The Hollow Board

My grandmother warned me about the board before she died, clutched my hand with papery fingers and said, ‘Nadia, it isn’t a toy. It’s a door, and some doors should stay locked.’ I was seventeen that summer, and she passed in May. By August, the door was still sealed in its battered wooden box, wrapped in a faded cloth, sitting on the top shelf of the hall closet in our creaking farmhouse in the Missouri Ozarks. I’d never dared to open it, but I’d always been drawn to it, a magnet for curiosity.

It was a humid Thursday night, the air thick with the smell of rain-soaked earth and bruised grass. My aunt Lena had driven up from St. Louis with my cousins, Harper and Juno. Lena was my late mother’s sister, a woman with a smile she wore like armor and a laugh that never reached her eyes. That night, she announced it was a ‘tradition’ to do something fun on the last night before school started, and since the sky had opened up and lightning danced across the fields, we were stuck indoors. Harper, older and bolder, suggested the board.

‘Not the board,’ I said, my voice too sharp. ‘Grandma’s board. It’s locked away.’ Lena’s face flickered, a shadow I caught before she smoothed it away. ‘Oh, honey, it’s just a piece of wood. Your grandma was superstitious. We’ll be careful.’ Juno, younger and eager, fetched the box from the closet. I remember the weight of it in her hands, the way the wood felt colder than the air around it. We cleared the kitchen table, lit some candles, and placed the planchette on the board.

We sat in our usual circle: Lena at the top, Harper to my right, Juno to my left, and me across from Lena. English release beside the board, and Lena began, ‘We call upon any spirits who wish to speak. You may enter. We welcome you.’ The air grew still. The candles flickered as if a breeze passed through, but the windows were shut tight. For a long moment, nothing moved. Then the planchette twitched.

It began to move, gliding in frantic, jerky patterns. Lena said, ‘Is someone there?’ The planchette shot to ‘YES’ with a force that made our hands jump. ‘What is your name?’ she asked. The planchette moved, but the letters it spelled out didn’t form a word. It went: A, then B, then C, then A again, then Z, then X, then M. Over and over. Gibberish. Harper scoffed, ‘It’s all bullshit.’ But her hands were shaking.

Juno giggled nervously. ‘Maybe it’s trying to spell something in another language?’ Lena’s lips tightened. ‘I know Polish,’ she said, her voice low. ‘That’s not it.’ The planchette sped up, tracing letters with violent precision: Q, V, J, K, L, Y, P, then a sudden stop. Then it spelled, ‘SHE FLIES’—but that was backwards. Then ‘NOT ALONE.’ Then it spelled the same gibberish again, but this time the letters formed a shape: A circle with a jagged line through it. Harper pulled her hands away. ‘This isn’t funny anymore.’

I wanted to stop, but Lena said, ‘Just one more question. Who are you?’ The planchette paused. Then it spelled slowly, deliberately: ‘WE ARE THE OPEN.’ Juno looked up, her eyes wide. ‘What does that mean?’ The candles guttered, and the room plunged into darkness. I could hear the rain hammering the roof, and then a sound from upstairs: a rhythmic thumping, like something heavy being dragged across the floor of my grandmother’s old bedroom.

We froze. Lena whispered, ‘It’s just the wind.’ But the thumping grew louder, and then it stopped. A door creaked open. Footsteps on the stairs, heavy, unhurried. They came down the hallway toward the kitchen, and then they stopped just outside the door. We could see a shape in the doorway—a tall, dark figure, featureless, just a black stain against the dark. It stepped forward, and the planchette flew off the board, skittering across the floor.

It spoke, but not with a human voice. It was a hum, a vibration, like a swarm of bees, and the words formed in our heads: ‘You opened the door. Now you must close it.’ Lena tried to pray, but her voice came out a rasp. Harper was crying. Juno had her hands over her ears. I felt a cold hand grip my ankle under the table, pulling, and I screamed.

Then, as suddenly as it began, the lights flickered on. The candles soaked, the room bright, and the figure was gone. The board sat on the table, cracked clean in half, the planchette shattered. We left that night, drove to a motel, and never spoke of it again. But before we left, I noticed the board had a new mark on it: a handprint burned into the wood, small, like a child’s.

Months passed. I went to college, tried to forget, but every night I dreamed of the shape in the doorway, and the word it whispered—’OPEN’—over and over. My aunt eventually moved away, but Harper started sleepwalking, found herself standing in the kitchen of her apartment, a knife in her hand, staring at her own reflection. Juno stopped speaking entirely, communicates only by writing notes, and each note ends with a circle with a jagged line through it.

I thought it was over, until last week, when I received a package. No return address. Inside was a scrap of the board, the part with the handprint, and a note in handwriting I didn’t recognize: ‘You opened the door. Now you must close it. He is still here. You are still his.’

Right now, it’s just the feeling of being watched from the corner of my eye, and a faint humming in the air. The hollow board is in my apartment now, buried under papers, but I know one thing for certain: Some doors, once opened, can never truly be closed. And the door we opened in that farmhouse… it’s still ajar, and I think it’s looking back at me.