The Table of Whispers

The house on Maple Street had a history of creaks and groans, but for the first month, I thought nothing of it. My mother, my brother, and I had moved in after the divorce, and the place was a rambling Victorian that had seen better days. The floorboards sighed underfoot, the windows rattled in their frames, and the doorknobs, old-fashioned glass ones that required a full twist, would sometimes pop open on their own. I chalked it up to settling, drafts, old age.

But then, my mother picked up a new hobby. She’d always been crafty, but this time it was woodworking. She found an old, discarded table base in the garage, its legs carved with strange, swirling patterns, and she decided to restore it, adding a glass top to make a coffee table. She spent hours in the living room, sanding and varnishing, and the smell of lacquer filled the house. I began to notice things. Doors that I had definitely closed would be ajar, and once, I heard a clatter in the kitchen, as if something had fallen, but when I went to check, everything was in its place. I thought it was my imagination, or maybe the house settling again.

One night, I was home alone. My mom and brother were visiting my grandma, who lived a few miles away in a small cottage she had finally made livable. I was about to take a shower when I heard a faint sound from the living room. It was a soft, repetitive tapping, like fingernails on glass. I froze, listening. The tapping stopped, then started again, more insistent. I crept down the hallway, my bare feet cold on the hardwood. When I reached the living room, the lights were off, but the streetlight cast a pale glow through the window. The coffee table stood in the center of the room, its glass top gleaming. And on the glass, I saw a pattern of tiny cracks, spreading like frost, starting from a single point in the center.

I stepped closer, my heart pounding. The tapping grew louder, and I realized it was coming from underneath the table. A wave of cold air washed over me, and the room seemed to darken. I knelt down, peering beneath the table. In the shadows, I saw something—a shape that was not quite human, with long, thin fingers tapping against the underside of the glass. It seemed to sense my presence, and it slowly turned its head. Its face was featureless, a smooth oval of blackness, but I felt its gaze on me.

I scrambled backward, falling over the rug. The tapping stopped, and a low, guttural voice whispered, ‘You let it out.’ The room was silent, but the whisper seemed to come from all around me. I ran to my bedroom, slamming the door, and I leaned against it, gasping. I tried to rationalize it—a prank, a hallucination—but I knew what I had seen. After that night, the house changed. I would find the table’s glass top fogged with moisture, even on dry days. The television would turn on by itself, showing static. And every night, at the same time, I would hear the tapping again.

I called my mom, begging her to come home, but she laughed it off, telling me I was reading too many horror stories. I decided to investigate the table more closely. Hidden in the wood of the legs, I found a carved inscription: ‘He who invokes the departed must bear their weight.’ I realized that my mother, in her craft project, had unknowingly made a Ouija table. She had told me she made a Ouija top once, but I had assumed it was just a joke. Now, I understood: she had opened a doorway, and something had come through.

I tried to remove the glass top, to destroy the table, but it wouldn’t budge. The wooden legs seemed fused to the floor. I even tried to break the glass with a hammer, but it wouldn’t crack, instead sending a shockwave through my arm. I was trapped with it. That night, I heard footsteps in the hallway, heavy, deliberate steps, different from the light ones I’d heard before. They stopped outside my door. The doorknob twisted slowly, then the door creaked open a few inches. Through the crack, I saw the creature from under the table, standing there, its face now bearing a grotesque smile with too many teeth.

I know now that the table is a prison, and I am its new warden. My mother and brother never came back from grandma’s house—they claim they felt a chill and left me to deal with the ‘old house noises.’ I haven’t left the house in weeks. I sit in my room, listening to the constant tapping, the whispers that sometimes form my name. And I know that when I die, the table will claim another. But until then, I keep the doors closed, even though they always open.

I have started to carve my own inscription into the table’s leg, a warning for whoever finds this house next. But my hands are shaking, and I know it’s only a matter of time before the tapping becomes knocking, and the knocking becomes breaking, and I join the whisperers beneath the glass.