After Sundown

by Mark Morris

  Her field of vision dwindled to a single blur as what felt like tiny hands plucked at her, pulling at the threads of her being. In the end it was the singing that finally broke Vera’s mind. The voice that came from the stones was vast and harrowing, a single ancient note, endlessly repeating.

  Murder Board

  Grady Hendrix

  “I had childhood dyslexia,” Caroline says. “So I don’t even know if I can do a ouija board.”

  “Put your fingers on the planchette,” he says.

  “Why don’t we play Scrabble?”

  They’d already played sixteen games of Scrabble, two of chess, six of Rummy. Rain sheets down the massive, two-storey glass wall that covers the entire rear of their house. Caroline looks through the watery ripples, across their saturated back yard, at the dark brown scrubby foothills sealing off their view. They paid a premium not to see any neighbours, but right now she’ll take some warm, comforting porch lights. The news says a mudslide has blocked most of Buena Noticia Drive and the rain isn’t supposed to stop for two days. She feels completely alone.

  She turns back to the board and Bill, staring at her across the table, lines on either side of his mouth cut deep, bristly eyebrows meeting in the middle, lips compressed, breathing through his nose. This is Bill’s anger face. More and more, it’s the only face he shows.

  She insists on meeting hostility with love.

  “Let me get candles,” she says. “To make the right atmosphere.”

  Standing, she pecks him on one unshaven cheek. She wants him to know she’s glad he’s sharing this relic from his past with her.

  She finds three Cire Trudon candles (two Moroccan Mint Tea and one Mist Soil) and wishes she could find candles that don’t cost $100 each, but she doesn’t want to ask David where the candles are. She’s fuzzy on what religion they practise in Serbia but David’s so square he would see the ouija and assume they’re worshipping the Devil, and honestly, they can’t afford to lose David.

  * * *

  Bill needs her to put her fucking fingers on the fucking ouija board now. This house cost $13 million, he owns over $3 million in guitars, and there’s an uncashed royalty cheque for $48,271 lying on his office desk, but the most valuable thing he owns is this ouija board. Calcified masking tape barely holds its box together, there’s a gouge through the ‘T’, and the smiling woodcut moon in the corner has a cigarette burn stabbed in one eye, but if the house caught fire it’s the first thing he’d save.

  When he was little his old man tried to tell him about money.

  “Billy boy,” he’d said in that we’re-all-pals-here salesman voice he could never turn off. “Do you know what money is? Money makes dreams come true.”

  His old man didn’t know shit about money, but Bill does. And he knows money makes people lie.

  Everyone in his life lies. His manager, his lawyer, his agent, his business manager – they all tell him what he wants to hear. He expects that, but the sick, evil, twisted fucking thing is that money even warps ordinary people. Old friends, cousins, his brother, his nieces and nephews, they spin every word because they always need something: a waived licensing fee for one of his songs, a loan, for him to come to their kid’s gallery show and spend $12,000 on some shitty metal sculpture that’s currently hanging over his front fucking door. They tell him he must be working out but he sees the mirror and knows he’s a skeleton wrapped in loose skin. They tell him how great he looks but his face sprouts hairs and brown spots like a mouldy piece of bread.

  He trusts David and Miloje because he signs their cheques. They’re paid to give a shit. It’s an honest relationship. Not like Caroline.

  He sees the disgust on her face when she thinks he’s not looking. He knows she doesn’t breathe through her nose when she gets into bed. She wipes food off his chin like he’s his old man. She’s always at her yoga and her Peloton and her treatments and with her friends, and they’re all gorgeous and young and their husbands take them trekking in Nepal and whale-watching in Alaska, and he’s locked her up in this glass and concrete tomb with him, and he strongly suspects she wants to escape. He asks if she’s happy and she makes nice noises, but they all lie.

  However, something in this board looks out for him. Something in this board keeps saving his life. Something in this board tells him the truth.

  * * *

  Caroline smiles at Bill, sparks the lighter, touches it to the three wicks, and a bubble of warmth blooms around them while the rest of the living room sinks deeper into gloom.

  “So how do you do this?” she asks.

  She’s going to make this work. She knows he’s still upset about her wiping salad dressing off his chin at lunch, but that one blip won’t ruin their day. She’s going to make this a positive experience.

  “Same way you’ve always done it,” he growls.

  Growing up, Caroline only wanted to get out of the LV. Rural Pennsylvania, Lehigh Valley, full of shut-down steel mills and skinheads stabbing each other with screwdrivers at shows. The girls who went to college, and had sleepovers, and pulled out ouija boards, and said ‘Bloody Mary’ at midnight into mirrors. Those girls didn’t invite Caroline over, so whatever they liked, she hated.

  But Bill’s told her about how the ouija warned him to walk out on that woman the day before she overdosed and the cops raided her apartment, how it told him his first manager was ripping him off, how it clued him in that his second wife was cheating. She assumes this is the same ouija board, and that means he’s serious about it, but to her this is silly, it’s a Parker Brothers board game, manufactured by the truckload, and shipped out by the millions. There’s one in every home. But he’s sharing part of his life, so she needs to try.

  “Is there some ritual you have?” she asks. “Some way you want me to focus?”

  “Put your fingertips on the planchette,” Bill sighs.

  “Like this?” she asks.

  He rolls his eyes and nods.

  “Now what?” she asks.

  “We wait.”

  They sit, the two of them, rain occasionally gusting against the big plate glass window with a wet drum roll. The candle flames flicker for a moment then hold steady. Bill closes his eyes. The candlelight softens his lines, bathes his face in a warm glow. He looks like the Bill she remembers.

  She knows what people think. He’s seventy-one, she’s thirty-six, the trophy wife, the gold digger, the woman who pulls on latex gloves and squeezes out a blob of cold lube and gives him handjobs so he’ll keep her in his will. That’s what his money guy thinks, and his lawyer, and she worries that it’s what Bill thinks now, too. He changed after he got his walker last year. He started shutting her out.

  She wants to tell him that he’s still the rock’n’roll guy to her, still the man with a thousand stories, still the guy she hasn’t gotten to the bottom of yet. She wants to tell him how unreal it feels whenever he says Rod, or Phil, or Tom – she grew up listening to those guys, she never thought she’d walk around naked in front of their friend.

  In a second she’ll gently use the pointer to spell ‘love’ or ‘trust’ or something that will restore his faith but before she can do anything it flutters beneath her fingers. “Stop it,” Bill snaps.

  “I didn’t,” she says, and feels embarrassed at having to play along because of course he’s doing it and pretending he’s not.

  She’s not a dummy. There are no spirits. No invisible angel hovering over the Parker Brothers board. At best, it’s the ideomotor effect, meaning they’re both making small, unconscious movements that will move the pointer to letters revealing their subconscious thoughts.

  But maybe she’ll learn something about Bill, so she relaxes her fingers until they barely brush against the pointer. It doesn’t move. Her finger tendons tremble, she strains to hold them still, and then the pointer writhes beneath her fingertips and her stomach snaps tight aroun
d a frozen pea.

  Something invisible whips the pointer back and forth in a tight arc over the blank semicircle between the arch of black letters and the straight row of numbers, gathering force, the one leg missing its felt pad scratching the board.

  Then it yanks her arms forward, and her fingers lose contact for a second, and her chest feels full of ice because this feels Not Her. This feels like Black Magic. This feels Unnatural. The pointer hits an invisible patch of thick air and stops on a letter.

  “I,” Bill reads, then it jerks their arms to the side, pauses on, “W,” and shoots off again.

  She can barely keep up, and she takes her eyes off the pointer for a second to see what Bill’s thinking, and he’s smiling in triumph, and it’s ugly, and she looks back down because she doesn’t want to miss the next letter because it’s...

  “I,” she breathes.

  IWI. I witch? I will? Will not?

  “L” and then it makes a little circle over L and darts up to the one-eyed moon and back down again.

  “I will...” Bill breathes.

  The candlelight wobbles as the pointer stops on K, then back to I and then the double L’s again and they’re both reading out loud, “I... will... kill...” and they both stop reading and it stops moving, resting on the letter U.

  Caroline yanks her hands back, Bill doesn’t move, and she doesn’t want to look at him, so she stares down at the board, wishing it away.

  I will kill u.

  * * *

  “We need light and positive energy,” Caroline says, standing, pulling the pointer out from under Bill’s frozen fingers, dropping the board in its disintegrating box. “I know it’s special to you but I’m exercising my veto. We don’t need this kind of negativity in our marriage.”

  She walks to the kitchen, snaps on the light and Bill hears her stuff it in the trash. “I’ll tell David to leave it there,” she says, staying on the other side of the room, far away from him. “I’m going to smudge this space then take a sauna. Days like this you need to practise self-care. Do you want a sauna?”

  She doesn’t wait for his answer but walks to the other wall where her fingers fly over the controls for the lighting system, tapping it a final time, and the gloomy room blooms with soft lamplight and accent spots. She strides purposefully, youthfully, to the door leading to the hall and stops, so far away her face is just a pink thumbprint. Bill realises she’s waiting for an answer. He realises it’s been a long pause, the kind of pause people take when they’re really turning something over in their minds. He has to make her think it’s nothing.

  “What’d you say?” he asks. “The rain’s fucked up my hearing aid.”

  “Do you want a sauna?” she asks.

  “No,” he says, making himself smile. “Thank you. But do you want to open a bottle of wine tonight? It’d be nice to talk.”

  Even as a blur he can see her posture relax.

  “We could use some joy,” she says, and comes all the way across the room to kiss him.

  He’s itching to move but manages to keep his thoughts hidden. The second she leaves he gets up and rescues the ouija from the trash and apologises to it over and over again inside his mind.

  * * *

  Caroline gets all the way up to her bathroom, starts the sauna, studies her face in the mirror, reaches past the fluffy towers of spare towels to pull out her spirit box, slides open its wooden lid, and fishes out the bundle of sage between two fingers before she realises what just happened. She stares at the crystals rattling around the box next to a couple of mummified joints, the Buddhist prayer beads, the stiff loop of red string she wore back when she got into Kabbalah, and thinks:

  I will kill u.

  It’s too melodramatic. Too over-the-top. No way did Bill subconsciously project his secret murderous rage onto the pointer because Bill’s never been secret about his rage.

  Her fingers still feel the pointer squirming beneath their pads, spelling that hateful message, and she stops breathing:

  I. Will. Kill. U.

  Bill hates emojis, abbreviations, funny misspellings, any word he wasn’t taught in school back in the Fifties. His subconscious mind would have perfect spelling. His ideomotor impulse would spell ‘you’. But hers? He’s always thought of her as a child.

  Their marriage, seen through his eyes, flashes through her mind: a young trophy wife after his money, saddled with a fading guitar player who uses a walker after taking a fall. They share no interests. They have zero common friends. They built a house that seemed like an escape but turned into a modern art prison in the foothills.

  Her skin prickles hot.

  He thinks she wants to kill him.

  It’s crazy, not even worth mentioning, but shouldn’t she reassure him? She walks to the bathroom door, raises her hand to the knob, doesn’t know how to bring the subject up, lowers her hand, goes back to the sauna, puts her palm on its door, but she has to make sure he doesn’t think she hates him, lowers her hand, then back to the bathroom door, and back, and forth, and back, and forth.

  He’s rich, he’s old, she’s young, she grew up poor, he’s always in a bad mood – it’s got all the ingredients of a true crime podcast. That’s ridiculous. You (young, bored) can’t just tell your (rich, elderly) husband you’re not thinking about killing him out of the blue after a session with a ouija board that he believes has saved his life more than once.

  That decides her. She doesn’t believe in the ouija, but Bill does.

  * * *

  “That’s fifty-three thousand dollars,” Bill says.

  The soft bundles of cash stink like dirt. David doesn’t look at them, but both men are very aware of them stacked up on Bill’s desk. They’re very aware of the open case next to them. Bill took everything out before he called David into his office because he didn’t want any confusion over what he wanted.

  “You put it all in one of those duffle bags and it belongs to you. But I need an answer right now,” Bill says.

  David takes care of things Bill can’t be bothered with. Housework, errands, that kind of thing. He’s used to giving him orders. As long as he pretends this is one more errand, he can do this.

  He sees David cock his head to one side and flick his eyes across the desk again, taking in the pile of money and matte black gun box, lid open, showing the matte black .38 lying on matte black foam. For the first time in years, Bill’s palms tingle, his chest feels tight, even sitting down his legs shake. Now that he’s said it out loud it’s too late to go back.

  “Okay,” David says.

  “Okay?” Bill asks, surprised it’s so fast, but then again, David is from Eastern Europe someplace. Who knows what the fuck he did over there? He’s probably been in the army, shot some babies, there’s no way of knowing what kind of fucked up shit he did before he came to LA.

  “Yes,” David repeats. “Okay.”

  “Well,” Bill blows out air. “I’m going to say I was in the practice room out back. That’s why I didn’t hear anything. I can give you three hours. Do it fast, because I’ll call the police at—” he checks his Omega, “—7:13 p.m. It’ll take them a while to get out here, but every minute you waste is a minute of your head start.”

  David gets the duffle bag and loads up the money. Relief floods Bill. He knows he picked the right man, and he had to pick someone because the ouija never lies. It told him Roxanne would OD, and he got the fuck out of her house and took the board with him. The second she’d laid it on the table it’d felt like his, so he didn’t think of it as stealing. That night she choked to death on her own vomit and the cops were all over her pad and if he’d gotten tangled up with them he’d never have made the audition for Rod’s tour, and he would have wound up just another chump, like his dad.

  It told him his manager was skimming, and that prick almost choked when Bill dropped the hammer. It told him Gena was
putting out for that Greek jazzercise stud and he hid his video camera in their home gym and used the tape to make sure her alimony was as close to zero as you could legally get in California. The ouija had saved his ass again and again. Now it was going to save him from Caroline.

  David zips the bag closed and pries the gun out of the gun box. Jesus, Bill thinks, he’s just going to strut through the house carrying the thing out in the open.

  “Goodbye,” David says, already at the door.

  Should he say something more formal, Bill wonders? And realises no, there’s no time to dick around. If Caroline thought she could slow-poison him, or fuck with his insulin, or put some deadly shit in his vitamins, she’s got another thing coming. He’s Bill Pfarrer, and he makes fucking decisions and sees them through to the end.

  “Goodbye,” Bill says.

  God, the guy’s carrying the gun funny, but then again it’s not exactly military hardware. Back in Serbia bullets probably cost too much money. He probably just beat people to death with the fucking thing.

  * * *

  Caroline stops on the stairs the instant she detects motion in the living room, then relaxes when she sees David.

  “David,” she calls. “Have you seen Bill?”

  He stops on a dime but doesn’t turn and that’s not like David who’s always so unbearably proper it makes her tense and that’s when she sees the gun in his hand and the living room walls feel very, very far away.

  “He is in his office, miss,” David says, and she doesn’t understand why he’s carrying a gun.

  Then he disappears into the kitchen heading for the suite he shares with Miloje. Did Bill give David his gun? What’s going on? She’ll ask Bill. She walks so fast she might as well be running down the hall to Bill’s man cave.

  She taps on the door, pushes it open, and even with the lights out she knows something’s wrong. She flicks on the light and immediately sees the empty gun box in the middle of David’s desk.