The Tallyman’s Request

When I was nine, my family rented a drafty farmhouse on the edge of the Blackwood Marsh. The land had been in the Pruitt family for generations, but they’d all moved on, leaving behind a sagging barn and a well that swallowed the moonlight. My mother, seeking distraction from the city’s noise, had taken to attending séances with our nearest neighbor, a reclusive woman named Elsbeth Vane. Elsbeth claimed her grandmother had ‘the sight,’ and she’d inherited a battered Ouija board to prove it. On Friday nights, she’d set it up on her kitchen table, its oilcloth worn thin, and my older brother, Marcus, and his friend, Tommy, would come along, eager for a thrill.

Most sessions were tame. A spirit calling itself ‘Mary’ would spell out mundane pleasantries, or a trickster named ‘Pip’ would move the planchette in circles until Elsbeth scolded it. But one night, as a storm rattled the windowpanes, a different presence came through. The planchette jerked violently, spelling out a single name: ‘Silas.’ No warmth, no familiarity. The air in the kitchen grew thick, and the candle flames bent toward the board as if bowing. Elsbeth’s face paled. ‘I don’t know any Silas,’ she whispered.

We waited, breath held. Then the planchette moved again, slow and deliberate: ‘Warn Perry.’ We exchanged glances. No one in our group was named Perry. My father, who had joined us that night, frowned and asked, ‘Perry who? What do you mean?’ But the board went still. The storm passed, and we chalked it up to a bored spirit playing tricks. Yet, that night, I dreamed of a man in a muddy oilskin coat, standing at the edge of the marsh, pointing toward our barn. He didn’t speak, but his eyes were hollow, and his finger never moved.

The next day, we discovered the truth. Our landlord, Mr. Pruitt, had a brother named Perry—a reclusive man who lived alone in a shack deeper in the marsh. He hadn’t been seen in a week, and when the sheriff went to check, they found him dead. He’d drowned in a shallow ditch, his boots still on, his face frozen in a look of terror. The locals whispered that Perry had been ‘taken by the marsh,’ and that Silas was a name from an old Pruitt family diary, a man who’d gone mad and vanished into the swamp a century ago. My mother stopped using the board after that, and we moved away before the snow fell.

But I’ve never forgotten the moment the planchette spelled ‘Warn Perry.’ I don’t know if we could have saved him—if the warning was meant for us to reach him before the marsh claimed him. Sometimes, on quiet nights, I still hear the rustle of an oilskin coat outside my window, and a voice, low and guttural, repeating the command: ‘Warn Perry.’ Only now, I wonder if Perry was never the name of the dead man, but the name of the one who would come next—and if our failure to heed the warning has set something loose that no amount of distance can escape.