern had grown steady again. He seemed genuinely focused on the board. Moving the planchette herself wasn’t out of the question, but she hoped he and the ideomotor effect would do that for her.
The planchette twitched. “They’re here,” Cam said breathlessly, hoping to channel her relief and excitement into a good performance. “Spirits, tell us what your message concerns.”
After a moment’s hesitation, the planchette moved again. It stalked across the board, slow and stuttering, hovering for a moment over H before coming to a decisive stop on I.
“You’re moving it.”
The absurdity of his statement- the perfect reflection of playing this game with her tween friends- stunned her into silence. Cam had often ruminated on the fact that when she asked her parents for a ouija board as a twelfth birthday present, she would never have dreamed of using it to try and contact her dead mother two years later. Her current predicament was the only thing that could have possibly been further from her imagination.
Cam lifted her hands. “Spirits. Guide him.”
With a sharp breath, he unconsciously moved the planchette down one row to land on V. “What the fuck is this?”
“Focus. Relax. Once we know what the spirits wish to speak about, we can proceed.”
The planchette’s next journey took it across most of the length of the board. Cam didn’t dare to check the time, but she guessed it took upwards of two minutes to reach its destination: A. He didn’t say anything this time.
The next and final letter sat directly below. Once the planchette stopped on N, the intruder tore his hands away from it as though it were burning hot, then swept the board and planchette off the chest with such force, they hit the wall.
The knife spun a few inches closer to her.
“How the fuck did you know my name?” he shouted.
He believed. He’d wanted her to be telling the truth, for some unknown greatness to await him and him alone, and he had spelled out his own name with that hope.
“If you really thought that was me, you would kill me right now.” She watched the knife out of the corner of her eye. If he lunged for it, she had a chance of reaching it first. What difference this would make against his strength, it was hard to say.
Ivan demanded, “What is it? Magnets?”
“You set up the board yourself. You looked through the chest. There is no trickery here. You know this is true.”
“Fuck. Fuck,” he said again, but the anger had gone out of his voice.
“May I call you by your name?”
He turned to stare at the board lying at an odd angle on the floor. “You might as fucking well.”
“Ivan. This is the most important night of your life. Take your time. Gather yourself. The spirits have waited for you already, and they will wait with patience now. We don’t have to resume until you’re ready.”
“W-what did you say your name was?”
She let herself smile this time. “Cameron. Call me Cam.”
“You always been like this, Cam?”
“Pretty much. My mother died when I was fourteen. My father tried to comfort me by holding seances to contact her. He was a strange one,” she added, his memory melancholy and bitter on her tongue. “Then he held them for himself. Found other people who believed. We were with them for a long time. I left ten years ago, but he stayed.”
“I got a dead mom, too.” It wasn’t exactly sympathetic. Just a statement of fact, relevant to the conversation, with no real emotion attached.
“I’m sorry to hear that.” In a fit of gallows humor, Cam thanked her own mother for having died. Common ground wasn’t always so easy to come by.
The thought crossed her mind that Ivan might have been the reason his mother died, but she had to set it down to carry on. Cam gave him a minute or so of silence. Then, carefully, she asked, “Since we’re regrouping, would you mind if I used the restroom?”
Ivan waved her off.
In a state of disbelief, Cam stood up and took slow, light steps toward her bathroom, ready for him to change his mind. The few seconds before she crossed the threshold and closed the door stretched impossibly thin, holding her captive in the anxious certainty that he would make a move.
Her thumb on the lock felt like the center of the universe. She pressed, and with that, every ridiculous, reckless, unhinged thing Cam had done that day paid off. Even if he tried to break the door down (he certainly could), he wouldn’t be fast enough to stop her. She had the text written and ready to send within seconds.
Cam plucked the spool of fishing line out from her sleeve and set it on the bathroom sink. She was stalling. Righteous anger flushed her cheeks, filled her eyes with tears as her need to survive the next millisecond tapered and the reality of Ivan’s original intentions for her finally broke through. How dare he? Whatever the justice system had in store for him could never repay the terror and the violation he had subjected her to.
Cam would never feel safe in her apartment again. It was a miracle of self-medication and secondhand therapy from Birch that she’d scraped together any sense of security at all after the adolescence she’d had. Her long afternoons hunting bookstore basements to fill her shelves, her slow mornings in the hammock, the cast iron pans she had rescued and re-seasoned- what right did this man have to take the small comforts she’d recovered away from her? She reminded herself with a fresh rush of rage that he’d meant to take much, much more.
Her finger hovered over the send button. It was too good for him. That aside, was she really going to hand his punishment over to people who hadn’t had to find him hiding in wait for them in their own closet? His future judge, the jury, the lawyers, none of them had needed to swallow the absolute fact of their imminent death and carry on talking as though it meant nothing.
And then what? He hadn’t laid a finger on her, in the end. If he’d killed others, and she had no doubt of that, would they find the evidence to prove it? So, a few years in prison for him, maybe? A lifetime of looking over her shoulder for Cam. He wouldn’t get what he deserved.
None of the others had.
Cam left the message as a draft. Her lighter was still in her pocket. She flushed the toilet and removed her wig, hiding it under the sink. The unopened jar of burn gel still sat in her medicine cabinet. Turning on the tap, she took out the gel and applied a generous amount to her scalp. Cam used the back of a comb to taper the edges of the gel on all sides.
The faucet hid the sound of her striking her lighter. She held it in front of her face, watching herself in the mirror, and shouted, “Ivan!”
“What?”
“Get the board! We never closed the door between the living and the dead! You have to-” She cut herself off and pushed her soap dispenser onto the ground with a satisfying crash.
As Ivan scrambled in the other room, she could just barely hear him saying, “Shit.”
Cameron lit her scalp on fire.