FIRES BURNING UNDERGROUND, Nancy McCabe EXCERPT

FIRES BURNING UNDERGROUND

It’s Anny’s first day of middle school and, after years of being homeschooled, her first day of public school ever. In art, Larissa asks what kind of ESP is her favorite: telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, or telekinesis? Tracy asks how she identifies: gay, straight, bi, asexual, pan, trans, or confused? And thus kicks off a school year for Anny in which she’ll navigate a path between childhood and adolescence, imagination and identity.

In a year of turmoil and transition, with a new awareness of loss after the death of a friend, Anny struggles to find meaning in tragedy, to come to terms with her questions about her sexuality, and to figure out how to negotiate her own ever-shifting new friendships. And when her oldest friend’ s life is in danger, she must summon up her wits, imagination, and the ghosts that haunt her to save them both.

EXCERPT

Larissa lifts the lid from the Ouija board box. From the kitchen, dishes clatter. Doors slam. Voices joke and scold. I think of my mother’s warnings about the Ouija Board and wonder, How could anything we do be evil in the middle of such a normal, busy house?

But a little voice keeps nagging at me. That’s the way it happens, it says. That’s the way people give up their principles and values, a little at a time.

We swirl the planchette around to warm it up. Larissa says that a few turns will loosen it up like bike gears after a winter of disuse. 

“Tell us our names,” Larissa orders the planchette. She draws out her words so they sound spooky and mysterious. Nothing happens.

“Reese, did you take your vitamins?” Larissa’s mom pops into the room. I expect her to see the Ouija board and scold us, but she barely seems to notice what we’re doing. 

Larissa sighs loudly and heaves herself up to go follow orders. I’m all alone with the board. It seems perfectly harmless and ordinary and inanimate. How could this piece of cardboard deserve so many of my nightmares? What did I expect? A cursing voice to emerge from it? A foul, rotting smell?

“Ouija…it’s only a game—isn’t it?” I read the box again. This time, it seems more funny than scary.

The Ouija board is actually a whole lot less creepy than typical sleepover rituals. It’s less disturbing than séances and games like Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board. I’ve always hated when other girls suggest those games, but we’ve never called up any spirits. We’ve never managed to float anyone into the air on our fingertips. It’s all just pretend.

I’m pretty calm by the time Larissa plops down again and resumes her position.

“Tell us our names,” she repeats in her low, ominous voice.

The planchette jerks an inch and stops.

“Did you push it?” Larissa asks.

I didn’t. My heart jolts and revs up and starts pounding. “Did you?” I ask.

Larissa shakes her head and speaks to the board in that slow, weird tone again, her spirit-summoning voice. “Come and talk to us. Tell us our names.”

There’s a long silence. We sit rigidly still. We barely breathe.

“We won’t hurt you,” Larissa adds suddenly, as if she’s coaxing the spirit of a skittish cat. “Come here. We won’t hurt you.”

I laugh nervously.

The planchette slides and halts.

“You pushed it,” I say.

“I thought you did,” Larissa answers.

We stare at each other with widened eyes.

“Tell us our names,” Larissa says, and the planchette jerks along slowly, pausing on letters: “A-N-N-Y K-N-O-W-S M-E,” it takes forever to spell out, even moving fast. I think that someone needs to invent a Ouija board that uses modern technology, maybe texting.

“It’s not really answering our questions,” I point out.

“How does Anny know you?” Larissa asks.

“S-U-N-D-A-Y-S,” it spells.

“Church,” Larissa says in a hushed voice. “That boy you knew who died.”

Later, I can’t sleep. We should have boxed up the board. We should have put it in another room so it’s not just there emitting scary energy. The planchette with its little round eye crouches right near my hand. My skin prickles. What if a demon is staring at me? 

I leap up. I hurry to the bathroom.

As I settle back into my sleeping bag, the heel of my hand hits the planchette. It goes spinning toward the wall. The plastic strikes and is still.

My heart stomps in my chest. The planchette may just be a piece of plastic, but it seemed like a live animal earlier, the way it darted all over the board, and now I almost expect it to howl furiously. 

I will never sleep again. What if I wake up and find that I’ve turned into a beast with filthy words spewing from my mouth? What if the evil energy in the room causes light fixtures to crash to the floor and shatter into a thousand spiky pieces? When I go home, what if the dolls on my bedroom shelves, ones I’ve collected since childhood, contort their faces and speak in the voices of my ancestors?

I keep remembering ghost stories from camp along with scary movies Ella is always describing to me. Voices crying out the words “bloody fingers” in the night and mysterious fingerprints appearing out of nowhere. The face of a baby who drowned shrieking up out of a sink full of water. 

 Evil. The word alone makes my heart thud.

 Demons. My head spins. 

Finally I spin toward sleep. My mind whirls as fast as the planchette. My thoughts skitter from one to another and then into a swirl of black that turns into the blackened room of a burnt house, choking me. I snap awake.

Outside, a robin begins to sing. The sky has lightened enough so that when I go to the bathroom again, I catch my face in the window, just a series of shadowy shapes. I crawl into the sleeping bag again. Drowsiness slows down my galloping thoughts. It dulls my drumming heart. Daylight is coming. 

At last I drift off, even though it feels like my mind is still racing.

—

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Nancy McCabe is the author of nine books, most recently the middle grade novel Fires Burning Underground, the comic novel The Pamela Papers: A Mostly E-pistolary Story about Academic Pandemic Pandemonium, and the young adult novel Vaulting through Time. Her memoir in essays Can This Marriage Be Saved uses a variety of forms and metaphors to explore the story of her ill-fated youthful marriage. She has also published two adoption memoirs, an essay collection, a novel centered around a host story of sorts, and the reading and travel memoir From Little Houses to Little Women: Revisiting a Literary Childhood.

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Category: On Writing