The Dry Well

It started with a joke, the kind you tell at a sleepover when you’re too old to believe in ghosts but too young to admit you’re scared. My friend Maya had found an old talking board in her grandmother’s attic, a dusty thing with a cracked corner and a planchette that looked like a tiny coffin. We were in her basement, the only light from a single bulb swinging on a frayed cord, and the air smelled of old concrete and mothballs.

Maya’s grandmother had died the previous winter, and Maya thought it would be ‘fun’ to try to reach her. We set up the board on a wobbly card table, lit a candle, and followed the instructions from a dog-eared pamphlet that came with it. We placed our fingertips on the planchette, closed our eyes, and called out to her. For ten minutes, nothing. The planchette didn’t move. Maya started making jokes, and I could feel the awkwardness growing. We were about to give up, to laugh it off and snap a picture for social media, when we all took our hands off the board at the same time.

The lights went out. Not just the basement, but the whole house, we later learned. The candle flame stretched tall and thin, then died. And in that absolute darkness, we heard a sound like a dry well being scraped from the inside—a rough, low drag of something heavy. Then the planchette shot off the board, flew across the room, and embedded itself in Maya’s mirror, cracking the glass from corner to corner. We didn’t wait. We ran.

Maya’s mom was at work, so we bolted to my place, which was only a few blocks away. My house was a small two-bedroom bungalow with a crawl space that always smelled of damp earth. We locked the doors, turned on every light, and tried to convince ourselves it was a draft, a coincidence, a trick of the mind. But that night, things started happening. Cabinet doors in the kitchen opened by themselves, one after the other, as if someone was checking the contents. My little sister’s toys moved from one corner of the room to another. A drawer in my desk slid open, then shut with a bang. And from outside, we heard a slow, wet tapping on the window frame, like something with too many fingers drumming impatiently.

We said ‘goodbye’ to that board a hundred times, but it didn’t listen. We burned the planchette, but the crack in the mirror kept spreading, even though we threw the mirror away. My parents couldn’t explain the scratch marks that appeared on my bedroom door overnight, deep grooves that looked like they were made by long, sharp nails.

It’s been three years since that night. Maya moved away, and we don’t talk anymore. But I still live in that house. And now, every single night, when I lie in bed and face the ceiling, I feel it. A pressure on my back, like a weight being slowly lowered onto my spine. It’s not angry; it’s patient. It waits. And sometimes, just as I’m about to fall asleep, I hear a tapping on the frame of my bed, now a familiar rhythm. Once, I woke up to find my ceiling covered in a fine white dust, and in the middle of it, a symbol I’d never seen before—a spiral with a jagged center.

Last week, I was walking down the hallway to the bathroom, and I felt the pressure on my back again. But this time, it wasn’t just in my bedroom. It was everywhere I went. It followed me to work, to the grocery store, to my car. I could sense something standing behind me, watching. I turned around in the middle of the cereal aisle, and for a split second, I saw it in the reflection of a glass door—a tall, thin figure with no face, just a smooth, blank expanse where its eyes should have been. It was wearing an old-fashioned coat, the kind from a century ago, and its hands were long and white, with fingers like the legs of a spider.

I drove straight home, locked the door, and sat in the dark. I don’t turn on the lights anymore, because I’m afraid of what I’ll see in the corners. I called Maya, begging her to remind me how we closed the session. She said we did everything right, but then she paused and said, ‘You know, the planchette wasn’t the only thing that cracked. The board itself cracked too, right in the middle, and I think something came out of that crack.’

Yesterday, I built a small fire in the backyard and threw in the last piece of the board—the corner with the word ‘Goodbye’ on it. As it burned, the flames turned green, and I heard a voice, not from the fire, but from inside my own head. It said, ‘You cannot burn a doorway. You can only widen it.’

Now, as I write this, I can feel the pressure on my back, heavier than ever. The tapping on my bed frame has become a knocking. And tonight, I’m afraid to look at the mirror in my bathroom, because in the reflection, I can see a shadow that doesn’t move the way I do. It stands behind me, waiting. And when I turn, I know it will be there, ready to show me what it has been so patient to reveal.