The proprietor looked as though he’d been slapped in the face. “The Ouija isn’t something to play with,” he warned. “It’s a potentially dangerous conduit between worlds. And anyway, we no longer stock board games. All kids want now are Nerf cannons and video games. Bigger, louder, more violent, kill, kill, kill…”
Clay left the store and walked all of fifteen feet before noticing a window full of Tarot cards and books on Wicca. On a shelf in the back corner of the store, he found a solitary Ouija in an antique box with lurid snakes and ghost faces. He laid the box beside the register and said, “This is just a toy, right?”
“Right,” the clerk replied.
Across the valley, the sun was a silent explosion behind the mountains. Clay’s nerves prickled. It was one thing to enter the Generator in search of human trespassers; another to do it with the intent of poking its resident odd vibe with a stick.
Clay sometimes watched paranormal investigations on television. Like a fanatical laying-of-hands revival, the appeal of these documentaries was more about the participants than the actual goings-on. Because who the hell were these people? One of the investigators had suggested that ghosts were nocturnal creatures; like owls, you might find one “awake” in the day, but they generally preferred darkness. Who knew if there was any truth to it (the woman also had eight children and chain-smoked like she was in the Rat Pack), but it had stuck in Clay’s mind.
Visiting the Generator at night also seemed a more direct way to harden his inner-skeptic. A large part of him still believed (or wanted to believe) that the disembodied whispering had only been his imagination in overdrive, that the guitar had been “playing” because of seismic tremors deep within the mountains—this was California, after all, where earthquakes happened so frequently the locals called them “good vibrations.” Couldn’t a few shakes, low on the Richter scale, rattle the guitar on consecutive nights?
Or even rats, running in tandem through the crawl space?
Sure. As long as you ignore the fact that you challenged the guitar to play “American Rapture”—and it fucking did!
Of course, lingering in the back of Clay’s mind was something far worse than any ghost. It was the unsettling idea that maybe he was making this shit up. Going batty. Buttering the brass and polishing the popcorn. Didn’t he sometimes also feel like people were watching him? A neck-prickling sensation that he felt in the most random places—and rarely with proof that anyone was actually watching? Paranoia. Delusions of grandeur. Maybe that was the real reason Peter had him seeing another shrink. Maybe he’d observed things in his son, disturbing things that Clay himself was blind to. And wasn’t twenty a ripe-perfect age for schizophrenia? Payton Alexander probably saw ill-fated cases all the time. A well-intentioned youth laid to waste by invisible disease. Seeing and hearing things on their own wavelength. Like that time at the peephole, Clay thought. Like now?
One thing was certain: He was already going crazy with wondering. So, Rickenbacker in one hand, Ouija in the other, Clay marched into the Generator and swatted the lights on.
No one was hanging from the rafters. The guitar didn’t come to life without his touching the strings. No secrets were whispered to his ear. But in his first week as Casa Harper’s caretaker, Clay would be installing better lighting in here. A single hundred-watt bulb and weak panel lighting upstairs weren’t exactly shadow killers.
After some minutes, Clay settled into a seat at the octagonal card table that his father had recently purchased (now wanting to turn the Generator into a game room for the work colleagues he would never have over). Piercing the plastic around the olive-colored box, Clay liberated the Ouija and its heart-shaped planchette. Almost needless to say, he had never called upon a spirit before; but he’d seen it done plenty on the TV specials. You placed your hands on the planchette and asked a basic question; then you waited for said planchette to move under your fingers and spell out something cryptic with the letters on the board.
The guitar resting across his lap, Clay began, feeling both ridiculous and palpably afraid. He wished Savy was here. Just the two of them huddled close, their bare legs touching under the table. But there would be plenty of time to scare her off later if anything came of this. “I’m… attempting to contact the… um,” Clay informed the quiet room. “Last night I heard this guitar playing itself. And when I entered the room, someone was… whispering. If that…”—spook?—“… that spirit should… be around tonight, I’d like to know if he or she intended for me to find the guitar and”—can I keep it?—“what should I do with it?”
It was as pathetic a monologue as had ever been uttered.
The planchette lay limp under Clay’s fingers. In movies, this was always the moment when the cynic informed everyone how stupid they were acting. The moment before the planchette jumped and everyone said, “I’m not moving it, you have to be!” Right before some terrible revelation was had. Or the cute girl had her cute nerdy glasses knocked off. Or the clueless dad walked in with a tray of cookies and everyone screamed.
None of that happened. The only spirit moving now was the one telling his bladder it was time to water the flowers. “I’m sort of new at this,” Clay went on. “Obviously. I certainly don’t mean to, um, offend thee.”
Thee? Thee! What the fucking fuck? A
