The Cardboard Dial

We called it the Cardboard Dial, a crude circle scribbled on a pizza box with a upturned glass as the planchette. Four of us huddled in the damp basement of my Uncle Ray’s empty storage unit, convinced we could pierce the veil between worlds. My name is Mara, and for years I’ve carried the weight of what we did that night. My cousin Theo, and our friends, Jenna and Cole, were the others. We were just bored, fed up with another dead-end summer in our sleepy coastal town of Port Blossom. The idea, cooked up by Cole after a marathon of found-footage horror, was to summon something, anything, to prove we were brave.

The air was thick with dust and the smell of salt from the nearby bay. We drew the dial with a black marker, the letters getting smudged by our sweaty fingers. We placed candles in old mason jars, their flames casting shivering shadows across the concrete walls. Holding hands, we chanted a half-remembered incantation from a website, our voices cracking with nervous laughter. Then we took turns pressing the glass, asking idiotic questions like ‘Is there anyone here?’ and ‘What’s your name?’ The glass didn’t move. After twenty minutes, we gave up, laughing at our own stupidity. Theo grabbed the pizza box, crumpled it, and tossed it into a bin outside. We went home, thinking that was the end of it.

But it wasn’t. A week later, I was in my room, the window open to let in the breeze, on a call with Jenna about some mundane drama. My bedroom door was shut, the way I always kept it. Suddenly, the brass knob started rattling, as if someone was furiously shaking it from the other side. ‘Come in!’ I yelled, annoyed that my mom had forgotten to knock. The rattling continued, more insistent. ‘It’s open!’ I called, trying to keep the irritation out of my voice. Still, the knob jiggled, a frantic, almost desperate rhythm. I told Jenna to hold on, dropped the phone, and strode to the door. I yanked it open, ready to face my mom’s forgetfulness. The hallway was empty, the light at the far end flickering. A cold draft swept past me, smelling faintly of rotting seaweed.

I tried to dismiss it as the wind, but the doorknob had been rattling against a latch that was firmly engaged. I checked the lock, but it was unfastened. I closed the door and went back to the phone, my heart drumming. Jenna was asking if I was okay. I said I thought I heard something, but it was nothing. That night, I couldn’t sleep. I kept staring at the door, waiting for it to rattle again. It didn’t, but I heard a faint scratching in the walls, like something was crawling through the insulation.

The next day, Cole called me, his voice shaky. He asked if I had noticed anything weird. He said his shower curtain kept billowing even though the window was shut, and he found wet footprints on the bathroom floor, even though no one had used it. Jenna reported that her kitchen cabinets would open on their own, and she found a single strand of hair, long and black, coiled on her pillow, even though she had short blonde hair. Theo, the skeptic, initially laughed it off, but then his phone started receiving calls from a number that matched his own, but with a voice like a wet throat singing a song we didn’t recognize.

We met in secret, terrified. We reasoned that the Ouija board, despite being thrown away, had opened a door. We had to close it. We decided to recreate the board, exactly as we had drawn it, and perform the ritual in reverse, bidding whatever we had summoned to leave. We used the same pizza box, but we had to guess the layout. We found an old photo of the board we had taken for proof, but it was blurry. We spent hours reconstructing it, using the same marker, the same glass. We returned to the storage unit, which was now infested with a certain unnerving stillness. The air was colder than before, and we could see our breath.

We set up the candles, just as before, and placed the glass on the ‘Goodbye’ spot. We held hands, but this time we were trembling, our fear palpable. Theo started to speak, his voice cracking, ‘We call upon the presence we contacted eight days ago to leave this world and return to the void.’ We pressed our fingers on the glass, expecting it to move, but it sat still. Then, without warning, the glass shot to the ‘Yes’ spot. We all yanked our hands back as if burned. The glass began to spin wildly, then it flew across the room and shattered against the wall. The candles all snuffed out at once, plunging us into darkness. A sound arose, like a hundred whispers, growing into a chorus of gibberish. We scrambled for the door, fumbling for the light switch, but nothing happened. We shoved each other, panicking, and finally burst out into the dim afternoon light outside. We never looked back.

But it wasn’t over. Now, months later, I still hear that rattling. It followed me to my new apartment, thirteen miles away. Last week, I found a pizza box on my doorstep, perfectly clean, with a circle drawn in black marker, the letters exactly as we had written them. Inside, there was a note, scrawled in handwriting that wasn’t mine or anyone I knew: ‘You forgot the goodbye.’ I threw it out, and I haven’t slept since. I’m writing this because I know something is coming for me, for all of us. It waits in the spaces between door and frame, in the flicker of a candle, in the silence after a knuckle taps on wood. And it knows our names.