1534 1985
Two cousins. Five voices.
A town history forgot.
In the summer of 1985, cousins Robin and Eddie ask a Ouija board if anyone is there. Five voices answer—and lead them toward IdlePeep, a forgotten place with a dark history.
What begins as curiosity becomes a search through centuries, as the cousins discover that being heard isn’t all the dead want.
From the archive
Trace the clues.
Follow the letters.
Look for what history
left behind.
Beyond the gates
A supernatural mystery about the need to be heard,
the pull of the unknown, and the people we refuse to forget.
The prologue & first chapter · Read here, at your own pace
There was a street that the maps would forget.
It ran crooked off the low road, past the tannery and the last of the good houses, down to where the ground turned soft and the river ran slow and brown between its reeds. People who lived on the high streets did not come down to it, and people who lived on it did not often leave, and so it kept to itself, the way poor places do, and called itself by a name that meant nothing much: IdlePeep. An idle place. A worthless patch. A lane that peeped out at the water and saw nothing worth the looking.
On a cold afternoon near the end of the year, five young people sat in the lee of a wall where the wind couldn't reach them, and they were laughing.
They were always laughing, those five. That was the thing the street remembered about them, after. The oldest girl had a laugh you could hear from the top of the lane, and the smallest of them — a thin boy, twelve, all elbows, the one the others teased and loved in equal measure — laughed hardest of all, even when the joke was on him. Especially then. They had a board between them, lines scratched into wood, and little carved pieces, and they were playing the game that everyone played in those days, the one with the dice, and arguing about the rules the way you argue with people you have known your whole life and intend to know for the rest of it.
None of them looked at the field.
Out past the last house, where the common land went to waste and brush, there was a shack a person had built for himself out of other people's leavings, and in the doorway of it a figure stood very still and watched the five of them laugh. It had been watching a long time. It would watch a while longer. The cold came off the river and the light went gray and then grayer, and still the five played their game in the shelter of the wall, warm in the middle of all that cold, certain — the way the young are certain — that the afternoon would last, that the laughing would last, that they would always be exactly this: together, and safe, and seen only by each other.
They were wrong about the last part.
And four hundred years later, when two children in a far country first set their fingers to a little glass eye and asked the dark if anyone was there, it was the laughing that came back first. Of course it was. The laughing was the bait.
The summer Robin turned sixteen was the longest and emptiest of her life, and she would spend the rest of it wishing she could give that emptiness back.
But she didn't know that yet. On the last Saturday in August she knew only that it was ninety-four degrees outside, that the air conditioning at the mall had given up sometime around the Fourth of July, and that there was, in the entire town, exactly nothing to do. She had ridden her bike to Eddie's, and Eddie had ridden his bike to nowhere in particular alongside her, and the two of them had drifted across town the way they always did when the days got long and shapeless — not going anywhere, just leaving wherever they were.
They ended up at Tomes, because Tomes was air-conditioned and free and the old man who ran it didn't care how long you stayed as long as you didn't dog-ear anything.
Tomes was a used bookstore in the bad half of a strip mall, between a tax place that was always closed and a video rental that was always crowded. Inside it smelled like every used bookstore everywhere — dust and old paper and something faintly sweet going slowly bad. The shelves ran too close together and too high, so that the light from the front windows gave out about six feet in and the back of the store stayed in a kind of permanent brown dusk. Robin loved it back there. She didn't say so, because Eddie would have made it into a thing, but she did. It was the only place she could think of where being alone felt like a choice instead of a verdict.
"I give it ten minutes," Eddie said, dropping into the cracked vinyl chair by the door, the one with the duct tape on the arm. He had a way of folding himself into furniture like he'd been poured there. "Ten minutes and you're gonna want to go to the pool."
"You hate the pool."
"I hate the pool," he agreed. "But I hate being bored more, and you're about to make me bored." He tipped his head back and closed his eyes. Eddie could fall asleep anywhere — in a chair, on a bus, once, memorably, standing up against a fence at one of his own baseball games while he waited for his turn at bat. It drove Robin crazy. She envied it more than she'd ever admit. Eddie moved through the world like it owed him a soft place to land, and somehow the world kept paying up.
They were cousins, though strangers always took them for brother and sister, or worse. Same summer-brown arms, same way of finishing each other's sentences and then arguing about who'd thought of it first. Robin's mother and Eddie's father were sister and brother, which meant the cousins had been handed to each other as babies and never quite given back. For sixteen years they'd been the other one's first phone call. Robin sometimes thought Eddie was the only person alive who knew the actual her, the one underneath the one she showed people, and she suspected he thought the same, and neither of them would have died before saying it out loud.
"I'm just looking," she said, and went into the dusk.
She didn't have anything in mind. That was the truth of it, the part she'd turn over later until it wore smooth. She wasn't looking for anything. She was sixteen and lonely in a way she didn't have a name for — not friendless, exactly, she had friends, she had a whole circle of them who were all, that summer, somewhere else, doing something better — but lonely in the marrow, lonely the way you can only be in a small town in August when you're old enough to know there's a bigger world and too young to go to it. She drifted the aisles because drifting was the closest thing to going somewhere. She let her fingers trail the spines.
She found it in the back corner, on the bottom shelf, where the store kept the kind of books nobody admits to buying.
Somebody had shelved it wrong, or maybe right — that was the part she'd wonder about. The little hand-lettered cards taped to the shelves said RELIGION above one section and OCCULT above the next, and the book had ended up in the gap between them, lying flat where it must have slid, half in and half out of the brown dark. AISLE SIX, said a card on the post. She crouched. She didn't know why she crouched instead of just walking on. Her knees popped — gymnast's knees, sixteen going on sixty, her coach liked to say — and she reached into the gap and slid the book out into the better light.
It was old, or made to look it. The cover was the deep red-brown of dried blood, though she didn't let herself think blood, not then, and the title was stamped into it in letters that had once been gold and were now mostly the memory of gold. One word.
OUIJA.
She'd heard of them. Everybody had. There'd been a thing at a sleepover in seventh grade, somebody's older sister, a glow-in-the-dark board from the toy aisle, a lot of shrieking that Robin had even then suspected was mostly performance. This wasn't that. This was a book about them — a real book, dense and serious, with chapters and footnotes and grainy photographs of people from a long time ago sitting around tables with their hands laid flat. She opened it to the middle. The paper was soft with age and handling, gone the color of weak tea. She read a sentence, and then she read it again, and the back of the store got very quiet, the way a room does when you stop noticing it.
"Whatcha got?"
Eddie had come up behind her without her hearing, which Eddie could do — he was big now, had been since freshman year, but he moved quiet, a catcher's habit, all that crouching and waiting and watching the whole field at once. He looked over her shoulder and snorted.
"Oh, no. No way. Put that back."
"It's a book, Eddie."
"It's a demon book. My mom would lose her entire mind." He took it from her hands, not unkindly, and held it up to the light, turning it, grinning already, getting ready to make it funny, because that was what Eddie did with anything that got too quiet — he made it funny, the way you'd throw a blanket over something to put out a fire. "'Ouija,'" he read, in the announcer voice he used for things he thought were ridiculous. "'The talking board. A history.' A history. Robin. People wrote a whole history of the cardboard thing from the toy store."
"That one's not from a toy store."
"They're all from the toy store." He flipped it open, scanning, looking for the funniest line, and Robin let him, because she'd learned a long time ago that the fastest way through Eddie's jokes was to wait them out. He'd land on something, read it dramatically, they'd both laugh, and then she could have the book back.
But she was watching the book the whole time, the way you watch a dog somebody else is holding by the collar.
She didn't want to laugh at it. That was the strange thing, the thing she couldn't have explained to him if he'd asked, which he wouldn't, because Eddie didn't ask that kind of question. When Eddie looked at the book he saw a toy — a dumb fun thing, a way to scare yourself on a boring night and then put away and forget. Robin looked at it and felt the floor of her stomach drop the smallest amount, the way it did at the very top of a roller coaster, in the half-second before. Not because it scared her. Because it didn't feel like a toy at all. It felt like a door. A real one, in a real wall, in a house she hadn't known she'd been walking around the outside of her whole life.
She didn't say any of that. She said: "Three bucks. It's marked three bucks."
"You're not actually buying it."
"It's three dollars, Eddie."
He looked at her then, really looked, the grin slipping a notch, because for all his coasting Eddie could read her better than anyone, and he'd caught something in her voice that didn't match the joke. For a second she thought he might say the serious thing, the are you okay, what's going on with you this summer thing that had been sitting unspoken between them for weeks. She braced for it.
But it was August, and it was ninety-four degrees, and they were sixteen, and the serious thing was hard, and the easy thing was right there. He handed the book back.
"Your funeral," he said, and went to wait by the door.
The old man at the register didn't even look at the cover. He took her three dollars, slid the book into a paper bag gone soft at the corners, and said, "Bag's free," like he was doing her a favor, and maybe he was. Robin carried it out into the white blast of the afternoon, and the heat hit them both like a hand, and Eddie groaned and squinted and shaded his eyes, instantly miserable, instantly himself again.
They unlocked their bikes. And because Eddie could never leave a thing alone, could never let a joke just die a natural death, he reached over and tugged the book half out of the bag and flipped it open one more time, one-handed, balancing it against the handlebars.
"Okay, last one, then I'm done, I swear." He cleared his throat for the announcer voice. "'The single most important rule —'" He paused, eyebrows up. "Ooh, the single most important. Get a load of this." He found his place. "'The single most important rule of the board, which the practitioner forgets at his peril, is also the simplest. Whatever else you do, however the session goes —'"
He stopped.
It was a small stop, half a second, and Eddie covered it by making his voice extra silly for the last part, so it came out as a joke, the way everything came out of Eddie as a joke. But Robin heard the half-second. She always heard the half-second.
"'— always say goodbye before you go,'" he finished, and laughed, and shoved the book back in the bag, and swung his leg over his bike. "Always say goodbye. That's the big secret. That's the peril. God, Robin, you spent three dollars on a book that tells you to have manners with a board game." He pushed off, wobbling, already pedaling, already over it, already onto the next thing. "Race you to the light at Cedar. Loser buys a slush."
Robin didn't push off after him. Not right away.
She stood with one foot on the pedal and the soft paper bag warm against her ribs, and she looked at the shape of the book through the paper, and she thought about that one sentence, and the thing about it was that she didn't laugh. Eddie had laughed. It was funny, the way he'd read it. It should have been funny.
She just didn't see what was funny about a rule that existed because, at some point, somebody hadn't followed it.
"Robin!" Eddie hollered, half a block ahead now, a dark shape against the glare. "Slush is on the line! Move it!"
She put her foot down on the pedal and went after him, the way she'd been going after him her whole life, and the bag bumped against her side, and the heat poured down, and the long empty summer rolled on toward its end.
She didn't say goodbye to the store.
She'd think about that, later, too.