Chapter Text
The night smelled like petrol and rain-wet leaves, and Rey rode it with her boots on the dashboard, scrolling and laughing at scare pranks on instagram. Poe’s car rattled over every pothole; Finn nursed a paper bag in the back; Rose kept the Bluetooth speaker alive with a playlist that swerved from witchy pop to teeth-rattling synth. The windows were cracked for the smoke. Cold air slicked along Rey’s throat and made the hair on her arms rise.
“Tell me again why we’re doing this,” Finn said, already grinning.
“Because Poe said ‘abandoned satanic church’ and you can’t just say that to me, and expect me to pass” Rey said, kicking his seat lightly. Her chipped black polish glinted when the streetlights caught it. “It’s Halloween. It’s begging for us.”
Poe drummed the steering wheel. “Technically, deconsecrated chapel that got a bad reputation in the ‘90s. Teen cult, goat rumors, cops found candles and, like, a ferret skeleton—”
Rose arched a brow. “Poe read three Wikipedia pages and is now our tour guide.”
“Excuse you,” Poe said, offended and delighted. “Local legend. My cousin got drunk there once and said the bell rings even though there’s no bell.”
Rey leaned her head out the window for the sweet burn of cold, then dropped back in and stole the bottle from Finn. It was cheap whiskey and it loved her like bad decisions. “If the bell rings,” she said, “we dance.”
“Deal,” Poe said, and floored it over a farmhouse lane that turned to gravel and then to something not entirely road. The headlights splashed over hedges, then trees, then the moss-eaten wall that girdled the chapel grounds. Beyond, the church crouched like a warning: stone blackened by damp, leaded windows punched out, the door chained once and then pried open anyway. Someone had tagged a pentagram over the arch—sloppy, earnest, wrong.
Rey loved it immediately.
They parked crooked under a dead yew. The sky was a cold bruise; the moon was thin and mean. The air tasted of gunpowder and pondwater; somewhere a fox screamed. Rey jumped the wall because the chain-link gate offended her, then held a hand out to help the others, even though Poe didn’t need it and Rose pretended not to.
Inside, the chapel was all echo: pews broken into bones across the flagstone floor; hymn boards still clinging to walls in crooked numbers; the altar an ugly block of stone polished by years of hands that had begged and been ignored. The ceiling had a hole big enough to see stars. Wind spoke through it like a throat.
“Spooky ambiance: achieved,” Poe said, and the words came back to them, thinner and stranger. He set the portable speaker on the altar and turned it up until it felt like they were inside the song. Bass thrummed; candles, jammed into beer bottles and empty jars, took flame one by one. Rose pulled a bag of gummy bats from somewhere and a slim silver case from somewhere else; Finn laid out cups and the second bottle—clear, harder.
Rey shrugged out of her jacket and let the night find her wrists. She had dressed for trouble: ripped tights, thrifted band tee hacked off at the sleeves, boots scuffed to honesty. A chain hung low at her throat, the charm a small iron key she’d found in a flea market and decided belonged to her.
They made the church theirs the way kids make anywhere theirs: too loud, too bright, too alive for the dead to mind. They drank in toasts that got sloppier and truer. They danced between the ruined pews like saints with better choreography; they slid on the flagstones and howled laughter up into the hole where the bell wasn’t. Monster Mash played over the speaker. Rose bumped hips with Rey and shouted
"We did the mash"
Rey replying creepily to her with "We did the monster mash"
Poe spun Finn until both of them fell into a wooden carcass and only laughed harder. Rose slipped out a few rolled joints from her pocket. She'd promised it was solid stuff, she didn't fail. With twenty minutes they were giggling over squeak.
Time got weird in the way it does when the air is cold and your blood is not. Poe climbed the half-ladder to the organ loft, yelled, “I can see God from up here,” and then added, “He’s unimpressed” when a bat strafed him.
Rey wandered.
She let the music drop to a throb behind her and found the vestry door hanging off one hinge. Inside was dust thick enough to write in, a hook still holding a rotten length of rope where a bell pull had been. A mirror leaned against the wall, clouded with grime and a single line cracked through the corner like a smile. Rey breathed on it. The fog bloomed and then died, ordinary. She left a fingerprint that looked already old.
In the main nave again, the cold had come in more seriously, so she moved, trying to keep heat. She balanced on the spine of a shattered pew and walked it like a beam, arms out, the way she had as a kid on the culvert behind her foster home, always daring herself farther. The floor ten feet below gleamed dark with damp. It would hurt to fall. She smiled and went faster.
“Rey,” Finn called, the exact mix of fond and alarm she liked to cause. “Please get down.”
She hopped the last foot with theatrical safety and bowed. “I live forever.”
Poe tossed her the cloth bag he’d brought like a magician’s joke. When Rey opened it and found the Ouija board packed tight with its planchette and a stick of incense that smelled like pine tar and oranges, she laughed aloud.
“You brought a board to a notoriously haunted church?” she asked. “You beautiful cliché.”
“Hey, don’t insult my commitment to the bit,” Poe said, grabbing two more candles like he could convince them to do mood lighting.
Rose slid in beside Rey, already clearing a patch of flagstone between the pew islands. “If we’re doing this, we’re doing it right,” she said, that tone her friends knew—a lab voice, experimental and precise even when she was grinning. She set the board, heavy as an attic-secret, and the planchette, wood worn smooth by other, braver or dumber hands. “Phones off. No joking questions about your future career, Poe.”
“What about my love life?” Poe asked.
“Especially not your love life,” Finn said, laying down four votives at the board’s corners like he’d seen on some occult forum. He looked at Rey last. “You don’t have to.”
Rey’s mouth tilted. “Of course I have to.”
They circled the board and sat cross-legged on cold stone. The speaker bled into a quiet song; even that felt too loud, too alive, so Poe turned it down until it was just a heartbeat in the background. Candlelight made them all beautiful and a little haunted. The church held its breath.
Rose lit the incense. The smoke curled, gray snakes dancing slow. “Okay,” she said. “We’re respectful. We say hello, we say goodbye. We don’t invite anything in. Fingers on,” she said, and the three of them did, Rey last. The wood was cool under her fingertips. The letters—A through Z in two arched ranks, the numbers squat at the bottom, the moon and sun painted in cracked lacquer in the corners—looked like they didn’t belong to any alphabet she’d ever trusted.
“Is there a spirit who wants to talk?” Poe asked, half-actor, half-kid.
Nothing moved.
Wind scraped the roof and a small rain of grit tapped the stone like tiny feet. Finn’s gaze flicked to the dark mouth of the vestry and back. Rey felt the pad of her thumb throb where she’d earlier burned herself on a lighter; it twinged now with a ghost of heat. She pressed that thumb lightly to the planchette too, daring it.
“Is anyone here?” Rose tried, simple, clean.
For a long breath, the board was a joke.
Then the planchette twitched.
Finn jerked. They all laughed, edged. “That was you,” Poe said, proud and unconvincing.
“Swear it wasn’t,” Finn said, hands comically high. “You felt that.”
Rey felt something else: the tiniest static against her palm, like the moment before a storm breaks. The incense went bitter in her nose. She smiled because she was herself and because fear tasted like champagne when it was this cold.
“Hello,” she said softly, not mocking, not brave. “We’re listening.”
The planchette slid. Not smooth—a hitch, a catch like it had to chew through the dust of unused rails. It dragged their fingers up, left, to YES. Stopped.
“Okay,” Poe said, whisper-light now. “Okay, cool.”
“What’s your name?” Rose asked. Scientific, as if she could catalog this.
The planchette made a tiny decision and turned, slow as an old dog. It moved to a letter and paused and Rey’s mouth went dry for no sensible reason.
M.
Finn let out a breath that could have been a laugh or a prayer. “M,” he repeated. “Okay.”
The planchette did not wait for permission. It hummed under their fingertips like a living thing and moved again. I.
Rey’s skin felt too tight; the hairs on her arms lifted as if some static hand stood her up by them. The song on the speaker wound to its end and didn’t start again. Somewhere in the trees, something cracked as if the night shrugged.
N.
Poe’s knee knocked hers. He wasn’t shaking. She was. No: she was shivering with a thrill that braided too neatly with fear to separate.
E.
They stared at the word the board had made with their hands.
MINE
The candles leaned and steadied. The incense burned down to a black tooth. The hole in the ceiling looked like a throat.
Poe swallowed. His voice was dust. “Okay, that’s—okay.”
Finn tried for rational. “Common word. Could be—could be anything. A warning? A—”
Something cold zipped up Rey’s wrist like a ring being slid on. She didn’t yank back. She wanted to. She didn’t. “Mine what?” she asked the board, and the church listened harder.
The planchette didn’t move.
Rose’s hand shifted, tiny; the planchette knocked into the edge of the N and Rey felt the jolt in her teeth. The wood’s edge snagged something on her thumb. She hissed, involuntary. A thin, mean splinter kissed the bead of blood out of her skin.
Finn saw first. “Rey—”
“I’m fine,” she said, automatic, and the drop welled rich and bright and then slid, hot, along the side of her thumb onto the planchette’s rim. It sank into the wood like thirsty ground drinking rain.
The change was not dramatic. No bell rang. No ghost wailed. The board just felt heavier, as if it had noticed. Rey’s thumb burned and then went cool and then felt like nothing at all. A pressure—not a touch; that would have been obvious—rested on the air over her shoulder, the way heat from a candle makes you think there’s a hand almost there.
“Okay,” Rose said briskly, breath too fast. “We thank you for talking to us. We’re ending the session. We say goodbye.”
She nudged the planchette toward the corner where GOODBYE waited, letters curved and comfortable from use. The planchette shuddered, slid half an inch—and stopped. They pushed, all three, and it did not go.
“Poe,” Finn said quietly.
“Not funny,” Poe whispered back, not joking. He lifted his fingers clear. “I’m off. See? Not me.”
Rey didn’t lift. For reasons that she would defend to the grave and could not explain, she pressed down. She wasn’t challenging. She was agreeing, the way you brace a ladder someone else is climbing. Under her, the planchette was a small animal that had made a decision to live. It drew itself back to the middle of the board and sat there like a dare.
“Rey,” Finn said again, helpless.
“Hey,” Rey said to the air, to the board, to the wrongness in the room that wasn’t even wrong yet, just awake. “We hear you. Are you friendly?”
The planchette skated, sudden, fast. It bumped her thumb hard enough to bite the tender edge again, and the sting made her eyes water. It slammed to NO and stayed.
Poe swore. “Nope. Hate that. Hated it.”
Rose’s lips thinned. She was thinking in machines, in problems she could solve. “We follow the rules,” she said, stubborn like only Rose could be. She placed a tumbler over the planchette, smooth and controlled. The wood tapped the glass twice like a heartbeat and then fell still.
The word was still there, though, pressed into the night like a thumbprint in wax. MINE.
Rey wiped her thumb on her jeans and watched the blood leave a comet smear. Her pulse was a drum in her wrists and that not-touch at her shoulder leaned, testing for give. She wanted to turn around. She didn’t. Turning around would make it ordinary; she wasn’t prepared for ordinary.
“Pizza?” Poe said, hopeful, desperate, pointing at nothing and everything. It was his talent, turning a mood by sheer force. “We can get delivery to a haunted church. That’s, like, a bucket list.”
Finn laughed because Poe needed him to. “I’m not sending a teenager into this Blair Witch vibe.”
“Fine. Chips on the way back,” Rose said, already blowing out candles with too-sharp breaths. Smoke swelled, sighing out of the jars like something unhappy to be dismissed. “We’re done. We are done.”
Rey didn’t argue. She looked at the glass, at the planchette sitting docile beneath it, at the board with its alphabet that wasn’t for letters tonight. She pressed the pad of her thumb against her mouth and tasted metal. Something in the nave shifted, a small sound like a step in dust. She could say she imagined it. She could say she didn’t.
As they packed, the speaker sputtered and died like a heart giving up a joke. They moved through the chapel’s dark like four small suns, each a candle, each brilliant for a brief time and then out. Poe slung the board back into its bag with more care than he wanted to show. Finn took the glass last and slid it on top of the planchette because it felt safer like that. Rose tucked the incense stub into her pocket like a sample to examine in daylight.
Rey lingered.
She stood by the vestry door and watched her breath make a soft cloud that drifted and was gone. The cracked mirror watched her back, dim and unhelpful. The iron key on her chain lay warm against her sternum like it wanted to be chosen for something. The pressure at her shoulder didn’t leave, exactly. It rearranged itself, a room shifting after you walk through it. It wasn’t a weight; it was a claim.
“Goodbye” she said, quiet enough.
Rey turned her back on the mirror and went to her friends. She didn’t look over her shoulder going through the arch; she didn’t need to. The feeling went with her, climbing into the night and the car and the skin between her shoulder blades.
On the way out, as Poe wrestled the car into life and Finn swore at the cold, the wind shoved the broken door. It swung, groaning. The sound had no right to be anything but wind. It felt like a word.
Mine.