The Split Glass

May 8, 2012

by Darlene

In the autumn of 1997, I was fifteen, and my friends and I thought we were invincible. We lived in a sleepy town where the most exciting thing was the annual pumpkin fair, so when my friend Ben suggested we try a Ouija board in his father’s workshop, we jumped at the chance. The workshop was a dusty, cluttered space at the back of his house, filled with the scent of motor oil and old wood. That night, the only light came from three flickering candles we placed on an upturned barrel that served as our table. We used a tattered map of the world as the board, and for the planchette, we had a chipped saucer with a marble glued to its center, believing the weight would prevent any accidental movement.

Our self-appointed leader was a boy named Marcus, who claimed his cousin had taught him the proper rituals. He had us sit in a circle, our fingers resting lightly on the saucer’s rim, and he began with the usual chant, ‘Is there anyone with us?’ Nothing happened for the first two attempts. On the third, Marcus gasped and yanked his hand away. ‘The saucer… it split,’ he whispered, his face pale in the candlelight. We all looked, but the saucer was whole. Still, a chill ran through us. Ben, ever the skeptic, laughed it off and said Marcus was trying to scare us. We decided to continue, eager to prove the whole thing was nonsense.

We resumed, and after a few minutes, the saucer began to tremble beneath our fingers. Then it moved, not in a smooth glide, but in a series of jerks, as if something was pushing it from below. We asked, ‘Who are you?’ The saucer slid to a spot on the map near the Atlantic Ocean. ‘We’re in a boat,’ Ben joked, but Marcus’s voice was serious. ‘No, it’s pointing to coordinates. This is where the ship went down.’ We asked what ship. The saucer moved to the letter ‘T’, then ‘H’, then ‘E’, then ‘M’, then ‘I’, then ‘R’ – THEMIR. None of us had heard of that ship.

Suddenly, the candles flickered and went out completely, plunging us into darkness. We heard a scraping sound, like something being dragged across the concrete floor. Ben fumbled for a flashlight and clicked it on. The saucer was on the floor, broken in two, with the marble rolling toward the door. But that wasn’t the worst. On the wall behind the barrel, scratched into the wood, were the words: ‘YOU SHOULD NOT HAVE SAILED.’ We ran out of the workshop, hearts pounding, and didn’t stop until we were back in Ben’s living room.

We tried to convince ourselves it was a prank, but the next day, Ben’s father found the workshop in disarray: tools thrown, the map torn, and the saucer pieces glued back together with a strange black tar. We never spoke of it again, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that we had disturbed something. That night, I had a dream of a ship sinking in icy waters, and I saw a name on its hull: ‘The Mire.’ I woke up gasping, and I knew the truth: the thing we contacted wasn’t a spirit of a person, but the ship itself, a malicious entity that had been waiting for someone to call it.

Years later, I learned that a ship called ‘The Mire’ had indeed disappeared in the Atlantic in 1948, under mysterious circumstances. The official report said it was lost at sea with all hands, but there were rumors of mutiny and madness. I still have that broken saucer piece with the marble, kept in a locked box in my attic. Sometimes, at night, I hear it scratching from within, as if it’s trying to spell out a message. I never open the box. And I never play with a Ouija board again.

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