The Saltwater Circle

In the autumn of my sixteenth year, my cousin Tess and I uncovered an old, waterlogged Ouija board in the attic of our grandmother’s seaside cottage. The planchette was a piece of driftwood, and the letters were painted in peeling white on the board’s surface. The cottage stood on stilts above a beach of black sand, and the wind off the harbor always smelled of brine and rotting kelp. Halloween night, with the tide unusually high and the moon hidden behind a thick fog, we decided to try the board. My friend Marcus was there too, skeptical but eager for a thrill. We sat in a triangle of flashlight beams, our fingers resting on the driftwood pointer.

We asked for a spirit, and after a few hesitant motions, the pointer spelled ‘MIRA.’ Tess asked if she was real, and Mira responded with a slow, careful ‘YES.’ Mira claimed she was a girl of ten who had drowned in the harbor in 1923, and she was lonely. She said she liked the way our voices sounded, like seabirds over the water. Over the next hour, we talked with Mira about her life, her favorite shells, and the lighthouse that used to stand on the point. She seemed gentle, almost shy. We promised to speak with her again, and when we stopped, the pointer drifted on its own to ‘MIRA’ one last time, as if to wave goodbye.

The next morning, we were buzzing. Tess insisted we try to contact Mira again, but we had no board. So Marcus sketched letters on a piece of cardboard, and we used a coin as a pointer. To our surprise, the thing worked. But this time, a different presence came through. It called itself ‘GULL,’ and it was not kind. It mocked our attempts, spelling out cruel jokes in broken English. When we demanded to know who it really was, it said ‘I AM THE ONE WHO SITS ON THE ROCKS.’ It told us to look out the window, and we saw a dark shape perched on a jetty, too large for a bird. We shouted at it to leave us alone, and after a long silence, it finally spelled ‘FINE.’

But something had changed. Every day after that, we would hear a scratching at the cottage’s window at night. Sometimes we’d see a pale face with hollow eyes pressed against the glass, right before it disappeared. Tess thought it might be Mira, but the face was too tall, too thin. Then Marcus began to talk to himself in a low murmur, using words he didn’t know. One evening, he turned to us and said, ‘The tide is coming in faster tonight.’ His voice was not his own. We tried to banish whatever had attached itself to him, but our amateur rituals only made it laugh. The spirit said, ‘You invited me. You can’t invite me out.’

Desperate, we dug out the original board and called for Mira. But Mira’s response was faint, almost static, like a distant radio broadcast. She said, ‘There are others between you and me. They live in the salt and the foam. I am sorry.’ The pointer then spelled ‘THEY ARE THE DROWNED CHOIR,’ and the lights in the cottage flickered. The scratching at the window became a chorus of knuckles on glass. We slammed the board shut and sat in silence, listening to the water slap against the stilts. Outside, we could see dozens of shapes bobbing in the surf, all facing us.

We spent the next three days not talking about it, but the presence grew stronger. Marcus’s murmurs turned into full conversations with empty air. Tess started sleepwalking to the shoreline, leaving footprints that filled with black water. I didn’t tell them, but I saw a girl’s face in the reflection of the kitchen window, and it smiled at me with teeth like broken shells. On the third night, we decided to perform a proper banishing, using sea salt and a lit candle. But as we chanted, the candle flame turned green, and the pointer swung violently, spelling ‘TOO LATE.’ The windows burst open, and a gust of freezing, salty wind threw curling seaweed into the room. When we looked out, the shore was packed with figures, some child-sized, some long and distorted, all singing a high, thin song that drilled into our ears.

Then, as suddenly as it began, the wind died. The figures were gone. Marcus slumped, unconscious. When he woke, he said he remembered nothing. We thought it was over. But the next day, we found a note written in seaweed on the kitchen table: ‘We are the ones who listen to the shells. Tell Mira we miss her.’ And the worst part: we had not written the note. That evening, as we packed to leave, I caught a glimpse of the board in the attic, and the pointer was moving on its own, spelling out a name we had not given it: ‘THE CHOIR.’ We have not been back to the cottage since. But sometimes, when the tide is high and the fog rolls in, I hear that song from the house on the stilts, and I know they are still waiting for their invitation to come ashore.