The Cardboard Circuit

Iris lived in a cramped apartment above a 24-hour laundromat in Des Moines, the groan of industrial dryers her constant lullaby. She believed in the paranormal with the fervor of a zealot, but she also read neuroscience journals, seeking a rational explanation for every flicker and chill. Her roommate, Marcus, was a physics major who saw the world as a series of equations; ghosts were statistical impossibilities.

One night, two weeks before Halloween, Iris decided to build a Ouija board. Not from some ancient wood, but from the greasy cardboard of a delivered pizza box. She decorated it with glow-in-the-dark marker: a sun, a moon, a crooked star, and a crude rendition of a ghost that looked more like a blob with eyes. The planchette was a shot glass from a bar crawl, its rim encrusted with old salt.

Marcus watched her work, shaking his head. ‘You know this is just ideomotor effect, right? Your subconscious pushes the glass, and you think it’s spirits.’

‘Maybe,’ Iris said, her eyes gleaming. ‘But maybe not. You ever wonder what’s really out there?’

‘I wonder about your rational faculties,’ he said, but he agreed to play, if only to mock her.

They sat on the floor of their living room, the board between them on a battered coffee table. They placed their fingers on the shot glass, barely touching it. Iris had lit a single black candle, its flame casting dancing shadows on the wall. The air smelled of pepperoni and wax.

For a minute, nothing. Then the glass twitched. A faint scraping. Iris felt a cold draft despite the closed windows. Marcus’s eyebrows rose. He claimed he wasn’t moving it.

The glass slid to ‘H.’ Then ‘E.’ Then ‘L.’ ‘L.’ ‘O.’ It spelled HELLO.

‘Okay, very funny,’ Marcus said. ‘Stop pushing.’

‘I’m not!’ Iris said, her voice high. She was genuinely startled. The glass felt like it was being guided by an invisible hand, not her own.

‘Who are you?’ she asked aloud.

The glass moved to ’10’ and then stopped.

‘Ten?’ Iris said. ‘Like a number? Hello, Ten.’

Marcus laughed nervously. ‘Maybe that’s its age. Or its IQ.’

The glass began to move again, faster now, sliding to ‘I’ ‘N’ ‘T’ ‘E’ ‘R’ ‘E’ ‘S’ ‘T’ ‘I’ ‘N’ ‘G’. Then it stopped.

‘Interesting?’ Iris asked. ‘What’s interesting?’

The glass shot to ‘Y’ ‘O’ ‘U’ ‘R’ ‘E’ ‘A’ ‘R’ ‘D’ ‘B’ ‘O’ ‘A’ ‘R’ ‘D’.

‘It’s commenting on the board,’ Marcus said, rolling his eyes. ‘Let’s ask something real.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Ten, what’s your real name?’

The glass moved, but instead of letters, it began to draw a shape. It traced a circle, then a cross, then a triangle, then an infinity symbol, then a zigzag, then a star, then a tiny square, then a spiral, repeating and overlapping until the glass was scribbling madly across the board, leaving a faint scratch on the cardboard.

‘Stop it!’ Iris shouted. ‘You’re ruining it!’ She tried to lift her finger, but the glass clung to it, as if magnetized. Marcus yanked his hand back, knocking the candle over. The flame died, plunging them into near darkness, save for the glow of the board’s marker and a streetlight through the window.

The glass was now racing on its own, still touching Iris’s finger but moving with an unnatural force. It spelled out a string of characters: ‘%&*#@!.’

‘This isn’t funny,’ Marcus said, his voice tight. He fumbled for his phone, turning on the flashlight, and aimed it at the board. Iris’s face was pale, eyes wide. The glass had carved a deep groove into the cardboard, shredding the marker lines.

‘Ten,’ Iris whispered, ‘what do you want?’

The glass traced a long line across the board, then stopped at the word ‘OUT.’

‘Out?’ Marcus said. ‘Out of what?’

The glass slammed to the corner, then spelled: ‘YOUR HEAD.’

Iris screamed. The glass flew off the board, shattering against the wall. The candle flame, which had been out, suddenly reignited with a greenish flicker, and the board began to smolder at the edges, as if from an unseen heat.

They scrambled back, but the board crawled across the floor toward them, its glow now a sickly orange. It flipped over, revealing the underside, where the pizza grease had formed patterns that looked like eyes and mouths, all moving.

Marcus grabbed Iris’s arm and pulled her into the hallway. They heard a rustling from the living room, like something was tearing the board apart. Then silence.

They didn’t sleep that night. They sat in the kitchen, huddled together, watching the door. In the morning, they went back in. The board was gone. No ashes, no cardboard, no shot glass. The candle was intact and unburned, resting in the center of the table. On the wooden surface, etched as if by a knife, was a single symbol: a circle with a cross through it, and beneath it, the number ’10.’

They moved out a week later. But in the new apartment, Iris began to hear a faint scraping at night, like glass on cardboard. And every time she closed her eyes, she saw that symbol, burned into her eyelids. One night, she woke up to find her own hand moving across the nightstand, tracing the shape of a circle and a cross over and over.

She hasn’t told Marcus, but she’s started carrying a pizza box in her bag, just in case. And she’s stopped believing in science.