Fear was prominent in the eyes of Leigh Anne, Mason, and Hailey. This had started out as an innocent attempt to ask a spirit to stop playing games in Hailey’s room, but it had turned into something else in the last few minutes. Something very dangerous. Something that I suspected was no longer within our power to end. The flames atop the three candles seemed to have merged into one flame, bright and dazzling. I remembered what O’Hanley had said about the candles serving as a method of indicating if more spirits were in the room with us, and I winced.

For a moment O’Hanley seemed at a loss for how to respond to the board’s odd greeting of “Hi, friend,” but then authority returned to his voice. “Is this Billy? If this is Billy, you must leave this place now and never return.”

We waited. Too nervous to breathe, too scared to move.

The spinning began slowly, so slowly that none of us noticed it at first. “What’s happening?” Hailey asked when we all observed at the same moment that the either walls of the room and its contents were moving around us in a circle… or we were spinning. As the speed of the spinning increased, from where we sat it looked like we were in the eye of a tornado. The details and objects of the room whipped into a gray, windless motion blur around us.

“We have to take our fingers off the board,” Dr. O’Hanley urged us, his voice loaded with resolve. “We must break this connection!”

Unexpectedly, the spinning stopped. An eerie calm fell over our circle. All typical dormitory sounds ceased to be audible beyond the walls of Room 9C.  Silvery moonlight spilled into the room through the windows, which provided the same amount of light as the old-fashioned glass oil lamp set on a table underneath them. Long, red brocatelle curtains that I’d never seen before hung around the window with a valance across the top. The furniture had been rearranged, but the room’s walls and windows were still where they’d always been. Two narrow beds covered in bedspreads that matched the curtains flanked the room, pressed against opposite walls. Unlike the standard issued beds of Hynes Hall, these beds had finely crafted wooden headboards. Oil paintings of what looked from where I sat like horses and carriages hung on the walls in ornate frames painted with gold leaf.

It was as if we had just been transported back a century in time.

“What… the hell is going on?” Mason asked in wonderment.

The planchette dashed around the board again. “I,” Leigh Anne said, watching the letters on which it fell, “Will… will show you.”

“Are we… did he just freakin’ take us back to the turn of the century?” My own voice sounded foreign.

Trying to regain the upper hand in this situation, Dr. O’Hanley asked the board, “Are we speaking with Billy?”

The planchette shifted upward toward the YES in the top left corner.

“Are you showing us why your soul has lingered in the room for all these many years?” O’Hanley asked.

The planchette remained on YES. A playful trickle of childlike laughter emerged from behind me and Mason. I strained to look over my right shoulder, unable to comfortably turn my head because of my finger on the planchette. In the doorway between the main room and the bathroom, a boy squatted. He was playing with a shiny tin soldier, bobbing it up and down as if pretending to make it march through the air.  The boy wore a white button-down shirt with a wrinkled collar, black pants that were cropped just below the knee, and long black socks that covered his legs. He was pale and slim, but the features of his face were too fuzzy for me to clearly distinguish.

“William,” a man’s voice said. Our heads jerked around to the area near the beds. “Please be mindful of the conversation we had this morning. You mustn’t make so much noise tonight while I’m away.”

The man spoke with the proper diction of a trained actor. He checked his reflection through the grainy black patina on the mirror near the door, behind where Hailey sat. He had chiseled cheekbones and hollowed cheeks, a square jaw; hair parted neatly down the center of his head and combed back over his ears with gleaming hair cream. The white collar of his shirt folded upward at a strange angle with a fine silk tie knotted at his throat, and he carried a top hat in his hands as if he were preparing to go out. Overhead, an old-fashioned Edison light bulb hummed at the center of a frosted glass light fixture, its filament heart glowing with golden electricity. 

The child abandoned his play voice and switched to whining with the stomp of a foot. Although his height and build suggested he was only seven or eight years old, the pitch of his voice and phrasing of his response suggested he was at least ten. “I could accompany you to the theater, and then you wouldn’t have to worry about all the noise I make at night.”

I became keenly aware that we were neither sitting on Hailey’s orange rug nor the blue Berber carpeting beneath it. We sat on heavily waxed hardwood, the building’s original flooring. The smell of fresh floor wax, pungent as kerosene, filled my nostrils.

The man smoothed the sides of his hair back over his ears again before delicately positioning his hat upon his head and adjusting its brim. “How can I trust you to conduct yourself like a gentleman at the theater when you can’t be trusted to quietly read a book and turn in for the night without disturbing the other guests of the hotel?”

Billy’s eyes returned to the tin soldier in his hand. “It isn’t fair that you get to go outside every night and I don’t. Mother wouldn’t be very pleased with you for keeping me locked up in here like a prisoner.”

The man near the door tilted back his head and barked a sarcastic laugh toward the ceiling. “Ha! How many boys your age would trade places with you in an instant? Sleeping in a comfortable bed, dining on chicken pudding for dinner? You seem to forget that my work at the theater pays for this terrible prison of yours. If your mother were still alive, she’d want you to mind the rules of this hotel for the rest of our time in Boston. Our future depends on the run of this play, William. We’ve discussed this. If you were to create a ruckus at the Colonial Theater, I could lose my part and then you know where we’ll end up.”

Sulking Billy kicked at his scuffed shoes. “Back in New York on the Bowery.”

“Exactly.” The man in the top hat removed an overcoat from the wooden rack next to the door and folded it over one arm. “Which is also where we’ll end up if Mrs. Saunders next door complains to the concierge again about you. Put the oil lamp out before you go to bed.” The man withdrew a silver flask from the pocket inside his suit coat and took a swig from it before returning it to its home.

Billy leaned against the bathroom doorframe while the man stepped out of the room, and all of us listened, petrified, as he locked the door from the outside with a key. After a moment of hesitation, the ghost of Billy walked through our small circle and pressed his ear to the door to listen.

“He’s locked in.” Leigh Anne spoke aloud, reminding all of us that we were observers.

Billy’s small hand jiggled the doorknob, which was indeed locked. He knocked twice softly on the door and called, “Papa?”

I felt air slowly escape from my lungs as Billy’s ghost gradually became so transparent that he disappeared against the black paint of the door. The five of us in the circle exchanged frowns; our fingers were still fixed to the Ouija board, and none of us had the courage to move a muscle. Around us, the hotel room was completely static. The hum of the old-fashioned light bulb over us hinted that Billy was still with us… had more to show us.

“Thank you for sharing your story with us, Billy,” O’Hanley finally said in a tone that bordered on patronizing. “It must have been awful—”

O’Hanley stopped himself short when the acrid smell of smoke filled the room. We heard the wobbly squeak of the window handles opening the small panes of the window outward toward the dark courtyard. As the dimly lit room filled with thick gray smoke, my heart started to race. “What is he doing?” I asked Dr. O’Hanley.

In a vibrant burst of flame, the red brocatelle curtains ignited. Hailey screamed. Faster than my brain could even register that the curtains were ablaze, fire devoured them and danced along the nearby brocade wallpaper. It flickered within the wallpaper’s elaborate velvety pattern, embers burning hot and red in the golden jacquard stars and leaves. The fire was bright enough to illuminate our faces, amplifying the low glow provided by the electric light over our heads.

“He must have died in this room in a fire,” Leigh Anne said, shaking her head with pity. “He was locked in, and because the windows face the courtyard, no one heard him crying for help.”

Smoke continued to fill the room. It was growing so thick that I could barely see O’Hanley just a few feet across from me on the other side of the Ouija board. “We can’t be too sure of that,” O’Hanley cautioned, sounding dubious. “Ghosts that present themselves as children can’t be trusted. They could be unfairly trying to gain our favor by presenting themselves as innocents. And when ghosts really are children, that’s sometimes more dangerous. Children don’t understand boundaries. They don’t know the danger of going too far.”

We’d been in the room long enough that my own room down the hall seemed like a memory from a past lifetime. Adrenaline flooded my system, blood thundered in my ears; I could think of nothing but bringing an end to contact with this spirit and getting the hell out of Room 9C.

“That’s enough now, Billy,” he warned. “You’ve shown us what you wanted us to see.”

Hacking coughs seized Hailey. She cupped her left hand over her mouth and her entire body shook. Smoke burned my eyes, and tears rolled down my cheeks in hot rills. Even though my rational brain knew that the scene around me was just an apparition, it certainly felt real. I could sense the heat from the fire on my face. With an earsplitting pop, the glass oil lamp on the table below the window detonated like a bomb. Particles of glass blew toward us like razor-sharp snowflakes. I buried my face in my left elbow, and when I dared to look up at the others again, O’Hanley, Leigh Anne, Mason, and Hailey all looked as if someone had sprayed their faces with a fine mist of blood.

“He’s not trying to show us anything!” Hailey hysterically screamed over the growing roar of the fire. “He’s trying to kill us the same way he died!”

Dr. O’Hanley attempted to calm us with his outstretched left hand. “Everyone just remain calm. None of this is real. This is just an apparition, something a spirit wants us to believe. We are not in any actual danger…”

Leigh Anne wiped her face with her left hand and saw garish red blood streaked on her fingertips.

“Then make it stop!” Mason commanded O’Hanley.

Awkwardly I shifted onto my knees. Dr. O’Hanley furiously shook his head, almost as if he wasn’t too sure anymore of what was real and what wasn’t. Hailey’s body wracked with another round of coughs. Fat, furious flames blazed along both of the wallpapered walls over the beds. The wallpaper was charred where the wall met the ceiling all the way around the perimeter of the room. The bedspreads singed in unison, catching fire slowly. From where I sat, I could barely see the dark windows anymore through the brightness of the fire.

Then, in the midst of all of the chaos overtaking the room, I felt my finger moving.

All of our fingers were moving.

The planchette had shifted to the “Z” on the second row of letters on the Ouija board, and swiftly progressed to “Y” and then “X.”

“No,” O’Hanley shouted. “No!”

“What’s it doing?” I asked, fearful that something distinctly terrible had to be happening for O’Hanley to react so strongly. The planchette continued its leftward progression: “W,” “V.”

“When the planchette moves backwards across a board, either reversing the alphabet or counting down from ten to one on boards with numbers, that means an evil spirit is trying to escape it,” Leigh Anne hurriedly explained.

Hailey looked around the room, fire reflecting in her dark eyes. In between dry coughs, she sputtered, “Don’t let it out!”

“U.” “T.” “S.” The planchette was picking up speed.

All of us frantically tried to tear our fingers off of the planchette, but couldn’t. “Try to lift the board!” O’Hanley encouraged us, but the board was so firmly fixed to the hardwood floor that I couldn’t even get the fingernails on my left hand underneath it. “It won’t budge!” Leigh Anne screamed.

“R.” “Q.” “P.”

“If this is just an apparition, then we’re still really in Hailey’s room, aren’t we?” I asked O’Hanley. I had no idea anymore what century we were in, or what part of the world. If we were even still in our own dimension, on our own planet.

Dr. O’Hanley nodded at my question, unable to tear his eyes off the planchette as it swished back across the board to the “M” at the far end of the first row of letters, near Hailey. We were running out of time. In a matter of seconds, the planchette would reach “A,” and if Leigh Anne’s hypothesis was true that Billy—or whatever was claiming to be the spirit of a little boy named Billy—would be able to escape the board when it did, not only were we in grave danger, but probably so was every other resident of Hynes Hall.

Not even fully thinking through what I was about to do, I ungracefully climbed to my feet. With my body bent at an odd angle—right index finger affixed to the planchette on the floor, knees belt unevenly—I swiped at the air behind Mason’s head. In this phantasmagorical vision of Room 9C, there was no desk in this part of the room, only a velvet armchair pushed into the corner. But if we were still actually in Hailey’s room, the three candles that Leigh Anne had lit at the onset of this nightmarish exercise were still burning on the corner of Hailey’s desk, right behind Mason.

The first time, I ran my hand through the space where the candles should have been and felt nothing.

“K.” “J.” “I.”

The second time I waved my hand through the space, I jerked my hand back to my chest in pain. My fingertips blistered instantaneously. Fire! Although I couldn’t see them, the candles were still there in reality, exactly where they were supposed to be.

“G.” “F.” “E.”

“What are you doing, Cara?” Leigh Anne yelled.

I reached out a third time a few inches lower than before and felt my hand wrap around the oily wax cylindrical shape of a candle. I grabbed it and squatted back down toward the board. Trying to envision a candle dripping with wax that had the power to smother the flame if I were to hold it at the wrong angle, I gently, carefully tilted my hand downward toward the board.

“D.” “C.”

It took a second, but a tiny tongue of flame appeared at the center of the board, two inches away from the space between my thumb and curled index finger.

“B.”

A white, foul-smelling ribbon of smoke drifted upward from the tiny flame. The planchette stopped moving instantly, and I felt the board’s grip on my index finger release. All of us lifted our fingers off the planchette as if it were scalding to the touch, and leaned back to watch the board burn in horror. The flame from the candle burned a perfectly circular hole in the center of the board, and smoke spiraled up from it like a small-scale tornado. Like a static-y transmission on a television screen, we saw momentary glimpses of our real surroundings—present day Room 9C—flickering back and forth with the apparition of the room being devoured by flames. The spirit was losing its power to continue its show.

And then… a terrible, unmistakable human cry came from the hole. Hailey threw her hands to her ears to block it out. Perhaps she heard it at a much louder volume than the rest of us, but her eyes squeezed shut in pain.

“More fire,” O’Hanley said breathlessly, looking across the board at me and Mason. Mason and I both leapt to our feet, and in the fractions of seconds during which we were able to see the true features of the room in which we stood, we seized the other two candles and lowered them to the board.

Now burning from its center and two corners, the surface of the board blackened. Barely breathing, we didn’t even attempt to stifle the fire when the burning room around us finally gave way to Hailey’s dark room. We sat in the pitch darkness watching the board turn to ash, watching it catch Hailey’s orange patterned rug on fire, watching in silent horror until the very last bit of the board to remain before flames consumed it was the word GOODBYE.

“Well,” Mason said after the five of us had sat in the dark in silence for probably three long minutes trying to make sense of what we’d just witnessed. “That’s the last time that evil spirit will mess with a girl from Brooklyn.”

I wanted to smile, but couldn’t.

“That was excellent thinking, Cara,” Dr. O’Hanley commended me. “Very well done. I encourage all of you to put what happened tonight out of your minds. I don’t believe that we were communicating with the soul of a child. I think what we contacted tonight was something else, something evil.”

I became distinctly aware that I could hear the Drake CD playing down the hall. Kids were goofing around outside Room 9C as they waited for the elevator to take them away to their Friday night plans. Leigh Anne found the strength to cross the room and turn on the overhead light, and we all breathed a sigh of relief to see that Hailey’s room looked as it previously had (except for the small fire blazing on her novelty rug). Mason filled a cup in the bathroom with tap water to extinguish the smoldering rug, and I cranked the windows as wide as they would open to let out the smell of the burning fibers.  The stench of char and flames that had filled the room just moments ago had completely vanished.

“Well,” Dr. O’Hanley said after we had rolled up the flawed orange rug with the intent of carrying it down to the trash room in the basement. “I can’t imagine you’ll be having problems with your faucet anytime soon.” He held the charred planchette between two fingers and dropped it into his backpack.

“What are you going to do with that?” Leigh Anne asked, seemingly distressed about the future of the metal object. I didn’t care what O’Hanley did with it; I just wanted that thing out of Hynes Hall forever. My muscles ached as if I’d just ran a marathon, and I longed to return to my own room.

“There are proper disposal techniques for such objects,” O’Hanley said. “Although the planchette itself is harmless. It’s the board that functions as the conduit for the spirit.”

I wasn’t entirely sure I believed him about that. Mason and I lingered with Hailey in Room 9C when Leigh Anne volunteered to take O’Hanley down to the lobby and sign him out.  Even with the door propped open to allow the fluorescent safety of the hallway to invade the room, the three of us were still rattled. “You can sleep in my room tonight,” I told Hailey. “I don’t think you should be in here alone.”

Hailey didn’t even attempt to argue, and Mason didn’t say a single word to dissuade me from my offer. It was only as I closed the door behind the three of us for the night that I happened to notice what hung on the wall over Hailey’s desk. It was a painting of a horse-drawn carriage set in a small gold frame.

Maybe, I realized with a shudder… we hadn’t set fire to the board before the planchette had made its way to “A” after all. Hailey ventured back into Room 9C the next day to fill a suitcase with clothes and books, but took up informal residence on an air mattress in my room until the holidays, at which time her parents arranged for her transfer into a single private room at Endicott Hall. They assured Mr. Flynn repeatedly at Hailey’s insistence that I wasn’t the problem; I’d been as great a resident assistant as they ever could have hoped for at Commonwealth University. When Hailey’s replacement moved in after Christmas break and told me with an amused smile that there was something weird going on in his room with the windows and lights, I assured him that Hynes Hall was an old building, and that there was no such thing as ghosts. 

The End.