"Murder Board" Grady Hendrix
"Murder Board" is a spectacularly staged noir thriller enhanced with accomplished and gruesome set-pieces.
I have never read Hendrix's fiction. There is real wit and ambition here, the aesthetic guts to invest a short story with the energies normally confined to a novel.
* * *
Aging, walker-bound rocker Bill Pfarrer has no trust for anyone in his life: he is rich and famous, and has learned to be suspicious the hard way. He is married to Caroline, half his age and not his first wife, or second. She has also learned some facts of life the hard way:
[....]Growing up, Caroline only wanted to get out of the LV. Rural Pennsylvania, Lehigh Valley, full of shut-down steel mills and skinheads stabbing each other with screwdrivers at shows. The girls who went to college, and had sleepovers, and pulled out ouija boards, and said 'Bloody Mary' at midnight into mirrors. Those girls didn't invite Caroline over, so whatever they liked, she hated.
Bill's negotiation with reality, his special line to the truth about people and whether they mean him good or ill, is mediated with a ouija board. It is not an ancient bespoke cursed artifact, but "a Parker Brothers board game, manufactured by the truckload, and shipped out by the millions."
Bill's told her about how the ouija warned him to walk out on that woman the day before she overdosed and the cops raided her apartment, how it told him his first manager was ripping him off, how it clued him in that his second wife was cheating.
Caroline sees her marriage as increasingly precarious: with each new infirmity, Bill is pulling away from their world.
As the story opens, the ouija board puts its weight on this delicately balanced situation.
She's not a dummy. There are no spirits. No invisible angel hovering over the Parker Brothers board. At best, it's the ideomotor effect, meaning they're both making small, unconscious movements that will move the pointer to letters revealing their subconscious thoughts.
But maybe she'll learn something about Bill, so she relaxes her fingers until they barely brush against the pointer. It doesn't move. Her finger tendons tremble, she strains to hold them still, and then the pointer writhes beneath her fingertips and her stomach snaps tight around a frozen pea.
Something invisible whips the pointer back and forth in a tight arc over the blank semicircle between the arch of black letters and the straight row of numbers, gathering force, the one leg missing its felt pad scratching the board.
Then it yanks her arms forward, and her fingers lose contact for a second, and her chest feels full of ice because this feels Not Her. This feels like Black Magic. This feels Unnatural. The pointer hits an invisible patch of thick air and stops on a letter.
"I," Bill reads, then it jerks their arms to the side, pauses on, "W," and shoots off again.
She can barely keep up, and she takes her eyes off the pointer for a second to see what Bill's thinking, and he's smiling in triumph, and it's ugly, and she looks back down because she doesn't want to miss the next letter because it's…
"I," she breathes.
IWI. I witch? I will? Will not?
"L" and then it makes a little circle over L and darts up to the one-eyed moon and back down again.
"I will..." Bill breathes.
The candlelight wobbles as the pointer stops on K, then back to I and then the double L's again and they're both reading out loud, "I... will... kill..." and they both stop reading and it stops moving, resting on the letter U.
Caroline yanks her hands back, Bill doesn't move, and she doesn't want to look at him, so she stares down at the board, wishing it away.
I will kill u.
It's not an unexpected ouija board message for a horror story. And Hendrix has built his career on ringing changes and high-concepting some very old genre cliches. He certainly demonstrates mastery in the crowded hour of mayhem that ensues after the board has spoken.
Jay
14 November 2021
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"Murder Board" can be found in Mark Morris' anthology After Sundown.
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