The Dustless Board

Three weeks after I moved into the creaking Victorian house on Henley Street, I found the attic door swollen shut. My landlord had mentioned it had been sealed for decades, and the peeling wallpaper in the hallway bore witness to decades of neglect.

On a Sunday afternoon, with rain drumming against the windows, I forced the door open. A ladder, rickety but functional, led up into a gloom pierced by one grimy skylight. The air was thick with dust and mildew. Old furniture stood like frozen ghosts: a rocking chair, a broken crib, a child’s school desk. But the centerpiece was a massive bookcase, its shelves sagging under the weight of rotten leather volumes.

I climbed up to inspect the top shelf, and there, incongruously clean, sat a Ouija board. No dust, no cobwebs, no grime. It was polished oak with brass corners and a planchette that seemed to glow faintly even in the dim light. My heart hammered. This house had been empty since the Whittaker family left in 1952. No one could have dusted it.

I brought it downstairs, my hands trembling. My wife, Nora, laughed when I showed her. ‘You’re joking, right? It’s probably from a prop shop.’ But her smile faded as she ran a finger over its surface—it came away perfectly clean. ‘Okay, that’s weird.’ We decided to hide it in the back of the hall closet, hoping to forget it.

That night, a thunderstorm rolled in. Lightning flashes turned the bedroom into a strobe. I couldn’t sleep, and Nora tossed restlessly. Around 3 a.m., she woke up sweating, claiming she felt a cold draft coming from the closet. I told her it was the old house, but when I walked to the closet to check, the door was slightly ajar. The Ouija board lay on the floor, as if it had been pushed out.

I shoved it back and slammed the door. Nora went to the bathroom, and when she returned, she was pale. ‘The mirror’s fogged up, and there’s writing on it.’ I rushed in. In the condensation, letters were scrawled: ‘DON’T TOUCH.’

The next morning, I tried to bury the incident by returning to work. But when I came home, Nora was frantic. She said she heard laughter from the attic, and when she went up, the planchette was moving on its own, spelling out words. She had taken a photo. In the photo, behind her reflection, there was a shape—tall, skeletal, with too-long arms.

We called a priest. He blessed the house, but as he left, he handed me a small iron key. ‘Found this in the attic,’ he said. ‘Maybe it opens something.’ That night, I heard Nora whisper in her sleep: ‘He’s in the walls.’ I woke her up, but she didn’t remember saying anything.

Over the next week, small things changed. The books on the shelf reorganized themselves alphabetically. A child’s music box in the attic played a tinny lullaby at odd hours. I found a receipt from 1952 in the kitchen drawer, for a ‘Spiritual Consultation’ at the Whittaker house.

Then, the worst happened. I woke up one night to find Nora standing by the bed, staring at the closet. Her eyes were open but vacant. She walked to the closet, opened the door, and pulled out the Ouija board. ‘He wants to finish the game,’ she said, in a voice that was not her own.

I grabbed the board, intending to burn it, but the planchette flew off and struck my hand, drawing blood. A line of words appeared on the board, as if burned into the wood: ‘YOU WILL BE HER UNDOING.’

That night, Nora went into labor—she was only six months pregnant. The hospital was a flurry of white and green. Doctors said the baby was coming early, and there were complications. I sat in the waiting room, alone. At 4:00 a.m., the attending physician came out, his face grim. ‘We lost the baby,’ he said.

I broke down. But as I wept, I felt a cold hand on my shoulder. I turned, and for a split second, I saw a thin, smiling man with hollow eyes. He held a small bundle—the baby—and then vanished.

I drove home in a daze. The house was silent, the storm gone. I walked to the attic, climbed the ladder, and found the Ouija board on the bookshelf, clean as ever. The planchette rested on ‘GOODBYE.’ I took the iron key from my pocket. It fit a small chest in the corner of the attic. Inside, there was a diary, brittle with age.

It belonged to a woman named Edith Whittaker. She wrote that her husband, Henry, had summoned something using the board to cure their sick son. But the entity took the son’s body as its own, and Henry, in despair, hung himself in the barn. Edith sealed the attic, hoping to contain it.

The last entry, dated 1952, read: ‘It sleeps now in the board, but it will wake when another child is conceived in this house.’

Nora had conceived her baby in this house. And now, the thing had taken it.

I don’t know what to do. I have the board hidden in a lead box, buried in the backyard. But every night, I hear a baby crying from the attic. And sometimes, when I pass the closet, I see the shadow of a tall figure, and it whispers, ‘Let me in.’

I don’t know how long I can resist.