The Crayon Circle

The house on Hemlock Lane was old, but it wasn’t haunted—at least, not until I started drawing circles. My name is Miles, and I’ve lived here my whole seventeen years. The place was built by my great-great-grandfather in 1918, and the woods behind our backyard used to be a potter’s field, a resting place for the poor and forgotten. I never thought much about it, except on Halloween, when the wind would moan through the pines and I’d imagine the dead shifting in their shallow graves. But as a kid, I saw things—lights flickering in empty rooms, my bedroom door opening at night when no one was there. I told my parents, but they said it was just old house creaks and my mind playing tricks.

When I turned sixteen, I became obsessed with the dark. Not in a devil-worshipping, ‘Hail Satan’ kind of way, but in a ‘let’s read about rituals and folklore’ way. I devoured books on medieval demonology, Japanese yokai, and Sumerian mythology. My parents, being devout Baptists, were horrified. They confiscated my books and grounded me when they found a sketchbook covered in sigils and occult diagrams. But I couldn’t help it—there was a pull, a curiosity that bordered on compulsion.

That’s when I met Chloe. She was new to town, transferred to our school in time for junior year. She wore black lipstick and had a pentagram necklace, and we clicked instantly. We spent hours in the school library, reading about demon hierarchies and banishing rituals, though we always kept it fictional, like we were just making up stories. One Friday night, at her house, with her parents away, we decided to actually try a summoning. ‘It’s just a lark,’ she said, laughing. ‘Nothing’s going to happen.’ We googled ‘simple demon summoning ritual’ and found a set of instructions that seemed too easy: draw a circle, light a candle, chant some words. We didn’t have chalk, but Chloe had oil pastels. So, on her bedroom floor, we drew a huge pentagram, five points, with an eye in the center. We put a black candle at each point, lit them, and sat cross-legged inside the circle. Chloe pulled up the chant on her phone, and we began, giggling at our own absurdity.

At first, nothing happened. We finished the chant, looked at each other, and burst out laughing. ‘See? Stupid,’ I said. We blew out the candles and tried to scrub the pastel off the floor, but the stain wouldn’t come out. The next day, we realized the drawing had soaked into the wood like a tattoo. Chloe’s mom was furious, but Chloe just shrugged and said, ‘We’ll repaint.’ Over the next week, I started having dreams. Vivid, terrible dreams where I was standing in the middle of the pentagram, and the eye in the center blinked. I’d wake up sweating, the image burned into my mind.

I tried to forget it. I took up running, I hung out with other friends, I even went to church with my parents to appease them. But the dreams got worse. The eye in the center would follow me, and I’d hear a low hum, like a thousand voices talking at once just out of range. Then, one afternoon, I was home alone, and the lights flickered. The kitchen faucet turned on by itself. I told Chloe, expecting her to laugh, but she looked pale. ‘I’ve had strange things too,’ she said. ‘Last night, I heard someone breathing in my closet. And my mirror fogged up with writing that said, ‘I see you.’ We tried to rationalize it, but we knew deep down that the summoning had worked—we had opened a door.

The incidents escalated. Objects flew across my room. Doors slammed. Chloe’s phone would ring with static, and she’d swear she saw a figure in the corner of her eye. The temperature in the house plummeted, even in July. My grandmother, who lives with us and is slightly senile, started muttering in German, ‘Der Kreis ist geschlossen,’ over and over. I looked it up: ‘The circle is closed.’ I got chills. I called Chloe in a panic, and she confessed that she had kept a piece of the crayon circle—she had scraped off a tiny piece of floorboard and kept it in her jewelry box. ‘I thought it might be cool,’ she said. ‘But now I think it’s like a relic. We need to get rid of it.’ We agreed to meet at her house the next day to smash it and burn it.

When I arrived, Chloe wasn’t in the living room. Her phone was on the kitchen table, and her keys were by the door. I called for her, but only silence answered. The house creaked, and I felt a cold draft. I walked to her bedroom, and the door was ajar. Inside, the floorboard was missing, and on the wall, drawn in black, was the same pentagram with the eye—but the eye was open, and it was looking at me. I heard Chloe’s voice, faint, as if from far away: ‘Miles… help.’ But it came from all directions. I turned to flee, and the door slammed shut. The candle flame flickered, and the eye on the wall swiveled to meet my gaze. I felt a cold hand on my shoulder, and a voice whispered in my ear, ‘Now you see me.’

I screamed and blacked out. When I woke, I was lying on the floor outside her room, the door shut, the pentagram gone. But on my hand, inked like a tattoo, was a small black eye. Chloe was gone. Her parents came home, and we searched, but she never turned up. The police found no trace. The official story was that she ran away. But I know. I saw the eye. It’s on my hand now, and whenever I look at it, I feel a pull—a desire to draw another circle, to complete the pattern. I’ve fought it for weeks, but I’m losing. Last night, I woke up on my bedroom floor, a crayon in my hand, in the middle of a half-drawn pentagram. And in the dark, from the woods, I hear a whisper: ‘Finish it.’