The Glass on the Maple Table

In the autumn of 1988, when I was sixteen, I went to a sleepover at my friend Elsie’s house. Her family were Norwegian, and they spoke Norwegian at home, a melodic language that felt like a secret code to the rest of us. Elsie’s parents were away for the weekend, leaving us with her brother, Nils, who was nineteen and had just gotten his license. He spent most of the night in his room with his friends, listening to Ministry and plotting something we weren’t invited to.

Elsie’s house was a converted farmhouse on the edge of a vast, dark pine forest in the middle of the Finnish countryside. The nearest neighbor was a mile down a gravel road, and the only light came from the moon and the dim glow of the living room where we set up our sleeping bags. The house smelled of wood smoke and pine tar, and the floors creaked with every step.

We were five girls total: me, Elsie, her cousin Liv, and two other friends, Marta and Ingrid. We’d spent the evening eating licorice, braiding each other’s hair, and listening to cassettes on a boombox. But as the clock crept past midnight, and Nils and his friends had grown quiet upstairs, our boredom turned to something else. In the middle of the coffee table, half-buried under magazines and a bowl of popcorn, was a homemade planchette board. It was a piece of mahogany with the alphabet cut from a Scrabble set and a glass upside down in the center.

‘We should try it,’ Marta said, her voice low, almost daring. We all looked at the board, then at each other. None of us had ever done anything like that before, but the house felt too still, the forest too close, and the idea of summoning something, anything, was thrilling. Elsie hesitated, but Liv shrugged and said, ‘Why not? It’s just a game.’

We cleared the table and sat around it, our fingers resting lightly on the glass. The board was worn, the letters faint, but it looked authentic, like something Nils had made with too much care. Ingrid started by asking a simple question, ‘Is anyone there?’ For a moment, nothing. The glass didn’t move. Then it shuddered, just a little, as if a draft had passed through. We all tensed, but then the glass started to slide, slow and deliberate, toward the YES at the top.

‘Stop it,’ I whispered, but no one was pushing. The glass moved with a will of its own, and we all felt it, a cold vibration under our fingertips. We asked another question, ‘Who are you?’ The glass began to move again, spelling out a name: ‘H-E-L-E-N-A.’ Marta gasped. ‘That’s my grandmother’s name,’ she said. ‘She died last year.’

Then came the knock. It was three slow, heavy knocks from somewhere inside the house—not the front door, but deep within the walls. We froze, the glass still under our hands. Elsie’s face went pale. ‘That’s Nils,’ she said, but her voice was unsure. We called out for him, but there was no answer. The knocking came again, louder this time, and then a third, right above our heads, from the ceiling.

We should have stopped, but curiosity had us in a grip. We asked the glass if it was Helena, and it spelled, ‘NO.’ Marta asked, ‘Then who are you?’ The glass moved in wild, jerky motions, spelling out a string of letters that made no sense: ‘V-A-R-A-K.’ Then it stopped, and the glass cracked, right down the middle.

We all pulled back, a jagged split marring the glass. The knocking stopped, and the silence that followed was thick, smothering. Then we heard footsteps on the stairs, heavy and deliberate. Nils appeared in the doorway, his face blank, his eyes fixed on us. ‘What are you doing?’ he asked, his voice oddly flat, not like his usual mocking tone. He walked over to the table and looked at the cracked glass, then at all of us. ‘You found it,’ he said. ‘It’s been waiting.’

He picked up the broken glass, and we noticed his hand was shaking. ‘This board was my great-grandfather’s,’ he said. ‘He used it to contact his dead wife. But he warned us never to use it without a copper coin. The glass traps a spirit, but they can only stay inside if you have a coin to bind them. You didn’t, did you?’ We shook our heads, too terrified to speak.

Nils ran his thumb along the crack in the glass. ‘It’s loose now. Something came through, and it’s not leaving. It’s in the house with us.’

At that moment, the back door swung open, a gust of cold wind rushing in, carrying the smell of damp earth and rot. The candles we’d lit flickered and died, plunging the room into darkness. We screamed, and Nils threw himself in front of us, but he wasn’t fast enough. We heard a voice, low and guttural, speak from the shadows: ‘It has been a hundred years. I will feast.’

We fled, grabbing our sleeping bags and bashing through the door into the night, not caring about the frozen ground or the dark forest. We ran toward the only light we could see, a distant farmhouse, and when we finally reached it, breathless and sobbing, we turned back. Elsie’s house was still and dark, but in the window of the living room, we saw a silhouette—not Nils, not any of us—just a tall, thin figure with its head tilted, as if watching us.

We never went back. The police report said the house was empty when they arrived, but they found Nils’s body in the living room, his mouth open in a silent scream, and the glass shards embedded in his palm. I’ve never tried a Ouija board again. But sometimes, in the dead of night, I think I hear those three knocks, coming from inside my own walls, and I wonder if it followed me, waiting for the moment I let my guard down. The cracked glass is still in my memory, and I know that the thing we released is still out there, hungry and patient.

Years have passed, and I’m now in my mid-forties. I’ve moved to the city, surrounded by noise and light, but I still feel it sometimes, a cold draft that has no source, or a pattern in the leaves that spells a word. I know she’s with me, that Helena, or whatever she really was. She’s not a ghost; she’s a hole in the world, a place where darkness pooled. And on the last night of every October, I hear the glass crack again, and I know she’s coming back for the rest of me.

I never told anyone the full story. But I’m writing it now, because maybe if I get it out, she’ll let me go. But I know better. I saw her smile in the dark. That thing I let in that night, it’s not content with just one victim. It wants to be known. And it has a name, a name we’re too afraid to speak aloud: it calls itself V.A.R.A.K., and it is patient.