The Last Board

My sister came home from the county fair with a beat-up wooden board wrapped in brown paper. She’d bought it from a stall run by an old woman with one milky eye, who said it was ‘a gift for the curious.’ I told her we should leave it alone, that boards like that weren’t toys, but she and her friends from the auto shop laughed at me. They said they wanted a thrill, and they’d already cleared a spot in the basement of the old mill where we used to hang out.

That night, the five of us huddled around a rusted workbench, the board sitting between us like a sleeping animal. My sister had invited Mason, a lanky kid who always smelled of gasoline, and the twins, Leo and Iris, who never agreed on anything. I didn’t want to be there, but I couldn’t let my sister go alone.

We set a copper coin on the board, and Mason’s girlfriend, a quiet girl named Tess, lit a candle and read a prayer from a torn page she’d found in a library book. The air was thick with dust and the smell of old oil. My sister, always the bold one, placed her fingers on the coin and asked, ‘Is anyone here?’ The coin slid to ‘YES’ so fast we all jumped.

Then Mason laughed and said, ‘That’s just the wind.’ But my sister’s face had gone pale. She asked again, ‘Are you a relative of mine?’ The coin slid to ‘NO.’ ‘Do you know my grandpa?’ ‘YES.’ ‘Can I talk to him?’ ‘NO.’ Weird, we thought, but maybe it was a trick. ‘What’s your name?’ The coin spelled ‘D-J.’ ‘How old are you?’ ‘4-5.’ My sister asked, ‘How long ago did you die?’ ‘5-2.’ I felt the wrongness of it, like the numbers were wrong on purpose. ‘Did you die in a car accident?’ ‘NO.’ ‘Heart attack?’ ‘NO.’ ‘Violent way?’ ‘YES.’ ‘Murdered?’ ‘YES.’

My sister swallowed hard. ‘I’m sorry to hear that, DJ.’ And then she pulled her hand away. The coin didn’t move. For a moment, I thought it was over. We sat in silence, the candle sputtering. Leo whispered, ‘Maybe we should leave.’ But my sister shook her head. ‘One more round. We can’t just stop after that.’

She put her hand back on the coin, and so did the others, but I held back. I saw something out of the corner of my eye, a shape in the shadows near the conveyor belt, like a small figure standing very still. My sister repeated the questions, but this time the answers were different. ‘Are you here?’ ‘YES.’ ‘Are you a relative?’ ‘YES.’ ‘Who?’ The coin spelled ‘D-A-U-G-H-T-E-R.’ My sister’s hand trembled. ‘Are you the one who was killed?’ ‘YES.’ ‘By who?’ The coin spelled ‘B-R-O-T-H-E-R.’

And then the candle went out. The basement was plunged into darkness, and I heard a sound like a child’s laugh, but it was wrong, too high. Someone turned on a flashlight, and we saw that the coin was spinning on its own, faster and faster, until it shot off the board and fell into the machinery. My sister gasped. ‘What is this?’ But no one could answer.

Then, from the darkness near the stairs, came a voice, small and cold. ‘You said sorry, but you didn’t mean it.’ I looked and saw a boy, no more than five, standing there. His clothes were old, like from the 1970s. His face was blank, but his eyes were black. I tried to move, but my legs wouldn’t respond. The others were frozen too.

The boy walked toward us, each step making a soft squelch, like stepping in mud. He stopped at my sister and pointed at her. ‘You will know.’ Then he turned and walked into the wall, and he was gone.

We ran. We left the board and the mill, and we didn’t look back. But that night, my sister woke up screaming. She said she saw DJ, the little boy, standing at the foot of her bed. ‘He said I’m his brother now,’ she whispered. The next night, she didn’t sleep. She started drawing the mill on every piece of paper she could find, obsessively, until her fingers bled. The drawings were all the same: the basement, the board, and a small figure in the corner.

Two weeks later, she disappeared. The police found her in the mill, sitting at the workbench, the board in front of her. The coin was gone. She was rocking back and forth, humming a nursery rhyme. She didn’t recognize any of us. She only said, ‘He’s waiting for me to be fourty-five.’ We tried to take her home, but she fought us. She screamed that she had to stay. That DJ was her son now.

We brought her home, but it wasn’t long before we heard footsteps in the attic, and the sound of a coin scraping across the floor upstairs. My sister was in her room, rocking. She looked up at me with eyes that weren’t hers and said, ‘He’s not alone. He brought his brother.’ I felt a chill, and I knew I needed to find that board and burn it. But when I went back to the mill, the board was gone. Instead, there was a note, written in crayon: ‘You can’t burn what’s already inside.’

Now, every night, I hear a little boy’s laugh coming from my sister’s room, and she is always talking to someone I can’t see. She calls him ‘DJ,’ but sometimes she calls me that, and it makes me sick. I know that if I look in the mirror, I might see a small figure standing behind me, smiling. And I know it’s only a matter of time before he asks for a name, and I’ll be the one who answers.