The Porch Light

My partner, Dale, had been talking up his friend’s place for weeks—an old farmhouse on the edge of a dried-up riverbed, where the wind moaned through the gaps in the clapboard and the porch light flickered even when the switch was off. I was the one who wanted to contact something, to prove to Dale that this whole spiritual nonsense was just our minds playing tricks. So I brought my mother’s old talking board, the one she’d used before she died, wrapped in a velvet cloth and stinking of mothballs.

When we arrived, Dale’s friend, a wiry man named Marcus, took one look at the board and his face went tight. He pointed to the porch, a wooden plank that groaned under our weight, and said, ‘That stays out there. No way I’m letting that thing into my house. It’s already bad enough.’ I thought he was joking, but he stood with his arms crossed, blocking the doorway. So I left the board on a rusted chair, and we went inside.

Inside, the air was thick with dust and something else—a smell like burnt toast, faint but constant. Marcus showed us around, his flashlight beam cutting through the dark corners. He pointed to the walls, where faint circular marks dotted the plaster, like someone had been knocking for decades. ‘We hear it every night,’ he said, and as if on cue, three slow knocks echoed from the far wall. I jumped, but Dale just rolled his eyes. Then Marcus led us to the hallway, where a massive mirror, taller than me, hung crooked. ‘That’s the portal,’ he said. ‘We’ve tried everything to cover it, but it always ends up exposed again.’ His reflection seemed to lag a fraction behind his movements, but I chalked that up to bad lighting.

After a while, Marcus reluctantly let me bring the board inside, muttering something about ‘damn curiosity killing the cat.’ We set it up on the kitchen table, the only clear space in the cluttered room. Dale lit a candle, and we rested our fingers on the planchette. Nothing. We sat for ten minutes, asking any spirit to talk, but the planchette just sat there, dead. Dale suggested using a pendulum instead, which he happened to have in his pocket—a quartz crystal on a silver chain. I held it over the board, and it began to sway in slow circles.

‘Are there any spirits here?’ I asked. The pendulum swung to ‘yes,’ then resumed its circles. My pulse quickened. ‘Should we go to the cemetery down the road and try the board there?’ The pendulum swung to ‘no’ with such force that it nearly slipped from my fingers. ‘Why not?’ I asked. ‘Are there bad people there?’ ‘Yes,’ it replied, so strongly that the crystal hit the board with a sharp tap. A chill ran up my spine, but I kept going.

Then Marcus, who had been pacing in the hallway, poked his head into the kitchen. ‘You done yet?’ he said, his voice tight. ‘We’re just getting somewhere,’ I said. He sighed, grabbed a glass of water from the counter, and left. But he came back two more times, each time with a different excuse—needed to check the locks, thought he heard something outside. Every time he interrupted, the pendulum went dead in my hand. I asked the spirit, ‘Is Marcus making you angry?’ The pendulum swung hard to ‘yes,’ and Marcus, from the other room, yelled out, ‘I’m not angry! I’m just tired of this crap!’ We exchanged a wide-eyed glance. There was no way he could have heard our quiet conversation.

We pushed on. The pendulum began to trace a name, letter by letter, over the board. A flat ‘A,’ then an ‘N,’ a ‘G,’ an ‘E,’ an ‘L.’ ‘Angel,’ it spelled. ‘Who are you?’ I asked. ‘How old are you?’ The pendulum swung to ‘1’ and ‘4.’ ‘Angel, are you trapped here?’ The pendulum swung to ‘yes,’ and then, without warning, the lights flickered. The candle flame stretched tall and thin, then split into two. Marcus came running in, his face pale. ‘It’s him,’ he whispered. ‘The boy. He died in this house. He was fourteen.’ I looked down at the board, and the planchette was moving on its own, tracing a message before my fingers even touched it. ‘Help me,’ it wrote. ‘He won’t let me leave.’ I felt a pressure on my chest, like a hand pressing. The mirror in the hallway shuddered against the wall.

Then the porch light flickered, visible through the kitchen window, and I remembered the board I’d left outside. But it was here, on the table, I’d brought it in. The chair on the porch was empty now, and the light was swinging as if something had just brushed past it. A knock came from the front door, slow and deliberate. Three knocks. The mirror reflected not our faces, but a boy standing behind us—soaked, like he’d been standing in rain, his clothes clinging to his thin frame. But when we turned, there was no one there. ‘Get it out!’ Marcus shouted, and he lunged for the board, but it flew off the table, hitting the floor with a crack. The lights went out. In the dark, I felt a cold hand wrap around my ankle, and then a whisper that wasn’t ours, right next to my ear: ‘You brought me in.’

We fled, leaving the board shattered on the kitchen floor. In the car, I couldn’t shake the feeling that we hadn’t left alone. The rearview mirror showed the porch light, burning steady now, and the faint silhouette of a boy standing in the doorway. But when we drove past the farmhouse last week, the porch light was still on, and there was a new face in the window—not a boy, but a woman, pressing her palm against the glass. And I knew, with a cold certainty, that the door was never really closed. You just have to be willing to open it.