What the Board Said
A talking board turned up at Kitchen Table this month. It had excellent manners, it knew the cat's name, and it taught us more than we had planned to learn.
Kitchen Table this winter is working through the elements, and November was fire, which at a study circle means candles, and candles, at the dark end of the year, mean scrying. So that was the plan. Nine of us round the long table in the hall, one purple candle each, the overhead lights off, Pangur in his usual place on the radiator, and the old instructions: soften your eyes, let your thoughts go past like traffic, look into the flame and not at it, and write down whatever comes before you decide what it means.
It went the way first scrying always goes. Two people saw something. Three people saw their own eyelashes. One person saw a horse, very clearly, and is still annoyed that it has not yet turned out to mean anything. I saw a doorway, which I see most years, and which I have decided is less a message than a habit. We wrote it all down with the date and the moon, as you are supposed to, and put the lights back on, and someone put the kettle on, and that should have been the evening.
The question
One of the newcomers stayed behind while we were washing up. I will not use her name; she asked me not to, and it is her story more than mine. She had come to us after Samhain because her grandmother died in August, and she had read about our dumb supper, and she had a question she had been working up to all night. Did we ever use a talking board? Could we, just once? She had one at home. She had not dared to use it on her own.
I said what the Hearth says, which is no, we do not hold séances, and I said it as kindly as I could. And then Wren, who was drying, said: "We have a board, actually."
We do. It came to us with the library of the witch whose books arrived in boxes a few years ago, with her notes still in the margins. It is a Parker Brothers board from the seventies, in a box gone soft at the corners, and when Wren fetched it from the library cupboard we found that the old owner had tucked an index card inside the lid. In her small slanting hand it said: Faraday was right. Keep anyway.
So we had a conversation, the five of us who were left, at the end of the long table with the candle stubs. The Hearth does not summon the dead, and we were not going to start at ten at night with a grieving stranger and a box from the cupboard. But Kitchen Table is a study circle, and studying a thing is not the same as doing it. We agreed we would find out what the board was. Lights on. No names of anyone who had died. Nobody asks it anything they would mind the answer to. She agreed, and I think she was relieved to be given rules.
The experiment
Four of us put two fingers each on the planchette, very lightly, and Wren asked whether anyone was there. It drifted, hesitated, and went to YES. Everyone looked at everyone else, and everyone's face said not me. Wren asked whether the someone had a name. It went, slowly and then with growing confidence, to P, and to A, and to N, and at that point the someone on the radiator lifted his head, and we all started laughing so much that the planchette slid off the edge of the board.
It was right, of course. The board knew the cat's name. The board knew it because four people who love that cat had their hands on it.
Then we did the thing I had read about and never tried. We tied tea towels over our eyes. Wren, who was not blindfolded, quietly turned the board the other way up, so that every letter now sat where a different letter had been, and we did not know. Then she asked again. Was anyone there? Did they have a name?
Blind, I could feel it moving. It moved exactly as before: the same hesitation, the same growing certainty, the same swoop at the end. I would have sworn on anything you like that my fingers were only resting there. When we took the tea towels off, Wren had written down the letters it had stopped on. They spelled nothing at all. But every one of them sat exactly where P, A and N had been before she turned the board. We had spelled the cat's name again, with great conviction, into thin air.
What it meant
I had expected the young woman to be disappointed, and I think for a minute she was. Then she said something I have been turning over since. She said, "So if I had done it at home, it would have been her." Meaning her grandmother. And then, more slowly: "No. It would have been me, doing her voice."
That is the whole thing, really. The board is not nothing. It is a remarkable instrument for letting your hands say what your heart has not admitted yet. It would have spelled out exactly what she most needed to hear, and she would have believed it, and it would have been her own voice telling her. That is not wicked, and it is not even quite false. But it is a great deal of weight to put on a piece of printed hardboard, and grief is the worst possible time to be carrying something you have mistaken for a message.
The physiologists have a name for it, the ideomotor effect, and you can read more about it, and about why the Hearth keeps the board in the cupboard, on our new page on speaking with the dead. What the page cannot quite get across is how it feels, in the dark, with your eyes covered, when the thing moves under your fingers and you are certain, absolutely certain, that it is not you. I understand much better now why the Victorians filled their parlours. I would have been there with them.
What we did instead
We put the board away and lit one of the candle stubs again, and I suggested what we do at Samhain: write to her. Not to the board, not through anyone. Straight to her grandmother, on paper, in the first person, and then read it aloud if she wanted, or burn it, or keep it.
She wrote for a long time. Wren made more tea. Pangur came down off the radiator and sat on the board's box, which I am choosing not to interpret. When she had finished, she read it to us. I will not say what was in it. I will say that at the end, without anyone deciding to, the rest of us said what the circle says at Samhain after every name: What is remembered, lives. She said afterwards that it was the first time she had said goodbye out loud, and that she had not known she had not said it.
Nobody received a message that night. Somebody sent one, and I think it arrived.
The board is back in the library cupboard. Before she put it away, Wren took out the old index card, wrote a second line under it in her own hand, and put it back in the lid. It now reads: Faraday was right. Keep anyway. Agreed, and kept. It is a very good mirror. It is a terrible telephone. I think the witch who owned it knew both of those things, and I am glad she left it to us.
Ash leads the Hearth's Kitchen Table and keeps the eighth night of the flame. Pangur has been told about Faraday and remains unimpressed.