“Father dear, your baby’s here,” a girl named Patty something-or-other said, and giggled. “It must be my father, he died of a heart attack when I was three.”

“It’s writing some more,” Sandy said.

S, A, Y, S, the planchette spelled laboriously.

“What’s going on?” Nadine whispered to a tall, horse-faced girl she didn’t know. The horse-faced girl was looking on with her hands in her pockets and a disgusted look on her face.

“A bunch of girls playing games with something they don’t understand,” the horse-faced girl said. “That’s what’s going on.” She spoke in an even lower whisper.

“FATHER SAYS PATTY,” Sandy quoted. “It’s your dear old dad, all right, Pats.”

Another burst of giggles.

The horse-faced girl was wearing spectacles. Now she took her hands out of the pockets of the overalls she was wearing and used them to remove the spectacles from her face. She polished them and explained further to Nadine, still in a whisper. “The planchette is a tool used by psychics and mediums. Kinestheologists—”

“What ologists?”

“Scientists who study movement, and the interaction of muscles and nerves.”

“Oh.”

“They claim that the planchette is actually responding to tiny muscle movements, probably guided by the subconscious rather than the conscious mind. Of course, mediums and psychics claim that the planchette is moved by entities from the spirit world—”

Another burst of hysterical laughter came from the girls clustered around the board. Nadine looked over the horse-faced girl’s shoulder and saw the message now read, FATHER SAYS PATTY SHOULD STOP GOING.

“—to the bathroom so much,” another girl in the circle of spectators suggested, and everyone laughed some more.

“Either way, they’re just fooling with it,” the horse-faced girl said with a disdainful sniff. “It’s very unwise. Both mediums and scientists agree that automatic writing can be dangerous.”

“The spirits are unfriendly tonight, you think?” Nadine asked lightly.

“Perhaps the spirits are always unfriendly,” the horse-faced girl said, giving her a sharp look. “Or you might get a message from your subconscious mind which you were totally unprepared to receive. There are documented cases of automatic writing getting entirely out of control, you know. People have gone mad.”

“Oh, that seems awfully farfetched. It’s just a game.”

“Games have a way of turning serious sometimes.”

The loudest burst of laughter yet tacked a period to the horse-faced girl’s comment before Nadine could reply. The girl named Patty something-or-other had fallen off the bed and lay on the floor, holding her stomach and laughing and kicking her feet weakly. The completed message read, FATHER SAYS PATTY SHOULD STOP GOING TO THE SUBMARINE RACES WITH LEONARD KATZ.

“You did that!” Patty said to Sandy as she finally sat up again.

“I didn’t, Patty! Honest!”

“It was your father! From the Great Beyond! From Out There!” another girl told Patty in a Boris Karloff voice which Nadine thought was actually quite good. “Just remember that he’s watching you the next time you take off your pants in the back seat of Leonard’s Dodge.”

Another loud outburst greeted this sally. As it tapered off, Nadine pushed forward and twitched Rachel’s arm. She meant to ask for the assignment and then make a quiet escape.

“Nadine!” Rachel cried. Her eyes were sparkling and gay. Her cheeks had bloomed with roses. “Sit down, let’s see if the spirits have a message for you!”

“No, really, I only came to get the assignment in remedial r—”

“Oh, poop on the assignment in remedial reading! This is important, Nadine! This is big-time! You’ve got to have a try. Here, sit down next to me. Janey, you take the other side.”

Janey sat down opposite Nadine, and at the repeated urging of Rachel Timms, Nadine found herself with the eight fingers of her hands touching the planchette lightly. For some reason she looked over her shoulder at the horse-faced girl. She shook her head at Nadine once, deliberately, and the overhead fluorescent bounced off the lenses of her spectacles and turned her eyes into a pair of large white flashes of light.

She had felt a moment of fear then, she remembered as she stood looking down at another planchette in the glow of a six-cell flashlight, but her remark to the horse-faced girl had recurred—it was just a game, for heaven’s sake, and what horrible thing could possibly happen in the middle of a gaggle of giggling girls? If there was a more hostile atmosphere for the production of genuine spirits, hostile or otherwise, Nadine didn’t know what it would be.

“Now everybody be quiet,” Rachel commanded. “Spirits, do you have a message for our sister and Brownie-in-good-standing Nadine Cross?”

The planchette didn’t move. Nadine felt mildly embarrassed.

“Eenie-meenie-chili-beanie,” the girl who had done Boris Karloff said in an equally successful Bullwinkle Moose voice. “The spirits are about to speak!”

More giggles.

“Shhhh!” Rachel commanded.

Nadine decided that if one of the other two girls didn’t start moving the planchette soon so it would spell out whatever silly message they had for her, she would do it herself—slide it around to spell out something short and sweet, like BOO!, so she could get her assignment and leave.

Just as she was about to try doing this, the planchette jerked rudely under her fingers. The pencil left a dark black diagonal slash on the fresh page.

“Hey! No fair yanking, spirits,” Rachel said in a vaguely uneasy tone of voice. “Did you do that, Nadine?”

“No.”

“Janey.”

“Uh-uh. Honestly.”

The planchette jerked again, almost pulling their fingers from it, and skittered to the upper-lefthand corner of the paper.

“Wowie,” Nadine said. “Did you feel—”

They did, all of them did, although neither Rachel nor Jane Fargood would talk to her about it later. And she had never felt particularly welcome in either girl’s room after that night. It was as if they were both a little afraid to get too close to her after that.

The planchette suddenly began to thrum underneath their fingers; it was like lightly touching the fender of a smoothly idling car. The vibration was steady and disquieting. It was not the sort of movement a person could cause without being fairly obvious about it.

The girls had grown quiet. Their faces all wore a peculiar expression, an expression common to the faces of all people who have attended a séance where something unexpectedly genuine has occurred—when the table begins to rock, when unseen knuckles rap on the wall, or when the medium begins to extrude smoky-gray teleplasm from her nostrils. It is a pallid waiting expression, half wanting whatever it is that has begun to stop, half wanting it to go on. It is an expression of dreadful, distracted excitement… and when it wears that particular look, the human face looks most like the skull which always rests half an inch below the skin.

“Stop it!” the horse-faced girl cried out suddenly. “Stop it right now or you’ll be sorry!”

And Jane Fargood screamed in a fear-filled voice: “I can’t take my fingers off it! ”

Someone uttered a little burping scream. At the same instant Nadine realized that her own fingers were also glued to the board. The muscles of her arms bunched in an effort to pull the tips of her fingers from the planchette, but they remained where they were.

“All right, the joke is over,” Rachel said in a tight, scared voice. “Who—”

And suddenly the planchette began to write.

It moved with lightning speed, dragging their fingers with it, snapping their arms out and back and around in a way which would have been funny if it weren’t for the helpless, caught expressions on all three girls’ faces. Nadine thought later that it was as if her arms had been caught in an exercise machine. The writing before had been in stilted, draggling letters—messages that looked as if they had been written by a seven-year-old. This writing was smooth and powerful… big, slanting capital letters that slashed across the white page. There was something both relentless and vicious about it.