Happy Halloween - Deleted Scene from Nevermore

“Hell no. Oh Hell no!” Moneesha, a junior theater student was voicing her objections to the board.

 
The party was at Liam’s house, a tidy little stand alone in Reisterstown. There were about twenty of us sprawled around his finished basement. A movie marathon had ended after a group attack of ADHD, and people were trying to think of new, holiday appropriate activities. Elizabeth, a junior photography major, read tarot cards and palms. We’d been entertained for nearly an hour but the masses had begun to hunger for more.

Liam’s girlfriend answered the challenge. She knew he had a Ouija board in his room, and while we were all entranced with the news of whether or not Mr. A would fail Tubby this year, snuck it past his parents in the living room and down to us.

Within seconds of revealing the box, most of the room wanted to play. A few of us weren’t comfortable with it, but Moneesha was freaking out.

“I ain’t hanging out here while y’all are playing with the dead.”

“Aw, come on. It’s just a game.” The same thing was said in a dozen different ways from a dozen different people. But Moneesha wouldn’t be budged.

“Nuh-uh. No way. You start playing with the dead, you better be ready for when they start playing with you. And I don’t want any part of that.” In what Val would call a Grand Diva Bitch Fit, she stormed upstairs, slamming the door behind her.

In hindsight I probably should’ve gone with her. But there’s that saying that hindsight is always 20/20. A group of us weren’t interested in playing. Elizabeth stacked her cards and curled up on an arm chair near the TV. Andy and Nika, girls from the Multimedia program, were huddled on the sofa, eyeing the board and the people around it with obvious distrust. Going on instinct, I joined them. We were all aware suddenly of something in the air. I felt cold and hot all at once, like I was sick, but without the headache and soreness of a real fever. Andy shivered beside me.

For a while, there was a confusion of noise over the board. Giggling and complaints over who was moving the table seemed to go on forever. Then, voice by voice, the room went quiet.

“Lizzie, get a pen and some paper. Come write this down for us.”

She got up without a word, grabbed a sketchbook and pencil, and sat behind Liam. Nate started calling out letters. They didn’t seem to make any sense, just a random string of letters without any rhyme or reason. Some of the tension eased from the group and people started giggling and chatting and complaining again.

“Figures we’d get the retarded ghost.”

“Daniel’s moving it!”

“Am not, bitch!”

“C’mon guys, get serious about this.”

“Yeah it’s not gonna work if y’all are fucking around.”

“Wait, don’t we have to ask a question?”

A pregnant pause and then:

“Is anyone there?”

“Is my grandmother there?”

“Can we talk to Elvis?”

“Shut up!” Nate yelled. “One at a time, ladies and gents. One. At. A. Time. Now,” he said, “is anyone there? Yes or no.”

Beside me, I felt Andy push her body deeper into the couch cushions, away from the Ouija board and the stale air surrounding it.

For a while, it seemed like they were getting answers. A yes, a no, a generic name, an accusation of murder with the body never found that got everyone excited. Then there was nothing. The planchet circled the board over and over, never pointing to anything for the rest of the night. The board was put away. Andy, Nika, and I relaxed, and the party went on almost as if the little experiment with the supernatural had never happened. There were jokes, accusations that the whole thing was a hoax, that the supernatural was just people with too much imagination and too little common sense, followed by claims that the paranormal was real, ghosts were real, and that the Ouija board had failed because of so many skeptics.

It was all too easy to ignore in favor of more scary movies, and different, more entertaining board games.

I don’t remember when we started making shadow puppets.

Sometime after midnight, I’d curled up between Tubby and Marco. We were backlight, and we’d laughed at the weird shadow our bodies had cast. It seemed a natural thing to start making the dog and duck shapes we’d been taught in elementary school, and I laughed as Marco’s butterfly danced around Tubby’s barking dog.

More hands shadows rose from the floor. They made no shapes, they just reached and writhed on the wall.

          
“Knock it off, fuckers,” I swore at the people behind me. “Either do something neat or go the fuck away.”

           
“Fin, who are you talking to?” Nate asked.

          
“I’m talking to whichever ass hats are making these weird shadows behind me and the boys.”

“There’s no one sitting behind you guys.”

I felt cold. My ears were trained on the sound of Nate getting to his feet. He’d been laying on the floor a few feet away watching TV. He stood behind me and his shadow joined our lump monster, but it didn’t interrupt the sea of arms and hands. His hands spasmed on my shoulders, his finger tips digging into my collarbones as he watched the wall with us. More hands had sprouted from our joined shadows. There were dozens now, more pairs than there were people in the room, and none of them were ours. Our hands had dropped to our laps as soon as we’d realized there really was no one behind us, and I could see Nate’s knuckles turning white on either side of me.

The room had gone perfectly silent. The others had seen the wall too.

One by one, we got up and walked upstairs. Tubby, Marco, me and Nate, all walked outside to the car without saying a word. No one in the basement spoke either. But as I opened the door to Marco’s car, I heard Elizabeth screaming.

Fin Tells A Story

My story isn’t a ghost story exactly. But it’s creepy. I heard back when I lived in New Mexico. I’d been in an accident and this old guy had found me and talked to me while we waited for help. He told me all sorts of stuff, but this one stuck with me.

Long before whitey came to this continent, before our history remembers, a great catastrophe fell upon the land. No one knows what this catastrophe was, but it was big and bad and people were desperate to avoid it.

To get away from whatever was happening, the whole of the world came together to hide in these caves in the desert. The caves went deep down, all the way to the heart of the world, and everyone who’d once lived separately above ground now lived together beneath it.

After many years had passed – maybe ten, maybe a hundred – the catastrophe passed. It was safe for people to go live under the sky again. So for three years, the people toiled to make a ladder that would reach all the way from the heart of the earth to the skin. Once the ladder was finished, people started climbing it. Everyone was excited as the people who’d climbed first and reached the surface sent word back down of how bright the sky was. Soon more and more people reached the top.

But once one third of all the people in the world had reached the surface, they moved a mountain over the opening, so that the people below could never reach the surface and get revenge. Now, whenever the earth quakes or the mountains spout fire, it’s the spirits of the people below. Some of them are pushing against the mountain, trying to move it and escape to heaven. Others are setting fires beneath the earth that will reach the surface, hoping to burn the children of the people who killed them.

But some say that not everyone trapped died. Instead they…adapted. They became monsters, killing and feeding on the others. And they grew used to the perpetual dark and the cold and the taste of human flesh. Sometimes, at those times when the earth trembles from their efforts, these descendants escape. Sometimes people like us see them. I’ve heard that some of them look like lizards, with scales and slit eyes on humanish bodies. Others are like bats; shadowy people with bat wings and eyes that glow. Then there are the ones who’ve grown huge and hairy. They have to be big to fight off the others, and the hair keeps them warm in the cave.

But there are the truly frightening ones as well. The shadow people. There are two theories about them. The first is that they’re descendants who stayed smart. While the others became like animals, these descendants retained human intellect but forgot everything else, like how to be human, how to feel. The second theory, the one no one likes to think about, is that the spirits of the dead found new bodies and have come to the surface for revenge.

It’s always made me wonder, if maybe we aren’t the monsters. I mean, if something like that were true, how horrible would we be? We’d be the descendants of people who’d killed the rest of the world for no reason. They created monsters, Moth Men and Big Foots, never mind earthquakes and volcanoes.

We accuse people who make two-headed dogs and put kittens in ovens of being monsters. We avoid their families for fear that that sort of evil is contagious, or it’s a trait passed from generation to generation. Our ancestors were, like, Frankenstein and Jekyll and Hyde and, and, and every serial killer you can think of rolled into one and spread out over everyone who would be the parents and grandparents and great grandparents of everyone who ever existed. And we’d be left over from that genetic line. What would that make us?