The Hollow in the Board

I moved back in with my mother when I was twenty-four, after my marriage collapsed and I had nowhere else to go. She lived in a small town in the Texas Hill Country, in a house that had been in our family for generations. She ran a home daycare, and the place was always filled with the sounds of children, but beneath that, there was something else. My mother had lived there for nearly a decade, and she had grown accustomed to the oddities: the way the kitchen faucet would drip in a pattern that spelled out words, the small puddles of water that appeared on the floor in the middle of the night, the occasional sensation of a cold hand brushing against her neck when she was alone. She dismissed them as quirks of an old house, but I never felt at ease. Every time I stepped through the front door, a knot tightened in my stomach, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that the walls were watching.

One evening, my aunt came over, and we decided to use a Ouija board we found in the attic. It was an old, handcrafted board, with the letters and numbers painted in faded gold, and the planchette was a heavy piece of glass with a hole in the center. My mother was hesitant, but my aunt laughed and insisted it would be fun. We set it up on the dining room table, lit a few candles, and began. The planchette moved almost immediately, sliding from letter to letter with a force that surprised us. But the messages were disjointed, fragments of words, random letters, and sometimes symbols we didn’t recognize. After an hour, we were frustrated and a little unnerved. My mother finally said, ‘Let’s stop. This feels wrong.’ We put the board back in its box and went to bed.

I slept in the living room that night, on the old pull-out couch. I fell into a deep sleep and entered a dream. In the dream, we were at the same table, playing the same board, but in the center of the board, where there should have been a sun or a moon, there was a dark hole. I asked my aunt, ‘What is that for?’ She looked at me with a strange smile and said, ‘We have to put our hands in it to finish.’ In the dream, I saw my mother place her hand into the hole, and it seemed to swallow her arm up to the elbow. She didn’t scream; she just looked at me with terror in her eyes. Then my aunt pushed my hand toward the hole. I resisted, but the force was overwhelming.

I woke up with a gasp, my hand tingling. The room was dark, and the house was silent, but I could feel a presence. I turned on the lamp and saw that the box containing the Ouija board was on the coffee table, even though I knew we had put it away in my mother’s bedroom closet. I tried to dismiss it as my mother having moved it, but when I picked up the board, I noticed something different. In the center, exactly where the hole had been in my dream, there was a small, dark indentation, as if something had been burned or carved into the wood. I ran my finger over it, and it was cold, colder than the rest of the board.

I called my mother, but she didn’t answer. I walked to her room and found the door slightly ajar. Inside, she was sitting on the edge of her bed, staring at her hand. There was a small, dark mark on her palm, like a burn, but it pulsed with a faint light. When she saw me, she whispered, ‘It’s in me now.’ I tried to comfort her, but she recoiled. Over the next few days, she became increasingly withdrawn. She would speak in a low monotone, and sometimes her eyes would glaze over, and she would speak in a language I had never heard. The children at the daycare started to complain of a cold spot in the corner of the playroom, and they would sometimes point at my mother and say, ‘She has a shadow behind her.’

I sought help from a local historian, a woman named Mrs. Ortiz, who knew the history of our house. She told me that a century ago, a man named Silas Blackwood had lived there. He was a practitioner of a dark art, and he used that same Ouija board to commune with something that was not of this world. Legend had it that he made a pact with that entity, offering it a vessel in exchange for power. The entity was never fully banished; it waited for a new host. As Mrs. Ortiz spoke, I felt a chill run down my spine. I knew that we had inadvertently opened the door.

That night, I decided to confront the entity. I took the board to the backyard and built a small fire. I intended to burn it, but as I held the board over the flames, a voice, not my mother’s, but a deep, rumbling voice, spoke from behind me. ‘Give it back.’ I spun around, and my mother was standing there, but her eyes were completely black. She smiled, and her smile was too wide. ‘You can’t destroy me. I’m already here.’ I dropped the board into the fire, but it didn’t burn. The flames seemed to shy away from it. I grabbed a shovel and tried to hack it apart, but the wood was as hard as iron.

In desperation, I ran to the house, grabbed a hammer, and smashed the board with all my might. It split in two, and from the break, a dark, viscous liquid oozed out, reeking of decay. As soon as it touched the ground, my mother screamed, a terrible, agonizing sound, and then collapsed. I rushed to her, but when she opened her eyes, they were her own, and she was gasping for air. She clutched my arm and said, ‘I saw it. It was in my head, showing me things. It wanted to use me to bring more.’ She was shaking, and I held her until the sun came up.

We buried the remains of the board in a metal box under a concrete slab in the backyard. My mother retired from the daycare, and we moved away shortly after. But I know that the entity is not gone. Sometimes, at night, I feel a cold hand brush across my neck, and I see that dark mark on my mother’s palm, and I wonder if we truly escaped, or if we only locked the door from the inside.